The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  As I listened, I began to realise that every word that came out of the coroner’s mouth was concerned with factual information: there were no right or wrong answers to his questions, no shades of personal opinion or approval, just as his staff had assured me. He gave frequent factual recaps and reminders that his job was to establish how, when and where the Woodhalls had come by their deaths.

  ‘We touched just now on the rear left seatbelt, which you believe was functioning normally. And it was not your conclusion that there were any other mechanical faults to the vehicle?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No tyre defects, for instance?’

  ‘No. The vehicle had been serviced by Camberwell Motors in south London just twenty-six days earlier. Two tyres were replaced then and so were virtually brand-new.’

  ‘And there were no signs of sabotage to the car?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘I’m looking at the photographs taken after the removal of the persons. You directed the photographs of the interior of the vehicle?’

  ‘That’s right, along with my colleague, Police Investigator Robert Timms.’

  A small movement in the second row seized my attention: Arthur. As he turned to respond to the offer of drinking water by a neighbour, I saw part of his face for the first time, a glimpse of the profile so familiar and beloved it caused tremors of yearning in me; to resist them I had to hold the breath in my lungs and wrap my arms around my chest, feeling the air inside me press and press. In front, the stifled sobbing continued.

  The investigator was excused and the coroner spoke at some length. ‘Now, as I say, I have had the opportunity to examine the witness statements and I have shared such material as I consider necessary from three quite complex pathology reports… I am satisfied that the identities of Sylvie Woodhall, Alexander Woodhall and Hugo Woodhall have been correctly established and that the place they met their deaths has been correctly recorded. I have been left in no doubt as to the accuracy of the recording of the times of death. I am also satisfied that I have clear knowledge as to the precise injuries that caused those deaths…’

  I exhaled. This sounded like a summing-up to me – was I off the hook, then, no longer required after all? Listening to the investigator’s evidence had made me feel helpless as to what I could contribute to this inquiry; I hadn’t been at the roadside that horrible morning, I was not an eye witness or a member of the emergency services. More than this, the idea of going into the witness box and standing where he had stood, only then able to see the faces – and experience the glare – of those people who detested me, made me feel faint with cowardice.

  ‘What still remains, however, is for me to establish how the collision came to happen, not in the technical sense, which as I say I am clear on thanks to the evidence I’ve just heard from Police Investigator Brian Jarrett, but in the sense of being satisfied that the car came off the road accidentally, that is by pure accident and not by any deliberate act on the part of any of the persons in the vehicle. As I remarked when I opened this inquest, were such evidence to come to my attention, I would have no hesitation in adjourning this hearing in order to make further and necessary enquiries.’ Throughout this speech, the coroner’s manner remained perfectly avuncular – he had an understated authority that reminded me of no one so much as Arthur – but it was impossible not to be electrified by the content, with its implications of suicide and even murder. All heads in the room were raised now, all backs tensed to attention, as he spelled it out for us: ‘While satisfied that there could have been no sabotage to the vehicle, I would like now to question a group of witnesses who may be able to help me in understanding if the collision could in any way have been intentional on the part of the driver, Mrs Woodhall.’

  He called Josa Buxton, who identified herself as Sylvie’s elder sister of Arundel, Sussex, and confirmed that she had spoken to Sylvie the day before the accident. I thought of the yellow plate, of Sylvie holding it to her chest like a trophy or a shield; I thought of a walk through a darkening park with a man who belonged to somebody else, the sense of enchantment I’d felt in his presence, the conviction that there could be no resisting what lay in store for us. What had Arthur said about our being together? It seemed inconceivable that it wouldn’t happen, he’d said. He had not bargained for death, for the obliteration of his family.

  ‘I knew there were problems in the marriage,’ the sister said, in answer to a question I had missed. ‘I knew that Arthur had been unfaithful to her several times over the years and she found it very upsetting.’

  I caught my breath. Somehow I had not considered that other people would be questioned about the Woodhalls’ marriage today; only me. Stealing a glance towards Arthur’s row, I saw that his head remained facing the coroner; he did not turn to look at his sister-in-law as she laid his private life bare.

  ‘It was not her desire to end the marriage?’ the coroner asked.

  ‘No, definitely not. She wanted to keep her family together. She felt very strongly that teenagers need their parents just as much as younger children do. She’d done a lot of reading about it.’ Anticipating the direction of the coroner’s enquiries, Josa declared, ‘There is no way on earth she would have deliberately harmed her boys. I can’t stress that strongly enough. If anything, she was sacrificing personal happiness for their well-being.’

  The coroner nodded respectfully. ‘You last spoke to her on the morning of Friday the twenty-second of July, when she met you for coffee at your home. You were aware of no specific problem or piece of news that had distressed her in the preceding days?’

