People LIke Her

by Ellery Lloyd

  She’d just spoken to the hospital, she said. Emmy’s mother was going to be fine. No signs of concussion.

  That’s why she’d been trying to contact Emmy, the reason she’d called the retreat. To tell her that Virginia was in the hospital. That she’d tripped coming down the stairs of a Mayfair members’ club after the launch of a limited-edition gin and landed backward on the marble floor of the lobby, knocking herself out cold. Irene told me this in the back of a taxi on the way to the nearest police station, but to be honest, not much of it registered. Every time we hit traffic, Irene would lean forward and enter into a brief exchange with the driver, then we’d pull a sudden U-turn or take a sharp detour. “They let me speak to Ginny half an hour ago,” Irene informed me. “She insists her shoes were the problem.” The whole time Irene was talking, she had one eye on her phone, her thumb constantly moving.

  “Right,” she said, glancing up as the taxi pulled to a halt outside the police station. “Here we are.” Irene and I made our way into the building and identified ourselves at the front desk. As we were waiting for someone to come down and collect us and take a statement, she talked me through all the steps she was going to take, and explained those she had already taken. I was barely listening, or, if I was listening, I was not capable of taking any of it in.

  All I can remember thinking about was Emmy and Bear, Bear and Emmy, out there somewhere, missing.

  The very first thing I told the police was that I had seen the car. The one Emmy left in. I had seen the car pull up, seen her get into it, seen the thing drive away. They asked me to describe it. I told them it was blue, the kind of car Uber drivers always have. A Prius, maybe? I don’t drive, don’t know or care much about cars. The driver? I said I hadn’t really got a good look at him. No, I couldn’t remember the license plate number. And my wife, they said. Did my wife seem in any way upset as she was getting into the car? Concerned? “No,” I said. “But she thought she was getting into the car the retreat had sent,” I reminded them. She had no way of knowing someone had canceled that car. She didn’t have any idea what car she was getting into. They asked if I was able to remember the last thing we talked about.

  I could.

  The last thing Emmy had said to me was whether I’d put Bear’s change kit in the duffel bag and whether the duffel bag was in the trunk and I said yes and she asked if I was sure and I said I had literally just double-checked. Fine, she said. Then she’d tried to slam the car door but caught the corner of her coat and had to open the door and slam it again as they were driving away, but she didn’t look back.

  It suddenly struck me that I might never see my wife again, that my last ever memory of her might be that moment, her silhouette as she fiddled around, half turned in her seat trying to get her seat belt plugged in.

  The police asked about the retreat. I told them everything I knew. They asked why I hadn’t raised the alarm sooner. I repeated quite a lot of what I had already told them.

  “So you weren’t surprised that she didn’t get in touch with you?”

  “Like I said,” I reminded them, “I wasn’t expecting to hear from her for another two days.”

  The thing that kept going through my head was that statistic about most people who go missing turning up within forty-eight hours. It was a statement that kept coming up in the stuff I had looked at on the train when I was trying to work out how to file a missing person report, trying to work out what it was the police actually did in a situation like this—and I suppose for most people it was a statistic that would have been reassuring.

  But Emmy and Bear had been missing now for three whole days.

  The most likely explanation, one of the officers suggested, was that Emmy had just needed to get away and clear her head for a bit. That happened. People did that. Had I checked our joint bank account for transactions? She was probably having a lovely time at some spa in the West Country or something, with no idea about all this hullaballoo going on at home.

  Irene looked unconvinced.

  I suspect what she was thinking was that if Emmy was going to pull a disappearing act like that, the old Agatha Christie routine, she’d have discussed it and cleared it and planned it out with her first.

  I found it hard to dispute this logic.

  What the police seemed most worried about was whether Emmy was depressed, whether she had expressed to me any self-harming impulses or feelings of low self-worth, whether she has been showing any signs of postnatal depression.

  I shook my head firmly.

  They asked me a lot of questions about my whereabouts over the past few days, questions I didn’t fully grasp the significance of until I went over it all in my head again later.

  Were we experiencing any financial worries currently? Did I think there was any possibility she had met someone else?

  “Listen,” I said. “I am really sorry, I know you are just trying to eliminate the most obvious explanations first, but please listen to me. My wife didn’t leave or run off or decide to disappear. She’s been taken by someone. That man, the driver. You need to find that man. Just look at her feed. There are pictures, videos. She thinks she’s going to a retreat for five days. That’s what she told everyone. She was behaving completely normally.”

  Half the computers in the building turned out to have social media automatically disabled. At least two of the others didn’t switch on at all. Finally Irene pulled out her phone and we talked them through Emmy’s feed, standing in the one corner of the room where she got decent reception.

  I think it was only when Irene logged into Emmy’s account and started showing them the kinds of direct messages that people would send her that they really started to take what we were saying seriously.

