The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Not even your family? What about Phil?’

  ‘He’s been all right about it, yes. He’s visited us here with the boys a few times. And Arthur’s brother has been OK too, though not his wife or their sister. And none of Sylvie’s family, none of the nieces or nephews on her side.’ She bit her lower lip, obviously upset. ‘We’re hoping that when they’re older they might decide to get in touch with him again themselves. We’ll have to see.’

  ‘Are you here long-term, d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know; it depends on Arthur’s work. Neither of us wants to go back to London. There are new eye clinics opening overseas, we might go to one of those.’

  ‘And you’re still writing?’

  Emily blinked softly. ‘No, I’ve written all I’m going to write. I’m training to become a counsellor, so I could work anywhere English-speaking, I suppose.’

  ‘Somewhere people would be less likely to recognise you.’

  ‘Yes, though it’s been fine here so far. The staff at the summer school where I’m doing my course have been great. They agreed I could register under a different name and so far no one has questioned that. And the few times I’ve been recognised, it hasn’t been as bad as I expected. Often they just know they know me but can’t think where from. Someone thought I’d been on a reality show, one of those singing ones. If only!’

  Tabby wanted to ask what Emily’s assumed name was (just out of interest), but Emily had talked enough and said she was going to bed. She showed Tabby the room in which she was to stay and again Tabby acknowledged the significance of a person required to be so vigilant about privacy deciding to lower her guard in this way. It made her feel proud.

  Too stirred up to sleep, she asked Emily if she could use the computer downstairs for a little longer.

  ‘Of course,’ Emily said. ‘Just turn out the lights when you come back up.’

  Seconds later, the door to the main bedroom was closed behind her. Tabby could not quite comprehend that in the space beyond was the couple who had so recently incited national damnation, whose reunion was a miracle even in their own eyes. Arthur Woodhall and Emily Marr, together after all. From what Emily had said, they had very little left but each other. They’d been prepared to make sacrifices for each other right from the beginning; in the end, the sacrifices were larger, unspeakably graver. Everybody counted, as Emily had insisted, but nobody won.

  Downstairs, Tabby returned to the Missing Persons site. She read that the majority of missing adults had chosen to disappear, a significant percentage having mental-health problems, which ranged from mild depression to severe psychosis. In some cases the missing were patients who had absconded from hospital mental wards. One other statistic caught her eye: seventy per cent of those who’d made contact with the helpline said that being missing had positive aspects to it.

  Certainly Emmie had been content with her existence: comfortable in Tabby’s company, absorbed by her work for Moira, happy with her little house by the port where you could run either the water heater or the washing machine but not both at once. Life, unsupervised, unmedicated, it had had positive aspects to it. She’d only become unhappy when Tabby had insisted on exposing her history. Her ‘history’, she corrected herself. So much concerning Emmie had now to be thought of in inverted commas, including her name.

  She found the site for the East London Trust, which, as Arthur said, was a major mental-health facility. Idly browsing this and others linked to it, she came across an alphabetical list of medicine and studied it carefully. She thought she recognised one name near the bottom: Quetiapine. Could that be right? None of the others looked familiar in the same way. She clicked on the link and read:

  Quetiapine is a type of medicine known as an atypical antipsychotic. It works in the brain, where it affects various neurotransmitters, in particular serotonin (5HT) and dopamine. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that are stored in nerve cells and are involved in transmitting messages between the nerve cells.

  Dopamine and serotonin are known to be involved in regulating mood and behaviour, amongst other things. Psychotic illness is considered to be caused by disturbances in the activity of neurotransmitters (mainly dopamine) in the brain. Schizophrenia is known to be associated with an overactivity of dopamine in the brain, and this may be associated with the delusions and hallucinations that are a feature of this disease.

  Quetiapine works by blocking the receptors in the brain that dopamine acts on. This prevents the excessive activity of dopamine and helps to control schizophrenia. It is also used by specialists to treat episodes of mania and depression in people with the psychiatric illness bipolar affective disorder (manic depression).

  Tabby frowned, her pulse beginning to pound. Schizophrenia? Bipolar disorder? She didn’t even know what the terms meant, associating them with Jekyll and Hyde split personalities. Beginning to read a second time, she halted almost at once at the term ‘antipsychotic’ and searched for a simple definition: ‘Psychosis’ is the word used for conditions in which the patient loses touch with reality.

  Becoming dislocated, separated, isolated. Becoming, perhaps, a different person entirely…

  She turned off Emily’s PC, put out the lights and tiptoed upstairs.

  The spare room was at the back of the house, the clean bedding cold from lack of use. She remembered the first evening in the house off rue de Sully, Emmie saying, ‘So what’s your name? I assume it’s not Goldilocks?’, and at the sound of her friend’s voice, the amusement in it that had been all the sweeter for being so undeserved, she began to cry into her pillow.

