The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  Without saying a word, she headed for the stairs.

  ‘Emmie?’ Tabby called after her. ‘Are you all right? I didn’t mean to upset you…’ Now she was the one at a loss. What had she stumbled into here, and had it been wise to confront Emmie like that? Had she sounded too accusatory, as if she meant to condemn Emmie in the same way the rest of the world evidently had? Shouldn’t she have instead reassured her, as she had once before, that she was on her side, no matter what? Did she genuinely care about Emmie’s feelings or had she only been satisfying her own appetite for personal information, the unattractive part of her that had bloomed during her time here, fast coming to define her?

  This unpleasant chain of thoughts was broken by Emmie’s heavy-footed return. She stood before Tabby once more, this time with her laptop in her arms. That odd sense of pride was gone now, as was the voracious gaze; instead she looked fretful, grief very close to the surface of her features. Tabby knew then that the woman in front of her could not be the one described as heartless and scandalous and deplorable, and far, far worse. Even before she had mastered the basic elements of the story, she was starting to grapple with the full scale of the injustice that might have been done to her friend.

  She reached up and touched Emmie’s arm. ‘Listen, I should have said before I started that I’m not going to make any kind of judgement. Whatever you’ve been involved in, I’m just a shoulder to cry on, that’s all. A friend.’

  Emmie did not respond to this in words, but placed the laptop gently on Tabby’s lap, the greatest gift she could bestow. ‘It’s all in here,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Everything you want to ask me, all the details you want to know, it’s all explained here. It’s easier if you just read it.’

  ‘You kept a diary?’

  ‘Not exactly, not day by day, but my side of the story. Everyone was so sure they knew what happened, what kind of a person I was, but this is my version of events. This is the truth.’

  Tabby steadied the laptop on her knees, her fingers fiddling with the catch and lifting the screen. ‘That’s what you’ve been doing all these nights? Writing?’

  Emmie did not answer but stood staring at the laptop, as if already regretting allowing it out of her possession. It was heartbreaking to see her face. She looked older than her thirty-two years, a broken and tortured version of the exquisite young woman Tabby had seen online an hour ago.

  ‘You’re sure you want me to read it?’

  ‘Yes. But please be careful with it. It’s all I have.’

  Tabby needed no second invitation. She turned the power on. It took a few moments for the desktop to display, it was an old thing. ‘What’s the password?’

  ‘Woodhall.’

  ‘As in…?’ But it was a stupid question. ‘OK. What’s the file called?’

  ‘It’s on the desktop. It’s called “Emily Marr”.’

  It was a sizeable file and clicking it open Tabby saw that it was in fact over a hundred pages long. She already knew she wanted to read it in solitude; it would be impossible to concentrate if Emmie were standing over her like this, agitated and expectant, ready to repossess the computer at any moment. ‘Is it OK if I take it upstairs to my room to read?’

  Emmie nodded.

  Tabby stood up, moved past her towards the stairs. A thought struck her then, not an urgent one, just something to bridge Emmie’s rather tragic relinquishment of the material with her own indecent desire to devour it. ‘You didn’t tell me it was your birthday,’ she said, her voice bright, only a little strained.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it? The thirteenth of July? I had no idea or I would have given you a present.’

  As Emmie’s face darkened, Tabby feared she’d said precisely the worst thing she could have done, but a moment later Emmie’s expression had cleared again. ‘Birthdays are the last thing on my mind,’ she said.

  Chapter 19

  Emily

  In all the research I’ve done since, I have never seen a coroner’s inquest into the death of an ordinary citizen get the coverage this one did. By ‘ordinary’ I mean someone who was not in her life a famous personality or a celebrity, for there had been nothing ordinary about Sylvie’s world, of course, with her three-million-pound Walnut Grove house, her celebrated husband and her privately educated children. Her ‘coven’ of high-status friends.

  Nina Meeks, for instance, her closest friend of all, a newspaper columnist of impressive power and reach. If I had not appreciated before the full extent of that power and reach, I soon would. Normally she commented on stories already in circulation, scandals under way, but this time she decided to create one. She made the distinction herself in the article that began it all – ‘it’ being not so much my fall, since I was already on bloodied knees, but my public disgrace, my character assassination.

  Whatever you want to call it.

  But that was not until Friday morning. When the coroner announced his verdict on the Thursday morning, it was not immediately reported online. Very little came up when I Googled ‘Woodhall inquest’ on the PC at work that afternoon, only the original brief reports of the accident from the previous summer, and so I waited till Charlotte was out of range and phoned the coroner’s office. A verdict of accidental death had been recorded, I was told, and just in time, because it was almost four o’clock by then and the office was about to close for the day.

