The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  As a matter of ritual as much as pride Tabby would check every room in turn before pulling the front door shut behind her. The interior shone, the surfaces gleamed, the light danced: the perfect Ile de Ré holiday awaited the approaching Belgians. Call it atonement, recompense, a guilty conscience – she was, if anything, doing a better cleaning job than she would have done otherwise.

  No one would guess.

  Though Moira had praised her as an outstanding worker, Emmie was a less than fastidious cleaner at home and had made no objection when Tabby offered to clean their house once a week as part of her rent.

  To avoid disturbing Emmie, she tried to find a time when she was alone in the house, which she approached with the same thoroughness she did her paid jobs. The rooms were comparatively small, but the facilities more dilapidated. The bathroom in particular was in need of renovation, but she liked its worn-and-torn charm, still remembered with pleasure her first bath in it, how magical it had felt to be bathing unhurried, the polished blue sky high above the ancient glass of the skylight.

  One thing she was absolutely clear about: she had not volunteered her services in order to snoop. Any search she might make for the purple folder was casual, its failure of no particular disappointment to her.

  In Emmie’s room she always exercised the utmost restraint as she vacuumed the rug and straightened the items in the drawers and wardrobe. Of course it was impossible not to note, alongside the utilitarian sweatpants and cotton tops, the pretty vintage dress Emmie had worn in the photograph, or the single other smart item in her wardrobe, a black boiled-wool jacket with big covered buttons and a white fur collar. It was in the same retro style as the dress, though far too heavy to be worn in summer weather here.

  To do her job properly, it was important to dust the few items on the dressing table, to spray the mirror and polish the glass to a shine. To do this it was necessary to remove the postcard of the painting she had often wondered about, but she would make a point of not turning it over to read the message. On one occasion, however, entirely by accident, the card fell from her grasp to the floor, landing with the words facing up. It was only a single line of blue ink and – well, she was only human: For E, my coup de foudre, with love, A x The painting was called Coup de Foudre, too, she noticed. She’d heard the term, but could not place it. There was no French–English dictionary in the house, unless you counted Emmie, whose French was fluent, but Tabby could hardly ask her for a translation: she would make the connection straight away, know Tabby had been reading private correspondence. She might not appreciate the coincidental nature of such things; she might think, First the photograph, now this.

  She repositioned the postcard, telling herself that she would not give it another thought.

  It was Sunday lunchtime and therefore a bit of a risk, but still she texted Grégoire: What does ‘coup de foudre’ mean?

  The message came back a little later: A lightning bolt.

  Then, a minute later, an afterthought: The English say, love at first sight.

  And she imagined him laughing to himself at the thought of her believing this to be what they had, chortling as he stood in the vast kitchen scrubbing mussels with Noémie or dressing the salad, strolling with their kirs on to the sunlit terrace by the pool. No, it made little difference whether he planned to leave his wife or not after the summer (of course he didn’t): the point was that if he were legitimately free he would not consider her, Tabby, for a public relationship.

  She was no one’s lightning bolt.

  Chapter 14

  Emily

  Sylvie and the boys were dead. They’d come off an A-road near Horsham and crashed into a bank of trees. All three suffered fatal head and chest injuries and were pronounced dead at the scene, their bodies taken to the hospital mortuary. Such was the car’s speed before the frontal impact crash that it had been described by witnesses in stationary oncoming traffic as terrifyingly over the limit. To have survived it would have been a miracle, and there had been no miracle.

  The liaison officer spoke to Arthur with maternal tenderness. ‘Were they on their way back to London, do you think? Was that the route she usually took?’ I don’t think she was pursuing any official inquiry, but was just trying to get him to speak, to say something and engage with the information. He was in shock, anyone could see that, his gaze stark and empty, his skin greyish and dehydrated-looking and his breath faint. I wanted to grip him in my arms, cover his face with my body, speak for him, breathe for him, but I knew instinctively I should not. Since I had joined them in the kitchen, he had scarcely glanced in my direction. Instead I had to rely, as the others were, on the strong, sweet tea he’d been given.

  ‘Do you feel light-headed?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said in a voice that was no longer his. Like his face, it was devoid of conscious expression. ‘They weren’t coming back to London.’ I realised he was answering the officer’s question, not mine. ‘They were down there for the summer. I was joining them this afternoon. There was no reason for them to come back, they must have been going out for the morning somewhere.’

  The woman said the deaths had been reported to the local coroner, which was normal in the circumstances. He would probably wish to investigate, she said, which meant that registering the deaths and proceeding with the funeral would have to wait until authorisation was received.

  ‘Investigate?’ I said, when Arthur failed to query this information. ‘What do you mean, the “circumstances”? You just said no other vehicles were involved?’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t know how the car came to go off the road the way it did. It might have been any number of factors. It’s nothing to worry about, the coroner enquires into all unexplained violent or unnatural deaths, that’s his job. An inquiry will establish the facts, the exact cause of death.’

