The Pursuit of Emma, Dave Moyer [best contemporary novels txt] 📗

that page over I knew I was going to find out the truth and lose my last desperate shreds of hope that this was all a mistake. Reading her file would be the end of us, would kill any feelings I had for her. My fingers drummed nervously on the top of the file as I summoned up all my courage. This was it.

‘Goodbye Ems,’ I whispered.

I opened the file. Chapter Nine

‘I guess the truth often hurts more than lies.’

The file was devoid of any structure or order. It had clearly been cobbled together by different agents trying to find anything on her.

The first things I noticed were the photos hooked to the corners of the file with paperclips. There were six different photographs of different size and quality hanging there. They all showed my Emma, most of them when she was considerably younger. The first one I focused on showed her when she was no more than eighteen years old. She was slight and had long curls of dark brown hair covering her face. She was dressed completely in black and looked fantastic. I picked up another to compare it with.

The second photo was harder to make out. It was black and white and looked as if it was taken on a telescopic lens. It was certainly taken from a good distance. Ems was barely in this image and at first I couldn’t see her. There was a crowd of people and if you looked hard enough you could just make out Emma edging out of the left-hand side of the photo. I examined the image. She looked blonde, although this was harder to tell in black and white. Between the blurs of life passing by it looked as if she was carrying something but it was impossible to be sure.

The contrast between the two was extraordinary. I had no proof but I felt pretty confident that both were taken in completely different countries. The first looked dusty and dry, perhaps somewhere like Mexico. The second looked busy and thriving but it was definitely not England. Maybe Milan or Paris. At that moment, I wished I knew more about geography and the world around me. It was all guesswork and I could be getting it completely wrong.

The contrast wasn’t just in the environment either. It was with Emma herself. There can’t have been more than a year between the two images but it appeared more like a lifetime. Everything was different. The clothes she wore, the hairstyles and colour, the way she stood out in one and blended away in the other. She was a chameleon.

I scanned through the remaining photographs with the same level of amazement. Each was a new country; each must have been a different life for her. My head rushed as I tried to get it around the information. I gave up. You know the feeling when you find out something about your partner you never knew before? Maybe you find out they had more sexual experiences then you thought or they did something bad (like supporting Gordon Brown)? As hard as you try you always look at them in a different way. Imagine how I was feeling right then. I was looking at someone I had never met before. She was a complete stranger.

The rest of the file was made up of printed sheets of facts. According to the first sheet nobody knew her real name. There was simply a blank space where the answer should be. There was a space below that accommodated her ‘known aliases.’ This line was over-flowing with details. Some had question marks over them written in biro, clearly added on later. The list read:

Known Aliases: Harriet Rae, Helen May-Cooper, Rachel Harper (?), Lucy Stevenson, Maria Gomez (?) Megan Tollera (? Spelling) Charlotte Brown, Emma Jordan.

It was at this moment when I realised how insignificant I was in her life. According to these police files she had at least eight identities and Emma Jordan was just one of them. The girl I had met, fallen in love with, got ‘married’ to and wanted to start a family with was just one fragment of a world for this person. Why would she do it? I spent years with her every single day. I wondered if there was a husband or boyfriend in each of her other worlds, all wondering where she was and who she really was. I forced myself to carry on.

The next information I turned to was ‘criminal convictions.’ It read:

Criminal Convictions: None

The column left for ‘suspected offenses was not so empty however. There was a list that stretched over several pages. It went from art theft to confidence tricks and pretty much everything in between. The list was so conclusive. If we were to believe what the file was saying she had attempted to steal most things of value between here and northern Africa.

I allowed myself to look at the positives for a second. Firstly, she hadn’t killed anyone. It didn’t look like she had tried to hurt anyone in her life. So that was nice; I hadn’t been living with a murderous psychopath. There was something else. All of her crimes were sophisticated somehow. She wasn’t robbing stereos out of cars or conning old ladies out of their pensions. She was thinking. Yes, she was stealing and breaking the law and would probably end up in jail for the rest of her life but it wasn’t desperate. She stole because she could, not because she needed to. It was an intellectual pursuit and, looking down her list of ‘achievements’, she was amazing at it.

