The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  When she slept at all, that was. Waking on Sunday night in the early hours, she heard sobbing from the main bedroom. It happened the next night, too, and then the one after that, until it was established as habit, the sound she expected to hear first every day even before the church bells. That flicker of unease she had felt when confronting Emmie now returned, growing constant and impossible to ignore.

  On Wednesday and Thursday mornings, Emmie was late for work and Moira had to phone to chivvy her along. On the Friday, unknown to Moira, she finished over an hour early, presumably compromising her trademark thoroughness in order to do so. The all-important Saturday shift at her two cottages in La Flotte was missed completely after she called in sick and stayed in bed. She’d gone from being reliable to unreliable virtually overnight. When more absences followed, Tabby phoned Moira herself with the fabrication of a virus, offering to cover Emmie’s missed shifts herself where her schedule allowed. Emmie, however, would have preferred them both to stay at home, for it was clear that where once she had rebuffed overtures on her housemate’s part, she wanted now to talk ceaselessly of herself and of the events of her past. Her persecution by Nina Meeks was her most frequent lament, and it was evident that, as Tabby had feared, the scenarios were entirely current to her, right at the surface of her memory.

  ‘Without her, I think we could have stayed together. The article, the hate campaign, she made it impossible for him to have anything to do with me. She thought she was just crucifying me but she was actually crucifying both of us. I know I could never have made it better, but if I could have been with him, it would have been something. He must have been feeling so deserted, so alone.’

  ‘You must try to forget,’ Tabby told her, after several days of this. ‘Like you said in your journal, you’ve written it down to get it out of your system, not to keep going over —’

  ‘I’ll never get it out of my system! It’s not fair, I didn’t ask for this. What did I do to deserve it? I don’t understand!’

  Tabby was helpless in the face of such a maelstrom of despair – and ever more convinced of her own guilt in its creation. The fact was that, left to her own devices, Emmie had found her own way of coming to terms with the injustices she’d endured; it was Tabby who had induced this disastrous relapse. There had been nothing cathartic for Emmie about the enforced confession: it had only reopened the wound, and now she was as vulnerable, as volatile, as broken as she’d described herself to be at the worst of her collapse.

  ‘Emmie, what happened was you fell in love and it didn’t work out. Relationships fail all the time because of far less. Yours didn’t stand a chance, no relationship could survive what happened to you two. The media scandal – well, of course I don’t think you deserved that at all, but you have to put it behind you and concentrate on this new life you’ve made for yourself. Let yourself grieve for your father without cluttering your mind with Nina Meeks – she’s not important. Come on, you were doing so well. Should I get in touch with your brother? You were obviously close before you left; talking to him might help?’

  ‘I just want Arthur,’ Emmie wailed. It was a phrase Tabby would hear over and over again during this time.

  And she had only herself to blame. She was Pandora, and the consequences of her actions could not be undone. Since the box had been opened, she had not touched a single cupboard in her clients’ houses marked ‘Privé’.

  The situation deteriorated. As the air temperature settled and slowly, teasingly dipped, the atmosphere in the house grew only more febrile.

  ‘Emmie,’ she said, coming home from a job on the second Friday to find her friend still in her pyjamas, the journey from bed to sofa evidently the extent of her day’s exertions, ‘it’s none of my business, but how about we see a doctor and get you something to help with this?’ She was thinking of the pills she’d found, medication she now knew to have been prescribed by Emmie’s father’s doctors to subdue just this emotional torment.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Emmie said, her voice distorted by the swelling of her nose and throat from weeping. ‘I’m completely fine.’

  ‘But a doctor might be able to help you feel even more fine.’

  ‘I said I don’t need a doctor!’ This was uttered with vehemence, its effect strengthened unsettlingly by the reddened whites of her glaring eyes.

  ‘OK, but if you change your mind… I know how it feels to —’

  ‘You don’t know,’ Emmie broke in, impatient of the repetition of any ideas but her own. ‘How can you?’

