Underwear, it said.

One pair of your panties.

Not clean ones. Used panties, folded up in a plastic bag.

Leave them on your doorstep tomorrow morning, behind the small tree in the pot.

When this is done, I will give you your first clue.

I want to be able to trust you, Laura.

Yours with respect,

X

12.

Confused, she put the letter down, and walked away from it, feeling sick to her stomach, the skin on the back of her neck prickling as if someone were breathing on it from behind.

No way, she thought, red spots of embarrassment pooling on her cheeks.

No way.

Humiliated, and deeply disturbed, Laura found herself with a decision to make. The letter had said no Police, but what she was being asked to do was wrong, and she knew it. The next step should be to inform an adult. The next step should be to throw the letter away, burn it, and forget it ever happened.

But then what about Bobby?

The child that she still was wanted desperately to fix everything, to bring him back, and this letter might be her chance.

And really, what did she care about a pair of old knickers, when it came down to it? If she could just give Mrs. Eveleigh some answers, maybe she wouldn’t hate her as much as she did, or continue to blame her for Bobby’s disappearance. It never occurred to Laura that it was unfair of Mrs. Eveleigh to blame a teenage girl for something as profound and terrible as the loss of her son.

Crushed by the weight of responsibility, and exhausted by the idea that even if she told her parents what was happening, they might not believe her, or take it seriously, Laura’s resistance crumbled.

She did as she was told.

She went upstairs to the bathroom laundry basket and pulled out one pair of her plain cotton knickers. She found a plastic bag and folded them up inside, a hot, lurching, urgent feeling in the pit of her tummy. Then, she tucked the plastic bag behind the small potted bay tree by her front door.

Afterwards, she hid in her room, ashamed and terrified of what she had just set in motion, knees drawn up to her chest, a pillow over her head, held there until she almost suffocated herself, a useless, pathetic shield against the bogeyman lurking outside her front door.

Eventually, she decided to check the letterbox, in case her mother came home from work and stumbled across something she shouldn’t. She extricated herself from her cocoon and crept downstairs, opening the front door a tiny, barely perceptible crack.

The bag was gone. In its place, there was another envelope. Inside that was a scrap of paper, and on it, the first clue:

φ 50.9025. Λ -1.63403114

Which made absolutely no sense to her whatsoever.

After this, he had written one standalone sentence, and it was this that confused her most of all:

I loved him, you know.