The Disappearance of Emily Marr (3 page)

No, she needed to find a public phone, ring her bank in the UK and beg for a last extension to her overdraft, enough to get her home and into someone’s spare room (anyone’s but her mother’s and stepfather’s), enough to feed herself while she looked for a job, any job that paid because beggars could not be choosers and she was a beggar. She had to admit that here, in the cobbled and picturesque streets of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, she had come to the end of the line.

She finished her bread and wondered how much a bottle of water would cost in this town. It would be more prudent to get tap water for free. She needed the toilet, too, would set about finding a public one or a café that would let her use its facilities without requiring her to buy a drink.

Down the alleyway, the woman had reappeared at her door, now carrying a backpack of the size you took on to planes to avoid checking in luggage. She pulled the door shut and hurried to the corner, head down, giving Tabby no more than a glimpse of drab-yellow anorak and the bleached ends of a head of cropped mouse-brown hair. She turned uphill in the direction of the church, leaving town, Tabby supposed idly. Imagine leaving a great place like this by choice, to go back to Britain! But she was forgetting that this was what normal people did. They came to the end of their holiday and had a home to return to, one they looked forward to seeing again, however restful the trip. Or, if they lived here, then they had jobs to hold down and places to be. They would come and go.

Leaving town… Places to be… Come and go.

To her credit, there was a civilised interval before the bad idea struck. When it did it caused as much revulsion as it did excitement, followed by the sensation of having been relieved of command of herself, of acting outside her own jurisdiction. And then, indecently quickly, it took hold of her completely.

B11903N.

She stepped into the alleyway towards the green door and without risking a glance to either side of her she keyed into the pad the same sequence of letters and numbers she’d heard said a few minutes earlier. There was an affirmative click, and when she pushed at the door it gave way. She slipped quickly through the gap with her eyes down, pushed the door silently behind her, then stood facing it for several seconds, waiting and listening. The weightless sensation had gone and now her lungs squeezed, painful and arrhythmic, like bellows operated by a lunatic, jolting an explanation from her. What are you doing? What
on
earth
are you doing?

She turned and looked ahead of her. A short passageway drew her into a small, dark ground-floor room with two shuttered windows and a glass door, which appeared to open on to a sliver of outside space too narrow for any furniture and shaded from the sun by a tall brick wall. There was a galley kitchen along the far wall, the units in a state of near-dilapidation, the worktop disorderly but clean enough. The sight of a single mug on the draining board reignited her thirst and she went straight to the tap and drank, returning the mug to its spot and looking about from her new vantage point. There were two small sofas by the fireplace, both ancient and fraying, an oval dining table with cheap cane chairs and various other junk-shop pieces: lamps, books, all the furnishings of a modest home. In the right-hand corner of the room there were stairs: so it was a house, a small, cavernous one, hidden from the street, open to the light only at the back.

Right, she thought, think. The place did not appear to be any kind of holiday unit and even if it was the woman had left possessions about the place and so could not have checked out. Best-case scenario: she lived in England and used the house only occasionally (why else could she have needed three attempts to get the code right?); she had left for the airport (hence the carry-on bag) and was returning home, perhaps not coming back again until summer. Tabby could stay here for weeks, come and go using the code, not catch anyone’s eye, not answer any questions. It wouldn’t matter if the electricity supply had been turned off, she needed only water which she already knew she had.

She tested the lights: working.

Worst-case scenario: the woman would be back in five minutes, having gone to the gym or to the shop to pick up dinner. There could be any number of explanations why a person might choose to leave her house at five o’clock in the afternoon with a medium-sized bag, and relatively few involved fleeing the country. Whoever she was, she was here alone, for the items about the place came singly: one bike propped against the wall, one pair of wellington boots by the door, one jacket and one fleece on the coat hooks; that lone mug on the draining board.

