The Disappearance of Emily Marr (41 page)

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?’

The heat generated by this diatribe seemed to linger in the air after she’d finished speaking, repelling apology and denial equally. The compulsion to giggle had left her, but Tabby still wasn’t sure she could bear much more of this meeting – this day – and yet, according to Moira’s wall clock, it was not yet eleven. She glanced across at Emmie, whose thoughts were now elsewhere, her mood apparently unperturbed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Moira, finally. ‘I don’t know what else I can say.’

It came as no surprise when Moira announced her decision: they were both sacked.

The following days were the strangest of Tabby’s life. If ever she had valued the structure imposed by work, any kind of work, it was now. Without any formal obligation to leave it, the house became a jail and Emmie her jailor – though the reality was the other way around.
She
was responsible for Emmie now.

Emmie had spoken little since her spirited moment in Moira’s office, either of her own drama or of the one that had caused them to lose their jobs. Not once did she ask Tabby if Moira’s allegation were true or who the man was who’d been visiting. She had no interest in it, just as she had none in eating or looking after herself – both she managed only with Tabby’s near-forcible encouragement. The same went for their walks, which continued only in short and painful form, rarely drawing them beyond the fortifications of Saint-Martin. Emmie was drinking now, a couple of glasses of wine before bedtime, and in camaraderie or defeat – she was not sure which – Tabby joined her. Any thoughts of a parallel with poor Sylvie Woodhall were best left unvoiced. Sleeping hours began to exceed waking ones for both of them.

By Thursday, the normality of working for Moira was so far out of reach as to feel like a job she’d done long ago, or perhaps only read about someone doing in a novel. For the first time, Tabby wished she could leave Ré. Without an income, the island was an untenable base, besides which she had enough cash now either to move on or travel back to England. But she couldn’t leave Emmie in this condition, not when she had caused the collapse. Without her meddling, Emmie would not have had to relive her traumatic recent past, she would not have lost the job that was anchoring her to the present.

Somehow, it had all gone catastrophically wrong again.

The next morning she found the number of a doctor and phoned to ask for advice. Thankfully, his English was better than her French, good enough for her to understand that he could do nothing without examining Emmie in person. House calls were not available, so she would need to bring Emmie to his surgery. This, Tabby knew, was impossible: even if she could somehow trick Emmie into it, she would turn on her heel the moment she realised she was in the presence of a doctor. If only things had not ended so badly with Moira, she could have appealed to her for help. Tabby thought again of Phil, the brother in Newbury who obviously loved and cared for his sister, and the next time she had access to Emmie’s phone she searched it for his number. To her disappointment, there were only three names listed: Moira, Emmie’s landlord M. Robert, and Tabby herself. There were no UK numbers at all: she had cut herself off well and truly.

As Emmie slept, Tabby took the laptop and read again parts of her story, hungry for clues as to what she might try next to improve her friend’s spirits. Finding none, she did however note one passage that she must have missed the first time, or read too quickly to absorb its significance: ‘I’d love to be able to say, just to one person, one time, “Come with me, stay with me until you’ve got yourself back on your feet.” Give someone a break, totally against their expectations
.
’
Here, after all this time, was the explanation to the one remaining element of Emmie’s behaviour she had not been able to fathom: why she had allowed Tabby to stay on the night of the break-in, why she had invited her to move in. Tabby was the recipient of her random act of kindness, her attempt to do a stranger a good turn. It broke her heart to know how the sweet, open-hearted girl in the story – flawed, yes, but as she said herself no more flawed than any other woman in love – had been reduced to the lost and broken creature in the bedroom upstairs.

At last, the following weekend, she woke up knowing just what she had to do. She made the phone calls as she shopped for food.

‘I need to leave the island for a few days,’ she told Emmie that evening. ‘I’ll be gone when you wake up. Will you be OK?’

‘Of course,’ Emmie said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

This was plainly incorrect, for she had scarcely left her bedroom since Wednesday, but other conditions encouraged Tabby to proceed with her plan. One, Emmie had not touched the laptop since Tabby had slipped it downstairs (nor had she asked where it was); two, she had had a bath and washed her hair; three, she had eaten the scrambled eggs and bread Tabby had taken her that lunchtime.

Having stocked the fridge with the healthy foods of recuperation – as if this were the simple matter of feeding a cold! – she left a couple of paperbacks by Emmie’s bed. She reminded her friend that she would be gone in the early hours and promised she would be back in a few days’ time and that everything would go back to normal. Whatever
that
was.

It was a little like leaving a young child to fend for herself, but Tabby reminded herself that Emmie had coped perfectly well before she arrived. Being on her own again might be just what she needed.

Meanwhile, Tabby would go back to England and find Arthur Woodhall.

Chapter 23

Tabby

It was the last weekend in August, a bank-holiday Monday in the UK, she discovered, and there were no available flights to London from either La Rochelle or Nantes that would not swallow her entire cache of euros. The Eurostar from Paris was fully booked. She would need to travel cheaply and slowly by train and ferry.

She began in the darkness of early morning, taking the bus to La Rochelle Station and marvelling at the length of the famous bridge she had first crossed with Grégoire. She still had no whole memory of her arrival in Ré that night in May. Such was the strangeness of the last few weeks, she thought that if she were to return and find the bridge gone, the island vanished, she would not be entirely surprised.

The train to Saint-Malo involved a change in Rennes, and then the ferry to Portsmouth took most of the day. It didn’t feel like a homecoming and she was grateful for that. She did not need the distraction of a sentimental journey. Arriving in England close to 7 p.m., she decided to take a cheap hotel room near the station for the night rather than risk arriving in London without a reservation and having to use every last penny on an expensive room there.

It was the right decision: in the morning she was well rested and optimistic, certain that by the time her head returned to the pillow that night she would have made progress, perhaps be on her way back to Emmie with news to lift her from her despair, even propel her to happier times.

She did not know London well, was not certain she had ever set foot in Emmie’s old neighbourhood, and so on arrival at Waterloo was pleased to find herself on the right side of town and just a bus ride away. Of course, she was not so naïve as to assume Arthur Woodhall would simply answer the door and welcome her with open arms, willingly returning to France with her that same day. For one thing, he probably didn’t live there any more – Emily had not once seen the lights on in his house during the period between the tragedy and her departure from the neighbourhood – and for another he would surely be at work, though not at St Barnabas’. Having remembered the news report of his resignation, Tabby had phoned the hospital for confirmation that he no longer held a post there. She could only pray that he had not, like Emmie, changed his name, making it impossible to follow his trail.