The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Arriving on the windswept Ile de Ré, Tabby Dewhurst is unable to even afford a room for the night. Overhearing a villager repeating the access code to her front door, she lets herself into the house, and so she enters the strange, hidden world of Emmie, whose sudden offer of friendship is at odds with her obsession with privacy. Tabby begins to form suspicions about Emmie, suspicions that lead her to a scandal with shattering consequences.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 432

Sample

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.

‘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.’

‘Don’t keep saying it, please,’ she said. ‘I get the message.’

This was a guest room, she thought as she drew his body against her own; not the room he shared with his wife. Someone – his wife, probably, or perhaps an interior designer – someone had once stood in the doorway and looked at the empty space and thought, Blue and white, that’s what I want. Like a house by the sea is supposed to look. In the bathroom there were probably white towels embroidered with fish motifs or perhaps anchors; a length of weathered rope for a handrail; a framed old photo of the village from the days when people covered themselves from head to toe for a visit to the beach, travelling en vacances by steam train; an oar with hooks to hang your clothes on.

But she was getting carried away now.

‘Before you get rid of me,’ she murmured, ‘do you even know my name?’

‘Of course I know your name. It is Tabitha.’

‘That’s right.’ Occasionally, since parting ways with Paul, she had used a different name, not because of any fear of entanglement or to conceal any crime, but because you could do things like that when everything was impermanent, when you were itinerant. You could use any name you liked because no one cared what your real name was; you could do it if only to see if it would change the story you told afterwards, or the actions you next decided to take.

But she’d used her real name with this man; not even Tabby, but her full name, one that she associated with teachers and step-parents and border patrol officials. She must have wanted to impress him. The thought made her arch her torso more urgently, not so much in desire as in gratitude.

 

The taxi driver spoke no English and she didn’t care to reveal her passable French just yet and expose herself to conversation. He knew he was delivering her ‘over the bridge’, but she would wait until the last possible minute before deciding which mode of transport she would pretend to be taking while knowing full well she could not afford to take it. And she could not face the humiliation of admitting that she was not sure where she was.

It was a beautiful place, wherever it was, remote and low-lying, the land flattened as if by the light itself, which was yellow and colossal, the vast sky wobbling with it. She squinted into the blue as she sought road signs with place names.

The first, Les Portes-en-Ré, had the diagonal red line through the words that meant they were leaving the village behind. Soon, a pattern had developed: Ars-en-Ré, Loix-en-Ré, Saint-Martin-de-Ré. They were in Ré, or on Ré, because one minute the water appeared in one direction and the next a seawall rose into view in another: a peninsula or an island, then. The bridge must connect it with the mainland.

Ré. Her brain had returned to full working order and she knew she had never heard of the place when her man – Grégoire, it had come to her just as they said goodbye – had proposed the trip, for he had been going to spend the weekend in his holiday home, arriving a day earlier than his family in order to meet with an artisan about his leaking roof. And why should she have heard of it? It was not on the checklist of the budget traveller, but clearly the location of expensive properties owned by people like him, Parisians, rich, established ones for whom weekend tranquillity was a birthright.

Presumably it was only in weaker moments that an interloper was picked up at the station and offered a bed for the night.

At last, after a smooth stretch between dark wood and flat field, the ribbon of sea visible once more on the left, she saw the bridge. It was a mile or so away, a long, curving black spine that made her think of the tail of a dinosaur, and in the distance, on the far shore, there were industrial buildings, cranes and huge ships. The parting village, by contrast, was delightfully small-scale, the water of its bay still and shining and massed with seagulls. The taxi passed a smart hotel weatherboarded in grey, a pier with sculptures on it, an expensive-looking boulangerie with terrace furniture in ice-cream pastels… Forget weekend tranquillity, Tabby thought, this was a place you might choose to live permanently if you had the luxury of choice.

‘Stop,’ she told the driver, and he did so without argument.

She had been given fifty euros by Grégoire for the taxi, the driver wanted twenty for the aborted trip, so she was up thirty on yesterday. Beyond this she had only her last loose change, the coins she might fish from the folds of her luggage.

She retraced her route to the hotel they’d passed and found in the lobby a map of France by which she was at last able to locate herself: Rivedoux-Plage on the Ile de Ré, off the coast of La Rochelle. It was about halfway down the Atlantic coast, south-west of Paris, north-west of Bordeaux. Calais was several hours away and Saint-Malo, which she knew had ferry services to England, was half as near. She refused to think of the distances to either in terms of hitchhiking.

At the reception desk, she asked how much the cheapest room was for a night.

‘One hundred and twenty euros.’ They had entered high season at Easter, the girl pointed out, which pushed the price up. Tabby only faintly recalled Easter, for one of the strange things about travelling was that you had no relationship with bank holidays or long weekends or annual festivals. You drifted through the calendar as you drifted across the map.

