In wedding hell over lost ring

Sheenagh Murray, 25, accidentally left the white gold ring in the toilets of Starbucks on Nicolson Street after taking it off to wash her hands.

Around 30 minutes after leaving the coffee shop, Sheenagh, who lives in Causewayside, realised she had left the ring and rushed back to check the toilets but the ring was gone.

She said: “I felt so sick, I just wanted to cry. I thought, ‘how could I have been so stupid?’ It’s a horrible situation.

“The ring is a little bit big so I took it off because I didn’t want it to drop down the drain.

“As soon as I saw it wasn’t in the toilet I thought somebody must’ve handed it in, but the staff said they didn’t have it.

“I was in tears at this point because I was just panicking.”

Sheenagh’s fiancé Matt Maguire had insured the ring, which has a round diamond in a square setting with small cluster diamonds at either side, and was specially engraved with leopard print on the back.

“I love leopard print so Matt got it engraved. It was quite a distinctive ring,” said Sheenagh.

“It is the single most beautiful thing someone has ever done for me. I can’t put into words how much the ring means to me.”

The couple, who both work as sound engineers, are offering a “large cash reward” for the safe return of the ring, which was lost last Monday.

They put a notice up on Gumtree’s lost-and-found section asking anyone who may have found the ring to get in touch. Two days later, the couple received a phone call from a man who claimed his fiancée had found the ring.

After taking it to a jewellers to find out if the diamonds were real, the man said he was planning to hand it in to police when he happened to come across the couple’s advert.

Sheenagh said: “He said he was a lawyer who worked in a solicitor’s office on the corner of North Hanover Street, and that we could meet him at 4pm on Thursday to get the ring. But when we went, there wasn’t a solicitor’s office. The man didn’t give us an actual address or a phone number, and the number he phoned from was withheld.”

Sheenagh has since added another post to Gumtree urging the mystery man to get in touch, but now has concerns it may have been a hoax.

“It did cross our mind it could have been a hoax but I don’t understand what he would gain out of it,” she said.

Sheenagh, who hopes to get married next summer, added: “The awful thing is we were going to have an engagement party in the next couple of weeks but it doesn’t have the same shine on it when you are engaged but you don’t actually have a ring.”

Matt, 31, said: “Obviously the ring means the world to us and after only being engaged for two months, this is really hurting the two of us greatly.”