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‘Not that I noticed and I wouldn’t have if one of these was all that had gone. I had a stack of them.’
‘Who was your stalker?’
‘I never knew. They left me little love letters. It was sweet at first, and then it got creepy.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. They just stopped one day.’
‘Did you ever take any calls on the phone number listed on the card?’
‘No. Like I said, I never gave out the cards. It was a crappy phone. Cheap. I chucked it when I got my first money from here, bought myself a smartphone and got a new number.’
‘Can you show me the letters the stalker sent you?’
‘I chucked them, too. Sorry.’
‘Did you have any idea who sent them?’
‘I thought it was a guy in the flat next door. He was a bit weird. He dropped out and left Bristol around the time the letters stopped coming.’
‘Can you remember what the letters said?’
‘At first it was “I love you” with a bit of “You’re so pretty” thrown in. Schoolboy stuff. The last two mentioned what I’d been wearing which was well creepy.’
‘Any abuse?’
‘“You think you’re too good for me.” That sort of thing. Incel stuff. But mild and, again, it was only in the last two notes that his tone started to change.’
‘Do you know what triggered the notes? Did you have contact with the man in the flat next door? Was there an incident that made you think it might be him?’
‘The first note mentioned that he’d seen me at a festival on the Downs, and I looked like I was having fun. I could only think he’d seen me doing a job for a car dealership. I’m with a modelling agency and they got it for me. A few students I know do events for them. It was one of those promotions where they hire girls to stand around a car and hand out merch. I was working for Maserati.’
‘Maserati?’ Hal says.
‘Yes.’
‘When was this?’
‘It was last spring. I remember because we had to wear almost nothing, and I was freezing. We all were.’
Jen and Hal exchange a glance. She can tell Hal is thinking what she’s thinking: that Tom Booth drove a Maserati.
52
THURSDAY
Sasha
Sasha pours hot water over her camomile tea bag and sets the timer on her phone for three minutes, so it infuses the perfect amount.
‘Sasha?’ She turns to see Anna in the doorway.
‘What’s wrong?’ Sasha asks. Anna is usually back at the Coach House by now. The Manor belongs to Olly and Sasha at night.
She looked at Anna with new eyes this afternoon, appraising her. Olly’s discovery of the journal is a game changer. He texted her photos of the last pages, and she read them with a building sense of horror that past events were finally catching up with them and that Anna has become a liability. Or is she overreacting? Can they relax because Anna has kept this quiet for so long that she’s hardly going to blab now?
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Anna says. ‘I just wanted to ask you something. I was going to earlier, but there never seemed to be a good time.’
