She pulls the fronts of her cardigan together over her summer dress which is slightly too low-cut for a doorstep greeting.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Thank you. So nice of you to spare the time.’
He smiles nervously. ‘I strongly suspect I won’t be of much use, to be honest, but I’m happy to try. Shall I …?’ He indicates the hallway behind her.
He follows her through the kitchen and into the back garden.
She holds the back gate open for him and turns to face the sign.
Liam stares at the sign for a moment, mutely. ‘Weird,’ he says, eventually. ‘Did you?’ He mimes a digging action.
‘Yes. I did. And I found …’ She scrolls through the photos on her phone. ‘This.’ She turns the camera to face him and shows him the photo of the ring.
She watches his face for some kind of visceral response, but there’s nothing there. ‘It’s a ring,’ he says after a moment.
‘Yes, I know. And I found out who it belonged to.’
‘You did?’
Again, there is nothing in Liam’s reaction to suggest that he knows anything about this ring, its provenance or its back story.
‘Yes. I went to the jewellery shop and apparently it was bought in June 2017 by someone called Zach Allister?’
She sees a small charge pass through him.
‘The shop owner gave me his address,’ she continues. ‘I went there yesterday and gave it to the woman who lives there. Kim Knox. Tallulah’s mum.’ She waits a beat before framing her nextquestion. She doesn’t want to say the wrong thing and put him off talking. ‘What … what happened?’ she begins. ‘I mean, that night? What’s your take on it?’
He sighs and looks at his feet. Then he looks up at her and says, ‘How long have you got?’
Part Two
23
Liam had been at Maypole House for over two years already when Scarlett Jacques turned up halfway through the school year. She wasn’t a boarder like him, she was a day girl, a local, just arrived in the area from Guernsey.
She appeared in the refectory on the first morning of that spring term wearing earmuffs and a miniskirt; she still dressed like a girl at that time. Her hair was dark and worn in two plaits with a blunt fringe. She had a piercing in her eyebrow and peered out of a huge green scarf wrapped high up her neck like a viper appearing from a basket, shivering lightly in a thin lambswool sweater even though it was warm in the school hall.
Liam watched her grabbing food from the display: bread rolls, ham, a bowl of cornflakes, hot chocolate, a boiled egg. You couldalways tell the new kids by how high they stacked their breakfast trays. She stood for a moment then, her tray held in front of her, elbows out like baby bird wings, looking around over the top of her huge scarf. Liam saw her shiver again before heading towards an empty table next to a radiator. He watched her for a moment, peeling her egg with pink-painted fingernails.
Liam didn’t see her again for a few days. The next time he did, she was surrounded by people, a different proposition entirely, a queen bee, no shivering, no anxious eyes over the top of a scarf that covered half her face. In under a week she’d gone from being adorable to unapproachable.
Liam pursued Scarlett quite openly during those dark January days; he was a farmer, a country boy: if you liked a girl there was no point sitting about hoping she’d get the message. At first she seemed resistant to his charms: clearly he wasn’t her usual type, he was too wholesome, too clean-cut, not clever enough, not weird enough. ‘You know what the issue is, Liam Bailey?’ she said to him in the student bar one night. ‘You’re too good-looking. I can’t deal with how good-looking you are.’
And he’d punched the air and said, ‘Yes!’ because being too good-looking was a hurdle they could clear.
They finally kissed during the February half-term break when the school was almost empty and most of Scarlett’s friends had gone home. She invited him to the local riding school and they took some horses out for the day; she wore a navy jumper and a navy quilted coat that he suspected belonged to her mother and with her riding helmet on she suddenly looked like one of the girls from home. She had rosy cheeks when they kissed, the airaround them full of the glitter of their breath, and Liam knew then that he was, for the first time in his life, madly, properly, just like his mum and dad-ly, in love.
When half-term finished and her friends returned to the Maypole, Liam had expected to be sidelined, but instead he was welcomed into the inner sanctum of Scarlett’s clique.
Mimi. Jayden. Rocky. Roo.
They were all studying arty subjects, and were colourful, intense characters, very different from Liam. They treated him like a mascot, like a pet bear; they teased him and called him ‘Boobs’ because they thought he looked like Michael Bublé although he didn’t, not even slightly. They copied his faint West Country burr and made jokes about shagging sheep and marrying cousins, and Liam didn’t mind in the least because that was his sense of humour too; he loved teasing people and getting a rise out of them. He called Scarlett’s gang ‘the groupies’ because they only hung out together when Scarlett was around. They never hung out without her and often you’d see one of them alone, just sort of loitering about campus, staring at their phone and Liam would say, ‘What you doing?’
‘Waiting for Scarlett,’ they’d reply.
Scarlett changed over that first year, went from the sort of girl who liked riding horses occasionally and plaited her hair to the sort of girl who used a fake ID to get tattoos in Soho and experimented with Class A drugs. She cut off her dark hair and bleached it. She pierced her lip, her nose, her tongue (Liam hated the tongue piercing, every time he saw a flash of it his gut clenched with discomfort). She stopped wearing feminine clothes andstarted dressing like a twelve-year-old boy from the Bronx. Liam didn’t mind. When they were alone together, she was just Scarlett, plain and simple, the girl he’d loved since the very first time he’d seen her peeling an egg.
They were together for the whole of her eighteen months at Maypole House. Liam was easy-going and uncomplicated, a good foil for Scarlett and her moods and her weird friends and for a while he had virtually lived at Scarlett’s house in the next village along – Dark Place. Words could barely describe the splendour of Scarlett’s home. Liam had seen a lot of stunning country homes in his life, but none as beautiful as Scarlett’s place. It was in a constant state of improvement during those years, builders’ vans on the driveway, drilling, banging, squares of dusky hues painted on to walls and painted over again, wallpaper samples everywhere, boxes of expensive tiles.