  Unexplained… unnatural… exact cause… I knew what she meant, then, and it chilled the blood in my veins: whether the crash had been accidental or deliberate. Arthur, of course, had no cause yet to question the distinction.

  ‘There must have been something wrong with the car,’ I said. ‘The brakes, maybe? To be driving at ninety or more when the limit was – what did you say?’

  ‘The limit is seventy on that stretch, I believe, but we won’t know the exact speed the car was travelling at until after the investigation.’

  Officer Matthews added, ‘I’m afraid they’ve had a lot of problems with speeding on that road. A motorcyclist appeared in the magistrate’s court recently having been caught at a hundred and thirty miles an hour.’

  ‘God,’ I said, shocked. ‘Maybe it —’

  ‘Sylvie wouldn’t have been speeding,’ Arthur said at the same time; it was as if he hadn’t heard me begin to speak. ‘Not with the boys in the car. You can’t compare this with some lunatic Hell’s Angel.’

  The officers were quick to agree with him, and I realised I should not have drawn the discussion in this direction.

  ‘I need to go to them,’ Arthur said. ‘I need to talk to the paramedics, the police, someone from the response team at the scene.’

  I’d momentarily forgotten that he was a medical professional himself and would know something of the process that awaited him. He put his tea aside as if he meant to leave that very minute. I looked to the police officers for a lead – he couldn’t be allowed to travel, not in this shocked condition – but they only nodded their agreement.

  ‘We can arrange for someone to take you,’ they said.

  ‘No, I’ll drive myself.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I told him. I’d never learned to drive.

  But he looked at me as if I were a stranger, an intruder. ‘What? No. No, thank you.’ I wondered if he knew my name.

  ‘You can’t drive,’ I said, fighting sudden tears. ‘You can’t be alone, either.’ I turned to the two officers, telling them my name, not sure if I was introducing or reintroducing myself, for this conversation – time itself – was creasing and stretching i
n peculiar ways. ‘I’ll make sure he gets there safely. Do you have an address for the hospital?’ I could not say ‘mortuary’; my brain could think the word but my voicebox could not produce it. ‘We’ll take the train. It goes from Victoria, I’m guessing. I’ll check.’ I’d phone for a taxi to take us to the station, I thought. I’d sit next to him for the whole journey, not let him out of my sight.

  But I could see the police officers were uncertain of me, had picked up on Arthur’s rejection of me, and neither judged it safe to supply the details. ‘If you prefer to make your way separately, that’s fine,’ Officer Wayne told him, continuing to speak very gently, ‘but Emily is right, you shouldn’t drive. Is there anyone else you’d like us to contact who might take you? A family member or close friend? We’d be happy to phone them for you and wait with you until they arrive.’

  ‘My brother,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s in north London. He’ll take me.’

  ‘What’s his name? Is his number in your phone?’

  ‘Yes. Toby Woodhall.’

  ‘Your phone’s in the bedroom,’ I said. ‘I’ll get it for you, shall I?’ All three of them looked at me then and I regretted having been so specific, not because of the officers, who exhibited a studied lack of judgement in their appreciation of my offer, but because of Arthur, who regarded me with utter bewilderment, as if he couldn’t comprehend how an uninvited guest should know the whereabouts of any of his possessions or consider it her business to roam his house. I fetched the phone, grateful to leave the room for a minute, also grateful to see that he’d missed no calls during our night together. However, returning downstairs I remembered the second phone, the one I’d seen recharging in his study. Not sure which held his brother’s number, I decided to bring both. As soon as I handled the second one, the display lit up with an alert for two missed calls.

  By the time I returned to the kitchen, Arthur’s expression had distorted into one of near-revulsion for me. I wanted to protest, remind him that he loved me and I loved him, that we loved each other. I wanted to vow to him that he would survive this tragedy, that one way or another he would continue to live, but I could say none of those things, of course.

  He noticed the missed calls at once, fingers finding the itemised log. ‘There’s a message from Hugo,’ he said in a tone of terrible wonder, and I was relieved when the officers suggested he wait a while before listening to any voicemails. Officer Matthews then made the call to Toby, who, I gathered, promised to set off from his house directly. It was agreed that I would take interim guardianship of Arthur and, having offered final condolences, the officers departed. I was moved by how shaken they looked compared with their composure on arrival, even though they must do this every day. But then I thought, no, they don’t, they can’t. Not this bad. This is exceptional.

  After they’d gone, I tried to hold him but his body recoiled, its resistance instinctual, and I knew, as I drew away, it was the last time we would touch. Even without his having been told about my phone call to Sylvie, I just knew. And I was not the only part of him that would be banished; he would never again be as he had been, feel as he had felt.