In any case, the tariff might as well have been one thousand and twenty euros as far as she was concerned.

She changed her approach: did they happen to have any job vacancies at the hotel?

‘What sort of work can you do?’

‘Any sort. Bar work. Cleaning. I could be a chambermaid?’

The receptionist shook her head. ‘But there are many more hotels and restaurants in La Flotte and Saint-Martin. You should try there.’

She gave Tabby a tourist map and a bus schedule. The next bus for the proposed villages, which were back the way she’d come, was not due for an hour and so she began to walk along the main road, soon detouring along cycle paths through the pine woods she’d earlier passed in the taxi. She felt strangely fearless, charmed, like a character from a fairy tale, safe from the wolf’s eyes thanks to some invisible protector. No one knows I’m here, she thought, enjoying the sensation of secrecy and solitude. I am completely alone. Free to start again.

As a waitress or a chambermaid, if she was lucky.

She reached La Flotte. It was a larger place than Rivedoux, with a pretty port, cobbled quayside and windswept promenade. No doubt life here was busy by its own standards, but it ran at a fraction of the pace she’d been used to in Paris and the other cities that had come before. There were, however, dozens of bars, cafés and hotels and she tried every one she came to, only to find that none needed an English worker with broken French.

Flagging, she continued to Saint-Martin, the capital village, but by now her legs and spirits ached too much for her to resume her search straight away. Besides, the port here was intimidating in its smartness, its bistros and art galleries reminding her of the chi-chi neighbourhoods of Paris that had had no place for the likes of her – and with rows of pristine yachts and speedboats to reinforce the divide. She sat on a bench on the waterfront and watched the people, out-of-season tourists, some in furs and designer sunglasses, with pre-schoolers wearing coats more costly than any she’d ever owned. Thirty euros was not going to buy a hotel room here, either, and only a miracle would produce any sort of hostel. She was going to have to make alternative arrangements.

‘Alternative arrangements’: how coy that sounded! She’d never done it before, slept rough. Two Australian guys she had met in Paris had said they’d done it all the time on a Greek trip the previous summer, and they made it sound like camping without a tent. You stayed up as late as you could bear, they said, then kipped in some secret nook for a few hours until sunrise, which was all very well in August and with old fishing boats strewn conveniently at the foot of sheltering cliffs, but did it work on the Atlantic in the first week of May, too? Would she be at risk of hypothermia or, in a place like this, police arrest? Instinct told her to head from the exposed and populated edges of the island to its empty interior: what about the woods she’d passed through, might there be a little hut or barn she could slip into there? The thought was half-hearted, however. The hours remaining till dusk might be shrinking fast but she still clung to the belief that something would save her before they disappeared completely. Something.

Thirty euros. She wasn’t a vagrant yet.

Hungry, she struck off from the waterside and into the pedestrianised heart of the town in search of a boulangerie or supermarket. She bought a small stick of bread and settled halfway up a street of souvenir shops to eat it straight from the paper sleeve, her backpack at her feet. It was not high season, no, but there were numbers of shoppers. She watched one group come out of the nearby linen shop, tried to imagine how it must feel to be on holiday here and not near-destitute, up on your luck and not down, with the money – and the desire – to buy table runners and bathmats, cushion covers and oven gloves. For the twentieth time, she wondered what she had in her pack that she might sell.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, come on!’

Her attention was caught by the sound of English being spoken – and in clear annoyance. Just a few feet away, down a narrow passageway to Tabby’s left, a woman was standing at a green door, stabbing with her index finger at the security pad on the wall, saying letters and numbers aloud in what was evidently an attempt to remember the correct entry code. She cursed when she got it wrong a second time, gaining access only at her third attempt (‘B one one nine oh three N, thank you…’), and the sound of her native, unaccented tongue released in Tabby the same peculiar flare of emotion that came with catching your favourite song in an unexpected place: here, at last, was hope! She could knock on the door and ask this woman for help, ask to borrow some money, one Englishwoman to another. But that was absurd. Why would anyone, compatriot or otherwise, lend a stranger money?

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.’

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.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s see how the other half live. Think of the free booze.’

Finances being painful and Matt an uncomplicated sort, this was all the enticement he needed. I bullied him into the shower while I dried my hair and did my make-up in the Fifties style I liked: dark brows, curled eyelashes and liquid liner, soft and dewy pink lips. Then I costumed myself in a dark red silk dress I’d found in the vintage shop near work. The style was off-the-shoulder and the skin of my chest and shoulders glowed white in the bedroom mirror – I felt like a strawberry dipped in cream.

‘That’s a bit revealing,’ Matt said, with neither approval nor disapproval – with little sense of relevance to him whatever, in. . .