  And Tabby had to admit she could not, not any more, and if she was to be of any use to Emmie it would not be by claiming affinity but by offering condolence after condolence.

  The following day, Saturday, she became officially out of her depth. At the rue du Rempart house, her phone rang over and over in her bag downstairs while she lounged with Grégoire in the bedroom above. Fearing interference by Moira, she went to fetch it, only to find eight missed calls from Emmie. Having phoned in sick a second time for changeover day, Emmie was now screaming for her to come home.

  ‘I have to leave,’ Tabby told Grégoire. ‘I’m worried she’s going to harm herself. She’s completely hysterical.’

  ‘What is she crying about?’ he asked, and Tabby noted the dryness of tone. She could not confide in him about this crisis, knowing instinctively that Emmie and Grégoire would not mix to anyone’s advantage, but even so, it disappointed her that he did not offer to help. He wanted only to help himself to her and head off home. Turning him out, not bothering with the usual safe interval between their respective departures, she vowed that this would be the last time they would be together. She would not text him the following week or the one after. She would entertain him no more, not in any sense of the word. And if he turned up at the usual time she would not answer the door. She did not say this to him, of course. Theirs was not an arrangement that called for formality and in any case she didn’t have the time to waste arguing. She left him at the door, dashing to the end of the street without looking back.

  In the house, Emmie was sitting on the floor of the living room, delirious with woe and apparently unable to get herself up. The contents of the purple folder were fanned out on the rug, a spew of vile headlines vying with one another for attention: MARR IS TOXIC, SAYS DEPUTY PM; IS EMILY MARR MURDERER OR MINX?; SURGEON’S GIRL NO BETTER THAN WHORE. Tabby sat down next to her, but knew better than to confiscate the cuttings. What had been the point of Emmie removing herself from the media’s reach if she was only going to gorge herself on this catalogue of its worst abuses?

  Having placated her a little, Tabby opened one set of windows and pushed back the shutters to let in some light and fresh air – she was convinced that before all else Emmie needed release from this entombment. She made tea, but Emmie misjudged the simple motion involved in taking the mug from her and it crashed to the floor, making a horrendous mess. Seeing some of her papers stained with the tea, Emmie began gathering them up with a hectic energy, wailing in the eerie, grief-stricken way Tabby was becoming so used to hearing, her eyes burning with some primitive, animal life force.

  ‘Please, Emmie, you must calm down. I think you need to get out of the house, get some air; you’re going stir-crazy here. And stop reading all this stuff! Maybe we should throw it away, and the laptop as well. Or at least let me put them where you can’t find them…’

  ‘No!’ Emmie screeched. ‘You can’t, they’re mine!’

  ‘Fine, well, let me put it all back together, at least. There’s paper all over the place. Why don’t you have a bath and relax? I’ll go and run it for you, shall I?’ To her knowledge, Emmie had not washed for two or three days.

  ‘I just need to rest,’ Emmie said, but less defiant now, and she levered herself on to the sofa with her arms, like someone who had lost the use of her legs. She did not remark on the contraband sunlight now slanting through the window and spotlighting the lamp table next to her, but just stared out at the wall as
if transfixed by the sight of bare brick. How Tabby longed to smash down that wall and steal sight of their neighbour’s courtyard.

  She brought more tea, studying Emmie with wariness as she judged whether it was safe to leave. ‘I have to get back to work. Will you be OK for another hour?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Emmie said, half in surprise, half in resignation. The feral intensity had gone from her eyes.

  There was an unwelcome element of farce to all of this when Moira phoned to harangue her. ‘For goodness’ sake, where are you, Tabby? The guests have arrived early at rue du Rempart. They’re in the house now.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Moira, I had to go home in a hurry – there was an emergency. I’ve just got the bedrooms to do, I’m on my way back right now.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Moira said crossly. ‘I’ve sent Sophy to finish the job. Luckily she was in Saint-Martin already and agreed to cover for you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good, thank you. I promise it won’t happen —’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss this now,’ Moira cut in. ‘I see there’s nothing in the diary for you tomorrow, which is just as well. Can you come to the office on Monday morning?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Tabby said, though it had hardly been a question of choice. In any case, Moira had hung up without waiting for an answer.

