‘No. Sometimes he’d do two days in a row and then nothing for a few days then he’d turn up again.’
‘No particular pattern?’
She thought for a moment, shook her head.
‘Do you work every day?’
‘No, I do Wednesday, Thursday and Saturdays, sometimes an extra day if one of the girls is sick or there’s stocktaking.’
‘Did you tell anyone at work about it?’
‘Yeah, they all knew. Jean, that’s the manageress, she went and had a word with him a couple of times, asked him to move on. He’d go off but, he’d be there again when I came out, or I’d see him on the way to the bus. It just went on and on.’ Her composure broke. ‘It’s awful,’ she protested, her face crumpling, ‘I keep thinking it must be me, something I’ve said or done. Why is he doing this?’
‘You don’t know him?’
‘No, I’ve no idea who he is.’
‘Does he seem at all familiar? Someone you might have met and forgotten?’
‘No, I’m pretty good with faces. I’ve never seen him, I’m sure.’
‘Has he ever spoken to you, approached you?’
‘Not then but later.’
‘Go on.’
‘About a month after it had all started, I’d had enough. It’s so…’ she paused, finding the right word, running her thumb along the chain and back. ‘It’s creepy, it becomes the most important thing, it gets in the way of everything else.’ She took a breath and exhaled slowly. ‘So, I went up to him, at the bus stop. I told him to leave me alone, to stop following me or I’d report him to the police.’
She swallowed, opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t. She ducked her head. When she did speak, it was a whisper; I strained to catch it. ‘He knew my name.’ She looked up and repeated herself, her voice breaking, high with panic. ‘He knew my name. “Debbie,” he said, that really freaked me out. How did he know my name?’ she cried out.
I waited.
“Don’t be like this,” he said, “you know how much you mean to me.”’ She blushed. ‘It was awful. “I love you,” he said. “You know that.” I couldn’t stand it. I just ran then, to the bus. The next day this letter came, pages and pages of stuff about how much I meant to him and how long he’d waited to find me, on and on.’ She shook her head in disbelief.
‘Have you got the letter?’
‘No, it made me feel dirty. I chucked it. There was no address or anything. It was posted in Manchester.’
‘Was it signed?’
‘Just the initial, G. There’ve been others since. I realised I’d better keep them, for evidence.’ She rose and crossed to a wall cupboard and pulled out a large manila envelope. From inside it she took a bundle of letters. Thick, inky script, closely written. I read two and learned nothing other than that the writer G was obsessed with Debbie, was convinced they would eventually be together and live happily ever after. The language was clichéd and sentimental. I also noticed there was no specific references in them, no mention of other people, of Debbie’s children, no places and nothing that gave any clue to the writer’s identity. It was all generalities like a badly written gift card going on for six pages at a time. The paper and envelopes were cheap – the sort sold at bargain discount outlets.
