Read Chapter 29: The Stalker Returns

The envelope was cream-coloured, heavy stock, the kind that belonged on a solicitors desk. It sat in the centre of Evelyn’s dressing-room table, propped against the mirror like an invitation. Her name was written on the front in a looping, old-fashioned hand she’d know anywhere. Her stomach dropped before her mind caught up.

Marcus crossed the room in three strides, already reaching for it. “Don’t touch it.”

She snatched it first. The paper tore beneath her fingers. Inside, a single sheet, the same looping script:

*Evelyn, my darling Elsie.*

No.

*Do you remember the pier? The compass we buried beneath the boards? The promise you made when you were small enough to believe in forever? You think you’ve forgotten, but I haven’t. I never forgot a single thing about you. Not then. Not now. He doesn’t know you. Not like I do. He can’t protect you from what I know. Come back to me, Elsie. Before it’s too late.*

Elsie. A name she hadn’t heard since her father died. A name she hadn’t whispered into any ear except his, those summer holidays in Whitby, when she was ten and the world was just the sea and the stones and her father’s hand in hers. She told no one. No one. Not Fiona. Not any lover. Not Marcus. The compass was a childhood game, buried under the third plank of the pier steps, and she’d never once spoken of it aloud in the twenty years since.

“He knows things,” she said, her voice far away. “Things no one knows.”

Marcus took the letter from her trembling fingers, reading it in silence. His jaw tightened. “Oliver doesn’t know your childhood name. He wasn’t even a suspect until six months ago. This isn’t him.” His eyes scanned the room, calculating, searching for threats even now. “This is someone who knew you before the fame. Someone from your past.”

“I haven’t been called Elsie since—” She stopped. A memory surfaced, thick and unwelcome. A cramped green room in Manchester, her first professional stage credit. A dresser named Marshall who corrected her posture, who called her a “proper little Elsie” whenever she lost focus. She’d laughed it off, shallow as she was. He was twice her age, married, quiet. Amiable. Round-faced and unremarkable, easily forgotten. But he’d hovered. He’d lingered at her shoulder, complimenting her voice, her hands. He’d been so attentive she’d complained to the stage manager, and he’d been reassigned. She’d never thought of him again—not once, in the decade of interviews and stalkers and anonymous threats, had his face surfaced.

Until now.

“His name,” she said slowly, pieces clicking together like a lock turning. “Marshall. Edward Marshall. He was the stage dresser on my first show. He used to call me Elsie. I’d forgotten him completely. I’d forgotten everything about him.”

Marcus was already on his phone. “I’ll have Fiona pull his file. Former colleague, early career. That’s how he knows your routine. That’s how he got close.”

---

That evening, the theatre swelled with its usual gala crowd. Evelyn moved through the second act of *The Weir* on instinct, her body onstage while her mind kept replaying the letter, the compass buried at Whitby, the round-faced man with the patient hands. The audience laughed at the right beats. She hit her marks. But in the wings, she’d caught Marcus’s eye twice, and twice he’d shaken his head—no new intel yet, no leads—and she’d forced herself back into the scene.

Halfway through her third-act solo, the fire alarms went off.

The sound was a shriek, splitting the theatre’s warm murmur with an electric scream. The lights flashed. The audience gasped collectively, a wave of bodies rising from seats. Evelyn stood frozen in a spill of amber light, her vision flooded by the sudden strobing pulse. Around her, stagehands surged, shouting over the din.

“Not a drill!” someone yelled. “Everyone out! Evacuate!”

The crowd flooded toward the exits in a slow, panicked torrent. Evelyn’s co-star grabbed her arm, pulling her toward the wings, but the press of bodies bore them apart. She stumbled, caught her balance, and turned for the left passageway where she’d seen the dressing-room corridor. It was dark back there, no strobes, no crowd. Marcus would be coming down the main hall. He’d find her. He always found her.

She pushed through the fire door and into the sudden hush of the backstage corridor. The alarm was muted here, a distant rat-a-tat-tat with no bite. She took two steps down the corridor, breathing easier, then stopped.

The door to her dressing room stood ajar. A warm, yellow light spilled out.

Slowly, she walked toward it. She pushed the door open.

Edward Marshall sat in her chair, still round-faced, still unremarkable, a decade older but utterly unchanged. He was wearing a theatre staff jacket—how easily he must have slipped in, a familiar face among a thousand—and he held her silver compact mirror in his hand, turning it over in his thick fingers. “You didn’t say hello in Manchester, Elsie,” he said, without looking up. “You used to say hello every day. You used to smile. He took that smile from you. That guard. That man. You let him touch you.”

“Edward.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to bring you back.” He set the compact down and stood, unfolding to his full, imposing height. He’d never seemed big before. Now he blocked the door’s frame, a wall of memory and menace. “They told me you were a star. Look at you. You forgot about the pier. You forgot about me. I had to remind you.”

“The letters,” she said. “The first stalker. That was you.”

“You think of him as Oliver, the poor intruder. But I saw you first.” He stepped closer, his voice gentle, almost intimate. “I was there when you were nobody, Elsie. Before you forgot yourself. I’ve watched you every night for weeks. Months. I know this theatre’s vents. I know how long it takes the doors to open in a panic. I know exactly how long I have with you before he comes running.”

From down the corridor, she heard a voice cut through the alarm. Marcus’s voice, shouting her name.

Edward smiled. Not kindly. “There he is.”

“You won’t touch me,” Evelyn said.

“I already have.” He raised her phone in his other hand—the one she’d left charging on the dresser. “I’ve had this for two weeks. I deleted the signal. I turned it off. I watched you send him messages, and he never knew the difference.” He pocketed it, stepping closer still, close enough she could smell the cheap musk of his cologne. His eyes were the colour of wet slate. “You’ll stop hiding from me, Elsie. Now. Or I’ll make you understand how well I know you.”

Bootsteps pounded the corridor. The door shook on its hinges as Marcus slammed it open.