  “Just look,” she told them, her thumb bending and straightening, message after message after message scrolling by. Of course, there were the usual fawning ones, but interspersed with real, spine-chilling nastiness. These were anonymous, for the most part, although not all of them. The same words cropped up again and again. Threats. Abuse. Irene clicked on one of the messages to show who had sent it. Their profile picture showed a woman, a perfectly pleasant-looking middle-aged woman in a polo shirt holding a glass of white wine on a balcony, somewhere sunny. The message she had sent was about what a shit parent Emmy was and how Coco deserved to choke on an uncut grape. There was someone with no followers and no posts and no profile picture telling Emmy that she hoped her whole family—my whole family—would perish in a car accident. A little farther down, a picture of some guy’s balls, taken from behind. It took me a moment to work out how he’d even managed to take a photo at that angle. Then a load more gratuitous personal bile and spite, on every possible topic from the color of her hair to the names of our children.

  It genuinely felt like a glimpse of some version of hell. All that fury. All that malice. All that jealousy. All that hate.

  “She never . . . ,” I said. “I didn’t . . .”

  I kept saying I had to take a minute, try to process all this, and then I realized there was just too much to process, that it wouldn’t matter how many minutes I had.

  On Irene’s screen was a message from a woman who literally kept sending my wife pictures of dog shit. A silhouette in a grey circle who kept demanding to debate her in person about mental health issues. A man who wanted her to mail him a bottle of her breast milk.

  Emmy could be in the hands of any of these people. Emmy and Bear. Two of the people I loved most in the world. My little boy, an eight-week-old baby who couldn’t quite lift his head or even turn it, who’d barely even learned to smile. The most helpless, beautiful, placid, innocent creature in the world. My wife. The woman with whom I’d chosen to spend the rest of my life, the person I’d known I was going to marry the moment I met her. Who was still, in spite of everything, my best friend.

  And then it hit me that the last thing I had said to Emmy as she was leaving was not I love you or I’ll miss you or Let’s talk about things properly when you
get back—it was some snippy little comment about her luggage.

  And for the first time in several days, the only thing I thought about when I thought about Emmy was nothing to do with how complicated our lives had become or the problems in our marriage or whether there was anything we could do to save it.

  Instead I thought about the night I first met Emmy. Her smile. Her laugh.

  I thought about our first date, about the color of the sky that late summer evening as we walked back from the zoo along the canal, hand in hand.

  I thought about all our private in-jokes, all the secret references no one else in the world would ever get, all the catchphrases and funny names for things that Bear and Coco would grow up thinking were normal and would one day realize were peculiar to our particular family unit.

  I thought about our honeymoon, the first night, when we got so drunk at that place on the beach we had to carry each other back to the hotel, and the next morning we woke up fully dressed and facedown in a tangle of unraveled towel animals on a bed covered in rose petals. I thought of the morning we discovered that Emmy was pregnant with Coco, the tears of joy, the fierceness with which I could feel her hugging me, the test stick still in her hand. I thought of all those nights in front of the TV, a whole winter of Netflix and hospital visits and scans and alcohol-free beers. I remembered the day Coco was born, that first moment they handed her to us to hold, the look on Emmy’s face, the glow. I remembered that afternoon, after we got home, alone in the house with the baby for the first time, that terrifying feeling of not having a clue what to do.

  At least then I’d had somebody else to share that feeling with.

  The police said they’d host a press conference the following morning. Did I have a picture of Emmy and Bear and me together, a picture of all of us smiling? they asked.

  I told them I thought I could probably find one. I don’t think they even realized the irony of their question.

  Irene and I left. I assumed we were heading home, and we’d been in the cab for about ten minutes before I realized we were going in the wrong direction.

  I said something like, “Hey,” and swiveled in my seat.

  “Settle down, Dan,” said Irene. “We haven’t got time to fuck about.”

  She’d put up a post on Emmy’s feed before we had even left the police station. It was a simple, straightforward message saying when Emmy had vanished, describing the car and the driver, describing what she was wearing and asking if anyone had seen her and Bear.

  It took us about fifteen minutes to get to Irene’s place. All the way there we were both glued to our phones. I was aware of the driver asking us a friendly question at one point and getting no answer and muttering to himself. We both ignored him. Under Irene’s post on the Mamabare account, comments were flooding in more quickly than I could even scroll through them. A lot of them were lengthy rambles about how much they hoped Emmy was safe and sending her love and letting her know they were thinking of her. Within about five minutes there were loads of people announcing the whole thing was a Hoax!!!! Within ten minutes all sorts of people were speculating wildly about what was going on, on the basis of absolutely nothing.

  It can really rob you of your faith in the human spirit, sometimes, the internet.

  On the other hand, by the time we got to Irene’s flat, someone had already spotted a road sign in one of Emmy’s Instastories, expanded it, and identified the bottom half of the letters enham. There was a lot of buzz about Cheltenham for a bit. Then someone mentioned Twickenham. That seemed more likely, given how long Emmy would have been traveling by the time she’d posted it.

  Irene’s car was parked around the side of her building. I had never seen where she lived before. It was an art deco block, somewhere in Bayswater, with brass handles on the front door and a marble desk in the lobby with a bloke behind it. The car was a classic two-seater MG, pale blue. Inside, it smelled strongly of old cigarettes.