  ‘No. She was quite negative when I asked after Arthur, but that wasn’t unusual. As I say, she had often felt let down by him. I thought he must have been unfaithful again, or she suspected he had. She’d become a bit paranoid about it and I suppose I’d stopped picking up on every little comment or criticism.’

  ‘Paranoid in the sense that she was suspicious of events taking place that had not in fact taken place?’

  ‘More that she didn’t always know for sure whether they had or not. She didn’t always have evidence. He was a master at covering his tracks and he also had his staff telling lies for him. You probably know he’s quite famous, very famous in his field, and everyone treated him like a god. It’s amazing Sylvie didn’t…’ She did not finish the comment, but it was clear that there was no love lost for Arthur from this quarter. Inevitably I was now thinking, Does she know about me? Do any of them? Was my testimony to be the first time they heard my name, understood my part in this tragedy? If so, I did not think I would get out of the building alive.

  ‘To clarify: in this conversation, you were not made aware of an individual person or specific incident to which she might be having an extreme emotional reaction. Did she mention any plan to return to London the following day?’

  ‘No,’ Josa said. ‘She always stayed till the August bank-holiday weekend. I’m sure she would have said if she was going back the next day, even if it was just a dentist’s appointment.’

  I had been the one with the dentist’s appointment, I thought. Shame seemed to be manifesting itself in body temperature and, having earlier been shivering, I was now flushed and sweating.

  When Josa stepped down, she took a seat next to Nina, who was called to the witness box immediately after and laid a gentle hand on the other’s shoulder as she passed behind her. Again, I craved similar comfort: what had I been thinking, trying to survive this on my own?

  As Nina swore her oath, it seemed to me that her confidence and authority brought a heightened significance to proceedings. She awaited questioning with an attitude quite different from that of Sylvie’s sister, as if her commitment and intelligence in this matter matched the coroner’s own. She was compelling, I thought, as I had when I first met her. What a friend to have, what a woman to have on your side!

  How incredible it seems now that I should have had such admiration for her.

  It was evident in her o
pening words that she had more specific insight into Sylvie’s private anguish than had Josa. ‘Yes, she had found out about Emily Marr about a month earlier,’ she said briskly. At the first mention of my name, I coloured deeply under my make-up, lowering my eyes in anticipation of the hostile attention to come. ‘She’d had her suspicions before that; she could tell Arthur was involved with another woman. But this one was different. She thought he seemed unusually happy. She said she’d seen him one day in the street when he didn’t know she was driving past and he looked euphoric. That was the word she used: euphoric. She found it heartbreaking that it should be someone else who’d made him so happy and not his own family. It was about the same time that our friend Sarah had told her she’d seen him and Emily outside the Inn on the Hill hotel and she put two and two together. It wasn’t rocket science.’

  ‘What was her reaction to this deduction?’

  ‘She was terrified he was going to leave her, she seemed convinced it was going to happen sooner rather than later, and she had to decide how to deal with that possibility. Until then, it had always been a question of her threatening to leave him and him deciding he didn’t want the affair as much as he wanted to stay with his family. There’d been a pattern she could rely on. But this time was different and she didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Her removal to Sussex for the summer was not to be considered an attempt by her to leave him?’

  ‘No, she went there for most of July and August every year. She thought it was best to carry on as normal, especially as it was Alex’s last summer before he went off travelling.’ Nina paused, lingering as I did, as everyone present must have been, on those words ‘Alex’s last summer’. ‘The boys had invited friends, there was a party planned for Alex’s send-off and she didn’t want to disappoint them by cancelling. Arthur always went down for two weeks in August and she decided that was when she was going to confront him, when there weren’t all of his work demands and, obviously, when he was away from her, Emily. Meanwhile she’d have time to develop some strategies to deal with the new crisis.’

  ‘She used that term?’ the coroner interjected. ‘She thought her life was in crisis?’

  ‘She thought her marriage was, yes. Not her life.’

  ‘Did she at any time give you the idea that she was feeling defeated by the crisis?’

  ‘No, the opposite. What Josa just said is right: Sylvie wanted to fight. She would have been returning to London to do exactly that. She probably planned to force the situation to a head.’ Nina’s adamant tone, her steadfast body language, made an indisputable truth of every opinion she uttered. ‘She’d said in the past she found it torture to not know what lay ahead for her and the boys. For years she hadn’t felt as secure as she should have done. It was almost a form of abuse, in my opinion.’

  It was grotesque, worse than anything I had imagined, to hear a dead woman’s fears about me announced in this way, and to what could only be a disgusted and sickened audience. I wondered if Nina knew about the phone call. She’d made no reference to it so far and yet it was laughable to imagine Gwen or her colleagues refusing a forceful character like this any requests for witness statements, blood relative or not.

  ‘You say you did not speak to her that night, the night of Friday the twenty-second? So you did not hear directly from her what her intention was in returning to London the following morning?’

