The house feels different immediately. It feels lighter and softer, and it feels, at long last, normal again. Alix stands for a moment in the hallway and absorbs the change in the energy. The cat sashays down the hall

towards her and throws itself around Alix’s legs celebratorily, as if she too knows that her territory is returned to her. Alix gathers her into her arms, carries her into the kitchen and puts her up on the work surface near her food bowl.

‘Gone?’ says Nathan, peering up at her over his reading glasses. ‘Gone.’

‘Are you sure? Have you checked?’

‘No, I haven’t checked. But I know she has.’ ‘Will she be OK?’ asks Leon.

Alix smiles at him. ‘She’ll be fine. Her mum will get her the care she needs.’

But the words sound hollow somehow, meaningless. Not because she doesn’t think Josie’s mum would help her, but because she’s not entirely

sure that that is where Josie is going. It’s an unsettling feeling, but she puts it to one side, because today is the day she’s been looking forward to all week and she has things to do, not least to sort out the spare bedroom for Maxine and the boys and the study for Zoe and Petal.

Her tread feels light up the stairs knowing that there is nobody up there on the top floor, knowing that her part in Josie’s drama is over. But a small shadow remains.

Josie has not stripped her bed, but has left it neatly made, the pillows plumped and fat, the surface of the duvet slick. Alix unmakes it and strips it.

Josie has left the shower room sparkling clean, her towels hung straight and symmetrical from the heated rail. Alix yanks them down and adds them to the laundry pile.

She pushes open the window and closes the curtains against the burning sun, which will be shining directly into this room by lunchtime.

She surveys the room, and it feels almost as if Josie was never here, as if none of it really happened. She drops to her hands and knees and looks under the bed. Some dust bunnies, but that’s all. And then she straightens up and runs her fingertips underneath the mattress.

The key is still there. The one with the number 6 on the tag. For a moment she considers jumping to her feet, running to the front door, seeing if she can catch up with Josie to hand it back to her. But immediately she

knows she mustn’t. She knows that this key means something. That maybe it has been left for a reason. She pulls it out gingerly by the metal hoop and stares at it for moment, before putting it in her pocket.

She redresses the bed, replaces the towels and closes the door behind her.

Zoe arrives first. She is the older of Alix’s sisters. The smallest. The quietest. Petal is the youngest of the cousins, Zoe’s long-awaited only child, conceived and born when she was forty-one via donor insemination.

Maxine arrives half an hour after Zoe. She is the younger of Alix’s sisters and has two boys, Billy and Jonny, one the same age as Leon and Petal, the other the same age as Eliza. Maxine is the tallest and the loudest and her

boys are horribly behaved but theirs is not the sort of family to care, and frankly, after weeks of listening to Josie describing the behaviours of her two children, they now seem like angels in comparison.

Alix has set up two paddling pools in the garden and has a huge bucket of ice in the shade for chilling the wine and the children’s drinks. All three

sisters are wearing billowy cotton dresses and the air smells of the sun cream that they have rubbed into each other’s necks and shoulder blades. Nathan gets back from a trip to the local garden supplies centre at about six with a new water sprinkler after discovering that the old one is dead. He

sets it up and the children run through it screaming with delight. He sits with the sisters for a while and drinks a beer, slowly, almost unnaturally so, pacing himself, Alix assumes, for the real drinking which will commence when he’s with his friends later. She swallows back the feeling of discomfort that hits her when she thinks about Nathan’s plans for the night and remembers his promise to her. She is 99 per cent certain that he will not let her down. He loves her sisters and has always been eager to have their approval and he knows that if he lets Alix down tonight, they will both

judge him very harshly. Not only that, but she has promised him sex if he’s home before midnight. She reaches out her hand at one point and squeezes his wrist with it, both affectionately and warningly. He smiles down at her and she can see it there, his resolve, to do better and be better. She squeezes his wrist again and turns her attention back to her sisters.

At seven o’clock they order their pizzas and start making the margaritas. Maxine is responsible for this undertaking as she spent three years working in a cocktail bar in her twenties. At seven thirty Nathan leaves. Alix follows him to the front door and puts her lips to his neck and brushes her leg against his groin. ‘Be good,’ she says. ‘Please.’

‘I swear,’ he says. ‘I swear.’

He kisses her softly on the lips and then on her neck and it is so unusual for them to behave like this these days, to be playful, to be sexual, that Alix feels a flush go all the way through her. She watches him from the window in the hallway, in his navy shorts, his floral-print shirt, his red hair pushed back from his face by black sunglasses, and she thinks that she has missed him. That she wants him. That she is already looking forward to him coming home. And then she turns back to the chaos of her sisters and their children and the calls of ‘Who wants a salty rim?’ and the hot, hot sun beating down through the roof of her kitchen and on to the tiled floor.

7.30 p.m.

Nathan has his phone to his ear as he heads through the back streets towards Kilburn tube station. He’s talking loudly in that way that some people do, as if he thinks everyone in the world wants to hear his business. His voice

grates through Josie’s head, even from a distance. There’s been a change of plan, according to the one side of the conversation that Josie can hear.