Tabby took the stairs, moving on soft feet like the prowler she was, careful not to scuff walls with her pack. There were two bedrooms, and from the door of the larger one she noted the handful of items on the chest of drawers – a leather-bound notebook, a small bottle of perfume (an upmarket English brand, bluebell, less than half left), a laptop of a size and manufacturer that made it, even to her uneducated eye, out of date. Tucked into the corner of a wood-framed mirror was a postcard of a painting, a swirl of red and pink, one of very few personal touches in the room. But she had no wish to touch and snoop: she was too tired and, besides, she had
some
principles. That made her smile, and the sensation of smiling in a situation like this – finding it funny! – brought on a deep sense of unreality.

If she couldn’t trust her own responses, could she trust that this was actually happening and not playing inside her mind as she snoozed in the sun somewhere?

Her need for the loo was real enough and she used the one next to the bathroom, willing the sound of the flush to fade quickly, in case the woman came back. She thought, I should get out of this place, forget I was ever here. No one will ever know I was.

But fatigue was taking her in the opposite direction, up a run of three stairs and towards the door of a second bedroom at the rear. It was less spacious than the first, no larger than the cabin of a boat, and was furnished with only a small double bed under the window, a chest of drawers and a stool. It looked as if no one had stepped into the room for months. She pulled the door to behind her, not quite closing it, and sat on the bed.

Her second guest room of the day, her second stranger’s bed. Though neatly made, the covers and pillowcase had the damp coldness of fabric not touched or turned for a long time.

She laid herself on top of them and closed her eyes. Even in this context, her last waking thought was of him, Paul.

Dreamlessness ended with physical touch: she was being shaken. There was a rough clutch on her left shoulder and hot breath on her face, and she could feel the anger in both.

‘Who are you? What are you doing in my house?’ The words were in English at first, frantic and involuntary, and then repeated in French.

Tabby opened her eyes properly. It was the woman she’d seen in the street, of course, her wan English skin flushed, dark eyes ablaze with fear. The light in the house had dimmed: it was evening now.

She struggled upright. In her sleep she had pulled the covers around her and they were tangled at the ankles and knees, shackling her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she began, voice gruff with sleep, ‘I’m so sorry. I just needed somewhere to rest. I didn’t think you were coming back…’ But she gave up almost at once. There was nothing she could say that would alter the fact of her trespass, the clear illegality of it. She needed to escape – and quickly.

‘Hang on, you’re
English
?’ If anything, the discovery appeared to intensify the woman’s distress, deepen her skin to a feverish red. Her grip tightened. ‘Who are you, tell me? How did you find me?’

Tabby did not understand. ‘I was so incredibly tired, I didn’t know what to do, and when I heard the entry code —’

‘What do you mean, you heard the code? You were watching me, then?’

Tabby disregarded the suspicion that they were talking at cross purposes: after all, they hardly had a common one. ‘No, I mean I saw you key in the code, and you said it out loud as well. I haven’t got any money and I needed somewhere to sleep, so I let myself in —’

The woman interrupted once more: ‘Are you
completely
mad? You can’t just overhear codes and
let yourself in
! This is a private home, not some sort of doss house!’

‘I know, it was wrong. I’m really sorry.’ How inadequate the words sounded: insultingly so, as if she were not respectful enough to try harder.

‘This is unbelievable, it’s breaking and entering. I’m going to phone the police.’

‘Don’t do that, please. I was going to leave as soon as I woke up, I promise. I wasn’t going to steal anything, honestly.’

‘“Honestly”?’

Tabby sensed a paralysis in the other woman that gave her her first hope, perhaps even a momentary advantage: if she made a dash for it she might outrun her discoverer. Her legs now free from the bedding, she began to slip from the woman’s grasp, heading through the open door and towards the stairs, but she was quickly pursued, footsteps menacing on the wooden stairs behind her. Emerging into the main room, Tabby stumbled and felt a twist in her left knee, at the same time remembering her backpack, still upstairs, at the foot of the bed. She knew she couldn’t leave it behind and turned in surrender. Trying her knee, the pain caused her to crumple to the floor and before she could compose herself she’d succumbed to whimpering into her hands. ‘Please, just let me go. I promise you’ll never see me again…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, look at you!’ the woman cried, her voice hardly more controlled than Tabby’s own. Indeed, she could not continue for a moment or two, breathing hard as she calmed herself. ‘Why don’t you get up from the floor and sit on the sofa. I’ll make you a drink. You obviously need a few minutes to get yourself together.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ Tabby sobbed. ‘I might as well just throw myself off the bridge and be done with it.’

