‘I have a strange request actually,’ she says, putting her hand into her bag.
The man jumps off his chair and put his hands up in the air. ‘Don’t shoot!’ he says. ‘Don’t shoot! Just take what you want!’
Sophie stares at him blankly for a moment. ‘I, er …’
The man laughs, over-loudly. ‘Just kidding,’ he says and Sophie thinks, There you go, you should never take a man wearing red glasses seriously.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Good.’ Then she takes the ring box out of her bag and puts it on the counter between them. ‘I found this,’ she says, ‘buried at the end of my garden. I wondered if you had any idea who it might belong to? I mean, I don’t know if you keep records anywhere?’
‘Well, yes, I most certainly do!’ He pats the cover of a large leather-bound ledger on the desk to his left. ‘Everything is in there from the day I got the keys to this shop back in 1979. So, let’s have a look here, shall we?’
He opens up the small box and takes out the ring between his thumb and his index finger; then he holds it under a bright light on a bendy post, using a small eyeglass to examine it.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’d like to say I remember this ring immediately – I do tend to pride myself on committing everything I sell to memory, but obviously some pieces carry more resonance than others and this carries little resonance. But I can tell you it’s contemporary, not antique; the hallmark says 2011. It’s nine-carat gold and while that is a very nice sparkly little diamond indeed it is not of great value. But,’ he says, flashing her a wicked look, ‘thankfully, I am a man who values the importance of good systems. And one of the things I do to everything that passes through this shop is to assign it a number. In case of robbery, or theft. Insurance claims. You know. So …’ He pulls the ring box towards himself and hooks his fingers under the blue velvet-covered filling. He levers it out and turns it over, and there, stuck to the underside, is a tiny sticker. ‘There,’ he says, lowering the eyeglass and beaming at Sophie. ‘Number 8877. So, now all I need to do is cross reference with my bible here.’
He’s thoroughly enjoying himself, Sophie can tell. She smiles blandly as she slowly flips through the pages of his ledger, running his finger down lines of text, humming quietly under his breath as he does so and then suddenly he stops, stabs the page with his fingertip and says, ‘Eureka! There it is. This ring was bought in June 2017 by a man called Zach Allister. He paid three hundred and fifty pounds for it.’
A chill goes up and down Sophie’s spine so fast it almost winds her.
‘Zach Allister?’
‘Yes. Of Upfield Common. Name rings a bell actually, come to think of it. Do you know him?’
‘No,’ she says, ‘no. Not really. I mean, no, not at all. Do you happen to have an address for him? So I can return this to him?’
‘I …’ He pauses. ‘Well, I suppose I could give you the address. I probably shouldn’t, but you look trustworthy enough. Here.’ He turns the ledger around and Sophie quickly takes her phone from her bag to photograph the entry. As she lets the lens focus on the text she recognises the address; it’s Kim Knox’s cul-de-sac. Of course it is. It must be where Zach was living when he and Tallulah went missing.
‘What a very strange thing,’ says the shopkeeper. ‘Burying a nice little ring like that in your back garden. I can only assume,’ he continues, ‘that the lady in question must have turned down his proposal.’ He looks sad for a minute, before rallying. ‘Are you going to reunite the ring with its owner?’ he asks.
‘Er, yes,’ Sophie replies brightly. ‘Yes, I know this address. I can definitely return it.’
‘I wonder what kind of apple cartthatmight upset?’ he says in a tone that suggests he’d love to be a fly on the wall.
‘I’ll let you know!’
‘Oh yes, please do. I’d love to find out what happens.’
‘I’ll be back, I promise,’ she says, tucking the ring into her bag and heading for the tiny shop doorway. ‘Thank you so much.’
The bus brings Sophie back to Upfield Common an hour later. She glances at the time. It’s nearly midday. She crosses the common and heads towards the cul-de-sac. It looks as if someone’s at home; the front window is open a crack and she can hear the sounds of a child’s laughter and a TV on somewhere.
She presses the doorbell and takes a step back, clears her throat, wonders what she’s doing for a moment, almost changes her mind, but then sets her jaw and reminds herself that when someone’s child is missing what they crave more than anything else is information and the ring in her handbag might provide some kind of answer. And then the door is opened and there is Kim. She’s wearing a denim miniskirt and a black cap-sleeved T-shirt. Her feet are bare and her hair is tied back in a ponytail. She looks at Sophie through trendy black-framed reading glasses and says, ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ says Sophie. ‘Er, my name’s Sophie. I just moved into the cottage in the grounds of Maypole House. A week ago. And there’s a gate in the garden that leads out into the woods, and I know this sounds weird, but there was a sign, nailed to the fence, saying “Dig Here”, so I got a trowel and dug and I found something. A ring. And according to this guy at the jeweller’s it was bought by someone called Zach Allister, who lived at this address. Here.’ She takes the ring box from her handbag and offers it to Kim.
Kim blinks at her and her gaze goes slowly to the box in Sophie’s hand. She picks it up and opens it. The diamond catches the light immediately, sending spots of light across Kim’s face. She shuts it quickly and then says, ‘Sorry, where did you say you found this?’
Sophie tells her again. ‘I just took it into Manton. To see if I could find out who it belonged to. The guy there kept records. He said this ring was bought by someone called Zach Allister. In June 2017. From this address. Look.’ She turns her phone to show Kim the picture of the handwritten entry in the ledger. She can’t say anything else. To say anything else would be to suggest that she knows more than she feels she should know.
Kim’s face has lost some of its colour. The TV in the background is suddenly loud. ‘Turn it down, Noah,’ she calls out over her shoulder.
‘No,’ comes a firm response.
Kim rolls her eyes. She looks as though she’s considering escalating the episode of intransigence but instead shakes her head slightly and pulls the door to behind her. Sophie follows her to the garden wall where they both sit.
‘This ring,’ says Kim, snapping the box open again. ‘My daughter’s boyfriend, he bought it for her. To propose to her. And then the night he was going to propose to her, they both disappeared. And all this time,’ she says, ‘I wondered about the ring and then you find it, buried in the grounds of Maypole House just next to the woods where we searched and searched and searched for those kids. And there was an arrow, you say?’
‘Yes.’ Sophie nods. ‘I took a photo, actually, because it was so strange. Look.’