by Lisa Jewell
He looks at her and then toward the woods and she sees something shadowy pass over his face. “Yeah,” he says, “sure. Maybe later? I could, I dunno, I could meet you? I finish work at four. Shall I come to the cottage?”
“Yes,” says Sophie, knowing that Shaun won’t be back until at least six, if not later. “Come at four. I’ll see you then.”
* * *
Sophie has discovered more about Dark Place over the past day or two. As well as the Wikipedia entry, the house appears in many online documents about buildings of architectural note and historical interest. She finds an article from a local historian based just outside Manton. He describes the house as “a hodgepodge of styles and eras, soldered together like a broken cake, but somehow appearing all the more glorious for it.” He retells the various stories attached to the house in much more colorful language than that used in the Wiki post, bringing the characters vividly to life. The moment when the assassin is brought down by the animal trap is described in painful, agonizing detail. It was high summer apparently, the trap was laid in an unshaded area, the man lay scorching, toasting, his skin blistered and looking like “the hide of a spit roast pig” when his body was found six days later.
Toward the end of the article, the historian makes brief mention of the most recent inhabitants:
Currently, Dark Place is under private ownership, the main home of a family originally from the Channel Islands. Planning applications show that they have added a glass extension to the rear of the central Georgian wing and installed a swimming pool at the back, with a separate pool house, designed to echo the surrounding architecture and bounded by a sweep of reclaimed Palladian-style pillars, said to have once belonged to a mansion just outside York burned to the ground by a vengeful lover. A suitable addition to a house that has never stopped evolving and never stopped finding tales to tell about itself and its inhabitants.
There was one section in particular that had really grabbed Sophie’s attention. About halfway through the article, the historian casually tosses in the lines:
There has long been a rumor of an escape tunnel linking Dark Place to the woods that abut it, dug during the English Civil War, but evidence of either an entrance or an exit to this tunnel has never been found, despite concerted efforts from inhabitants over the years.
A shiver had run down Sophie’s spine as she read the lines.
She checks the time now and sees that it’s nearly four. She turns her phone camera to selfie mode and inspects her face. Feeling she looks a little lackluster, she applies an extra coat of mascara and some tinted lip balm. A moment later there’s a knock at the front door.
“It’s me, Liam.”
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 backstory.
“Yes. I went to the jewelry 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 next question. 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 more than 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 could always 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 toward 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 less than 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 air around 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 colorful, 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 humor 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?”
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 and started 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 easygoing 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 splendor 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 onto walls and painted over again, wallpaper samples everywhere, boxes of expensive tiles.
Doing the house up was Scarlett’s mother’s job. Joss was exactly what you’d imagine Scarlett’s mum to be like: loud, bossy, something of a narcissist. Liam met Scarlett’s father only once or twice during the eighteen months that they were together. Martin Jacques worked in the City and had a pied-à-terre in Bloomsbury. He was very thin and distant, with a plume of silvery hair and an almost constant twitch in his cheek.
And then there was Scarlett’s older brother, Rex, closer in age to Liam, awesome guy, right up Liam’s street, if a bit full of himself and loud on occasion, very much his mother’s son.
The Jacqueses loved Liam. He was made to feel one of the family, a part of the furniture. Joss always had a little job for him to do; a leaky U-bend that needed tightening, a kettle that needed rewiring, a car that needed to be taken to a garage for a service. And he was always happy to be that guy, the practical guy, the one who could be relied on to know how to reboot a treadmill or keep foxes off your lawn.
And then it all changed. Scarlett finished her A levels in June 2016, after which she and her family went sailing for most of the summer—Liam was invited to go with them but was needed at home because his dad’s back had gone. By the time Scarlett was back from her travels and Liam was back from the Cotswolds, there was barely a moment for them to spend together before Scarlett started her fine art course at Manton College. Liam, meanwhile, was still at Maypole House, retaking one last A level. Without their regular lunches together, without the times when they had free periods between lessons and sneaked into Liam’s room in the residential block to have sex or watch TV, without the sheer proximity of each other, the whole thing seemed to slide away from them, the easiness and the closeness, and toward the end of that first term, just before Christmas 2016, Scarlett took Liam to the Swan & Ducks and bought him beer and fish and chips and told him that it was probably best if they were just to be friends. And Liam shrugged and said, “Yeah, I kind of knew this was coming.”
“Are you sad?” she asked, her eyes wide, her bottom lip pinned down on one side by her teeth.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sad.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, grabbing his hand.
“You don’t need to be sorry. You’re young. Life moves on. I get it.”
“Am I allowed to change my mind?”
He laughed. “Only if you change it in the next fifteen minutes. After that, forget it.”
She dropped her head onto his shoulder and then looked up at him again and said, “I might just go AWOL without you, you know. I might lose the plot. I might… I don’t know, I might do some terrible things.”
“Don’t be daft.”