The woman stared at her, at a loss. ‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said finally. Only when she turned her back did Tabby rise to her feet and limp to the sofa.

The kettle seemed to take a long time to boil, long enough for Tabby’s tears to subside, leaving her too desperate to feel any embarrassment. She became aware of the other woman’s scrutiny and then of its removal as the water was poured, the fridge door being opened and closed. Neither spoke, but it was not hard to guess the other’s thoughts. She’d had the fright of her life – to find a stranger, an adult female, in your home! It was a miracle she had not turned and fled the moment she saw her, returning only with a pair of police officers. (Tabby had seen the police booth next to the car park in the port, no more than two minutes away.) What would
she
have done in such a situation? But the notion of being the home owner, the occupier, was so heartbreakingly foreign she could not answer the question. She thought, inevitably, of Paul, not in accusation of his having caused her to fall so low, but in hope of him coming to raise her again. Rescue her.

She had never felt more pathetic in her life.

‘Right, here we go. How’s the leg?’

Tabby looked up in confusion, for the woman’s tone had altered completely. It was gentle and soothing;
kind
. Not only that, but as she approached the sitting area, bearing a tray with tea things, Tabby saw that her whole demeanour had changed: her shoulders were lowered and her facial muscles relaxed. Though she couldn’t say why, Tabby understood that this could not be the product of a natural draining of fear and adrenalin, but had to be something more deliberate. It was as if, in the time it had taken the kettle to boil, the woman had reinterpreted her own part in this unscheduled drama and committed herself to a different, less likely role.

‘I think it’ll be OK,’ Tabby said. ‘It’s just my knee, I’ve twisted it slightly.’

The woman placed the tray on the coffee table and handed her one of the mugs. ‘Drink this and let’s get to the bottom of what just happened here.’ She settled herself on the sofa opposite Tabby, her movements loose and easy. There was a trace of humour in her eyes, a reversal of mood confirmed by her next question: ‘So what’s your name? I assume it’s not Goldilocks?’

Tabby paused. If she gave her real name, she could still be reported at any time, and perhaps this was the thinking behind this change of approach. There might even be a sedative in the tea! With nothing to guide her but her gut instinct, she made the decision that this was no trick, no trap, but a chance.

Raising the mug to her lips, she smelled the warm, woody aroma of the tea and said, ‘No, it’s Tabitha. Tabby.’

‘Well, Tabby,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Emmie.’

Chapter 2

Emily

London, December 2010

It was 12 December 2010 when I met Arthur Woodhall, and I honestly believe that until that date I had not been properly activated. I had not yet become myself. I was thirty years old and, extraordinary as it may sound now, given all that’s happened since, I’d made little impression on the world. True, people often said I had an attractive face, but I’d come to learn that it never quite seemed to fit. People said I had a big heart, but I’d reached the conclusion that it might never be able to tolerate its own capacity.

I suppose what I mean is I’d never been happy before.

It was a Saturday and the occasion was the Christmas party of our neighbours, the Laings of number 197, a bash they were giving for the Friends’ Association of Walnut Grove. Such events, I was told that night, were held in rotation by certain members, mostly those owning the bigger houses on the street, houses worthy of opening up and showing off. Though Matt and I were not Friends, we were invited because the bedroom of our new rental flat at 199 adjoined a portion of the sitting room of 197 and it was thought the music might disturb us. The Laings did not want to risk being remembered as the ones who hosted the year someone called the police about the noise.

‘They don’t expect us to actually turn up,’ Matt said. It was he who had answered the door when Sarah Laing called round and he had described her to me as ‘posh and bossy’. ‘They’re just covering themselves in case it all kicks off. Let’s go to the pub instead.’