  It was getting dark by the time we hit the A316. I’d spoken to Doreen. Coco was in bed, and Doreen had agreed to stay the night. We passed Chiswick. We crossed the river. By the time we hit Richmond, someone had identified a service station in the background of one of Emmy’s Instastories as the one off the A309, just before you pass through Thames Ditton.

  If that was the case, it made sense in terms of the direction we were already heading.

  What makes you so sure it was that service station? someone asked.

  They pointed out the waving artificial man on the forecourt, the mannequin in overalls with the painted smile and the bobbing arm. They noted his distinctively chipped head, his weather-beaten features. They listed all the things you’d see if you reversed the shot 180 degrees—the chip shop across the road, the paper place, the closed-down Chinese restaurant with newspaper over all the windows.

  It was good enough for us.

  We didn’t speak much, Irene and I. She was driving, I was trying to keep up with what was going on online.

  What was going on online was that the whole community was assembling. Already—I wasn’t sure whether at Irene’s bidding or of their own volition—the rest of the pod had amplified our call for help. Not just the pod, either. All the small fry, all the followers. People in Scotland, people in Wales, people in the US. As it turned out, it was lucky they did. It was a woman in Arizona, an expat, who first suggested that a stretch of trees and open green in the back of Emmy’s next Instastory was Claremont Park at the point where it runs along the A307, who noted that if we looked carefully we could see a glint of lake in the distance.

  At that very moment I spotted a National Trust sign with the name of the park on it, approaching on our left. A few minutes later, we passed another sign indicating where to turn into the park.

  As we drove, the landscape was darkening around us. We’d been on the road now for at least an hour and a half. The last of Emmy’s Instastories had been posted at about twenty to one on the day she and Bear vanished. It had shown the car turning off the main road onto a narrower, hedge-lined road with a ditch running alongside it. The caption to the Instastory had been Where the f*ck . . . ? It was deeply unsettling watching the videos as we drove through the same landscape, knowing what we knew now. What kept bringing a lump to my throat was the thought that if something awful had happened to Emmy, this would be the footage that would be on the news, poignant and fascinating, like someone’s last grainy CCTV appearance before some awful tragedy or horrible crime.

  I swear there were times that afternoon when a ransom note would have been a relief.

  “There,” I said suddenly, almost as we were passing the turnoff.

  Irene hit the brakes hard, looked behind us, put the car into reverse.

  “You’re sure?” she asked me.

  I nodded.

  We both peered down the long, narrow, hedge-lined road. I checked once again the paused image on my phone.

  “This is it,” I said.

  It was one of those country lanes I hate driving down at the best of times, the kind you find yourself on when you’re on holiday, where you dread anything coming the opposite way because there’s nowhere to pass or pull over and one of you is just going to have to back up and back up and eventually try to nudge into a tiny space next to a gate or where the road slightly widens and hope you don’t end up scratching the rental car or reversing it into the ditch.

  Irene was taking it at about fifty miles an hour. You could hear thorns scraping along the paintwork, branches slapping against the side mirrors.

  We passed several gaps in the hedge, several gates opening onto what looked like empty fields. It was nearly ten minutes before we reached the house. Irene slowed the car almost to a halt as we both peered up the drive. No lights on. No sign of a car.

  “What do you reckon?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  We kept going. Up ahead, the road began to curve. Two minutes later it came to a halt at a gate. I got out of the car first. The gate was closed. On the fa
r side of it was a field, which sloped away downhill. Standing on the lowest rung of the gate, I could look down across it as far as the little stream that marked its far boundary. Somewhere in a clump of nearby trees, a wood pigeon was burbling. I could hear the faint hum of the electricity lines strung from pylon to pylon across the middle of the field.

  I looked back at Irene and shook my head.

  There was only one place a car—as opposed to a tractor—coming up this road could have gone.

  Irene turned the car around.

  It was a strange feeling, knowing that Emmy and Bear had been here, knowing they had driven up this very road, looked out at these very bushes. I wondered at what point Emmy would have realized something was wrong, that this was not where they were supposed to be going. That was almost the hardest thing to picture, to think about. I had no doubt her first thought would have been for Bear, to protect Bear. Would she have tried to get away? Would she have tried to reason with them? To bargain?

  Halfway up the drive, Irene pointed out that the garage door was ajar.

  She pulled up in front of the house, left her headlights on. I had my door open and was stepping out of the car before it had even come fully to a halt. It was one of those garages that had been built into the house, with a bedroom over it, some time after the rest of the house. The double doors of the garage were wooden, old, losing their paint in places. I pulled one open and then the other.

  Apart from a refrigerator and a square of carpet with some oil on it in the middle of the cement floor, the garage was empty. Two tiled steps led up to the rest of the house. I tried the door. It opened.

  Behind me I could hear Irene talking to someone on the phone. The police, I presumed.

  The room on the far side of the door was in darkness. Some kind of storage room, it felt like. The window onto the back garden was frosted, letting in little light. I got an impression of piled chairs and tables under sheets, stacks of plastic boxes. I felt for a light switch but couldn’t find one. There was a sort of path through the middle of the room that I groped my way down, and at the far end of it I fumbled around in the dark until I found a door handle and then opened it.