They’re not meeting at the place they’d arranged to meet; they’re meeting at the Lamb & Flag. ‘Yeah, and I’m not getting shit-faced, remember. I told Alix I’d be home before midnight. I’m on a promise. Yeah!’ He laughs. ‘Exactly!’

He hangs up and Josie stares at the back of his head in disgust. How could Alix even contemplate it? she wonders. How could she think she needed to promise him anything, simply for him to behave like a civilised human being? She is out of this man’s league in every way. Josie feels her

respect for Alix wane, records another tiny degradation in her feelings for her, but then remembers what she is doing and why and feels restored again.

She follows Nathan into the tube station. She’s wearing a new dress that she bought from Sainsbury’s this morning. It’s not as nice as the things she bought when she was with Alix, but it’s good for the heat and it’s also unfamiliar to Nathan. Her hair is tucked inside a straw hat, also from Sainsbury’s, and she’s wearing red lipstick for the first time in her life, which makes her look even less like herself.

She has googled the pub where Nathan is meeting his friends, just in case she loses him on the tube. It’s in a side street off Oxford Street, near the back end of Selfridges; the nearest tube station is Bond Street, six stops away.

Kilburn is an overground tube station, and she is glad not to be underground in this heat. A breeze comes from nowhere and ruffles the hem of her skirt and cools the sweat on her neck. Nathan, at the other end of the platform, is fiddling with his phone. He’s wearing shorts and his legs are skinny and pale, like a child’s. Once again, she wonders what on earth Alix has ever seen in this man. At least, she thinks, at least Walter was good- looking when he was young. Strong. Tall. Handsome.

The tube arrives and twenty minutes later Josie is following Nathan

across the chaos of Saturday-night Oxford Street, where the shops are all still open and the pavements are heavy with shoppers and early diners.

What a strange people we are, she thinks of her countrymen: where other people take to the shade, to the aircon, stay indoors and close their curtains in the heat, the English hurl themselves at it, like pigs into a furnace.

At a table outside the pub are three men, who all get to their feet and

make baying, animal noises when they see Nathan approaching. They bang him on the back and force a pint into his hand and then squeeze up along

the bench so that he can sit down and they all look like him, or at least different versions of him. One is Asian, one is Black, one is white with dark hair, but they are all dressed the same, they sound the same, laugh the same. They are a pack, she thinks, a pack of men. Men who should be home with their families, not sitting here acting like a bunch of overgrown schoolboys.

There is an Italian restaurant next to the pub, with tables on the pavement. She sits down and orders a Coke and a pasta dish with fresh tomato and basil. Nathan and his friends break out into deafening laughter roughly every forty-five seconds. More pints are brought to the table and a

round of shots. She hears Nathan telling his friends that he is celebrating because they have just got rid of the ‘houseguest from hell’.

‘Oh yeah. Who was that, then?’ says the Asian one.

‘Friend of my wife’s. Or maybe not quite a friend, but this woman she’s been doing a podcast about. She got in a fight with her husband and turned up on our front step last weekend with a bashed-up face. Alix let her in, of course . She’s so bloody soft, my wife. And this woman refused to go

home, refused to go to the police, refused to go to her mum’s, just sat in our house all week wearing Alix’s clothes with a face like someone just farted. And today, she finally left! So, cheers! Cheers to having my house back!’

Josie turns and watches them sourly as they bang their beer glasses together and say cheers.

‘Where did she go?’ asks the dark-haired guy.

‘No fucking idea and I do not care. I have never felt less comfortable in my own home, that’s all I know. The woman was a freak.’

Someone makes another of the animal noises, and they bang their glasses together again.

Josie pushes her half-eaten pasta away from her. The things that Nathan

is saying are not nice, but she’s not surprised. She knows that Nathan didn’t like her being there. But that’s fine. It all just strengthens her resolve.

She picks up her phone and finds the message thread she started earlier.

She types another message.

He’s at a table outside the Lamb and Flag. The one in the flowery shirt and red hair with three other men. Can you be here in ten minutes?

The reply comes immediately.

I’m just getting off the tube. I’ll be there soon.

Josie sends a thumbs-up emoji and puts down her phone, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

9 p.m.

Josie watches Nathan’s face register a small shock of pleasant surprise when the young woman stands over him and says, ‘Can I sit here while I wait for my friend?’

‘Oh, yeah. Sure. Of course.’ Nathan squashes along the bench closer to his friend and the woman squeezes herself on the end, so that her arm

presses against his. She places a drink on the table in front of her and

rummages through her tiny handbag, pulls out a packet of tobacco and some Rizlas and makes herself a roll-up. Josie watches her turn to Nathan and say, ‘Want one?’

‘Oh,’ says Nathan. ‘No. No, thank you. I never have …’ ‘Do you mind if I do?’

‘Not at all. Go ahead. Not a problem.’

