The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a low, quiet voice, and when Tabby looked up she saw that Arthur had not closed the door to the hallway when he had returned and that there was a female figure standing just outside, partly in the shadows. ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘You called the police?’ Tabby said to Arthur, stricken. But of course he had, he must have phoned when he’d gone upstairs, perhaps even from the car. How naïve she’d been, tailing him like some sort of idiotic Nancy Drew, spotted even before she’d pulled out of the hospital and joined the traffic behind him; and what a fool to think he had remained unaffected by becoming a media pariah – had she not seen for herself the electronic gates, the fact that the detached house was not overlooked on any side, details of far greater importance to Arthur than stylish furniture? This was a man who, like Emmie, had been driven from his home and his job. But unlike poor Emmie, he had status and wealth, the means to establish a supportive relationship with the local police and proper security at his new place of work. He was not a fugitive of no professional standing, like Emmie, but a man whose skills remained highly prized by society no matter what mistakes he’d made in his personal life. He was a victim worth protecting. Of course he could, and would, call for professional back-up the moment a stranger popped up talking of the Marr Affair. This police officer and her colleagues probably had their own keys, permission to enter the moment Arthur raised the alarm. No matter how hapless Tabby had looked, no matter how apparently well-meaning, he would still have needed to suspect that she could be dangerous. He would know to trust no one.

  She’d judged it all wrong, as usual.

  ‘I got it from Emily herself,’ she said, speaking towards the door. ‘She lent it to me. It’s not stolen,’ she added. The last thing she needed was a charge of theft on top of harassment.

  ‘Oh, I think you know it is,’ Arthur said, at her side.

  Indignant, Tabby spun back to him. ‘I know it is not. She gave it to me a week or two ago.’ She had lost all sense of time and could not spare precious seconds to puzzle over precise dates. ‘That’s when I read it myself for the first time. She wanted me to read it – and I’m glad I did. It helped me to understand her position, and that’s all I’m asking you to do. Is it so terrible a request? After everything you went through together?’

  ‘This is insane,’ Arthur said, speaking so softly it might even have been to himself. ‘Completely insane.’

  The word irritated Tabby, who felt now, in the presence of the police, that she had nothing left to lose: the worst was already upon her and it was now a question of keeping her self-respect – and respect for Emmie, too. ‘What’s insane is the way she’s been treated, like someone on a murder charge. No,’ she corrected herself, heated now, ‘like someone already convicted of murder! She may not have behaved very honourably, but I don’t think what she did was unforgivable. And a member of her family died as well, you know. I think it’s awful how everyone turned their back on her, obsessed with blaming her, turning her into a scapegoat, when what she needed was love and sympathy.’

  ‘Everyone,’ Arthur repeated with a strange, sorrowful wonderment, and Tabby saw she’d gone too far, after all, she’d caused new offence.

  ‘I don’t mean you, of course, and that’s not what she thinks either. I mean, you have obviously had a worse time even than her. I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr Woodhall, I should have said that first. I really am sorry. I didn’t know anything about the accident, or this whole tragedy, until very recently. I’d been out of the country.’ She was tying herself in knots now, all the while being regarded by Arthur as if she were the bearer of fantastical, bizarre tidings.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You don’t believe me?’

  The door opened fully then and the policewoman took a few steps into the room. She was dressed very casually, was clearly some sort of plain-clothes officer, her neutral, reticent body language no doubt the product of special training. I’m going to have to give up, Tabby thought; if I can somehow get out of this situation with only a warning or a caution… She thought with sudden longing of the ferry crossing to Brittany, of the quiet lounge of reclining seats where you could drop off to sleep to the motion of the Channel. On the way, it had been an exasperatingly sedate mode of transport, but now she could think of nothing more tantalising.

  Then she noticed something peculiar: the policewoman was not wearing shoes. Her feet were bare, her toenails the vivid white of the inside of oyster shells. She stood with a natural grace, drawing Tabby’s eye up the length of her languid, curvaceous figure. Though dressed, she must have just showered, because her wet hair was combed off her face, her skin scrubbed pink. She was extremely pretty. With a sudden flush for her own stupidity, Tabby recognised the truth. The woman must live here; she was not a police officer at all, but the new girlfriend Nina had hinted at, the inevitable source of consolation of which Meeks had disapproved. It was not considered seemly, perhaps, for Arthur to form a new relationship so soon after the death of his wife.

  The woman gazed at the laptop with an expression of simple fascination, attracted, perhaps, by the promise of secrets about Arthur’s infamous former lover. Did he talk about Emily to this woman? Tabby thought. Did he think of her ever? She felt the downward pull in her stomach of final defeat and thought, once again, Poor Emmie… She would have to go back to her with some false story, a succession of little white lies of the kind Emmie herself had once told her distressed father. The need to tell her what it would benefit her to hear exceeded any old-fashioned attachment Tabby might have to the truth.

