The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  He said nothing to this, had not the energy to fabricate an answer, for I knew then that there was no meeting in London. I stood, hopeless and forsaken, never in greater need of direction from him and never less likely to win it. I thought, in desperation, If I wanted to I could follow you to wherever you’re going; there’d be nothing you could do to stop me. I could sit outside your door and wait, like a pet you’ve tried to set free but who keeps coming back.

  But I was no pet, not any more.

  ‘Please, Emily. You must see there’s nothing to be gained…’ He didn’t finish the sentence but if he had it would have been ‘from talking’ or ‘from going over it’. There was nothing to be gained from us.

  My eyes brimmed. ‘I think there is something to be gained, Arthur. Knowing that someone loves you and wants to care for you during the worst time of your life. Not being alone in the dark night after night.’

  But my appeal seemed only to pain him. I am alone, he said, without words. You do not count. ‘You need to forget me,’ he said simply.

  ‘You mean that?’ Though my ribcage rose and fell with every desperate breath, he remained utterly immobile. He had not lost that capacity for stillness. ‘That’s really what you want? For us to forget everything we ever said, everything we ever felt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As my face convulsed in anguish, he pressed the fob in his hand and the car locks released. I watched him get into the driver’s seat with the hopeless wonder of someone seeing an astronaut prepare for a shuttle launch, his destination inconceivable to an ordinary, earthbound mortal like me.

  ‘Goodbye, Arthur,’ I said to the sealed window. And the car reversed from its spot, leaving me there with my face in my hands.

  I did not think again that day about Nina and what she had said. I did not think to fish from my bag the leaflet the support team had sent me, explaining the procedure in a coroner’s court, the passage warning witnesses that members of the press might request a statement to include in their coverage. The afternoon I was questioned, there was not a single reporter interested in exchanging two words with me, much less requesting a statement. I simply walked to the bus stop alone; in turmoil and wretchedness, certainly, but in private turmoil, private wretchedness.

  I had no idea, that day, as I waited for the train back to London, how precious my privacy was and how close it was to jeopardy.

  Chapter 18

  Tabby

  The day after breaching the secret folder, Tabby awoke earlier than usual and in a state of nervous excitement. It was obvious to her that she had found herself in the thick of some sort of mystery and that she now had enough clues to discover once and for all the cause of Emmie’s reclusive behaviour. It was also clear to her that she had not the strength of character to leave well alone. It was not well, she convinced herself, and that was all the justification she needed.

  She could hardly contain herself as she approached the internet bureau immediately after breakfast – until she saw the handwritten card in the window: Fermé. Ouvert 17 Août. She could not believe her eyes: closed, in the height of the season, in the midst of her investigation! There was not the demand, she supposed, not when most tourists had their own laptops and could pick up wi-fi in one of the larger cafés or hotel bars. And all the houses she cleaned had a PC for guests to use; an internet connection was expected in the same way a high-end espresso machine was, a twenty-first-century holidaymaker’s right.

  She replayed the thought – all of the houses she cleaned had an internet connection – and let it lead itself naturally to the next: all of the houses had a dossier of guest information that freely gave the wi-fi code. Moira had told her that the tariff was paid by the owners monthly: the guests could use the internet and landline as frequently as they pleased free of charge. Of course it was strictly forbidden for cleaners to do so, just as it was forbidden to read confidential documents locked in a drawer or entertain lovers in bedrooms you were supposed to be airing.

  Her job that day was in Le Bois-Plage and she arrived well in advance of the usual start time in order to watch the out-going holidaymakers get into their taxi for the airport (these days, she scarcely glanced at the faces of these tanned, well-rested folk; she shared no language with them, not even with the British ones). Making use of the adrenalin coursing through her, she worked furiously until the house resembled a show home. In this property, an interior-designed beach bungalow, there were numerous extra touches: towels and bedlinen to be folded and tucked just so, special local soaps for the adults and caramels for the children, a home-made lemon tart that had to be taken from the freezer at the beginning of the shift in order to defrost in good time. She forced herself to finish every detail before settling at the desk in an alcove off the kitchen and turning on the PC. She could smell the lemon in the thawing tart on the worktop nearby.