Josie can see colour rising through Nathan’s face. The woman is wearing a floaty black halter-neck top and tight white jeans and her curly blonde hair is tied back from her exquisite face, which is make-up free in the way that requires a lot of very expertly applied make-up.

Nathan manages to find his way back into his conversation with the three friends, but Josie can see that he is struggling now, that he is hyper aware of the stunningly beautiful young woman sitting right next to him, her bare arm brushing against his bare arm every few seconds. The woman plays with her phone for a few minutes and then she swears under her breath and bangs her phone down on the table. Nathan turns to her and says, ‘Are you OK?’

The woman sighs. ‘Just been blown out,’ she says. ‘By my friend. She’s always doing this. Every single time. Seriously. This is the third time in a row. God.’

‘That sucks,’ says Nathan. ‘I hate it when people do that to me.’ ‘Yeah. It’s just disrespectful, isn’t it?’

They don’t say anything for a moment. The woman takes a drag of her roll-up and blows it out of the side of her mouth. Nathan picks up his pint glass and takes a sip. ‘I don’t suppose I could stay with you guys for a bit?’ the woman says. ‘Just while I finish my drink? Seems a shame to waste it.’

‘God. Yeah. Of course. Please.’

‘Oh, thank you so much. You’re a saviour. I’m Katelyn, by the way.’ She offers him her hand to shake, and he takes it. ‘Nathan,’ he says.

‘Nice to meet you, Katelyn.’

Then he introduces her to the rest of the group, she shakes their hands, they smile, she smiles, they are all delighted that a beautiful young woman has joined their group, they are holding in their soft stomachs and bringing their best games to the table. Josie watches in satisfaction and then sends Katelyn another text message.

Bloody brilliant. Let me know when you’ve done it. I’ll be waiting for you.

Then she pays for her uneaten pasta and her flat Coca-Cola and heads away from the pub and into the maelstrom of the hot summer night.

10.30 p.m.

Alix sends Nathan a text message.

Hi! We’re being very bad. You having fun?

She watches the ticks on the message for a while, but they stay grey. She swallows down the sense of discomfort and puts her phone away. She’d been secretly hoping that he might have been home by now. The later he’s out, the higher the chance of him losing himself to the night.

Zoe is making herself a mint tea. She has a natural cut-off point for drinking; she’s always the first to stop. Maxine and Alix are drinking the warm dregs of a bottle of Prosecco they opened earlier that had been found bobbing around darkly in the ice bucket in the garden. Petal is in bed as Zoe is very firm about bedtimes. The other children are playing a computer

game in the living room incredibly loudly and Alix is about to go in and tell them to be quiet as there is a bedroom on the other side of the living-room wall where the house next door is converted into flats, and she doesn’t want to disturb the neighbours, but for now, she is enjoying the soft edges of the night, the night air cooling down the intense heat of the day but still warm enough for bare arms. She’s enjoying the conversation; they’re discussing their upcoming summer holiday, a big villa in Croatia, all three of them, their children, the husbands, their mother, a pool, ten days of happiness. It was booked back in January and felt at first close enough to touch and then, as the winter passed slowly into spring, impossibly distant, and now it is only twenty-two days away and Zoe shows them the new bikini she just ordered from John Lewis on her phone and they discuss their boobs and their bellies and their hormones and their moods and then, suddenly, it is nearly half eleven and Zoe is yawning and making moves towards bed.

Alix checks her phone to see if Nathan has sent her any suggestion that he might be on his way home. But there is nothing. She smiles tightly at something that her sister has just said. She doesn’t want to have to answer questions about it. Her sisters are aware that Nathan has started binge-

drinking again, but Alix hasn’t told them quite how bad it’s been and what hangs in the balance here, the slender fulcrum that her marriage is currently resting upon.

By the time all the children have been corralled into their beds and the sisters are getting ready to get into theirs, it is midnight. Alix sits straight- backed and tense on the edge of the bed. She will wait until five past midnight and then she will call him. For now, she walks towards the

bathroom, discarding her clothes in the walkthrough wardrobe as she goes.

And as she kicks off her sandals and leans down to put them away, she notices something in her shoe rack. A small clear plastic bag. A scrap of napkin with a number scrawled on it illegibly, and the name ‘Daisy’. A

cardboard holder for a hotel key card. The name of the hotel is the Railings. She knows it, it’s near Nathan’s office in Farringdon: a hip boutique place with all the window-frames and brickwork painted chalky-black. The guys at Nathan’s office often use it for after-work drinks and client entertaining.

Nathan has taken Alix there on a few occasions too, where they’ve had

drinks but certainly never taken a room. She holds the small plastic bag to the light and sees a residue of white powder clinging to its insides.

She feels a dark cloud of nausea pass through her from the bottom of her gut to the back of her throat. She looks at the items again. There are no

dates on any of them. They could have come from anywhere at any time.

But she knows they didn’t. She knows they are from one of the number of

nights that he has recently spent away from his home, away from his bed, in a black hole he claims not to remember.