  Freed now to deal with Emmie, she persuaded her to put on some shoes and leave the house for a walk by the sea. They took the coastal path towards Loix, to anyone else a route of the most restorative beauty but to Tabby merely a method of surviving another hour or two in a hostage crisis she could not begin to fathom, much less resolve. She kept walking long after she would normally have turned back, for she needed to exhaust Emmie as she’d once seen her father and Susie exhaust the two young girls. She was thinking that perhaps Emmie’s breakdown had been exacerbated by her having been denied the physical exercise she normally got from work.

  ‘Moira’s not happy,’ she said presently, and when Emmie made no comment, she found she had nothing to add herself. Moira, like Grégoire, was a transitory connection, a relationship conducted on the black. Priorities had shifted and it was no longer important enough for her to want to fight for it. She had worked her heart out this summer; she owed Moira nothing.

  Emmie, however, was different. She owed her everything.

  The next day, Sunday, to her great relief Emmie had calmed. She did not eat or bathe, it was true, but she at least submitted to another walk, another sustained avoidance of conversation on the subject of her downfall. Tabby tried not to worry that she was simply continuing her rant in her head. She’d decided that any more fits of mania like the one yesterday and she’d need to get a doctor involved, whether Emmie cooperated or not. She was no health professional, but the anger and helplessness between which Emmie veered daily were surely both symptoms of grief, delayed or suppressed during the course of the past few months and only now finding expression. Searching in Emmie’s toiletries basket for the pills she’d seen and finding the bottle gone, she hoped Emmie had begun taking them of her own accord, cheered herself with this likely evidence of self-help.

  On Monday, she suggested Emmie walk with her to La Flotte for her meeting with Moira, intending to harbour her safely in a café while she pleaded her case to their boss. Her amateur practitioner’s insistence on exercise therapy appeared to be succeeding, for Emmie was fast returning to her usual self, or rather the self she had constructed to conceal the original one. Tabby was grateful for the regeneration of it; she could cope with it far better than the shattered reality.

  In La Flotte, to her surprise – and faint trepidation – Emmie insisted on coming up with her to Moira’s office for the conference.

  ‘I’m not quite sure why you’re here,’ Moira said. ‘I thought you were still unwell?’ Her displeasure with both of them was plain. She did not offer them coffee or waste time on pleasantries, wordlessly gesturing to the two chairs at her desk before seating herself opposite.

  ‘She is unwell,’ Tabby replied when Emmie did not. It was only in seeing her friend in the artificial light of Moira’s office that she could appreciate how pallid she’d become; she’d lost weight in recent weeks, too, and the bones of her face were startlingly angular. Moira would be able to see this too, which was no bad thing, she decided. She resisted reminding their boss that Emmie was not being paid during her absence; the cash-in-hand arrangement had benefits for both parties.

  Moira turned to address Tabby. ‘We need to discuss what happened on Saturday at your rue du Rempart job.’

  ‘Yes, I —’

  ‘Let’s begin with my telling you what I know. I had a call at two-thirty from the new arrivals, saying the house was not fit for occupation. They shouldn’t have been able to use the entry system until the property was ready, but you obviously forgot to disable it when you left.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tabby said. ‘I was in a rush, there was a situation at home. I thought I’d be able to get back and finish up before they arrived.’

  Moira did not acknowledge this interruption. ‘When they got into the house, they found signs that one of the bedrooms had been in use.’

  ‘It was in a bit of a mess upstairs, yes. As I said, I hadn’t finished.’

  ‘The mother was extremely upset: the children found a condom wrapper on the mattress. There were also cigarette butts, a used sheet, and an item of underwear.’

