The Disappearance of Emily Marr Read online

  Louise Candlish studied English at University College London, and worked as an editor and copywriter before writing fiction. She is the author of eight previous novels, including the bestsellers Since I Don’t Have You, The Second Husband, Before We Say Goodbye, Other People’s Secrets, and, most recently, The Day You Saved My Life. Louise has also released her first digital short story collection, Summer Affairs. She lives in London with her partner and daughter.

  www.louisecandlish.co.uk

  Also by Louise Candlish

  I’ll Be There For You

  The Double Life of Anna Day

  Since I Don’t Have You

  The Second Husband

  Before We Say Goodbye

  Other People’s Secrets

  The Day You Saved My Life

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Sphere

  978-0-7481-1908-0

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Louise Candlish 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  SPHERE

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  The Disappearance of Emily Marr

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Louise Candlish

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Reading Group Questions

  The author on The Disappearance of Emily Marr

  For Lynda Alison Candlish (1944–2012)

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Emma Beswetherick and Dan Mallory of Little, Brown for the early championing of this idea, and to Rebecca Saunders for guiding the novel to fruition and for being so patient and clever with it. Thank you also to David Shelley, Lucy Icke, Cath Burke, Hannah Green, Kirsteen Astor, Carleen Peters, Felice Howden and Emma Stonex. Thank you to Vicki Harris for her excellent copy edit and to Emma Graves for the cover design.

  Thank you to Claire Conrad, Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon and Jessie Botterill at Janklow & Nesbit, London.

  Thank you to Natalie Downing for information about dementia and to Michael Orr for advice about psychiatric disorders – any mistakes are, of course, mine. Also to the helpful staff at Southwark Coroner’s Court, Tennis Street, London EC1. The description of the medication Quetiapine is based on one given at www.netdoctor.co.uk.

  Thank you to Jojo Moyes, Rosamund Lupton and Dorothy Koomson: it’s not always easy for busy authors to read books and give quotes and they have been generous enough to find the time to consider mine.

  Thank you to Jacqueline Miller and the McCarrys senior and junior for their respective parts in making life easier for me during the writing of this book. Thank you also to my supportive family and friends, especially Nips and Greta.

  Lastly, a grateful acknowledgement of the novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum) by Heinrich Böll, which has been a great source of inspiration to me.

  ‘Although every attempt is made to avoid any upset to people’s private lives, sometimes, in the interest of justice, it is unavoidable.’

  A Guide to Coroners and Inquests, Ministry of Justice

  ‘I did not recognise myself, either in the media’s depiction of me or in the altered woman in the mirror before me. I felt as if I was dissolving, disappearing. It was as if Emily Marr no longer existed.’

  Emily Marr

  Prologue

  Sussex, July 2011

  She had never in her life seen terror like it. It was stark and primitive, the elemental response of a person who knew he was about to die.

  A young person, too.

  When the car came off the road, Lisa Hawes was sitting in stationary traffic on the southbound dual carriageway opposite. The standstill was what made it possible for her to witness the accident with the level of certainty that the police, and later the coroner, would require of her. She was in the outside lane, a couple of feet from the central reservation: a front-row seat.

  Having not taken this route for weeks, she had forgotten about the roadworks taking place throughout the summer, necessitating a reduced speed limit and the merging of two lanes into one. Last time, there had not been a blockage like this, only a few minutes of impatient crawling, but perhaps there’d been an accident or there was some other unlucky factor at play. Her brother had once tried to explain to her the ‘wave’ dynamics that caused traffic to bottleneck and clot in this way, but she had not listened properly.

  ‘Just one idiot slowing right down and you’re all screwed,’ she remembered him saying.

  Well, if the driver of the oncoming Saab was an idiot then he was a dangerous one: far from slowing down, he was accelerating recklessly, the car drifting between lanes and towards the central reservation, on direct course for the car in front of Lisa’s own – so close, so fast, that she recoiled, right forearm to her face. She could make no sense of the motion at the wheel or the fact that there appeared to be three heads in the front, not two. In any case, her attention was seized by just one of them, the boy or young man in the passenger seat, by that face. The simian grimace, the ghastly stupefaction in the eyes, the rigidity of throat and mouth as the jaw strained in a scream: the sight of him riveted her, froze her heart.

