There was something else at the back of my mind that made me lean towards number three.
‘It’s too organised,’ I started. ‘Everything is too organised. She leaves and within hours her phone is disconnected. There is no way this can just be coincidence.’
‘But Tom, I met her for lunch there several times. I would wait in reception and see her come down the stairs several times.’
She was right. I had too. There must have been at least ten occasions when I would sit in reception and see her leave the lift, coming from the offices. Surely that had to be proof; she had to work there.
For the last few years our flat was strewn with legal documents and law books. Why would she have those? Then there were all the late nights and weekends she would have to work. Sometimes I’d even drop her off at Raynmer and Stein for goodness sake. This was insane.
I explained all of this to Sophie and between the two of us we searched for any plausible ideas. We came up with nothing. I knew this woman; I had to know her. I'd spent every night of our relationship together and had never once suspected anything.
‘Tom,’ Sophie began slowly. I could tell she didn’t want to say the next sentence but felt she had to.
‘Go on,’ I replied encouragingly.
‘Tom, I know it’s hard but try to take yourself out of this for a second. If you were just looking at the facts what would you say about this?’
I thought long and hard. Being objective with your own emotions is not the easiest thing to do but I tried to just imagine a whiteboard with main facts written on it. Eventually, I gave her an answer.
‘It feels like an affair. If I had to say, I’d say this woman was sneaking around behind her partner’s back and needed an excuse. Her new lover probably had lots of money so she just invented a job so she could sneak around all day and some weekends. Then eventually she falls in love with the new guy enough and decides to just leave. Sound about right?’
I looked at her painfully. She nodded, trying to conceal the stream of tears falling from her eyes. I was determined not to cry again. I was worried my body would break down soon unless I took some control over it.
‘I need to hear it from her,’ I said fiercely. ‘If this is true, I need to hear it from her. If she has found someone else, she would want a divorce right? I’m going to find her and make her say this to my face.’
‘But... how?’
‘I don’t know yet. I don’t know.’ I paced some more, wondering what my next move might be.
‘Go home, find every detail about your wedding; license, certificate, anything. Find it all and take it to a lawyer Tom. You never know what will help you find her.’
I looked up at her and smiled again. I loved it when she organised the group. She seemed to revel in it. Sophie worked in a private primary school in a nice area of the capital. It was a sheltered existence but it suited her perfectly. I could imagine her as a brilliant teacher. I bet the kids loved her.
‘You’re right. I will do. Listen, thanks for everything Soph. You’re a star.’ I walked over to her and hugged her firmly. It felt so nice to not be alone for a second that I didn’t want to let go. Eventually I had to, before it got weird.
Once I had gathered up my coat, I headed to the door. I turned to look at her one last time as she smiled bravely at me.
‘I’m here any time Tom, you know that.’
‘I know you are. Thanks.’ I opened the door, disappeared out of it before poking my head back through it.
‘Oh Soph. Promise me something?’
‘Anything.’
‘Don’t ever leave. I don’t think I cope without you too,’ I said weakly.
‘I promise.’
*****
The flat was cold when I got up there. I fumbled in my pockets for several minutes, worrying I had lost my keys. I finally found them in a pocket of my coat which I never used. Either I was very drunk last night or Sophie found them for me and put them in here. What would I do without her?
Reluctantly, I went in and proceeded to do anything but get out our wedding file. Yes that’s right I said wedding file. Most couples, I realise have an album of photos, etc but Emma had spent a full week off work making a file. This included the planning information from before, video and photos of the day and all our legal documents. I used to joke that I’d be lost without her as I had no idea how to organise my life. How right I was.
I think the thing I was most afraid of was breaking down. My mind was all over the place. How could it not be? My nerves were raw and my emotions felt shot. What was looking through old wedding photos going to do to me? I had to face it. Man up, damn it.
Two hours later, I was sat on the floor eating takeaway pizza and watching the whole ceremony on repeat. I hadn’t watched it properly since our first wedding anniversary and was amazed at how good it was. Not just the wedding, although that did run flawlessly. But the production of the video and the picture quality. It must have cost us a fortune but Ems organised everything from top to bottom. She had demanded it that way and I was more than happy to oblige.
I smiled one of my more mournful efforts when I saw the state of the wedding file, now separated from many of its inhabitants who lay chaotically all across the lounge floor. Emma would be so disappointed. ‘After all my hard work,’ I could hear her say. Then I would apologise, tidy it up and kiss her neck softly until her heart melted enough and she forgave me again. I missed her so much. But who was she? There was a very real possibility that I never knew the real woman at all and that all we shared were her pre-fabricated lies.
I had seen enough. Sophie was right, as usual. Tomorrow morning I was going to phone in sick to work (not they seemed to expect me in at the moment) and find a lawyer to track her down. I would find her.
I don’t know what it was that caught my eye but as I went to turn off the footage, I froze. What had just happened there? I thought I had seen something out of the ordinary. ‘Probably nothing,’ I muttered to myself and realised I was increasingly talking out loud when alone. Isn’t that the first sign of madness? I rewound the tape a little and focused my tired eyes as best I could.