  ‘I can’t bear this for you,’ I said. ‘I know it’s better if you go with Toby, but I can come to you any time if you need me. Tonight, tomorrow… just say the word. You mustn’t be on your own.’

  It was an appalling choice of words and he did not reply.

  Toby arrived. He was not like his brother at all, but chaotic in personal style and freely expressive of his anguish. ‘This is unbelievable,’ he kept saying, his voice rising and falling with the strain of an inadequate vocabulary, unpractised emotion. ‘Are they sure? I mean, all three of them? Alex and Hugo? Are they absolutely sure?’ I did not like to trust him with Arthur’s welfare, but I knew I had to.

  ‘I live up the road,’ I told him. ‘I was bringing back a document your brother lent me and was here when the police arrived.’

  Having no reason to know the lie, he thanked me for my kindness and took my number before urging me to leave; he probably thought I was longing to escape and get on with my delayed day.

  In my bag my phone rang and rang. It would be Charlotte, but I could not go in to work. I could not guide small children’s hands as they applied paintbrush to ceramic, or lead ‘Happy Birthday’ and call out, ‘Hip, hip, hooray!’ I could not explain to a mother why her child was snivelling or had lost his shoe. I could not smile hello or wave goodbye.

  ‘Shall I phone you later?’ I said to Arthur, hopeful to the last.

  His eyes looked blindly towards me, as if he were able only to follow the disembodied sound of me. ‘No,’ he said, ‘don’t. Don’t phone me.’

  I swallowed my sorrow. ‘You’re right,’ I said, as if in agreement. ‘I’ll wait for you to contact me.’

  By the afternoon, the deaths had been reported online. There was nothing like the subsequent coverage of the inquest, only brief references amid warnings of severe traffic disruption and temporary road closures. A single image showed an air ambulance at rest on a ghostly carriageway, two lanes of traffic held behind a barrier and backed up as far as the eye could see. You could not see the wreckage or any other emergency vehicles.

  On Monday there was a short piece on the Telegraph website, which named the family:

  The wife and two sons of leading Harley Street eye surgeon Arthur Woodhall have been killed in a road accident in Sussex. The coroner has opened an inquiry into the three deaths, which he has referred to the police for investigation on his behalf. Mr Woodhall is noted for his work in neuro-ophthalmology and strabismus, and lists among his patients members of the British and Saudi Royal Families. As well as running an exclusive private practice in Harley Street, he is a consultant at NHS St Barnabas’ in south London and founder of the AllSight charity, which works to combat blindness in West African countries.

  I must have read it fifty times.

  I couldn’t say now how many days passed before the coroner’s office rang me, but it was in the immediate aftermath, I’m sure, because I was aware as I pressed the phone to my ear of my face being swollen and sore from nightly crying. The officer, Gwen, told me the investigation was under way, the police having assigned an impressively large team to it. The implication was that Arthur’s VIP status warranted this commitment to maximum efficiency.

  ‘Would it be possible for someone to come and speak to you?’ she asked. Her manner melded matter-of-fact professionalism with the warm solicitude of a new friend. The former scared me, the latter made my heart clench.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you knew one of the deceased, Sylvie Woodhall.’

  ‘I didn’t know her. I only met her twice, and even then only for a few minutes.’ I felt like a criminal uttering this half-truth.

  ‘You knew her husband, though, and you spoke to her soon before her death. You may have information that could be useful in understanding her intentions before the collision took place.’

  They must have looked at her phone log, I realised. I must have been one of the last people she spoke to. Had I even been the last? It didn’t bear thinking about, but I could see I was going to have to.

  ‘Has there been a post-mortem?’ I asked, speaking in painful gulps. ‘I mean on Sylvie?’

  It was a question that had consumed me these days – these weeks. What I was thinking, what I had by then decided to be fact, was that our phone conversation had caused her to drink and drive. Arthur had told me she did not drink alcohol, or not often, he had as good as said she was a recovering addict. Had my refusal of her ‘deal’ led her to relapse the night before the accident? Unused to its effects, she might not have metabolised it quickly enough and it had acted as poison, affecting her judgement at the wheel.

  ‘A post-mortem has taken place now, yes,’ Gwen said.

  ‘What did you discover?’

  ‘The pathologist is still preparing his report.’ In other words, they weren’t about to tell me anything. She said she would pass my nu
mber to the investigator and forward me a guide to coroners’ inquiries to give me an idea of what the process would entail.

  I told myself it had been inevitable that someone would name me as Arthur’s lover; perhaps Arthur had already done so himself. And on a shameful, subterranean level, I couldn’t stop myself from hoping that being involved in the investigation might bring me into contact with him again. Maybe it would make him remember me. Because the tragedy may have stopped him from loving me, I understood that, but it had not stopped me from loving him.