She brushes her teeth furiously in the bathroom, staring at the warped

face of a wronged wife that looks back at her from the mirror. She has never been a wronged wife before. She has never, not in all their years together, suspected that her husband might have been the type of husband to pick up women in pubs and take them to hotels then come home twenty-four hours later and pretend not to remember anything. She has never had to confront

this feeling before, and it is sickening.

She thinks of her sisters, who are already cross with Nathan for not being home by midnight, imagines what they would think if they saw the things she’d just found on the base of her shoe drawer, imagines the things they would tell her she should do, the punishments she should mete out, the

actions she should take, and she thinks no, she wants to deal with this her way. Calmly. Rationally. Alix is not a dramatic or a reactive person. She is a

person who likes to step away from situations that make her feel bad, to look at them objectively as if they were happening to somebody else, and then make a decision based on how best to keep the peace and maintain the status quo, because Alix, as much as it pains her to admit it to herself, needs to maintain the status quo – for the sake of the children, for the sake of her lifestyle, for the sake of all of them. She has too much to lose by acting in rage, far too much. She needs to give Nathan a chance to prove that her

fears are unfounded, and then they can carry on.

At seven minutes past midnight, she returns to sitting on the edge of the bed and she taps in his number.

The call rings out.

12.30 a.m.

It is after midnight, and Josie pictures Alix in her bedroom, wondering why her stupid husband hasn’t come home yet. She pictures her leaning down in the dressing area and finding the pieces of evidence she’d left in her shoe rack this morning before she left, the key-card holder, the little bag, the

illegible phone number with a girl’s name she’d added to it. Daisy . She’d been pleased with that. The sort of ultra-feminine, young-sounding name that would set alarm bells ringing.

She pictures Alix calling her stupid husband and the call ringing out.

She pictures Alix’s stupid husband in a loud bar in Soho doing shots and lines with lovely Katelyn.

Her phone buzzes and she picks it up. It’s Katelyn.

We’re goin in. When u comin?

Right now, she replies. I’m leaving right now.

Sunday, 21 July

Alix cannot sleep. It is nearly 3 a.m. and she lies wide awake, on her back, staring up at the ceiling. The air is hot and sticky, and an electric fan rustles the pages of the paperback book on the bedside table. She is simultaneously shocked and entirely unsurprised that she has been let down by Nathan.

And she is humiliated that she had thought that an offer of sex might have been enough to tempt him home by midnight when, it now seems, he does not need to come home to find someone who wants to have sex with him.

In her mind she replays all the times he has expressed his disappointment in men who cheat. His friends are all ‘good guys’, he says, guys who would never do that. He has said he couldn’t comfortably be friends with men who treated their wives like that. But yet … Daisy; cocaine; room number 23.

She’d messaged Giovanni at about 1 a.m., who claimed they left Nathan at a bar in Soho just before midnight.

Alone? she asked.

As far as I know , he replied, and she knew he was lying.

She wishes she was the sort of woman who kept a stash of sleeping pills in her bathroom cabinet, like in American TV shows. She wishes there was something she could do to switch her brain off. Eventually she gives up on bed and heads downstairs. The cat is happy to have an unexpected nocturnal visitor and Alix crouches down to stroke her. Through the glass roof of the kitchen extension, she sees a fat, orange moon overhead. She imagines the

same orange moon hanging over Nathan, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, possibly glowing off the soft skin in the dip at the small of his back as he moves in and out of some faceless woman called Daisy in a boutique hotel room somewhere.

Alix wakes at five o’clock. The first thing she does is reach for her phone and check it for anything, absolutely anything that might suggest the possibility that her husband is coming home. But there is nothing. She rests her phone on her bedside table and lies back down. The sun is coming up and her curtains glow peachy red while the house creaks and sighs as it

expands back to size. She feeds the cat and drinks a huge glass of water and a moment later she hears footsteps down the hallway and there is Petal.

The shock of her niece, fresh and tiny in a blue cotton nightdress, contrasted against the dark griminess of Alix’s thoughts all night, almost

takes her breath away. ‘Good morning, sweetie,’ she says. ‘You’re up bright and early.’

‘I always like to get up early,’ she says. ‘I like it being just me.’

Alix nods at her and smiles and then offers her food to eat and juice to drink. She heaves open the back doors to let out the stale night air. She

empties the dishwasher and glances at Petal, every now and then, as she slowly eats a bowl of Special K at the kitchen table. She doesn’t talk to her, leaves her to enjoy her early-morning solitude. She calls Nathan. She makes a coffee. Calls Nathan again. She has no idea, none whatsoever, what she should be doing.

Alix did not know it was possible for time to pass as slowly as it passes that day. She goes back to bed at 7 a.m. and sleeps for an hour or so, but is soon wide awake again, the morning sun burning through the curtains and across her body, her head full of needles of sharp anxiety and shards of fragmented thoughts. She forces herself to eat some toast and necks three espressos in a row, none of them touching the sides of her exhaustion. How long, she wonders, how long can she merely sit and wait?

