She rubs harder, dampens the towel again, rubs more. As she does so, the blackness shifts and gold block lettering begins to appear. She takes the box to the bathroom and rubs it with the wetted corner of a towel. She brushes the dirt off the lid again with her fingertips but it’s still impossible to make out the writing printed on the top. She can feel it whispering to her through the branches of the trees in the woods, down the corridors of the college, from Liam’s balcony, across the surface of the duck pond on the common, from Kim Knox’s window facing the bus stop and the ring in its box in the back corner of her drawer.Īt this thought she gets abruptly to her feet and runs up the stairs to her bedroom, wrenches open the drawer in the dressing table and pulls the box out. How can two people go to the pub on a Friday night and never come back and nobody know what happened to them? The mystery consumes her, whole. She adds the name ‘Zach Allister’ to her search for Liam.

She deletes ‘Maypole House’ and adds ‘Scarlett Jacques’. She switches screens, opens her browser and googles ‘Liam Bailey’.’Īs she’d expected, the search term brings up a hundred people who are not the correct Liam Bailey. The cottage is cool and quiet, her laptop is open on the kitchen table, her novel is blinking at her from the screen, her email inbox is full of work-related things that she should really be attending to, the dishwasher needs emptying and she still has boxes left to unpack, but she doesn’t do any of those things. She’d felt it everywhere Shaun went the night before, the feeling of genuine engagement he left in his wake, the sense that people had been uplifted by him, flattered by his attention, that he’d created a kind of buzz about the new term to come merely by being present, before he’d so much as held an assembly or read a speech. ‘The affection was tangible,’ she’d said. And judging by the way people reacted to you at the dinner tonight, they all love you already.’ ‘Not too short,’ she’d reassured, ‘perfect length. ‘Wonderful,’ she’d said, giving a round of applause. He’d practised it in front of Sophie last night standing at the foot of their bed in just his boxer shorts and socks, while she lay on the bed, playing the role of his audience. The day will start with an assembly and Shaun has been writing his first day speech for days now. Shaun has been at work for days already, of course, but there’s something new and shiny about the day as she watches Shaun readying himself this sunny Monday. The first day of the new term has arrived at Maypole House.

The day she disappeared lisa jewell