  ‘Tabby,’ said Arthur, with the supreme weariness of one who had spent the afternoon in the operating theatre and had no energy for further physical investigation, ‘that was what you said your name was, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Should she have given him a false one? she wondered. The strange, staring woman in front of her wasn’t a police officer, fine, but Tabby sensed that she was not out of the woods yet.

  ‘Well, Tabby,’ said Arthur, standing now with a certain polite formality. ‘I would like to introduce you to Emily Marr.’

  Chapter 25

  Tabby

  Tabby stared at Arthur with the bafflement of an infant who had not yet learned sufficient vocabulary to follow adult conversation and must therefore rely on visual clues for clarity. She could tell something interesting had been said, something critical, but she could not make sense of the words. Meanwhile, Arthur and the barefoot woman had forgotten all about her, it seemed, and were gazing at each other instead, too many emotions crossing their faces – indignation, pleasure, bemusement, suspicion – to help her to reorientate.

  Then the woman came to sit beside Arthur. She was interested in the laptop, Tabby saw, rather than in its keeper. ‘I thought I’d lost it,’ she said, and her voice, breathy and low-pitched, had a quality of humility to it. ‘I never printed it out. It was just a file on my hard drive.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Tabby said, appealing to Arthur, the authority figure here, but he was still concerned with the woman with pearl-white toenails, the woman he said was Emily Marr but who could not be. She obviously could not be because Emmie was Emily, she was quite clear on that.

  The odd thing was that this woman looked a little like Emmie. Not like the Emmie in the old photos but the current incognito one. They had the same head of carelessly cropped dark hair, similarly wide-set eyes; an unselfconscious, unadorned personal style in common. This woman had finer features, however, and that soft-voiced sexiness. She was elegant and gently sorrowful; maybe ‘melancholy’ was the word, Tabby thought. Whatever it was, it made Arthur close his arm around her waist, cup her and protect her. He loved her, it was plain.

  ‘You’re not Emily,’ Tabby told her, and she sought Arthur’s eye for reassurance. ‘Is she?’ He, of all people, would know. But he wanted to let the woman speak for herself.

  She drew a deep breath and sighed. ‘There are still times when I wish I wasn�
��t, but I am. It’s obvious you don’t believe me – I suppose I could show you my passport, if you like?’

  ‘You have no need to explain yourself to this person, darling,’ Arthur said, and Tabby stared at him in bewilderment. He agreed, then, that she was who she said she was.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, once more. ‘This laptop belongs to my friend Emmie. She’s had it since I’ve known her and we met in May, nearly four months ago.’

  ‘It was stolen from me in March, from my brother’s house in Newbury,’ the woman said, as if in agreement. ‘Just before I left for Paris.’

  Paris? Newbury? The earth had shifted and time was stretching. Perhaps that was why Tabby was being so slow to understand. ‘Your brother’s house?’ she repeated. ‘In Newbury?’ Fear of police arrest had now been replaced by some other, unnamed apprehension.

  ‘Yes. It was reported stolen to the police, but they said straight up they didn’t think I’d ever get it back.’

  Tabby just breathed in and out, in and out, her vanquished brain straining to make the connections required for a first stab at an interpretation of this mystery. ‘So you think Emmie got it from whoever stole it from you? But if that’s the case, how did she get into it? How would she know the original password, if it wasn’t her own?’

  The couple exchanged a glance.

  ‘“Woodhall”,’ Tabby remembered. ‘That was your password?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it was a hard code to crack,’ the woman admitted.

  ‘It’s an old thing,’ Arthur commented, reaching across her to stab at the keyboard. ‘I’m surprised it still works.’

  ‘Technically, it’s Matt’s. But he left it for me when he moved out. I didn’t use it much at first.’

  Tabby being Tabby, she had investigated the other files and found documents to do with Matt Piper, the man in the wedding photograph, the one who had spoken up for Emily in the newspaper profile. ‘Matt, as in Emily’s ex-boyfriend?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ The woman looked frankly at her then – she had very dark indigo eyes, not like Emmie’s in colour or shape – and grimaced in embarrassment. ‘God, you must know everything about me if you’ve read this. I mean, the real everything. I have to tell you it feels a lot weirder than when people read the lies. What a bizarre situation.’ She was preoccupied once more, scrolling through the file, her eyes rolling up and down, up and down. ‘I wrote more after this, you know. There was another chapter. I wrote it after I left England. Just by hand, in a notebook; I couldn’t afford a new computer.’ She closed the lid, a tremor visible in her shoulders. ‘It didn’t finish here.’

  ‘Clearly not,’ Arthur said. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t have this confusion now.’ He turned to Tabby. ‘I think you’d better tell us about this friend of yours you seem to think is Emily. You say she’s using her name?’

  ‘Well, Emmie. She’s called Emmie Mason.’ It was the name in the document, of course, Emily’s own idea for her new identity.

  ‘And she’s in La Rochelle, is she?’

  ‘Near there.’ Tabby was reluctant for the time being to be more specific, not knowing what trouble poor Emmie might soon find herself in.