  Then he was gone. An instant before certain impact with the barrier, the vehicle jerked to its left, overcorrecting, changing direction with a thrilling, skidding clumsiness you’d associate with a dodgem car or a go-kart. There was the briefest glimpse through the driver’s window of a bowed head, blond hair tipped forwards. A woman. Lisa’s brain processed then what the three heads had signified: someone in the back must have reached between the front seats to grab the steering wheel, his face drawing level with theirs. This third person was in control of the vehicle, not the woman in the driver’s seat.

  But for no longer. Feeling visceral dread before any relief at being spared from harm herself, she watched first in her wing mirror and then through her rear side window as the car shot across the outside lane, off the carriageway and down the embankment. The decline was steep enough for her to lose sight of it but nonetheless there could be only one outcome: the car would plunge directly into a dense screen of trees that would be hardly more absorbent than a brick wall. The roar of impact was not as loud as it would have been had her own car not
been filled with the oblivious talk and brash laughter of a radio show selected half an hour earlier to keep her awake. (The irony! It would be three nights before she could sleep again.) Silencing it, she turned off the engine and reached to open the door. There was a claustrophobic moment when her heart pulsed too loudly, her blood too full for her skin, and then she climbed out.

  She stood with difficulty, knees soft. There was nothing to see where she judged the Saab to have gone off the road, only the tops of the trees. She expected, if not pieces of the wreckage itself, then certainly smoke, billowing like in the movies as if from a bonfire, but there was none. And there was no residual noise, either, at least not any that could be heard above the drone of oncoming cars, continuing northbound at speed. It seemed incredible that the drivers now approaching would have no idea what had just happened, no instinct that they were passing through an aftershock. They might hear of the accident later but they would never know that pure luck had saved them from having been in this tragedy themselves.

  For these were her first thoughts that morning at the scene, her natural assumptions as she stood by her own car, not yet ready to act: that the Saab must have hit something in the road further back, if not another vehicle, then perhaps an animal or an object swept into its path by the wind. The driver had been too stunned or panicked to react and the passenger had intervened. He had not been successful.

  Replanting legs that now trembled badly and using her hands to steady herself, she tried to decide if it was safe to step over the barrier and cross to the other side. The traffic was not heavy, it was not like the work-day sprint to London, but it was fast, and coming in both lanes. You would need to do it in one dash.

  The sound of car doors opening and closing in the queue of traffic behind her brought an injection of courage, as well as a sense of deliverance: others had seen what she had seen, some may even have had a view of the crash itself. Others were stepping from their vehicles and preparing to cross to the scene and search the wreckage for survivors.

  Others were putting phones to their ears and calling for help.

  Chapter 1

  Tabby

  France, May 2012

  ‘You need to leave,’ the voice ordered. ‘You can’t stay here.’

  Tabby pretended to sleep, stirring her body under the sheet as if dreaming too deeply to be pulled awake at first call. The fact that she was not able to place the identity of her commander did not trouble her enough to raise her heart rate.

  After all, sometimes when she woke up she didn’t remember which country she was in, much less whose company.

  Talking of which… She half opened her eyes and allowed her vision, if not yet her memory, to focus. She was in a big wooden double bed with soft sheets (Lord knew, it had come to the point where neither the bed nor the sheets were to be taken for granted) and the room was white and blue. Smooth white walls, rough blue beams, white bedlinen, blue rug, white dresser, blue vase: someone had been very strict about this, evidently. There were two windows set deep in walls of pale stone, the shutters closed. Shutters, here was her clue: she was still in France, of course! She had been in the country for a month or so now, mostly sleeping in budget fleapits in Lyon and then Paris, and could bring to mind no particular plan to evacuate. Where would she go, anyhow? Back to England? Never – at least not yet. Not until her money ran out.