  For the first time since parting from Paul she did not begin by checking her email for word from him – could that, at least, be considered the road to recovery? – but instead Googled ‘Arthur and Sylvie Woodhall’. The screen refreshed to reveal a bombardment of references, hundreds of thousands of them. She used the News filter to select a recent item on one of the more reputable UK sites. It was dated from April, four months ago:

  WOODHALL RESIGNS ST BARNABAS’ POST

  The surgeon at the centre of one of the biggest media sensations of recent times, Arthur Woodhall, has resigned his post at St Barnabas’ Hospital in south London with immediate effect. It is thought that Woodhall plans to leave the UK, though rumours that he has taken a position at the new Moorfields Eye Hospital outpost in Dubai have been denied by a spokesperson for the surgeon. It was confirmed that he will continue to treat private patients at the Marylebone Eye Clinic, Harley Street, for the foreseeable future.

  Woodhall’s wife Sylvie and the couple’s two teenage sons were killed in a car accident in July last year. Public reaction to the subsequent inquest, which revealed damning details of Woodhall’s affair with his neighbour, Emily Marr, became a media phenomenon thanks to a moral crusade led by the Press columnist Nina Meeks. The so-called Marr Affair has since come to be regarded as emblematic of the nation’s moral decay in an age of casual, low-brow celebrity and deteriorating state education.

  Tabby stared, her eyes returning to a single word in the second paragraph: ‘Emily’. This was no coincidence; it did not take forensic investigation to deduce that ‘Emmie’ could be a corruption of ‘Emily’. The only place she had seen a single letter of her name was on the pills bottle. E: she’d simply assumed it stood for Emmie. As for the surname, she had never seen her friend’s passport or any other formal identification – why would she have?

  She cast her mind back to the evening when she’d asked Emmie her last name. Emmie had hesitated, apparently not wanting to say, before at last admitting to Mason. Had she, in fact, made it up on the spot? Marr and Mason: the initial was the same.

  Excitement making her fumble, she Googled ‘Emily Marr’ and selected Images. There were surprisingly few different ones, given that the subject was a figure described as a ‘media sensation’, and the available ones were repeated hundreds of times, often treated in some illustrative way: Andy Warhol-style or a caricature with obscenely prominent lips and exaggerated curves; a line drawing of the kind you saw in court reports.

  But it was her Emmie, she was sure of it, even before she came upon the one photo she recognised: Emmie in the pink and green dress, the caption revealing both the identity of her companion and the occasion: Marr with her former boyfriend, Matt Piper, at a Piper family wedding in Kent. There was the cascading blond hair, the winged eyebrows and smudged kohl, exactly as Emmie had done her make-up the night they’d had drinks in the port. Some of the other images must have been taken years ago, for this woman was young, a real beauty; she did not look as if she cleaned holiday homes for a living or reacted with anything but confidence to questions about her private life.

  Scrolling on to a third page, Tabby
noticed two new shots, one of Emmie with an armful of newspapers, her face buried in their pages and only her blond hair visible, the second a full-length image in which Emmie had something of the morose attitude she did recognise. In this she was wearing a black coat and boots, black headscarf, dark glasses, no make-up: was this, then, post-‘exile’? To Tabby’s shock, the caption read: Emily Marr, leaving Willbury Cemetery in Hertfordshire after the funeral of her father, March 2012. Tabby felt her breath catch in her throat. March: so recently! When she considered how raw it felt in her own case, and six years had passed. Poor, poor Emmie, what drama and loss she had suffered, and, for reasons Tabby was now beginning to appreciate, had had to suffer in silence.

