The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
2
August 2018
‘Mr Gray! Welcome!’
Sophie sees a silver-haired man striding towards them down the wood-panelled corridor. His hand is already extended towards them although he has another ten feet to cover.
He gets to Shaun and grasps his hand warmly, wrapping it inside both of his as if Shaun is a small child with cold hands that need warming up.
Then he turns to Sophie and says, ‘Mrs Gray! So lovely to meet you at last!’
‘Miss Beck, actually, sorry,’ says Sophie.
‘Ah, yes, of course. Stupid of me. I did know that. Miss Beck. Peter Doody. Executive Head.’
Peter Doody beams at her. His teeth are unnaturally white for a man in his early sixties. ‘And I hear you are a novelist?’
Sophie nods.
‘What sort of books do you write?’
‘Detective novels,’ she replies.
‘Detective novels! Well, well, well! I’m sure you’ll find lots to inspire you here at Maypole House. There’s never a dull day. Just make sure you change the names!’ He laughs loudly at his own joke. ‘Where have you parked?’ he asks Shaun, indicating the driveway beyond the huge doorway.
‘Oh,’ says Shaun, ‘just there, next to you. I hope that’s OK?’
‘Perfect, just perfect.’ He peers over Shaun’s shoulder. ‘And the little ones?’
‘With their mother. In London.’
‘Ah, yes, of course.’
Sophie and Shaun follow Peter Doody, wheeling their suitcases down one of the three long corridors that branch off the main hallway. They push through double doors and into a glass tunnel that connects the old house to the modern block, and continue wheeling the cases out of a door at the back of the modern block and down a curved path towards a small Victorian cottage. It backs directly onto woodland and is surrounded by a ring of rosebushes just coming into late-summer bloom.
Peter takes a bunch of keys from his pocket and removes a pair on a brass ring. Sophie has seen the cottage once before, but only as the home of the previous head teacher filled with their furnishings and ephemera, their dogs, their photographs. Peter unlocks the door and they follow him into the flagstoned back hallway. The Wellington boots have gone, the waxed jackets and dog leads hanging from the hooks. There is a petrolic, smoky smell in here, and a cold draught coming up from between the floorboards which makes the cottage feel strangely wintery on this dog day of a long hot summer.
Maypole House is in the picturesque village of Upfield Common in the Surrey Hills. It was once the manor house of the village until twenty years ago when it was bought up by a company called Magenta that owns schools and colleges all over the world and turned into a private boarding school for sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds who’d flunked their GCSEs and A levels first time round. So, yes, a school for failures, in essence. And Sophie’s boyfriend Shaun is now the new head teacher.
‘Here.’ Peter tips the keys into Shaun’s hand. ‘All yours. When is the rest of your stuff arriving?’
‘Three o’clock,’ replies Shaun.
Peter checks the time on his Apple Watch and says, ‘Well, then, looks like you’ve got plenty of time for a pub lunch. My treat!’
‘Oh.’ Shaun looks at Sophie. ‘Erm, we brought lunch with us, actually.’ He indicates a canvas bag on the floor by his feet. ‘But thank you, anyway.’
Peter seems unperturbed. ‘Well, just for future reference, the local pub is superb. The Swan & Ducks. Other side of the common. Does a kind of Mediterranean, meze, tapas type of menu. The calamari stew is incredible. And an excellent wine cellar. Manager there will give you a discount when you tell him who you are.’
He looks at his watch again and says, ‘Well, anyway. I’ll let you both settle in. All the codes are here. You’ll need this one to let the van in when it arrives and this one is for the front door. Your card will operate all the interior doors.’ He hands them a lanyard each. ‘And I will be back tomorrow morning for our first day’s work. FYI, you may see some strangely dressed folks around; there’s been an external residential course running here all week, some kind of Glee-type thing. It’s the last day today, they’ll be leaving tomorrow, and Kerryanne Mulligan, the matron – you met her last week, I believe?’
Shaun nods.
‘She’s looking after the group so you don’t need to worry yourself about them. And that, I think, is that. Except, oh …’ He strides towards the fridge and opens the door. ‘A little something, from Magenta to you.’ A single bottle of cheap champagne sits in the empty fridge. He closes the door, puts his hands into the pockets of his blue chinos and then takes them out again to shake both their hands.
And then he is gone and Shaun and Sophie are alone in their new home for the very first time. They look at each other and then around and then at each other again. Sophie bends down to the canvas bag and pulls out the two wine glasses she’d packed this morning as they’d prepared to leave Shaun’s house in Lewisham. She unwraps them from tissue paper, rests them on the counter, pulls open the fridge and grabs the champagne.
Then she takes Shaun’s outstretched hand and follows him to the garden. It’s west-facing and cast in shade at this time of the day, but it’s still just warm enough to sit with bare arms.
While Shaun uncorks the champagne and pours them each a glass, Sophie lets her gaze roam across the view: a wooden gate between the rosebushes that form the boundary of the back garden leads to a velvety green woodland interspersed with patches of lawn onto which the midday sun falls through the treetops into pools of gold. She can hear the sound of birds chittering in the branches. She can hear the champagne bubbles fizzing in the wine glasses. She can hear her own breath in her lungs, the blood passing through the veins on her temples.
She notices Shaun looking at her.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘What for!’
‘You know what for.’ He takes her hands in his. ‘How much you’re sacrificing to be here with me. I don’t deserve you. I really don’t.’