I was completely torn, lost for words and impossibly confused. So that was the truth. Emma was a thief and a conman (or is the term conwoman?). I had been so angry at her for so long and, if I was honest, I wanted her to be pure evil. Having hoped her to be a murderer so I could let go of her forever, finding out the truth had seemed easier to take. I hated myself for it, but I was almost impressed by what she had done. However there were still all the lies she had told me. She had conned me from day one, but there was a bit of the Emma I knew in this file. The woman I loved was intelligent, fun and carefree. What if she was the girl I knew and loved... just with a different ‘job’?

And now the biggest question of them all:

If she was this criminal with a dark past, was anything we ever shared real?

She had taken nothing from me and spent years of her life with me. Maybe she fell in love but was too deep into her world and didn’t want to lose me. Maybe.

As I flipped over the page, there were more details about her work. I leafed through some of her higher profile cases, most of which took place in Europe. A personal favourite of mine was her bold attempt to recreate Victor Lustig’s masterpiece, ‘selling the Eiffel Tower’.

The details were sketchy but piecing together several different police files I just about gathered that she managed to find a buyer, take a deposit and arrange a meeting for a full payment before being foiled and getting away clean. She always got away clean.

I was shocked at how much she had fitted in so far. She was still in her mid-twenties. Wasn’t she? Oh God, what if she was older? I doubted it, looking at her photos and dropped the thought quickly. There were jobs done in Barcelona, Milan, Burkina Faso, Berlin, Northern Brittany and ...Mallorca. We had met in Mallorca. Five years before. I turned back to the page with all the dates and figures and checked when they thought she had been in Mallorca. Five years ago. I swallowed with yet more amazement. She had been working a con when we met.

*****

Lying on a beach in Mallorca, I was asking myself why anybody drinks alcohol. My liver had either died or was on its last legs. Rolling over to avoid burning was definitely too much effort. I had resigned myself to being red on the front half and pasty ‘British White’ on the back. Despite the hangover, I was happy. This was the first holiday I had taken with the lads and we were certainly making up for lost time. I don’t remember the night before but, according to Jack, it had been a good one. During the day, the island was peaceful. It was beautiful and relaxing, as close to paradise as I had seen. But at night, if you knew the right places to go, it was mental (in a good way). I was woken from ‘hung-over’ stupor by a swift jab in the sides. I groaned, looking up to see who owned the guilty hand. It belonged to Eric, a friend of mine. I say a ‘friend’ but really he was a friend of Tim’s, who was a friend of Jack’s, and I accepted him to the group without ever warming to him socially. For some reason he clung to me and took my distain as sarcastic banter. It wasn’t.

‘What do you want Eric?’

‘Babes, three o’clock!’ He shouted.

‘Really, are we still saying babes?’ I replied, slowly.

‘You’re gonna want to see this mate,’ chipped in Jack, who was already staring.

I almost didn’t bother. The lads didn’t have the best taste in woman and would get with anything that moved. Also, as much as I like girls, the way I felt right then, I didn’t want to breathe deeply let alone chat up girls. I wasn’t exactly an expert.

‘Literally the hottest girl I have ever seen,’ called out Tim, who was now joining in.

Finally I gave in and looked up. I felt like I had just been shot or struck by lightning. There were plenty of attractive women in bikinis, slipping in and out of the sea but I could see who we were all looking at. Making her way out of the sea was the most gorgeous girl I had ever seen. She was perfect. Her long blonde hair was swept over her back and allowed us to see her beautifully structured face. I allowed my eyes to follow the curves of her body downwards and had to force myself to keep breathing. She was stunning, in every sense of the word.

Nobody spoke. For minutes, I’m not sure that anybody blinked. We watched as she ran her fingers through her hair and began walking slowly off down the beach. I looked over at my friends to check I hadn’t just dreamed that and was relieved to see them all equally struggling to put their tongues back in their mouths.

She had reached the end of the beach and was almost going to disappear out of view. I don’t know if epiphany is the right word but I had a sudden realisation that I had to speak to her right now or regret it the rest of my life. I didn’t think. I stood up and began running, attempting to catch up with her. I ignored the fact I had no shirt on or the loud shouting of questions from my mates and pushed on. She