  The flare of unease this thought set off was extinguished by the sight of a male figure moving across her eyeline. He was much older than she, twice as old, perhaps – at twenty-five, she did not distinguish much between forty and sixty – and his appearance was defined by the topmost few inches of him. The hair was thick, about half of it silver, and elegantly swept from a tanned brow corrugated in such a way as to suggest a lifetime of intellectual vexation. Or perhaps simply the immediate difficulty of her.

  ‘Come on, you must wake up now!’

  He spoke English but sounded French (I’m firing on all cylinders now, she thought) and the tone was not at all unpleasant. Meeting his eye, she saw that his expression was purposeful, devoid of personal doubt in a way she could only envy. ‘You need to go,’ he repeated. ‘My family will be here today.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and as if hearing the instruction for the first time she wriggled upright.

  What was his name? Either they’d only met yesterday or she really was suffering from amnesia this time, but she couldn’t have amnesia because she’d remembered France and anyway her mind held the same weight of knowledge it always did first thing in the morning: knowledge that her father was gone, her mother a lost cause, her friendships mostly lapsed; knowledge that the person she had most loved – and still did – had told her he didn’t want her anywhere near him. He didn’t even want to know which country she was in, only that it should not be the same one as he.

  And now, this man did not want her either. It was as if she were some sort of pest, a liability, and sooner or later everyone she met understood that about her.

  Don’t cry, she told herself. They’ve got it wrong. You’re fine.

  ‘The taxi will take you over the bridge. The airport is close by, or do you prefer the train again? The station is in the centre of the town, for Paris or wherever you want to go.’

  What bridge? The centre of which town, if not Paris, where she was now certain she had woken up yesterday? Wherever you want to go: he made it sound like a romantic adventure, simply the next one after this, for theirs had been a romantic adventure, or a sexual one, certainly. Her mind began to sift recollections of the trip they’d taken to get to this blue bedroom: a dusk train from Paris, the journey involving a succession of drinks; the cool interior of a station building with soaring space overhead; a waiting taxi.

  She had an image then of this man handing her backpack to the taxi driver. That was a detail worth celebrating because she had her whole world in that backpack, or what was left of it, and she wasn’t ready to relinquish it yet.

  He was at the windows now, pulling the panes inwards, pushing the shutters outwards. He did it slowly and with deliberation, as if in ritual. Perhaps he hoped that when he turned around again she would have vanished, his problem solved. She heard the hushed murmur of the sea a fraction of a second before she saw it, and when she did she had to narrow her eyes, for it was more like a plane of light than a body of water. Chill air rushed to her skin, reminding her that the month was May.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  ‘We are in a village called Les Portes. I told you this.’ He turned, regarded her form beneath the sheet with an ambiguous expression, and she saw she’d been wrong: he had not decided yet whether she had become a nuisance or remained a temptation.

  ‘Ah.’ Les Portes. Le village à la pointe nord… the village at the northern tip. She remembered that phrase from yesterday, and now came images of the backpack coming out of the boot of the taxi, an empty street with white walls, cash changing hands. Cash. The uneasy feeling of a moment ago returned, sickening her stomach, and she could no longer stave off the most crucial of all memories: she had no money. Not just none in her possession or in her bank account, but no access to any. As of yesterday the cash dispensers of Europe dispensed to her no more, her overdraft limit having been exceeded and her account suspended. If her phone had not run out of credit, she would undoubtedly have received a message from the bank’s call centre notifying her of the ruinous impasse. Her train ticket had been bought for her yesterday by this unnamed patron, as had the drinks. She’d come here with him because she’d reached the point at which anywhere would do, and on any terms. That wasn’t to say that she hadn’t been attracted to him when they’d spied each other in the bar near the Gare Montparnasse, before he’d picked up the bill and relieved her of the need to present a bank card guaranteed to be declined, because she had. He had an air of affluence and protection, the kind that women responded to generically, even those with homes to go to. She would have been happy to stay longer than one night if invited.

 
; Instead, he was throwing her out. The only power she had at her disposal was what had brought her here in the first place and she reached out a bare arm and opened the bed covers in invitation. He moved towards her, sitting close to her on the bed, touching her thighs.

  ‘Your hands are cold. Come in and warm up.’

  He sighed. ‘Then you must go.’