The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
16
September 2018
The grounds at Maypole House fill slowly but surely during the weekend before term begins. The empty buildings come alive with the movement of people, the sounds of voices and music, of doors opening and shutting, ringtones and car engines, laughter and shouting.
Sophie feels strange, less like she’s in the middle of nowhere, as she’d feared, and more like she’s actually in the middle of everything. From the garden outside the kitchen she can sit and watch the students leave their rooms and head into the main building for breakfast. Some of them take morning jogs around the grounds. She starts to recognise certain faces, certain groups of friends, and she can tell even from a distance who is new to the college and who is a returner by the confidence with which they traverse the school grounds.
On the Sunday night before term officially starts, there is what is called the Registration Day Dinner. Registration Day is the busiest day in the run-up to the new term, when the majority of students arrive from home to board and sign up for their classes. In reality, most of this is done online before the students ever set foot on campus, but it’s an old tradition and it’s a good way for students to set eyes on their classmates before they hit the classroom. And then there is the dinner which, according to Shaun, is what it is really all about.
In days gone by, it was a sit-down affair, but since the new accommodation block was built ten years earlier, doubling the size of the student population, the dinner has morphed into a party with a buffet and a DJ.
Sophie, for some reason, wants to look stunning for the party. Not just nice, but knock-out, drop-dead amazing so that the students will all talk about her behind her back – so they’ll say, ‘Wow, Mr Gray’s girlfriend is really pretty, isn’t she?’ She wants, for some reason, to win the approval of some of the handsome-looking boys she’s seen jogging around campus. Not the young ones, obviously, but the nineteen-year-olds, the nearly-men with their summer tans and their thick hair and their swaggers.
She pulls on a black satin camisole top with lace trim and a lace-panelled back. She teams it with fitted black trousers and high heeled black sandals and she fixes her hair into a side ponytail that sits on her shoulder. She blobs her face with things that promise to illuminate and to shimmer.
Shaun does a double take as she walks into the hallway. He says, ‘God, wow, Soph, you look lovely.’ And she can tell he means it.
The noise from the main hall is deafening. It has a barrelled, wood-lined ceiling and windows set up so high they only let in light, no view. But there are three pairs of huge double doors open on to the lawn where there is a marquee, and tables and chairs laid out in the early-evening sun. She and Shaun wander across the lawn together, her arm linked through his, throwing smiles at people and stopping to say hello. They find an empty table and Shaun leaves Sophie to go and get them drinks. Her gaze travels across the scene as she waits for him to return, to the clusters of lovely young things curled around each other in little pockets, impenetrable, slightly terrifying, the power and yet the patheticness of them, the know-all- and know-nothing-ness. It’s not just their youth that glitters, she ponders as she watches them, it’s their backgrounds, their innate privilege, the suggestion in the way they touch their hair, the way they hold their drinks, the way they scroll so nonchalantly through their phones. They come from places that aren’t like the places most people come from and they have the high-gloss veneer of money that shines through the scruffiest of exteriors.
Sophie comes from terraced houses and cars that drive till they die and state schools and weekly Tesco shops and biscuits off plates at her grandma’s flat every Saturday. She hadn’t missed out on anything: there was always food and holidays abroad and shopping trips to Oxford Street and takeaways on Friday nights; there was always enough of everything. Her life was perfect. But it was matte, not gloss.
She thinks about Dark Place, about the Jacques family, about the swimming pool that must once have sparkled icy blue in the summer sun, the art that must once have sat on the Perspex plinths, the music that must once have tumbled out of double doors and across the manicured lawns, the especial laughter of people with numerous cars and horses and chalets in the Alps. Their daughter, Scarlett, had once been a student here, according to Kerryanne Mulligan.
Shaun reappears with two glasses of wine and takes his seat next to Sophie. ‘Sorry I took so long,’ he says. ‘Got waylaid.’
‘Let’s drink these,’ she says, ‘and then we can mingle.’
‘Urgh, God, do we have to?’ he says, dropping his forehead against her bare shoulder.
She ruffles the back of his neck and laughs. ‘I kind of think we do have to, yes. You’re basically the king. You have to get out there.’
‘I know.’ He lifts his head and puts a hand on her knee. ‘I know.’
They drink their wine and within a minute or two are joined at their table by a couple called Fleur and Robin who are the geography teacher and the photography teacher respectively and who live in a cottage just outside the village and have a Border terrier called Oscar and a rabbit called Bafta and are both very talkative indeed. Halfway through this conversation they are joined by a middle-aged man called Troy, who has a magnificent beard. He is the philosophy and theology teacher and he lives on campus and has a lot of recommendations for local delicatessens, wine shops and butchers. Someone whisks Shaun away and for a while it is Sophie and Troy, and that is fine. Troy is very easy to talk to, and then they are joined by someone with a French accent and someone with a Spanish accent and soon her table is overrun with people whose names she barely has time to catch, let alone their jobs or roles at the school. Then she notices a younger man, standing at the periphery of the group that has gathered around her table: he’s holding a beer in one hand; his other hand is in the pocket of a pair of navy chino shorts. His brown hair is short and wavy; he’s wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just above his elbows and white trainers, without socks. He has a nice physique. He looks a bit like a film star, one of the ones called Chris, Sophie can never remember which is which.
He’s talking to an older woman; Sophie can tell he doesn’t know her all that well, that he’s making an effort to be charming and polite. She sees him turn very vaguely in her direction, as though he can feel her eyes upon him, and she looks away. The next time she glances over she sees that the older woman has turned to talk to someone else and left him adrift. He lifts his beer bottle to his lips and takes a thoughtful slug. He sees her looking at him and smiles. ‘You must be Mr Gray’s partner,’ he says, approaching her.
‘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 here for …’ 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 get back 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.’
They conclude that they’ve already met and the conversation becomes diluted with other people and other topics and soon Sophie is no longer talking to Liam at all; he’s been absorbed into another group. She finds herself alone and walks across the lawn towards the bar inside the marquee. Here she gets herself a second glass of wine and carries it back outdoors. She can just see Shaun across the lawn, deep in conversation with Peter Doody and Kerryanne Mulligan.
Then she sees Liam walking across the lawn towards the main hall and, on a whim, she follows him. He carries on walking though the hall and out of the doors on the other side. Then he crosses the back courtyard and heads towards the accommodation block. She sees him tapping the security code into the panel and, with a buzz and a click, he’s gone. She sits on a bench in the courtyard, glad of a moment to herself before going back into the fray. The wine is warm but she drinks it anyway. The evening sun is strobing through ribbons of purple cloud and she turns her face into it, her eyes closed, listening to the distant din of chatter and laughter.
She shudders slightly to right herself, and then she opens her eyes and, as she does so, she sees a pair of tanned feet overhanging the bars of a balcony on the third floor of the residential block, the edge of a paperback book, a cold beer sitting on a table.
It’s Liam.
For a moment she toys with the idea of calling up to him, of inviting herself in, of drinking a cold beer with him and asking him what he thinks really happened at Dark Place that night.
She shakes her head to herself; then she heads back through the cloisters to the party.