- to meet someone at the pub. I have often waited outside a pub when I have arranged to meet someone to then go for a meal or drink.
- to meet up with someone who lived locally to the pub. It is a far less rural area than sometimes thought, with quite a lot of local houses and it may have been convenient to specify the Hand in Hand to a taxi driver and then walk a short distance to a house - but the fact that the taxi driver saw her standing there suggests otherwise.
- to be picked up by someone using the Hand in Hand as an easy to find local point. I suspect this is most likely although it would suggest deliberately choosing a place less likely to have too many people around (consistent with the other elements of planning) and (possibly) some local knowledge by the other person as it is on a back road (albeit not difficult to find).
I still lean toward her leaving, although whether she then met trouble at the hands of a third party seems the big question. I rather think this depends on whether that party was someone she knew well - such as from school - or was a recent contact. My inclination is that one of her friends knows more than they are saying, but that is just guesswork based on very little
I agree with you in that I also lean toward her leaving.
I think that it's possible Ruth's disappearance was very calculated actually. There are signs that this is the case.
-- Ruth deliberately ordered flowers for her stepmum, with whom there are indications she was having issues, most likely around the fact that Ruth had found out that her birth mum had committed suicide and not died in an accident. Ruth made a plan around the ordering of the flowers, which would have a message that was clear to her parents, and she must have known, since it's a small town/village, that the flowers would be traced back to the shop she bought them from and the shop owner would likely remember the girl who bought them. So she likely knew up ahead that this sequence of events would happen. She was sending a message, we just don't know what.
-- I think Ruth planned to make it look like she killed herself, and left notes that were ambiguous in a place where they would be found. You write and leave notes because you want and expect them to be found, right? Actually it's worth noting that most suicides DON'T leave notes and in teen suicides the numbers who leave notes are even smaller, since teen suicide is actually very rare, if you look up the teen suicide rate for the year Ruth went missing you can see it's tiny. Yet Ruth both wrote notes, and her notes were found very soon after her disappearance. Yet there was no body? Why? Well, let's hypothesize that Ruth took the taxi to the weird place of the top of Box Hill-- where some suicides have happened, and she might have known that--knowing that her taxi journey would be discovered soon after she went missing. We have pointed out before how odd this is as a place to run away from. But what if Ruth chose it because she wanted to lay a trail that suggested she was a suicide on Box Hill, and clearly her plan worked because the police found her notes. That in itself is fishy to me, because the night she went missing it was cold, rainy and blowing a gale, so if you left paper notes lying around they woudl go soggy, the ink would run and they would blow off. Yet clearly this cannot have been the case with Ruth's notes.
-- The taxi driver claims that Ruth just stood there after he drove off. That could be because she wanted him to see her standing there, to remember her, and/or because she wanted to give the impression she planned to stay on Box Hill and head down the bridleway, and she didn't want him to see where she was heading off to, so she waited til he was gone. It was cold and rainy and she had no coat so I doubt she would have stood around for long. Again, Ruth was aware that this journey would be found out, and she wanted that to happen since the journey places her at Box Hill. She wants people to think she went to Box Hill and killed herself there. Maybe she wanted to escape or maybe she also wanted to hurt her parents, send a message to them, pay them back.
-- Suicide by paracetamol is very hard and even if it was successful it would take hours and hours and most likely Ruth would have been found that night. Or, if she came to harm on Box Hill -- there was a search party that night, one would assume it would be reasonable that some signs of a struggle would be visible. and anyway, it would have been very bad luck for her to have chanced on a random stranger who killed her and hid her body so thoroughly no one ever found her on there.
No, I think Ruth planned her departure-- as evidenced by her farewell meal, her obvious distress around her home life, her friends probably know a little more than they are letting on but it's more likely she had help from someone outside of her school friends circle. She worked in a music shop, which wasn't a place that sold records and CDs but a place that sold sheet music, as her interest was playing and learning music, so its possible for example she could have met someone there. She was certainly telling some people she was close to about her problems at home. I think those problems probably ran deeper than certainly her family have let on. Whether something happened to Ruth after she ran away, i think we will never find that out.