“No,” she said. “I mean it. You’re the thing that keeps me on the straight and narrow. You’re the rock. And I’m hacking myself off you. And I don’t know what happens after that.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said lightly. “I’m going to be right there.” He pointed through the window of the pub, across the common, to Maypole House.
“Yes, but…” She trailed off and he saw something dark pass across her face.
“What?” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing’s the matter.” She forced an unconvincing smile and then they embraced for a while and Liam breathed in the smell of her and tried his hardest not to cry, not to show her that she was killing him.
* * *
Liam went home for Christmas. He was quiet, but nobody noticed because that wasn’t what it was like in his house. He had three brothers and a sister and now there were nephews and nieces and there were cows to be calved, fences to be fixed, and bales to be shifted, and by the time Liam got back to Maypole House in January he was almost over Scarlett.
Almost, but not quite.
After a few days back at school he decided to ditch his final retake. He’d signed up for it only so that he could be close to Scarlett and without Scarlett he was adrift in a school full of people younger than him. He had the grades he needed for his degree at the agricultural college. He didn’t need to be there anymore. He planned to leave Maypole House and go home to help his dad with the farm for a few months, but the day he was meant to be leaving, he got a call from Scarlett.
“I need you, Boobs,” she said.
She didn’t sound like Scarlett. She sounded different. She sounded hollow and scared.
“What?” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t tell you on the phone. Can you come here? To the house? Please?”
Liam looked around his room, at the bags half-packed, the empty bookshelves, the closing down of this chapter of his life, ready to begin the next. He’d intended to hit the road by 6:00 p.m. and it was already nearly three. He sighed and he let his shoulders slump and he said, “Sure thing. Of course. I’ll be there in, like, a couple of hours.”
“No, come now. Please. Come now!”
He sighed again.
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll be there in ten.”
* * *
“And what was it?” Sophie asks now. “What did Scarlett want?”
“Some kind of breakdown, I think,” Liam replies. “She was shaking, fetal. Her mother sort of made out she was attention-seeking.” He shrugs. “Maybe she was. I don’t know. But I knew I couldn’t leave her. I knew she still needed me. Told my dad I wasn’t coming home yet and moved in with her for a while. Then a vacancy for a classroom assistant turned up here at the school and I thought I could just do it for a few weeks, just to stay close to Scarlett.” He sighs. “And, yeah, here I still am, more than a year later.”
“Why?” asks Sophie. “Why didn’t you go home when Scarlett left?”
“I just…” He grimaces. “I didn’t know she wasn’t coming back. I thought they’d just gone away for the summer. And then it was September again and they didn’t come back. And then I thought they’d be back for Christmas, and they weren’t. Then it was 2018 and Scarlett stopped replying to my messages and my phone calls completely and I thought, well, she’s moved on. It’s over. But I liked it here. So I stayed.”
“And the pool party,” she asks gently, not wanting to push too hard. “What happened that night?”
He lifts his eyes to hers and sighs. “Christ. Who knows. All I know is that I have no idea why those kids were even there. The guy, Zach, I’d say he was kind of dark. I kept picking up on a weird vibe between him and the girl. At the pub, it felt like the girl really didn’t want to come back to the house; he really had to persuade her. And then, once they were there, at Scarlett’s place, they just felt kind of out of place. They didn’t really want to join in. You could tell the guy was brooding about something or other. Jealous,
probably.”
“Jealous? Of what?”
Liam blinks and she sees him hold his breath. “Oh God, I don’t know. The size of the house, the privilege, all of that kind of thing, I suppose. Anyway, the atmosphere was awkward. And then my friend Lexie—she lives here too, she’s Kerryanne’s daughter?”
Sophie nods.
“She was driving back to the school and I’d had enough by then and we offered the couple a lift back to the village, and she was like, yes, that’d be great. But he said no, we’re staying. I saw him sort of tug her back into her chair and I felt really sorry for her. And I told all this to the police at the time, obviously, and I think the girl’s mother, Kim, I think she thought there was something a bit off with him. That it might have had something to do with him. That he offed her. Then disappeared somehow. But you know, how could there be no evidence? That’s what’s always confused me. They were there, and then they weren’t. Not a drop of blood, not a sniff of death. Two whole people, just gone. It doesn’t make any sense. Does it?”
He drops his eyes to Sophie’s phone and looks again at the photo of the ring.
“And now,” he says, making the image larger with his fingers, “it’s starting all over again.”
24
FEBRUARY 2017
Tallulah stares down the long driveway, through the elaborate metal gates toward Scarlett’s house where it emerges from a crown of trees at the top of a small hillock. It looks like it could still be another mile away. She squeezes her bike through the narrow pedestrian gap to the side of the gates and then remounts and cycles onward.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing or why she’s doing it. She just feels like the walls of her life are closing in on her and she needs to find a gap just for a minute, just so she can breathe.