People LIke Her(78)
“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.