Lost property

I've worked in the office of a primary school for eleven years. One of my jobs is the lost property box.

Most of it is boring. Odd gloves. Water bottles. Jumpers with no name tag. But a few times a year, something turns up that nobody has lost yet.

The first time, it was a red hair clip shaped like a strawberry. Nobody claimed it. Two weeks later a girl called Ruby Ellis disappeared on her way home from the park. On the posters, in her school photo, she was wearing a red strawberry hair clip.

I told myself it was a coincidence. Lots of girls have hair clips.

Then a dinosaur lunchbox appeared in the box, with a name written on the lid in marker: SAM K. We didn't have a Sam K. A month later a new family moved into town, and their son Sam Kowalski joined Year 2. He didn't come back from a school trip in June.

I started checking the box every morning before anyone else got in. Things kept arriving overnight. Never anything that had been lost. Always things that would be.

I tried hiding them. I tried throwing them away. The next morning they were back in the box, folded neatly, as if someone cared.

This morning there was a lanyard in the box. A school staff lanyard, with a photo ID.

It's mine. I'm wearing mine right now. They're identical, down to the coffee stain on the corner.

I've told the head I'm unwell and I'm going home early. I've locked my car doors. But I keep looking at the lanyard on the passenger seat, the one I took out of the box.

And the one around my neck is gone.