At nine o’clock she feels it is polite to call Giovanni. He picks up immediately. ‘Gio,’ she says. ‘Nathan is still not home. Please, if there’s something you’re not telling me, tell me now!’

The thick, putrid silence on the other end of the line tells Alix all she

needs to know. ‘No,’ he says stiffly. ‘No. We just left him in a bar. Like we always do. There was nothing.’

‘Well,’ Zoe says when Alix relays this back to her a moment later. ‘Bro code. He would say that, wouldn’t he?’

Alix sighs. She knows that Zoe is right.

‘What time does he normally get back after a bender?’ Zoe asks. ‘The afternoon?’

‘Well then, let’s not worry until the afternoon,’ says Zoe and Alix nods but then something occurs to her and she pulls out her phone and opens up her banking app. She and Nathan have a joint bank account. They always have done, ever since it became clear that Alix was never going to be a big

earner and that Nathan already was. Nathan never looks at it. He never looks at bank statements or restaurant bills or keeps receipts. He spends

money on the assumption that he is roughly balancing his outgoings with his income and, for the most part, he is correct.

She scrolls through the pending payments section of her online statement, looking for anything to explain where he might be, but there is nothing.

Nothing since a payment to the bar in the West End that Giovanni said they’d left him in, of £25.60. No Uber payments. No hotel charges.

Nothing. He has disappeared without a trace.

The afternoon arrives. Dark clouds appear overhead, and the temperature finally drops a degree or two. Zoe and Maxine have stayed longer than planned and there is a weird unsettledness in the air, as if they are in a waiting room expecting an announcement of some kind.

Alix spends an hour in her walk-in wardrobe ransacking the pockets of Nathan’s clothes, looking for more clues to his behaviour, but there’s nothing. Her sisters offer her food, but she can’t eat. She can’t think. She can barely breathe.

The dark clouds gather momentum and then, at just after four o’clock, the rumbling begins, and by four thirty the rain lashes down, the air fills

with petrichor and the heat finally drops. They run around closing windows all over the house. Alix calls Giovanni again, but he doesn’t take her call.

Her sisters tell her they have to leave in an hour, their children have homework to do, their cats need feeding, it’s a school night, and Alix

realises that the moment her sisters leave, she will be trapped in the house, unable to leave without the children, and she quickly changes out of her summer dress and into leggings and trainers and walks as fast as she can

towards Giovanni’s house, half a mile away. He’s lying; she knows he’s lying. She needs to see him face to face, to look into his eyes, look into his partner’s eyes, get the truth about what happened last night.

He looks shocked when he sees her at the door. He opens it a crack and then fully open with a sigh of surrender. ‘Still no sign of him?’ he asks meekly.

‘No. Still no sign. And, Gio, please, don’t treat me like an idiot. I know something happened last night. Look.’ She empties her pockets of the

things she’d found in her shoe rack. ‘Look,’ she says again. ‘These are Nathan’s. I found them last night. He makes out he’s purer than pure, and

then I find girls’ phone numbers scrawled on napkins, bags of cocaine. I mean, seriously, just be honest with me. Was there a girl involved last

night? Just tell me!’

And then all the remaining puff goes out of Giovanni, and he invites her in and sits her at his kitchen table, which is covered with the debris of a family lunch, plates and dishes brought in from the sudden rain still with

splashes of rainwater on their rims. She sees Giovanni and his partner

exchange a look and then he turns to her and says, ‘There was a girl. But seriously, honestly, Alix, it wasn’t anything. And I swear, Nathan has never gone off with a girl before. I don’t know who that Daisy is on the napkin.

Maybe someone who wanted a job or office space or something. We talk to randoms all the time when we go out. But he has never, ever gone off with someone. I swear. But last night this woman came and sat with us. Her

name was Katelyn. Said she’d been stood up by her mate, was it OK if she hung out with us for a while. And she ended up staying and drinking with us and then we left the pub to go to the bar in Soho and she came with us. But I swear, Alix, there was nothing going on with them. Nathan kept talking about you. Kept saying he was married. How beautiful you were.’

Alix blinks slowly. She glances at her wedding ring and turns it once around her finger before looking up at Giovanni again. ‘And then what happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you said you left Nathan in the bar at midnight. Did she leave too?’

Giovanni drops his gaze to the tabletop. He shakes his head slowly. But then he looks up at her quickly and says, ‘She was saying she was going to get him home. She was saying that Nathan told her he was on a promise and she was going to make sure he got home to … well, you know?’

Alix exhales heavily and lets her head roll backwards. ‘He told a complete stranger about our sex life?’

Giovanni nods again. ‘But, honestly, it was just fun. Just banter. She just seemed like one of the boys, you know. She didn’t seem like she was …’

‘Like she was what?’

‘I don’t know. Like she was going to lead him astray, I guess. It just felt like one of those nights, you know, when Nathan wasn’t going to stop. One of those nights when he was going to get lost to the night, and – honestly? I

think we were glad he had someone with him, so that we could, you know, just go home.’