  When she came downstairs in the morning, Tabby found that Arthur had already left for work and Emily was packing a satchel for her college class. She declined the offer of breakfast: she’d imposed on the two of them for long enough, long enough to be leaving with a second riddle to unravel, a disturbing new set of mysteries to solve. As she prepared to leave, her phone rang. It was a staff member from the missing-persons charity, asking if she would take a call from Eve’s parents, who wanted to meet her at the airport and fly to France that afternoon.

  She agreed at once.

  ‘They’re so pleased you’ve come forward,’ the girl said. She made it sound as if Tabby had witnessed a crime, but there had been no crime, not in her opinion.

  ‘You’re meeting them today?’ Emily asked her as they were about to part.

  ‘Yes, later on, at Stansted Airport. They want to come back with me straight away.’

  ‘I hope she’s going to be all right, their daughter.’

  ‘So do I.’ Tabby hesitated; then, knowing she might never meet this woman again, she threw the last of her caution to the wind and asked, ‘You’re all right, aren’t you, Emily?’

  Emily looked moved by the simple enquiry, and out of practice in answering it, making Tabby remember what she’d said last night about starting again without friends. ‘Yes,’ she said, after a pause, ‘I’m more all right than I thought I could be. Thank you.’

  ‘And Arthur? He’s not… Well, he’s not like you described in your story, when you first met. I mean, it’s obvious why, I just…’ Tabby could not find the words.

  Emily drew her hands together, squeezing the ends of her fingers as if suddenly cold. ‘He’s very low, to tell you the truth, lower than you or I can understand. I don’t think you can ever recover from what he’s lost. But in the end you have a choice: you give up or you go on. He has enough reasons to go on. I hope that every year there’ll be more reasons.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tabby swung her bag on to her shoulder. She travelled lighter than ever today, having left the laptop with its rightful owner. She dreaded having to explain to Emmie where it was, very much hoping she would be relieved of the responsibility by someone better qualified to take it. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Emily said. ‘I won’t come to the front door with you if you don’t mind. It’s an old habit – you never know who might be lurking.’

  Chapter 28 />
  Tabby

  She had arranged to meet Ray and Kerry Barron at Stansted Airport by the airline desk; even without seeing the red carry-on luggage she’d been instructed to look for, she would have known them, for they radiated a distinctive nervous energy. An uneasy combination of prayer and resignation, it filled Tabby, already anxious, with a strange fatalism.

  Greetings barely out of the way, Ray was buying her a seat on the late-afternoon flight to La Rochelle that he and Kerry were already booked on and suggesting the three of them go through to Departures before they talked.

  In the queue for Security, Tabby watched them when they weren’t aware she was looking, fascinated to see shades of Emmie in Ray’s face – the same eye colour, the same slightly flattened planes of brow and nose – and in Kerry the perfect original of that hushed, sober bearing Emmie had and that Tabby still associated her with, in spite of recent volatilities. When the Barrons caught one another’s eye, it was with wariness, she saw, a sense of shared qualms that she could not help relating to herself. They’d been in purgatory and were now being led from it by a saviour they did not know and could not yet trust. Was the pain about to end or would it in fact grow worse? The responsibility made Tabby so nauseous she felt close to retching.

  Only when they’d cleared the departure controls and found a table in a café did anyone mention Eve by name.

  ‘We’ve brought some photos to show you,’ Kerry said, ‘just to double-check it’s her.’ Close up and in unforgiving lighting, the emotions in her eyes were startlingly raw: impotence; vulnerability; a livid, half-mad hope. Tabby looked quickly away, relieved to focus on the photographs.

  Two separate incarnations of Eve had been captured: first, the most recent, Emily-inspired one – there were several snaps from the same occasion as the image posted on the missing-persons website – then an earlier one, in which her long hair was dark, her eyebrows thick and shapeless and her lips sore-looking and unsmiling. In this, rather than in the more recent one, she looked like the deeply damaged woman Tabby now knew her to be.

  ‘So you obviously knew she had changed her appearance to look like Emily Marr?’ Tabby said. She had spoken to Kerry at length on the phone that morning on the train from Leeds, telling her what she knew about Eve’s contact with Emily in Newbury, the appropriation of the laptop and other personal items, Emily’s suspicion that she had been among those who’d harassed her while she still lived on the Grove. ‘She must have done it quite soon before she went missing, because Emily was only in the media from mid-February.’

  ‘Yes, it was a complete change of image since we’d last seen her,’ Ray said. ‘We had a family party for her grandmother’s birthday at our house – that’s when these photos were taken – and when Eve arrived everyone remarked on the new look. The blondness was a big transformation in itself, she’d always had her natural dark hair before that. Of course, we’d all read about the Marr scandal in the papers and a couple of people remarked on the influence. There’d been a feature about her that morning in the Mail, how she’d left London and gone into hiding.’

  ‘We easily might not have known, though,’ Kerry added, ‘because she almost didn’t come to the party. She said she couldn’t leave London because of work. We hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, which was unusual for us. We were worried she was obsessing about her job, but we found out after she went missing that she hadn’t been working for over a month.’