  ‘And I suppose she looks a bit like me?’ the new Emily asked. ‘I mean, like I used to look?’

  Tabby frowned as she nodded. Still mystified, she sensed that the other woman was closer to comprehension than she was. ‘That’s the strange thing. She looks more like you do right now. Short hair, no make-up, she dresses really low-key. It makes no sense.’

  ‘Oh, it does, believe me.’ Emily rose to her feet. ‘I think I have an idea what’s going on here. Do you have time to stay a little while, Tabby?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then let me get the last chapter for you. You’d better read it before we talk any more.’

  ‘Emily,’ Arthur protested, reaching for her hand and taking it in both of his. ‘Are you sure you want to rake over it like this? I’m sure Tabby won’t mind if we just ask her to leave. There’s obviously been a misunderstanding. This other woman is nothing to do with us.’

  He had a kind of unassailable calm, Tabby thought, a quality of being in the right; and so he was, for she wouldn’t mind being ordered to leave – at least she wouldn’t beg to stay. Though still unclear as to its precise nature or cause, she had entered into a state of humiliation, on Emmie’s behalf as well as her own. She did not know what had happened, only that she had somehow been deceived. A part of her longed to do as Arthur suggested and just go, not another word uttered, and yet… if this woman thought she had material that might cast light on Emmie’s situation, then she wanted to read it. Always, for as long as she could remember, when given the choice between knowing and not knowing, she wanted to know.

  ‘She needs to read it,’ the woman was telling Arthur, gently extracting her hand from his. Something in the way he reluctantly let it go, letting her fingers slide from his grip fraction by fraction, made Tabby’s heart contract with acute pain. Paul had never released her like this. In the end, he had wanted to push her away, send her flying. ‘I promise you it’s the only thing that will make sense.’

  ‘Fine,’ Arthur said, rising too. ‘You get what you need and I’ll pour us all a glass of wine. Stay here,’ he added to Tabby.

  For a second time, Tabby was left alone. She could hear the distant chime of wineglasses knocking against each other, a bottle being opened, while overhead footsteps scurried into a bedroom and then back again, towards the stairs. The door had been left open and she had a side view of the staircase. So indecipherable was the situation, so unfamiliar the atmosphere, she would not have been surprised if the woman returned dressed as Emily Marr, just as Emmie had that strange Saturday night when they’d walked together, arm in arm, down to the port. The shoes would come into sight first, then the flared skirt of the dress, then the bare shoulders, the pink loveheart lips and winged eye make-up of a Fifties siren.

  But when the new Emily returned she was dressed just the same. She moved very gracefully, light-footed and silent, like a dancer or a model; it was hard not to be transfixed, to want to keep your eyes on her all the time.

  ‘Here.’ She’d brought two items: a notebook the size of a paperback novel and a passport. This she showed Tabby first, drawing her eye to the name, Emily Rachel Marr, and the date of birth, which was the same as the one Tabby had seen on Wikipedia and other sites. In the photo she had platinum-blond hair, the trademark style of make-up: this was plainly the face that matched the one in the pictures online and in the print Emmie kept in her folder. Then the new Emily gave her the notebook. ‘Ignore the French,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get very far.’ Tabby saw that the pages at the front contained lists of French vocabulary, household objects and flowers and animal names, the basic foods: beginner’s French, well below Emmie’s impressive level. But Tabby supposed that this discrepancy was the least of what she was about to discover.

  ‘It’s at the back,’ Emily said, ‘the bit you need to read.’

  Arthur arrived to deliver a glass of wine and then the two of them murmured something about food and left her alone to read.

  Chapter 26

  Emily

  I’m not at Phil’s house any longer. I’m renting a tiny studio at the top of a house in Ivry in south-eastern Paris. My view across the rooftops is not of Sacré Coeur or the Eiffel Tower but of a warehouse for Chinese foods. It’s a proper hideaway, or maybe a safe house is closer to the truth. I’ve finally managed the disappearing act Nina Meeks advised me to do.

  I still fantasise sometimes about going back and getting my revenge – something Machiavellian and intricately plotted – but the truth is I don’t know how to avenge myself on a woman like her and I don’t think I ever will. If I did, I don’t suppose I would have been her victim in the first place, because bullies don’t choose victims of equal strength to their own. She’s a bully, I realise that now, a bully dressed up as a moral crusader, and no one will ever persuade me oth
erwise.

  Actually, since I’ve been here, I’ve thought of myself less as a victim and more as a survivor, which is progress of sorts.

  I have enough money to stay for five or six months without working, provided I buy only the bare essentials. If I can find a job, something that requires only minimal French, then I’ll stay longer. If not, I’ll return to England and take my chances. There must be someone there who either doesn’t know what I did or no longer cares. I can’t live in solitary confinement for the rest of my life. Maybe I’ll take a new name after all, reinvent myself the correct, legal way, like those juvenile killers who get given a new identity for their adult return to society.