  Next, she scrolled through the pages and pages of sites in the general search, scanning the avalanche of headings: Is Emily Marr the new Christine Keeler?, Emily Marr: Die, Slut!, Whatever happened to Emily Marr?, Marr: Public Enemy Number One, I Hate Emily, Emily Marr Jokes, Steal her style: Emily Marr… On and on it went, there had to be a year’s worth of reading material here. Tabby began with the Wikipedia entry:

  Emily Rachel Marr (born 13 July 1980) is a British woman who came to media prominence in February 2012 during the inquest into the deaths of Sylvie Woodhall, Alexander Woodhall and Hugo Woodhall. It was heard that Marr had been having an affair with Sylvie’s husband, Arthur Woodhall, a world-renowned eye surgeon with links to the British Royal Family. Marr, who lived on the same street as the Woodhalls, the famous Walnut Grove in south London, and worked in a neighbourhood pottery café, had been the last surviving witness to speak to Sylvie before her death. Though never charged with any criminal act, Marr was widely deplored for her lack of compassion for her lover’s wife, including her declaration ‘It’s every woman for herself,’ repeated to the coroner and reported by journalist Nina Meeks in the Press newspaper. She was subsequently condemned by the Church of England, the Deputy Prime Minister and several feminist groups for her disregard for marital values and her absence of remorse. The scandal reached its critical mass through digital media, but its inception was credited to Meeks, winner of a National Press Award in 2007 and widely tipped to receive another for her campaigning coverage of the tragedy.

  The section on early life and family lacked citation, but stated that Emily had been born in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, and gone to a comprehensive school, leaving with one A-level, in English. Her mother had died from ovarian cancer when she was nine years old and she and her older brother had been raised by their father, who had not remarried. When Emily was in her twenties, he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the form of dementia that led to his death at the age of sixty-three in early March.

  Tabby scanned down to the section headed Scandal:

  It came to light through statements given by both Woodhall and Marr that they had met at a Christmas party in December 2010 and begun an affair in February 2011. So intense was the attraction between them that by July Woodhall had decided to leave his wife to live with Marr. He had been about to drive to the family’s holiday home in Sussex to break the news to his wife when the police arrived at his London residence with news of the triple tragedy. Marr was present at the time, having stayed with him overnight, a detail that distressed Mrs Woodhall’s relatives and was considered deeply distasteful by Marr’s critics.

  Subsequent life

  Little has been heard of Emily Marr since she left her flat on Walnut Grove in late February 2012.

  Complaints were made to the Hertfordshire Constabulary following the funeral service of her father early the following month, which was disrupted by photographers attempting to access the burial site, and again following an incident in Newbury, Berkshire, where Marr is believed to have been in hiding at the home of her brother Philip. It is thought she may since have settled overseas to escape the widespread hate campaigns she was suffering in Britain. Internet reports have placed her variously in Morocco, Australia and the Netherlands. In spite of her infamy, she has not once spoken to the press or made a statement in any media, remaining, as the Sunday Times labelled her in a feature in June 2012, one of the ‘Top Ten Great British Disappearing Acts’, alongside Agatha Christie and Lord Lucan. Latterly, public opinion has shifted to include admiration for Marr in her eschewing of the celebrity and commercial opportunities that have undoubtedly been available to her.

  Riveted, Tabby continued to read about her friend’s infamous alter ego, article after article of mostly damning criticism, some of it expressed in obscenities and even death threats, until at last she was interrupted by the ringing of her phone. Predictably, tiresomely, it was Moira, checking that the job was done. She’d been making calls like this ever since her reminder of the rules regarding visitors.

  ‘I’m just leaving now,’ Tabby told her, rising to her feet and surveying the kitchen. The phone clenched between ear and shoulder, she sieved icing sugar on to the softened lemon tart. It looked perfect.

  ‘So late? You should have finished an hour ago. The family will be on their way from the airport by now.’