In the video we had just been pronounced husband and wife and we turned to look at the clapping congregation. Well, at least I did. The camera was now filming from the far end of the aisle, attempting to keep the direction exciting no doubt, and it made it harder to see. I could just make out Emma’s blonde hair down the far end, underneath her veil and from where we were seeing things it looked as if she turned her body but kept her head facing the reverend, as if in conversation with him. Nothing strange about that, but with the clapping going she would have had to speak very loudly to get any words across. I don’t recall her shouting. Now, just before she turned to realign her gaze with mine it appeared that she shook hands with him.
It wasn’t the gesture itself that surprised me, it was just how out of place it looked. The more I watched it, the more it stood out like a sore thumb. It looked more like a business transaction then a warm touch of appreciation. ‘Where is the remote? I can never find the...stop talking out loud,’ I said out loud.
I found the fugitive remote underneath some of our wedding photographs, now removed from their protective, plastic casings and paused the video. Searching through the menu of options I eventually found a way of zooming in. Despite the quality of the recording, I lost a great amount of detail and clarity when zooming. A few feet loses focus, so you can imagine how blurry my picture was when I zoomed the length of a church. I played it again.
‘That doesn’t look right,’ I muttered audibly.
I rewound and played it again but this time found a way to step on each frame, making the footage play much slower. She is definitely communicating with him in some way, but it didn’t look like she was speaking. Did she just give a nod? I played it again. Yes, almost definitely. Her hand lifts up momentarily and joins with his inconspicuously but as hers slips away his palm is not empty. What was th
at? A note? Oh my God...
‘Money,’ I shouted. I was sure of it. It took me a while to work out what is was because it seemed to be rolled into a small cylinder shape, but the more I watched it I could see it was money. My mouth dropped open. Continuing the video confirmed it was money. The reverend slipped his hand gently into his pocket directly afterwards which in my mind was the first thing you would do if somebody gave you a wad of money. Put it somewhere safe. Time for another head-spin. Thousands of questions flooded my head, which by now was a familiar feeling, but one burning was at the forefront of them all. Why, on what should have been the happiest day of our lives, was she giving people money? I didn’t know a lot about organising a wedding but I was pretty sure it wasn’t common practise to give cash payments to reverends at the end of the service. Seems to take the sheen off the event somewhat for me.
At the very least this was a good lead. I finally had a place to start. Tomorrow I would go and find Reverend...I rummaged through the folder until I found the section marked ‘church.’ A few pages in I found the booking form for Rev. James P Crawley. It listed the church address underneath (as if I could forget) and times of his services.
Tomorrow I would ask him in person. Tomorrow.
*****
My sleep that night was even more interrupted than usual. I don’t remember my dreams as a general rule but I know Emma was in them. She always is these days. I could see her face and her piercing eyes, but they weren’t sad or worried. They were smiling at me. I woke up confused, a little shaken and more tired than when I went to sleep. I knew she had lied to me. Huge fat black lies had come out of her mouth probably in their hundreds, but I couldn’t blame her. I wanted to but I couldn’t. I knew there was no good explanation but I wanted her back. In my heart, I knew I would take her back in a second if I could only find her.
Slowly, I dragged myself out of bed. I seemed to ache all the time even though I had barely moved over the last few days. I couldn’t face breakfast so I stumbled to the bathroom where I could barely confront myself in the mirror. I hadn’t looked at myself for weeks, probably not since Emma had left and I had certainly fallen apart. My hair, which is normally short and styled, looked somehow longer and dishevelled. My face was gaunt and pale, and my eyes were sunken, one of them sporting a light bruising. I guessed it must have been a parting gift from my bar-fight experience two nights before. All in all, not the best I’ve ever looked. I have never been confident of my appearance but I knew I had a certain charm and winning Emma seemed to back that up as evidence. Emma was a '10' so I can’t have been that far behind. I used to run regularly and had been slowly training to run the London marathon. This put me in good physical shape and would boost my confidence when I felt awkward. I had never really appreciated what I had before, but looking at myself now, I prayed for it back.
After a shower and a deep scrub I felt a tad more human and was ready to find the Reverend. The church wasn’t far and remembering my way wasn’t difficult. I used to take Emma up there on warm Sundays and talk about the future; how many kids we wanted, where we wanted to live someday. Must stop reminiscing and focus.
The church was beautifully crafted and even seeing it from a distance brought back hundreds of memories. The grounds were manicured perfectly and whenever we would walk around them, I would suggest we try and find Rev. Crawley for old time’s sake. Emma had never seemed keen on the idea so I never pushed it. This time was different though, I needed to find him.
I could go on for hours about me searching for Crawley. I could tell you how I paced through the church and up and down the grounds. I could mention how many different staff I talked to when I was there. But I won’t. The inescapable truth is the only thing that matters. According to everyone who worked there, passersby on the grounds and all the reports and records I could find, there was not nor had ever been a Rev. James Crawley working there.
Chapter Four
‘Do you feel better now?’