He glances up at her sheepishly. ‘I’m sure he’ll be home soon,’ he says. ‘You know what he’s like. He’s probably home right now. Just walked in through the door.’ He smiles at her, but she doesn’t return it.

‘What did she look like? This Katelyn?’ ‘Pretty?’ he says, his voice racked with apology. ‘How old?’

‘Youngish? Maybe late twenties? Early thirties?’

She sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘I wish you’d told me this earlier,’ she says. ‘I wish you hadn’t lied.’

‘I’m sorry, Alix,’ he says, picking at a bit of paper with his fingernails. ‘I’m really sorry.’

Monday, 22 July

Walking the children to school the next morning feels surreal. The air is cool and green, and she has thrown on a jacket over her summer clothes. The streets teem with children in sky blue and navy. Alix stares at them keenly. None of them has a father who went missing this weekend.

Ten minutes after she gets home, she notices she has a missed call from a number she doesn’t recognise. She googles the number and feels a jolt of

nervous energy surge all the way through her when she sees that it is the number for a hotel just off Tottenham Court Road, and then a wave of relief passes through her. She pictures Nathan waking up after the biggest bender yet, rubbing his eyes, looking at the time, realising that he’s been out cold for forty-eight hours, looking for his phone, discovering it was out of charge, using the hotel’s landline to call her, and everything falls into place. She calls the number back immediately with slightly shaking hands.

‘Hi!’ she says briskly to the young-sounding woman who answers the phone. ‘I think it’s possible that my husband just called from this number. Nathan Summer? Is he staying there?’

There’s a tiny pert silence and then the young woman says, ‘Oh, hi. Is this Alix Summer?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes. I, er – how did you know my name?’

‘Well, actually it was me that just called you, Mrs Summer. I’m really sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. But Mr Summer was here this weekend and unfortunately, after he failed to check out this morning, we used the master key to let ourselves into his room and found quite a lot of damage?

We found his business card in the room and we tried calling him a few

times on his mobile but it kept going to voicemail and so I called his office number just now to see if I could get hold of him that way, but they said he hadn’t come into work today and they gave me your number and I hope you don’t mind me calling you like this?’

Alix freezes while scenarios spool wildly through her head. Finally, she says, ‘No. Of course not.’

‘But we will have to charge Mr Summer for the damage to his room, I’m afraid.’

‘Sorry, can you just explain what happened? Blow by blow. Because I’m afraid I don’t really understand.’

‘Oh! Yes! Sure!’ the young woman responds brightly. ‘Mr Summer checked in here on Saturday night. Quite late. His companion told us that she’d paid online for two nights.’

‘Companion?’

‘Yes. The person he was with.’ ‘And who was that?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know. I wasn’t working on Saturday night. But the room had been prepaid for two nights. Mr Summer seems to have left at

some point on Sunday without checking out, nobody saw him leave and we have no record of it, and when we went to his room this morning to request that he vacate it, it was empty. No sign of Mr Summer or his companion.

And the room, I’m afraid, was trashed.’ ‘Trashed?’

‘Yes. And we are going to need to take some sort of payment to cover the costs, I’m afraid. And since his companion’s card is being declined and we are unable to contact Mr Summer, we’d be very grateful if you could help

us to sort out this issue.’

‘The room,’ says Alix. ‘My husband’s room. Has it been tidied yet? Has it been cleaned?’

‘No, we’re waiting for management to send over a specialist cleaning team. It hasn’t been touched.’

‘OK. Well, I’d like to see it, please. Because my husband hasn’t come home, he’s disappeared, and maybe there might be something in the room that explains where he is. Where he’s gone. Please? I can be there in half an hour.’

There is a short silence while the young woman goes to ask her manager and then she comes back on the line. ‘Sure. That’ll be fine. We’ll see you in half an hour.’

The receptionist hands Alix the key. ‘It’s room eighteen,’ she says. ‘On the first floor. Down there and up the stairs.’

Alix heads down the corridor and up a narrow staircase. Room 18 is the second door on the left. She touches the card to the panel, and it clicks

open.

The curtains are drawn and her eyes take a moment to adjust to the dark before she finds the slot for the key card and activates the lighting and it all comes to full and shocking life.

The room has been ransacked. The bedding has been pulled virtually completely off the bed so that the mattress is visible, and the duvet is hanging half on the floor. The minibar has been drunk dry; there are

empties all over the floor. The remains of a McDonald’s takeaway are scattered everywhere: ketchup-smeared paper packaging and greasy bags of cold fries. Alix picks her way gingerly across the chaos and towards the bathroom. Here there are wet towels on the floor, empty mixer cans in the sink, and there – Alix’s stomach turns, violently – women’s underwear, a thong made of cheap lace, removed and left discarded on the floor, blonde curly hairs in the sink, a smear of tinted lip gloss on the rim of a glass, and

the smell, just the sheer unmistakable smell of a woman everywhere in the air.

