Page 56 of The Love of My Life
Official Deed Poll, the document says at the top, before confirming that Emily Ruth Peel changed her name to Emma Merry Bigelow in 2006.
Chapter Thirty
LEO
Ruby is very excited about the police station, before I put her in a corner with CBeebies on my phone, but the police are not excited about me. People often take time out after arguments, the officer on the desk says. We get it all the time.
She says she’ll be in touch, but that Emma won’t be registered as missing until she’s been gone forty-eight hours.
This whole thing feels like someone else’s life. It can’t be mine.
When we arrive back it’s early evening and there is no sign of Emma, but Olly and Tink have just arrived with Oskar and Mikkel, who are here to distract Ruby. I feel like we’ve been upgraded to Defcon 1. My phone pings incessantly with message previews from friends, asking if I’ve found her yet. I can’t bring myself to open them.
Upstairs, the kids are playing a game that sounds quite dangerous. I leave them be. Tink is making some sort of soup or stew, and Olly is sitting at my kitchen table, listening to the full story for the third time.
‘What’s your worst fear?’ he asks, suddenly.
‘My – what?’
‘Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve just had devastating news about Ruby’s parentage, but you seem far more worried that something might have happened to Emma.’
I think about this. ‘I’ve been worried about her lately. She’s had a lot of stalky messages from men on the internet. Some dropped calls. And I hope it’s nothing, but there was a weirdo staring at her the other day, after the concert. Just staring right at her, as if he knew her.’
Olly seems perversely pleased. ‘Well then – you haven’t given up on your marriage,’ he tells me. ‘Which I’m relieved to hear. Leo, listen, I’m sure the internet men are just lonely. And everyone gets dropped calls – I still think there’s likely to be a reasonable explanation for all of this.’
Tink turns round from the worktop. ‘Sweetheart. Leo’s found out he’s not Ruby’s father. He’s discovered that Emma was called Emily Peel until she was twenty-six years old. I don’t think it’s reasonable to be talking about innocent explanations.’
Olly shrugs. ‘I believe in Emma,’ he says, simply.
I get up once again to open the front door and look down the street. I check my emails, my Facebook, my work emails – but, nothing. I’ve never known powerlessness like it.
What I keep coming back to is this: she left the house with only her keys, which means she was planning to come straight home. Significantly, the last sent message in her phone was to me, this morning, reconfirming she’d meet me at 9.30 a.m.
A bird is singing chromatic scales in next door’s sycamore. ‘Help,’ I say, suddenly standing up. ‘Olly, please help me, I have to do something.’
‘Right, OK.’ He’s grateful for a task. Tink watches us quietly. ‘Look, let’s start by writing down a proper list of all the things that could have happened. I know we’ve been through all of them twenty times, but maybe writing it down would help.’
Illness, we write – maybe a post-chemo reaction, or, God forbid, a relapse of the cancer – or accident. But we agree it’s too late for a chemo reaction and too early for a relapse. An accident seems unlikely, on the short journey from nursery to our house, but, just to be sure, I called the Royal Free and the Whittington Hospitals earlier, and she hadn’t been admitted to either.
I propose abduction next but Olly, quite reasonably, dismisses it. ‘This is Hampstead Village,’ he says. ‘Why would you abduct Emma when you could grab a millionaire?’
Stalker, I suggest. After a pause, Olly asks to see Emma’s Facebook messages.
I leave the room and get her laptop. I set it down in front of Olly, and Tink comes to look over his shoulder.
Emma’s had a steady stream of messages since I last saw her inbox. Most of them are actually quite sweet, but there’s enough sexual and aggressive stuff in there to make Tink turn away after a while.
‘Fucking dark ages,’ she says.
Olly looks grim. ‘I might not have been quite so blasé about the dropped calls if I’d seen these.’
We agree I should tell the police about this, but the number they gave me rings out, even though I try it five, six, seven times.
As I press redial for the eighth time, something occurs to me. I cancel the call and pick up Emma’s phone, which I’m charging on the worktop. I open her messages with Jeremy again.
‘Look.’ I hand Olly the phone. ‘Look how many times Rothschild’s tried to arrange to meet her in London. Maybe he turned up? Maybe he turned up here and saw her in the street and ...’
‘And what? Kidnapped her? In broad daylight? A well-known public figure?’
