‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Maybe it is.’
She calls Ryan when she gets home and fills him in on the police activity in the woods. It’s lunchtime, but she’s not hungry. She puts her hand into a bag of Noah’s favourite cereal and eats the nuggets from the palm of her hand, like a pony eating sugar cubes. She checks the time. Three hours until she collects Noah from nursery. Dom told her that he’d have an update for her inthe early evening. Her next shift at the Swan & Ducks is not until tomorrow. She’d been pleased when she’d seen the gap between shifts on her rota the previous week, she’d been looking forward to the time off, but now she wishes she was at work, her mind taken off the painful events unfolding behind Maypole House.
She opens up her laptop and types, not for the first time, the name ‘Scarlett Jacques’ into the search box. And once again, the internet shows her nothing. A defunct Instagram account. A defunct Facebook page. A defunct Twitter account.
She types in the name ‘Joss Jacques’ and gets nothing at all. She cannot for the life of her remember the name of Scarlett’s brother, the handsome boy who’d opened the front door to her all those months ago with a beer in his hand.
As she’s done at intervals over the past year, she tries calling Mimi on the number that remained on her phone after their conversation when Tallulah and Zach had disappeared. And as happens every time, it hits a dead tone. She sighs and runs her hands through her hair. The key players, all the people who were there that night, the people who might know what happened, have vanished. The only ones who remain are the nice boy Liam, Scarlett’s ex, and Lexie Mulligan, who comes and goes from the village for long intervals.
It can’t be a coincidence, she thinks now; it can’t be a coincidence that they’ve all gone, that they’ve abandoned houses, social media platforms, college places, friends. And now this: the deliberate presentation of the previously missing ring to the world, someone purposely restarting the engines of the investigation. But why? Why now? And who?
And as she thinks this, she thinks again of the nice boy called Liam, the big bear-like boy with the gentle West Country burr. She thinks of the fact that he is still here, he who had the most reason to leave. He’s still in the village, still at Maypole House, where he works as a teaching assistant. He would have known that there was a new head teacher arriving. He would have known about the entrance to the woods at the back door of the head teacher’s cottage. He was there the night that Zach and Tallulah disappeared. Maybe he found the ring? Maybe Zach dropped it and Liam found it and kept it for some reason?
Or maybe …? No. She shakes her head against the thought. Such a nice boy. There’s no reason why he would want to harm Zach or Tallulah. None whatsoever. But maybe he knows who did and maybe he’s tired of keeping the secret.
She switches on her phone and types in a message to Dom:
You should talk to Liam Bailey again.
A moment later Dom replies.
Good idea.
29
September 2018
The police are busy at the entrance to the woods. From the kitchen window Sophie can see a police officer in a high-vis gilet holding the lead of a liver and white springer spaniel, also wearing a high-vis gilet. She turns at the sound of the front door opening and closing and calls out, ‘Hello?’
Shaun walks into the kitchen, looking tired and concerned.
‘Bloody hell, Soph,’ he says, taking off his lanyard and putting it on the kitchen counter. ‘What have you started?’
‘That ring,’ she says. ‘It belonged to the boy who went missing. You know, that couple I told you about who disappeared from the village last year. He bought the ring from a shop in Manton and was going to propose to his girlfriend with it that night. And then they disappeared and so did the ring andnow …’ Her words spill out in a rush; she feels guilty for some strange reason.
‘Someone wanted us to find it?’
She blinks at him, surprised that he has worked this out so quickly. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘At least, that’s what it looks like.’
He opens the fridge, pulls out a packet of ham and starts to make himself a sandwich. ‘Do you want one?’ he says, waving the packet at her.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll probably have something a bit later. When the police have gone.’
‘God,’ he says, ‘this is the last thing I need. New job, new school year, dead fucking teenagers in the woods.’ He sighs.
Her breath catches. ‘You think they’re going to find bodies?’
‘No. I doubt it. Apparently, they did a full search of the woods twice when they disappeared. But still, even if they don’t find anything, the press are going to jump on it, aren’t they? And I’ll be overseeing a media circus.’ He sighs again.
‘Do you hate me?’ she asks him.
‘Of course I don’t hate you. But I am wondering why you didn’t tell me about the ring? Why you didn’t mention to me that you’d found it? That you were going to take it to the woman, to the mother?’
He spreads butter onto fat white bread. She sees the muscles of his face straining under his skin, his knuckles white and pronounced. She thinks of the suntanned man in T-shirts and shorts she’d spent her last few London summer weeks with, the guy with the ready smile and the look in his eye of a man who couldn’t quite believe his luck. She wonders where he’s gone, a week into this new life.
‘I suppose I thought you had more important things worry about,’ she says. ‘I was bored, I guess, and I thought it would be fun to follow up a mystery. It just went a bit further than I thought it would. I’m sorry it’s landed on you, I really am. Hopefully it’ll all fizzle out.’
‘Hm,’ he says, snapping the lid on to the butter tub and putting it back in the fridge. ‘Unlikely. They just asked to speak to a member of staff.’