  Tabby had no choice but to bluff her way through this sordid inventory. ‘I suppose they must have been from the previous occupants. As I say —’

  ‘Hardly,’ Moira interrupted. ‘The outgoing tenants were an elderly couple on holiday with their grandson. They were unlikely to have been using those items.’

  ‘The grandson maybe?’

  ‘He is eleven.’ Moira glared unpleasantly at her. ‘Tabby, please stop lying. The family saw you leave with a man just as they pulled up further down the street.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And it’s not the the first report of this kind, is it? You need to tell me truthfully, have you been using the house to meet a boyfriend? Have you been smoking there? Have you been using the premises for sex?’

  Tabby gazed dismally at Moira, hoping she might appear to her employer more apologetic than she felt. She was in deep trouble – might there even be an accusation here of prostitution? – and yet the situation felt tangential, a distraction from the imperative of keeping Emmie on an even keel. The procedural details of Moira’s investigation were laid out with a cold fury that would once have scared her but now seemed unimportant, possibly even bordering on comical. She found she had neither the energy nor the desire to defend herself.

  At her side, Emmie was clearing her throat, preparing to say something, causing Moira to glance in her direction. ‘Do you know anything about this situation, Emmie?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Emmie said, all of a sudden as animated as Tabby had seen her in twenty-four hours. ‘You’ve got it wrong. It was me, not Tabby.’

  ‘Don’t be crazy,’ Tabby told her, sighing.

  ‘No, it was,’ Emmie insisted. ‘Tabby wasn’t feeling well in the morning and so I went to her job instead. I invited someone I’ve been seeing to visit me while I was there.’

  Moira gave a huff of exasperation. ‘I thought it was you who called in sick on Saturday?’

  ‘I did, but I was lying. I cancelled because I’d arranged to meet this person. But when Tabby said she genuinely felt ill, I offered to cover for her and I invited my friend to visit me there instead of at home. It was me who had to go home for an emergency. We had a leak from the washing machine.’

  This surely sounded as implausible to Moira as it did to Tabby, and while noble of Emmie to try to save her skin, Tabby knew she had no hope of success.

  ‘Who is this person you were meeting?’ Moira demanded. ‘I’d like to phone him if I may.’

  Emmie was silent for an ominous moment, before replying, ‘Arthur. His name is Arthur.’

  ‘Oh,
Emmie, stop it,’ Tabby said. ‘You know that’s not true.’

  Moira looked from one to the other with disbelief. If anything, she was growing more furious as she awaited the explanation that would never come, and couldn’t have satisfied her even if it had. ‘I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I can tell you both equally that it is unacceptable to meet a boyfriend or any friend when you are supposed to be working. Has this been a regular stunt you’ve been pulling? Treating your place of work as some sort of short-stay hotel? I wouldn’t expect this of students, let alone adult women. I think you need to tell me exactly what’s been going on this summer.’

  ‘Don’t listen to Emmie,’ Tabby told Moira. ‘She had nothing to do with this. It was me. Ask the people in the house for a description of the girl they saw leaving and you’ll find it was me.’

  ‘I shall do no such thing. They’ve been troubled quite enough for one holiday and, I might add, are paying my client two and a half thousand euros to rent the house this week. They have no intention of getting involved in the seedy ins and outs of your dalliances.’ Moira was becoming pompous now, stirring in Tabby a horrible urge to laugh. ‘Yes, they arrived early, but they should not have been able to get in using the code until three o’clock. And even if your emergency were a genuine one, I have my doubts that you would have had enough time to get back and finish by three, anyhow, which would have made it unprofessional in a different way. I can only hope that these poor people don’t contact the owner direct about this, because if they do, he will want to find a new agent to manage his rental, and I won’t blame him if he does. You have completely abused the trust the client and I have placed in you and you have potentially damaged my business reputation. Do you understand that?’