  Still stupefied by the pain of my encounter with Arthur, I felt nothing distinctive on hearing the news. It was what had been expected, wasn’t it? A formal ratification that Sylvie could never have meant to kill herself or the boys; if she had wanted anyone dead that morning it was me. It was only when I got home from work that I found I had been given only half the news – or a third. Searching the internet once more, I saw that a local paper in Sussex had posted a report, including the full wording of the coroner’s conclusions:

  On the balance of probability, Mrs Woodhall’s death was not the result of any deliberate act. I do not believe she intended to harm herself and for that reason I have recorded a verdict of accidental death. In the matter of her two sons, however, I believe that a sober person would have understood that the boys were at risk of involuntary manslaughter.

  It has been established that the rear passenger, Alexander Woodhall, was not wearing a seatbelt at the point of impact and that this would have given him a significantly lower chance of survival than if he had remained in his seat with the legally required restraint. It has been reasonably demonstrated that he unbuckled his seatbelt in a bid to take control of the vehicle following Mrs Woodhall’s loss of control. I have to conclude that it was an avoidable end for him, just as it was for his brother, Hugo Woodhall, seated in the front passenger seat, and my verdict in the deaths of Alexander Woodhall and Hugo Woodhall is therefore unlawful killing.

  I cried for Arthur then. How could it not devastate him to hear that his wife was responsible for his children’s deaths, if not her own, declared a criminal in all but name? When I fell asleep that night, it was with his face held tightly in my thoughts. How I longed to be able to cradle his head in my hands on the pillow next to mine, put my lips on his skin, console him, protect him with my love on this night of all nights.

  To be fair to Nina, when she published her column the following morning, she probably did not dream it would have the impact it did. Possibly, in her own mind, she meant it for my eyes only. That was certainly my assumption when at 8 a.m. my doorbell rang and, hurrying downstairs, I found the doorstep unoccupied and a copy of the Press sticking through the letterbox. Pulling it free, I dislodged a yellow Post-it on the front page with the scribbled clue See page 13.

  It was her regular Friday slot, a full right-hand page. I would soon be aware that her column was more than simply a popular read; it was a national institution, and many people bought the paper expressly for it. Even in the digital age, what Nina said on a Friday was often what the nati
on discussed at dinner parties that weekend.

  The headline today was REMEMBER MY NAME and the picture was not of a movie star or a politician or of anyone widely recognisable, but of me. Me. Even before I could form my first intelligible thought my nervous system had skipped ahead, quickening my lungs and heating my skin. Standing there, barefoot and in pyjamas in the draughty hallway of 199, I tried to focus on the picture, make some sense of it, and soon identified by my dress and hairstyle that it must be one of the reportage-style shots taken at the wedding of Matt’s cousin Gemma two years earlier. Matt had been cropped out, his hand just visible on my right elbow, and devoid of context I looked light-headed, remote, as if I didn’t have a care in the world. I had not seen the shot for ages and supposed it must have come from Gemma’s or another guest’s Facebook page or blog.

  The article began:

  It’s not often I write about so-called ‘civilians’, those who are not famous and do not wish to be. As a columnist, my stock-in-trade is public figures, people we all know and feel a common urge to discuss. But there are times when I cannot escape the paradox of modern journalism: we must make a sensation of events that should barely pass as notable in the lives of household names, while overlooking the truly sensational among those we’ve never heard of.

  Well, maybe sometimes we should have heard of them.

  Personally, I think you should know the name Emily Marr. Say it out loud. Remember it. Emily Marr. I know it already, of course, for it belongs to the most despised woman in my neighbourhood.

  It strikes me that she also deserves to be the most despised woman in Britain. I’m pretty sure a certain coroner in Sussex agrees with me.

  My breath coming now in painful gulps, I read on in horror as Nina summarised the events of July 2011 before offering choice cuts from my testimony earlier in the week, including, inevitably, ‘it’s every woman for herself!’ – on which she bestowed an exclamation mark – and other damning admissions from my witness statement (of course she had got her hands on a copy, by fair means or foul, she was a journalist). I did not understood then that, although the verdicts were included in it, the main part of the piece had most likely been written before the inquest, timed to launch a campaign about British morals, a campaign that would later gain her editor a mention in the New Year’s Honours list. Nina had had months to hone her hatred, to set me up.

  Every woman for herself: that was the challenge Marr threw down that terrible July evening, and, just as any good wife and mother would, Sylvie got in her car and set off to claim the husband she had loved and honoured for over two decades.

  She made no mention of the fact that Sylvie had drunk the best part of two bottles of wine and taken a sedative before doing what any good wife and mother would do. I read on:

  Don’t get me wrong, Miss Marr’s was not a crime that will be remembered for centuries, she is no Lizzie Borden. Hers was a smaller, more familiar one, one that she hoped would remain secret – until it suited her to reveal it. She had an affair with a married man, a father; she ignored the pleas of his wife made on behalf of his children. In doing so she caused, indirectly, the deaths of three people. She is no serial killer, no, but in my opinion she has taken children’s lives and I call now for a public reckoning. On the day this newspaper launches a new campaign for old morals, I ask you again:

  Remember her name.

