‘Yes,’ she says brightly. ‘My name’s Sophie. Lovely to meet you.’
He passes his beer bottle to his other hand and offers her his hand to shake. ‘Great to meet you too. I’m Liam. I’m a classroom assistant here. I work with some of the kids with special needs, you know, dyslexia, dyspraxia, that kind of thing.’
He’s well spoken, but there’s a kind of rough Gloucester undercurrent to his accent.
‘Oh, that sounds really interesting.’
He nods, effusively. ‘Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, it’s not, like, my life’s ambition or anything, it’s just temporary, but for now it’s really, really satisfying.’
‘So, what is your life’s ambition then?’
‘Oh, yeah, right.’ He passes his hand around the back of his neck and screws his face up. ‘Haven’t quite worked that one out yet. Still trying to find one, I reckon.’ He smiles. ‘Twenty-one going on fifteen. Failure to launch.’
He sounds apologetic and Sophie finds herself reassuring him.
‘No,’ she says, ‘you’re working, you have a really important job, that’s more than a lot of young men your age these days.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Maybe.’ Then he says, ‘So, what do you think of Maypole House?’
She glances around and nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I like it. It’s not what I’m used to. I mean, I’m a Londoner, born and bred, I’ve never lived outside London before, so country living is a bit of a shock to the system.’
‘Oh, this isn’t country,’ says Liam. ‘This is not country, believe me. I was brought up on a cattle farm in Gloucestershire. That was country. This is just a nice place for people to live who don’t want to live in cities.’
Sophie smiles. ‘Fair enough, I guess.’ Then she says, ‘How long have you been teaching here?’
‘Well …’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘I actually used to be a student here, believe it or not. I was sent here by my parents when I was fifteen to do my GCSEs because I was getting too, er, distracted, by other things at my old school. And then I liked it here so I stayed on to do my A levels. Failed them all. Retook them. Failed one. Thought about retaking it … So yeah, I was a student herefor …’ He narrows his eyes as he makes the mental calculation. ‘… four and a bit years? It might possibly be an all-time record for the Maypole. Most students aren’t here for much longer than a couple of years. And now they can’t get rid of me.’
He laughs and Sophie laughs too.
Then she says, ‘So, you must know a lot about the place, about its history?’
‘I am the world expert in Maypole House, yes, that’s about right.’
‘So if Shaun needs to know anything, you’re the man to talk to?’
‘Yeah, I guess so. Just send him my way. I’m his man.’
‘So … you were here last summer,’ she begins carefully. ‘When those teenagers went missing?’
A shadow passes across his face. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I was here then. Not only that, but I was there.
Sophie starts. ‘There?’
‘Yes. At the house. The night they disappeared. I mean. I was friends with Scarlett, the girl who lived there. I didn’t see anything, obviously. I didn’t know anything. But yeah. Shocking times, really. Shocking times.’ He changes tack, swiftly, to Sophie’s frustration. ‘And what about you? What do you do for a living? If you were in London, did you have to leave your job, or …?’
She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No. I mean, I was once a classroom assistant, like yourself in fact. At a primary school in London. But now I’m self-employed, I can work from home, so nothing much has changed for me in that way, you know. Though, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t quite managed to getback into any kind of discipline yet. I keep getting distracted by things.’ She laughs, lightly, but actually she is worried by how, after nearly a week at Maypole House, she hasn’t written a word of her latest book. Every time she opens it up and begins to type, she starts thinking about Tallulah Murray and Dark Place and Scarlett Jacques and the rose bush across the common and the pink baby feet tattooed on the underside of Kim Knox’s arm and the engagement ring in the dusty black box hidden inside her make-up drawer. She thinks of Martin Jacques, whom she googled after snooping on his mail, thinks of the man she saw online, tall and haggard with a quiff of thinning steel hair and a stern expression, the man who is described on LinkedIn as the CEO of a Guernsey-based hedge fund and is currently, according to another Google result, living alone in Dubai having separated from his wife.
She’d found no mention of his ex-wife or grown-up children on any page of the internet but the separation seemed the obvious explanation to Sophie of why Dark Place had been abandoned and left to rot.
‘Oh well,’ says Liam, ‘I’m sure once the college gets into a routine, you will too.’
She smiles gratefully. ‘That’s a very good way of thinking about it,’ she says. ‘Thank you. You’re very wise.’
As she says this, she sees Shaun appear over Liam’s shoulder. She’s struck for a second by the contrast between them: the twenty years that divide them. Shaun looks, for all his handsomeness and charisma, old enough to be Liam’s father.
‘Hi,’ he says, putting a hand out to Liam, ‘Liam, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Good to see you again.’