  ‘No. As I said in my statement, she left a message for me but I was out of the country and at a location out of mobile range. I didn’t pick up my messages until I got back to my hotel in the early hours of Saturday, by which time I assumed she’d be asleep. I phoned her at eight-thirty in the morning British time, but it was too late, her phone was switched off. I know now she had already set off.’

  ‘The message you refer to is the spoken one recorded at seven-fifteen p.m. UK time on Friday the twenty-second, in which Mrs Woodhall says she has discovered her husband is with Emily Marr in the marital house in London?’

  ‘That’s right. She said one of our neighbours, another friend who was aware of the situation, had texted her to say she’d seen Emily arrive at the house at six-thirty. She begged me to call her back as soon as I could and discuss what she should do.’ Nina paused then and looked down, blinking several times, the first obvious trace of emotion in her demeanour. ‘When I didn’t phone back, she must have decided to contact Emily. She had the number from Sarah, who lives next door to Emily.’

  She did know, then, I thought. They all must. The realisation was a source of both relief and terror.

  ‘She’d considered this course of action before and I’d advised against it, but we’d talked about what she could say if she did confront Emily directly.’ The middle finger of Nina’s right hand dabbed at the corner of her eye. ‘Obviously, with hindsight, I wish I had stayed up all night and kept calling until she picked up. I would have told her not to go anywhere. I would have told her I’d come down myself the next day straight from the airport and we’d work out a plan.’

  ‘The issue of the sedative would suggest she may have slept through your calls in any case,’ the coroner suggested with sympathy.

  ‘Yes,’ Nina agreed.

  ‘So, given what you’ve told us, and the fact that a conversation was had with Miss Marr, what is your opinion of what Mrs Woodhall would be likely to do next, faced with an evening without immediate support or guidance?’

  Nina gave an audible exhalation. ‘If she was really distraught, she would have had a drink.’

  ‘You mean an alcoholic drink?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This would be corroborated by the toxicologist’s findings of high levels of alcohol in her blood and also by the CCTV evidence we have from Tesco Express near Pulborough, where Mrs Woodhall purchased two bottles of red wine.’

  I felt the hairs on my arms stand on end. I’d missed the toxicologist’s evidence, but clearly it was as I’d feared: my conversation with Sylvie had triggered a terrible relapse.

  ‘One bottle would be an enormous amount for Sylvie,’ Nina said. ‘Half a bottle, even. She hardly drank at all any more. She never let herself get drunk. It’s years since any of that. She must have felt absolutely desperate that night. And to take the sleeping pill as well: she must not have been able to bear her own thoughts.’

  Nina was thanked and excused. I felt her eyes seek me out as she walked the short distance between the witness box and her desk, challenging me to answer to her monumental anger and grief. But I could not; she knew I could not.

  A spry, red-headed man in his late thirties stood now and made his way to the witness box. I couldn’t remember the exact order of the witness list but the first question established him as the Woodhall family GP, Dr Hanrahan of Grove Walk Surgery.

  ‘You have said in your statement that you do not consider Mrs Woodhall to have been having any thoughts of taking her own life?’

  ‘That’s right. The last time I saw her, she was in reasonable spirits, good health generally. She had suffered from depression and had battled alcohol in recent years. I knew she still had trouble sleeping and we had discussed ways to alleviate that difficulty. In the past she had used alcohol to help her sleep but she had not done this for eighteen months or two years.’

  ‘You had prescribed the medicine Zopiclone? This is used to treat sleeping problems?’

  ‘Yes. I had directed Mrs Woodhall to use the lowest dose. But that had been several months earlier and she had not come to me for a renewal of the prescription. She must have had some left.’

  ‘We have heard from the toxicologist yesterday that alcohol would have increased and perhaps prolonged the sedative effects of Zopiclone?’

  ‘That’s correct. When I prescribed the medicine, I made Mrs Woodhall aware that it should not be mixed with alcohol under any circumstances.’

  ‘She did not, then, in your opinion, have an issue with alcohol abuse?’

  ‘No. She had begun to rely on alcohol in the past, but I would not
have classed it as chronic abuse. She did not want it to become a problem that affected her sons and she sought help early.’

  ‘Which is consistent with Mrs Meeks’ evidence that she was now living in sobriety?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You last examined her in May of last year. In your opinion there were no signs of any deterioration in her psychological health?’

  ‘No. She complained of stress and said she could not count on her husband for support domestically; he was extremely busy and worked long hours almost every day of their marriage, she said. She was not as close to him as she’d once been, but she had a very good relationship with her family and friends. She had a network she could rely on. She was not desperate.’

  To my alarm, this was as much as the coroner wanted to know from the GP and sooner than I’d expected he was dismissing him and calling the next name – mine. Getting to my feet and putting one in front of the other was a trauma in itself: I felt as if I’d been dropped into a well and left to tread water, gasping for breath until the air ran out. It was panic, pure and simple.