Alix sits on the side of the bath and stares about herself. She stands up slowly and peers into the bin, looking for clues. Back in the bedroom she

starts to see more than a drunken, sexual interlude playing out in this room. She sees a picture hanging crooked on the wall, a crack in its glass. She sees a table lamp knocked on to its side. The bedside table is turned at a ninety- degree angle to the wall. And there, she sees, as she crouches lower and lower to the wooden floor, is a small smudge of what looks at first like marmite, maybe, or ketchup from the McDonald’s, but comes away on the tip of her finger as bright scarlet blood.

She winces at the sight of it and stands up so quickly that blood rushes to her head. She turns in a circle, trying to find more answers to the thousand questions that flood her mind from the detail of the room, but there is nothing. A fight. A girl. Food. Drink. A discarded thong.

Alix sits on the edge of the pillaged bed and gets out her phone. She calls Nathan and it goes to voicemail. She goes back down to reception and when she talks to the young woman at the desk, she realises she is crying. ‘Please,’ she says, ‘please. I need to see your records. I need to see your

CCTV footage. My husband has disappeared, and I don’t know where he is and I can’t take another day like this. I can’t take another day of this not knowing . Please.’

The receptionist smiles nervously and says, ‘Let me ask my manager.

Give me a minute.’

A moment later a glamorous woman with dyed black hair appears from the office behind the front desk. Her name badge says ‘Astrid Pagano’ and she has intricate black tattoos up both her forearms.

‘Please,’ she says in a soft accent, ‘come with me.’ She beckons her into the back office and Alix follows.

It’s a tiny room and they are squashed together in front of the security monitors elbow to elbow. ‘I am sorry,’ says Astrid. ‘So sorry that you are having a difficult time. Let’s see if we can find you some answers.’

It takes a few minutes to find what they’re looking for. The date stamp on the screen says ‘Sunday 1.41 a.m.’ First of all she sees Nathan and a pretty blonde woman approaching the hotel. This must be Katelyn, she assumes,

the girl Giovanni told her about. She looks older than Alix had imagined; she has a mass of blonde curly hair tied away from her face in a ponytail,

and very soft features. She wears white jeans and white trainers and a loose black halter-neck top and big gold earrings and looks like a goddess.

Nathan, bringing up her rear, looks ridiculous in comparison. He can barely put one foot in front of the other and has to clutch the wall as he reaches the front door, to stop himself from falling over. The footage moves to another screen and here Alix watches Nathan stumbling around behind Katelyn as

she checks them in. She has seen Nathan drunk many, many times, but never as drunk as he appears to be in this footage. Then they disappear from the screen, heading darkly towards the staircase at the back of the hotel.

Astrid forwards through the next couple of hours and then pauses and slows the footage again at around 3 a.m. There is Nathan. He’s dressed and still stumbling. He bangs into the console table opposite the front desk and then pauses for a moment and takes his phone out of his pocket. He switches it on and frowns at it, swaying slightly on the spot as he tries to focus on the screen. Then he puts the phone back in his pocket and heads out of the front door. Now they move to the second monitor and there he is, there’s Nathan out in the dark street, glowing briefly under the direct light of a streetlamp and then turning into shadows again as he moves away. He is lit up by the approaching headlights of a car and he turns, almost losing his footing as he does so. He shields his eyes briefly with the back of his hand and then

smiles and waves.

The car pulls up to the left of the hotel, just visible in shot. Nathan

weaves his way from the hotel entrance, down the pavement, and then gets to the passenger door of the car. Alix watches him as he goes to open the door and then he stops and stares at the driver, appears to change his mind about getting in the car, but turns back, maybe as the driver says something to him, and a moment later he climbs in. Then the car slowly pulls away, and the street is cast in darkness once more.

‘Recognise the car?’ asks Astrid.

Alix shakes her head. ‘Can we rewind a little bit, to just as it arrives?

There,’ she says. ‘Pause it just there.’

Astrid hits the pause button on the screen and there is the registration plate, fully legible. Astrid hands Alix a piece of paper and a pen and Alix writes it down.

‘Maybe it’s an Uber?’ Astrid suggests.

Alix shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Nathan would never get in the front seat of an Uber. He always gets in the back. It looked like he was expecting to know the driver. And then he didn’t. But he got in anyway …’ Her voice trails away. None of it makes any sense. Whose car did he think he was getting into? Who was he expecting to see at three in the morning? Whose message had he seen on his phone before he left?

Astrid is about to shut down the footage but Alix stops her. ‘Can I see her leaving, please? The woman? Is that OK?’

‘Yes, of course.’

And there is Katelyn, a few seconds later, looking cool and put together, no visible sign of whatever had happened between her and Nathan in the trashed hotel room, not a hair out of place, her jeans still a pristine white. But just as she passes the front desk, Alix sees it – a red, raw scratch all down the side of her cheek. Katelyn turns again and it’s gone, but Alix doesn’t ask Astrid to pause it this time. She doesn’t want to see it again. She doesn’t want to know.

‘The name of the woman who made the booking. Do you know who it was? Was it her? Katelyn?’