  She’d been busy staking out Emily’s flat, Tabby thought, and then Phil Marr’s house in Newbury. Handing back the prints, she said, ‘It’s definitely her, but she looks different from both of these now. Her hair is short – to be honest, it looks like she cut it herself. She doesn’t wear any make-up. She’s quite scruffy, very understated.’

  ‘Is she healthy?’ Kerry asked. ‘Physically?’

  ‘She was. But just before I came back here, after she lost her job, she wasn’t in such good shape. She wouldn’t eat very much. She wasn’t looking after herself the way she had been. That’s why I came to get help.’ Hearing her own insinuation that it was the job loss that had set the emotional collapse in motion, Tabby felt that ever-present undertow of guilt tug hard at her intestines. Whatever was the matter with Emmie, or Eve as she must now think of her, she had until recently been physically well. She had been looking after herself. It was Tabby who was responsible for the deterioration, both in her forcing of Emmie’s confession of her ‘real’ identity and in causing her to be fired from the job that had anchored her.

  ‘I think we ought to tell you a bit about her medical history,’ Ray said, as if sensing her self-blame and hastening to set the record straight. ‘You need to know that this is a natural continuation of an existing problem, a problem she’s had for half her life, years before she met you.’

  Tabby nodded, grateful to let him lead both this discussion and any necessary action to follow, to deflect all that hopeful anticipation from her.

  As the story unfolded, it seemed to her that Eve had had the childhood Emily Marr had not: healthy, wealthy parents, a stable family environment, a peaceful and secure Home Counties lifestyle. There were two brothers, both younger, their decent, caring characters brought vividly to life in a matter of minutes and making Eve’s denial of her family even more unfathomable to Tabby than it already was. To have identified so intensely with a complete stranger while the people closest to her in the world wept for her, longing every day for a word of contact: it beggared belief. To have grieved for someone else’s loss of a father when her own lived and breathed and made huge sacrifices for her (both Ray and Kerry had reduced their working hours in order to support Eve in her illness, Tabby learned, and latterly to coordinate the nationwide search for her): it seemed obscene, almost blasphemous.

  But the Barrons knew differently. Clearly, the two of them had educated themselves in mental health and were keen to convince Tabby that Eve could not be held responsible for her actions. They explained the history of depression in the family, the elder brother of Ray who had committed suicide in his late twenties. ‘Eve suffered from her teenage years, but it grew worse in adulthood,’ he said. ‘She saw a series of professionals and was eventually diagnosed with a delusional disorder. At that stage, it was what they call “persecutory”. In layman’s terms, she thought everyone was against her.’

  ‘We would say paranoid,’ Kerry added, ‘but that’s not what it means, in fact.’

  ‘There was a series of worrying incidents, the last one being with a man at work. It was what we call stalking; the experts call it “erotomania”. The more he rejected her and the firmer he tried to be about it, the more she lost touch with the reality of what he was saying to her. She made contact with his wife, who felt threatened enough to call the police. Eve lost her job, of course.’

  ‘What sort of job did she have?’ Tabby asked.

  ‘She was a teacher.’

  ‘A teacher?’ It was impossible to imagine Emmie in front of a class, confident and animated, sharing her knowledge rather than guarding it.

  ‘Of course she hasn’t always been able to manage work. Her employment has been sporadic. Before this last position, she hadn’t worked for two years. She’s lived with us on and off and then there’ve been spells of independence. It’s been unpredictable.’

  The Barrons told her that in the time it had taken Tabby to travel to Stansted, they had been able to confer with Eve’s latest – indeed, current – psychiatrist. ‘He says she may have developed what they call a “grandiose delusion”. That’s when someone exaggerates his sense of self-importance and is convinced he has special powers or abilities. It’s quite rare, of course, but it does happen occasionally that someone actually believes he’s a famous person, like a member of the Royal Family or a religious leader.’

  Or the object of passing media fixation, perhaps, an object with whom physical similarities exist and are mistaken for something more profound than coincidence – in this case, likenesses in age, facial features and
height, ones that Emily herself had noticed. From what Emily had written and Tabby had read online, the whole nation had become fascinated by her, if only for a week or so, but it had somehow tipped in Eve to fanaticism, and then to something more extreme still.

  ‘He says that what could have happened is that Eve’s interest in this woman – her empathy with her – began to exceed natural limits and convince her of some sort of kinship, a kinship that became total identification. She began to behave as Emily would, or how she thought Emily would, and because of the nature of Emily’s circumstances, that meant living as if in hiding.’

  ‘But she never gave me the slightest clue,’ Tabby said. ‘She never once slipped up.’

  ‘But that’s just it, Tabby, it’s not a question of slipping up, it’s not a conscious pretence, like acting. She simply hasn’t been aware of her real identity.’

  Tabby remembered the description she’d studied of the antipsychotic medication Eve had been prescribed. ‘So it’s a split personality? Schizophrenia?’