  ‘I know, I wanted to do a great job. The place looks fantastic. I’ll be gone in two minutes.’

  She could tell Moira was frustrated to be having to micro-manage and that Tabby apparently continued to warrant it. ‘You know you’ll be paid only for the official hours of the job?’

  ‘Of course. That’s fine.’

  She turned off the PC and tucked in the desk chair, washed, dried and put away the sieve, and then headed for the front door. For once, she hardly cared if she would be paid at all.

  She charged home on Emmie’s bike through the vineyards, scarcely registering the swarms of tourists in her path. She could wait no longer, would pussyfoot around Emmie and her strategically placed folders no more. No one could be expected to contain knowledge of this magnitude (suspicion, she corrected herself. It wasn’t knowledge yet), and if confrontation led to her being asked to leave the house that night, then so be it.

  Inside the house it was quiet and cool, the shutters closed, as usual, on windows that could be overlooked only by a contortionist. But at least she now knew why. Emmie had been dozing on the sofa, but was roused at the sound of Tabby’s arrival, the bike clattering over the threshold, the door swinging shut with a thump that made the lights flicker. Tabby propped the bike against the nearest wall and came to a halt herself by the fireplace, catching her breath, preparing her lines. You’d never guess, she thought, looking at the yawning woman in front of her, the wan complexion and dank hair, the softening jawline and fleshy build. Even the distinctive eyebrow shape had grown out. You’d never guess it was the same person.

  ‘You gave me a shock,’ Emmie murmured, sitting upright. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Tabby waited for their eyes to meet before saying, ‘I know, Emmie.’

  ‘You know what?’

  There was an odd moment between them, a sense that there was still a chance for Tabby to hold fire or for Emmie to dodge the bullet, but it did not last.

  ‘I know you’re not who you say you are. You’re not Emmie Mason.’

  Emmie forked nervous fingers through her hair, brow creasing. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’re Emily Marr, aren’t you? The woman in the Woodhall case? Please don’t deny it, Emmie, it won’t help. I’ve just read it all online. I saw the picture of you in the same dress, the one you wore when we went out. It’s got to be you.’

  There was a silence. Emmie let her hands fall to her lap and fixed her eyes on them.

  ‘I knew you knew,’ she said presently, and Tabby crossed the rug to sit down beside her, both relieved that the surrender had come so swiftly and excited by the thought of the revelations to follow. ‘Have you known all along?’

  ‘I haven’t, actually. Not until today. I was in Asia when it was in the news, I must have missed the whole thing.’ It felt wrong to call it a ‘thing’ when it was someone’s life, someone’s life altered beyond recognition.

  All Emmie said was, �
�Oh.’

  Tabby leaned towards her, keen to resume eye contact. ‘Will you tell me about it, Emmie? I know it must be hard to talk about, but I’d like to understand. Tell me from start to finish what happened, every detail. How you met Arthur, how it could possibly come about that you could be so well known and so…’ she remembered the word that had cropped up in the coverage she’d read, ‘so hated. It’s hard for me to make sense of it.’ When Emmie remained silent, she added, ‘Only if you want to, of course. I just thought, maybe you’ve been wanting to confide, you know, subconsciously, leaving the folder out yesterday, after I’d seen the photo that time.’ She reminded herself that Emmie did not know she had read the obituary yesterday, though the distinction was hardly of relevance now she had made the leap she just had.

  Emmie appeared to reach a decision. She got to her feet and rolled back her shoulders, looked down at Tabby with a startling new expression: where once her eyes had only repelled Tabby’s curiosity, reflected it directly back at her, now they sucked powerfully at it, promising a limitless capacity to satisfy it. The sudden change in demeanour confused Tabby, for there was an air of grandeur to it also, almost as if Emmie were a Hollywood star who had been living undercover to research the role of an ordinary person and could finally unveil herself, instantly more comfortable once her rightful station was restored.