  Emily Marr is a young woman who symbolises all that has decayed in our society. She has no respect for anyone else and an inflated regard for herself. She wants what she wants without earning it, and without caring that it might already belong to someone else.

  Well, I hope she’s satisfied now.

  As I say, naïve as it now sounds, my first theory was that Nina had had this article mocked up especially for me, to scare me, punish me; I could not see that it could possibly be her actual column that day. I needed to double-check, though, for peace of mind, which meant I could pick up a copy from the newsagent on the way to work or I could look now to see if her column was available yet online – I’d often read it in that form before.

  Upstairs in the flat, I dialled up and found the site for the Press. That was when the full horror surfaced: this was no private psychological torture but a public denouncement, because there it was, in full, exactly the same copy as the printed version I held in my hand. Nina Meeks had told the whole country, her millions of readers, about me.

  Scrolling down, I saw that there were already dozens of comments, at 8.30 in the morning:

  Sounds like a complete whore to me…

  Selfish, heartless bitch. Meeks is right to bring real cases like this to public attention. I blame our culture of reality TV. People want something for nothing, even if it means stealing it from someone who’s worked for it.

  What a c**t. Terrible dress sense as well.

  Even the one less vitriolic comment I managed to find was unpleasant: ‘I’m not being funny, but look at her, she’s a babe! The wife must have been knocking on the door of fifty, who would you rather do?!! Bet the doc tampered with the brakes himself!!’

  Another user had responded to this: ‘Read the article, you insensitive tw*t. The poor man lost his KIDS in that crash!’

  Shaking, I closed the page. After a pause, I searched for the name ‘Lizzie Borden’, quickly finding a notorious killer from the nineteenth century. I was not to be compared with her, no, but our names were printed in the same sentence in a national newspaper along with the declaration that ‘in my opinion she has taken children’s lives’ – and so what else were people expected to do?

  I disconnected. Absurdly, I still intended to go to work, was dressed and about to leave the flat, when Matt rang. I had not heard from him since the evening he had moved out and so his call was a confirmed sign that I was in a critical situation.

  ‘What the fuck is going on, Em? I’ve just got into work and there’s some kind of viral thing about you on the internet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is, but you’re everywhere. It’s like a hate campaign. There’s a photograph of me doing the rounds as well, it’s mental!’

  My pulse began to trip once more. ‘It must be to do with what Nina’s written about me in the Press…’

  ‘Who’s Nina?’

  ‘Our neighbour – I mean my neighbour. The journalist, dark bob, high heels, friend of Sarah Laing, do you remember?’

  ‘Not really. What’s her second name? I’ll look her up on Twitter.’

  I spelled it for him, hearing the fear in my own voice.

  ‘Here’s the link to her article, hang on…’

  I waited while he read, my breathing strained and shallow.

  ‘You were seeing the bloke whose family died last year? You had to go to an inquest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Matt wouldn’t need to delve too deeply to see the overlap between the last months of our relationship and the start of the affair with Arthur, but that was the least of my worries – and his, evidently.

  ‘Seriously, you might want to close down some of your accounts, email and Facebook and stuff. You’re going to get hate mail. This woman has over half a million followers. Fuck, she was tweeting about you just now, this is surreal. Listen to this, she’s just said, “I agree, she deserves nothing less. And I say that as someone who has sympathy for Ruth Ellis’s memory.” Who’s Ruth Ellis anyway?’ he asked.

  ‘Wasn’t she the last woman to be hanged in Britain?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, that makes sense, here’s the thread: she’s responding to some loony who tweeted her, “Bring back the death penalty!” She means for you. Jesus, this is bad…’

  ‘Don’t tell me any more,’ I begged. My hand was trembling, the phone bumping against my ear.

  ‘Isn’t this libel or something? I think you need to get a lawyer.’ I could hear the new edge of outrage to his voice.

  ‘I don’t have money for a lawyer,’ I said.

  The call ended, I sat on the sofa, h
ead in hands, eyes tight shut. I couldn’t comprehend the hair-trigger brutality of this. I felt as if I were witnessing an explosion, still too blinded by the light to see how the particles had been blown apart. Only yesterday morning, the coroner had closed his inquest to a half-empty room. Was he aware yet of Meeks’ article? Could he do anything to get the Press to retract it? What had she said, I’m pretty sure a certain coroner in Sussex agrees with me… Was that true? Were you allowed to print comments like that? Underneath that scrupulous fairness, that egalitarian compassion, would he agree with every word she’d written?

  He might.

  Matt was right about the hate mail. I closed my Facebook account just as activity on it began to go haywire. My email inbox was swelling second by second in the same way it had when the computer had once had a virus; I logged straight out.