I drummed my fingers on the side of the sofa and smiled sarcastically. A week ago, I had been desperate to get back in this office but now...
Dr Davies peered at me blankly, allowing me to ponder her question longer. It seems standard practise for therapists to solely ask questions and provide no help whatsoever. If this is the case, Veronica Davies was very good.
‘Do you feel better?’ She repeated the question.
‘What do you mean?’ I seemed to arrive at these sessions already angry, perhaps sceptical, and these questions do nothing to ease my temper. My answers tended to be short and irate.
‘Well,’ she started slowly, as if explaining something simple to someone simple. This didn’t help with my anger. ‘You left last week with questions. You said you needed to search for the answers. I’m assuming you did some digging and probably found something. So I ask again... do you feel better?’
I laughed coldly, chuckling like a psychopath does at the beginning of a Bond film. The thought that I might have finally crossed the realm into insanity crossed my mind briefly. It wasn’t me that was insane, it was this whole situation.
‘You have no idea,’ I muttered slowly, continuing my convincing performance of a psychopath. ‘The more questions I ask, the more fucked up this whole shit becomes.’ My voice had become shrill and high and I was losing control of my language. I blame the stress.
Dr Davies looked slightly taken aback by my outburst but kept silent, observing. I realised that after the monosyllabic answers she was accustomed to from me, raw emotion must have been like gold dust.
I calmed down, breathing deeply. She couldn’t understand what was going on in my head. Nobody could. ‘You have no idea,’ I said once more.
‘So explain it to me.’
I did. I told her everything. I went through every detail, dripping with tears as I processed the thoughts once more. I was shaking, falling between anger and disbelief. I could tell Veronica was struggling to believe any of this but to her credit, she let me finish. I finally reached the end of my tale, looking at her for the first time in minutes.
‘So basically...Emma left, I knew nothing about her, she was never a lawyer and to top it all off we were never even married,’ I summarised. ‘So you tell me just the how the hell I’m supposed to process that.’
She said nothing. I sympathised with her for once. I didn’t imagine this was covered in whatever training she had done. She was scrambling internally, desperate to come up with something to justify her ludicrous prices. She didn’t say any of this of course, but I could see it in her eyes. At last she spoke.
‘There is a technique we use where we mind map all the problems in our lives. If you can visualise your problems you can fix them,’ she finished weakly.
‘Is this really necessary?
She insisted and produced a folded-down frame from behind her desk. She proceeded to turn this into an easel of sorts and rest a large sheet on plain paper on it, like a make-shift whiteboard. This was not helping with my ‘teacher-pupil’ complex. The set was completed with a large felt tip pen, the type I had thrown at me once by an irate English teacher. She raised it, ready to rehash the same information I had just explained to her.
‘So from the start...’ she instructed efficiently, determined to persevere with this stupid idea.
Twenty minutes later I was staring at the paper, now coated in her neat handwriting. Still perplexed and confused. It made for pretty painful reading and seeing it in black and white was not easing my mind. It read:
Tom Sharpe’s Problems to Solve
1) Emma has gone.
2) I have no way of finding her.
3) She had an elaborate web of lies, including somehow convincing me and all our friends that she was a lawyer.
4) There is no way of contacting her parents – if they even are her parents.
5) She paid some man to pretend to marry us.
6) Our marriage was a complete lie.
7) I haven’t been to work for two we
eks.
8) I will never see Emma again and get closure on this.
That last one was mine. I insisted she put it on there. So that was it. All this time I had been worrying that I had lots of problems to contend with, but it was just the eight. I hadn’t even mentioned how I was worried about paying the bills alone or how I was going to tell my friends and family about this. At a time like this, you would think futile human emotions like embarrassment wouldn’t matter, but you try telling your Mum (especially if she is anything like my Mum) you don’t have a wife and you have been conned for the last five years.
‘Why?’ I broke the silence, with a croak at the back of my throat. I coughed and continued. ‘This is what I can’t get my head around. Why?’
‘Why, what exactly? Which part?’
‘Imagine how much hard work it would take to set up the lies she did. I met her at work several times and I saw her coming down the stairs and never once suspected. There were files everywhere, which must have taken hours of work. For over three years she got up, went to ‘work’ really early and didn’t come home until the evening. She planned an entire fake wedding and somehow managed to fake documents like a marriage license. Then one day she disappears and doesn’t take a thing. Why go to that effort?’
As I spoke, I asked myself the same questions and came up with very few answers.
‘It does seem strange,’ whispered Veronica, more conservative than usual. ‘You are sure she didn’t take any money or items belonging to you?’
I was certain. Firstly, I have no money. I work for a small company (small for London standards) processing figures and details. A glorified accountant, without the ‘glorified’ bit. Truth be told, I wasn’t even a full accountant, I was a ‘junior’ which is a synonym for ‘doesn’t need to be paid much.’ I have very little savings and would never consider myself as a target for thieves. Is she a thief? No, she can’t be. For one thing, she didn’t take anything. My brain was starting to hurt again; too many questions.