Chapter 42

To Whom It May Concern

I, Miss Emily Jane Parker of Flat 3, Belle Vue Court, do hereby confess my sins. I am not a religious woman, but I do have a conscience, and I have done wrong. The punishment of the law frightens me. I am old, too old for life in a prison cell. I prefer to deal with my guilt in my own way, but I do apologise to those who find me, and for the inevitable mess. That worries me now, above all else. I like to be tidy. Neat. Clean. I like a job to be well done. I am a perfectionist. I like to finish what I begin, tie up the ends.

In recent months I have allowed my hatred for another woman to take over my thoughts, my daily life, my very existence. I had all but forgotten about her, the usurper from my past, until I discovered she had been here all along, the two of us living only floors apart. And then, suddenly, she had a name and a face, and she was real again, and old feelings came flooding back. Feelings of betrayal, abandonment, grief. A desire for revenge.

I wanted only to hurt her as she had once hurt me. To confuse her, unsettle her, make her feel she was going out of her mind, as she once caused me to lose my own mind for a while. To that end, I have been entering her flat in her absence and interfering with her possessions, moving them, hiding them, taking them away. I took some pleasure from it, and there has been precious little of that these last years. I did not want, or expect, to cause her physical harm. I may have fantasised about doing just that, but the courage escaped me.

You will find her locket and her statuette in my bedroom. There will be blood on the latter, which I am sure will come as no surprise. There will be no need to break the door down. The key is here in my pocket, alongside this letter. Unless it has been dislodged by the impact of the train, in which case I am sure you will recover it from the track.

The keys to her flat. You will be wanting to know about those too. How I obtained them. How I got in. We can blame Betty Bloomfield for that. A more scatty woman you would be unlikely ever to meet. I do not know how she holds down a perfectly respectable and responsible job at the local lending library when she has the attention span of a goldfish. In and out of the place, being a Good Samaritan, leaving the keys dangling in the door. So easy to slip them out and have a copy made. She never missed them. Not until she found them lying on her own doormat later that day and thought she’d simply dropped them. The woman is a fool.