Joyce Vincent lay undiscovered in her London flat for more than two years. The television was still on when they found her. The heating was still running. Mail had piled up behind her door, and she was surrounded by Christmas presents she’d been wrapping.
No one had reported her missing.
Joyce Carol Vincent was born in London on October 19, 1965. The people who knew her remembered a woman who was bubbly, ambitious, and impossible to ignore. She’d had a career in the City, working in a treasury department. She had a wide social circle, music-industry connections, and four older sisters. She reportedly met Nelson Mandela in 1990.
She was also private. People described her as a kind of chameleon, someone who could light up a room and then quietly withdraw from it. In her final years she gradually fell out of touch with the people who’d known her.
She had spent time in a domestic-violence refuge, and the flat where she died, above the Wood Green shopping centre, was housing-association accommodation that had been used for people leaving abusive situations.
She’s believed to have died around December 2003, aged 38. Her remains weren’t found until January 25, 2006, when housing officials entered the flat over unpaid rent. She had lain there for more than two years, a span the media often rounds up to nearly three.
There was no sign of foul play, and police ruled out crime. Her cause of death was never confirmed. The coroner recorded an open verdict.
In 2011, the director Carol Morley made a film about her called Dreams of a Life. She spent about five years tracking down the people who had known Joyce, and many of them learned for the first time, from Morley, that Joyce had died.
Zawe Ashton plays her in the film’s recreations. Joyce’s sisters were shown it privately but chose not to appear.
The thing the people in the film keep circling back to is that Joyce was loved. She was loved, but not enough. Most of them had simply assumed she’d moved on, gotten busy, drifted the way people do. They figured she was somewhere out there, living her life, and that one day they’d run into her again.