‘You do deserve me. I’m “sloppy seconds”, remember?’
They smile wryly at each other. This is one of the many unpleasant things that Shaun’s ex-wife Pippa had found to say about Sophie when she’d first found out about her. Also, ‘She looks much older than thirty-four,’ and, ‘She has a strangely flat backside.’
‘Well, whatever you are, you’re the best. And I love you.’ He kisses her knuckles hard and then lets her hands go so that she can pick up her glass.
‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ Sophie says dreamily, staring through the back gate and into the woods. ‘Where do they go?’
‘I have no idea,’ he replies. ‘Maybe you should go for a wander after lunch?’
‘Yes,’ says Sophie. ‘Maybe I will.’
Shaun and Sophie have only been together for six months. They met when Sophie came to Shaun’s school to give a talk about publishing and writing to a group of his A-level English students. He took her for lunch as a ‘thank you’ and at first she felt nervous, as if she’d done something wrong; the association between being alone with an older male teacher and having done something wrong was buried so deep into her psyche she couldn’t override it. But then she’d noticed that he had very, very dark brown eyes, almost black, and that his shoulders were broad and that he had a wonderful warm, hearty laugh and a soft mouth and no wedding band, and then she realised that he was flirting with her and then there was an email from him in her inbox a day later, sent from his private email address, thanking her for coming in and wondering if she might like to try the new Korean place they’d chatted about at lunch the previous day, maybe on Friday night, and she’d thought, I have never been on a date with a man in his forties, I have never been on a date with a man who wears a tie to work, and I have not, in fact, been on a date for five full years, and I really would like to try the new Korean place, so why not?
It was during their first date that Shaun told her he was leaving the big secondary school in Lewisham where he was head of sixth form at the end of the term to be a head teacher at a private boarding sixth-form college in the Surrey Hills. Not because he wanted to be in the private sector, working in a mahogany-lined office, but because his ex-wife Pippa was moving their twins from the perfectly nice state primary they’d both been at for three years to an expensive private school and expected him to contribute half of their school fees.
At first the implications of this development hadn’t really hit Sophie. March tumbled into April tumbled into May tumbled into June and she and Shaun became closer and closer and their lives became more and more intertwined and then Sophie met Shaun’s twins, who let her put them to bed and read them stories and comb their hair and then it was the summer holidays and she and Shaun started to spend even more time together, and then one night, drinking cocktails on a roof terrace overlooking the Thames, Shaun said, ‘Come with me. Come with me to Maypole House.’
Sophie’s gut reaction had been no. No no no no no. She was a Londoner. She was independent. She had a career of her own. A social life. Her family lived in London. But as July turned to August and Shaun’s departure drew ever closer and the fabric of her life started to feel as though it was stretching out of shape, she turned her thinking round. Maybe, she thought, it would be nice to live in the countryside. Maybe she could focus more on work, without all the distractions of city living. Maybe she’d enjoy the status of being the head teacher’s partner, the cachet of being the first lady of such an exclusive place. She went with Shaun to visit the school and she walked around the cottage and felt the warm solidity of the terracotta tiles beneath her feet, smelled the sensuous fragrance of wild roses, of freshly mowed grass, of sun-warmed jasmine through the back door. She saw a space below a window in the hallway that was just the right size for her writing desk, with a view across the school grounds. She thought, I am thirty-four. Soon I will be thirty-five. I have been alone for a long, long time. Maybe I should do this ridiculous thing.
And so she said yes.
She and Shaun made the most of every minute of their last few weeks in London. They sat on every pavement terrace in South London, ate every kind of obscure ethnic cuisine, watched films in multi-storey car parks, wandered around pop-up food fairs, picnicked in the park to the background sounds of grime music and sirens and diesel engines. They spent ten days in Mallorca in a cool Airbnb in downtown Palma with a balcony overlooking the marina. They spent weekends with Shaun’s children and took them to the South Bank to run through the fountains, for al fresco lunches at Giraffe and Wahaca, to the Tate Modern, to the playgrounds in Kensington Gardens.
And then she’d let her one-bedroom flat in New Cross to a friend, cancelled her gym membership, signed out of her Tuesday night writers’ group, packed some boxes and joined Shaun here, in the middle of nowhere.
And now, as the sun shines down through the tops of the towering trees, splashing dapples on to the dark fabric of her dress and the ground beneath her feet, Sophie starts to feel the beginning of happiness, a sense that this decision borne of pragmatism might in fact have been some kind of magical act of destiny unfurling, that they were meant to be here, that this will be good for her, good for both of them.
Shaun takes their lunch things through to the kitchen. She hears the tap go on and the clatter of dishes being laid down in the butler’s sink.
‘I’m going for a wander,’ she calls to Shaun through the open window.
She turns to put the latch on the gate as she leaves the back garden and as she does so her eye is caught by something nailed to the wooden fence.
A piece of cardboard, a flap torn from a box by the look of it.
Scrawled on it in marker and with an arrow pointing down to the earth, are the words ‘Dig Here’.
She stares at it curiously for a moment. Maybe, she thinks, it’s left over from a treasure trail, a party game, or a team-building exercise from the Glee course that is finishing today. Maybe, she thinks, it’s a time capsule.
But then something else flashes through her mind. A jolting déjà vu. A certainty that she has seen this exact thing before: a cardboard sign nailed to a fence. The words ‘Dig Here’ in black marker pen. A downward-pointing arrow. She has seen this before.
But she cannot for the life of her remember where.