Astrid flicks screens to the hotel’s booking system and clicks some buttons. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘so. The booking was made via a booking engine, earlier in the day. And no. The booking wasn’t made in the name of Katelyn.’ She stops and inhales audibly. ‘And I really shouldn’t be telling you this, as I’m sure you know. But I’m the boss today and I can see that

this is important. So …’ She turns back to the screen and clicks another button. ‘I can see that the booking was made in your husband’s name but paid for with a card in someone else’s name. The name on the card’ – she

turns to Alix and nods, just once, as if she already knows something – ‘was Miss Erin Jade Fair.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows Katelyn Rand again, sitting on the red sofa. She sighs and says:

‘So, Josie called me, shortly after us chatting at Stitch, after I gave her my number and she told me she had a gig. And the gist, apparently, was to catch out her friend’s husband in the act of infidelity. Apparently, this guy had been sleeping around for years – yeah, men , right? – and this woman refused to believe the evidence of her own eyes and ears. And Josie just wanted her friend to know, to see, to start believing what her husband was capable of. I said, “Er, no, I don’t think so, I am not actually a call girl, you know. I’m an actor.”’

Katelyn laughs and shakes her head.

‘She said, “You don’t have to sleep with him. You just have to get him into a hotel room. Just get it to look like you slept with him. And then leave the rest to me.” I mean, obviously, I thought it sounded batshit. I thought it sounded insane. But then she said … well, she said she’d give me a thousand pounds. And I thought, yeah. Why not? A thousand pounds, for one night’s work, not even that. So I said yes. Awaited further instruction.’

The interviewer interjects off-mic. ‘What was that?’

‘She told me to get chatting to him outside this pub off Oxford Street. It was that really, really hot weekend in mid-July, remember? When it was like thirty-five degrees? And I got there and got talking to him and he was like, yeah, a really nice guy. Him and his mates. Sweeties. And he kept talking about how he needed to go home because his wife had promised him a shag, it was like this running

joke, and I felt terrible, you know, really bad. I thought, well, I’ll do my best, but really, there’s only so much I can do. I thought my thousand pounds was hanging in the balance to be honest. But then I just saw him go, after his, like, fifth tequila shot, I saw his eyes go, I saw him just sort of go to a different place and that was when I knew he wasn’t going home to shag his wife. Poor woman.’

She looks up at the interviewer and smiles sadly.

‘Yeah. Poor both of them.’

***

Midday

Alix stands outside Pat’s apartment for nearly ten minutes, ringing and ringing her doorbell over and over again until a neighbour appears at the door of the next flat along and tells her that Pat’s not there, that Pat left for Stansted Airport on Saturday morning, that Pat was going on holiday, and that no, he had no idea where to. Spain somewhere, maybe?

‘But did she go with her daughter?’ ‘Josie?’

‘Yes. She was staying here with her. Or at least she told me she was.’ ‘Didn’t see Josie leaving with her,’ says the neighbour. ‘Haven’t seen

Josie for months. When Pat left the house on Saturday, she was on her own. But if I see Josie around, I’ll tell her you were looking for her, shall I?’

‘Yes,’ she replies vaguely. ‘Yes please.’

Alix heads straight from Pat’s estate to Josie’s building on Manor Park Road. She peers through the window but sees no sign of life. It looks exactly as it had looked the last time she was here. The closed laptop still sits on the brown table in the bay. The bed is still neatly made in the bedroom. She notices that there is a side return to the left of Josie’s building, blocked by a phalanx of wheelie bins. She moves a couple out of the way and then stands on her tiptoes to peer into the small dirty window

that overlooks the return. The curtains are drawn, but there is a small crack through which Alix can see the suggestion of mess and squalor, piles of

clothes and boxes and the corner of an unmade bed, one leg of a scruffy black and red gaming chair.

This must be Erin’s room, she assumes.

The return stinks. The bins are full and it’s the tail end of a heatwave. She covers her mouth with her hand and heads back to the pavement. She rings on the doorbell, although she already knows there’s nobody there. And then, when nobody comes, she heads home.

One very good thing about the vast range of women that Alix has interviewed over the years is the access it gives her to various forms of expertise. She has on occasion taken advantage of having certain email

addresses in her address book and now she sits at her laptop and searches for Joanna Dafoe, the deputy commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police Force, whom she’d had on her podcast a few years earlier and with whom she had bonded over Siberian cats and a habit of eating four Weetabix at a time.

Joanna, I’m sorry, this is so cheeky of me, but my husband has disappeared and I’m pretty sure he’s just sleeping off the mother of all benders somewhere, but I have seen CCTV footage of him being collected by a random car in the middle of the night, didn’t look like an Uber, I have the plates. How easy would it be to find out who the car is registered to?

A little later, she goes to collect Leon and Eliza from school. The sun is shining and there’s a cool breeze and the atmosphere is soft with the fading days of the school year, the promise of the long summer holidays to come, just three days from now. For a moment Alix feels as though everything could be normal, that she could go home and see Nathan waiting for her sheepishly in the kitchen, but then a few minutes later she checks her email and there is a reply from Joanna Dafoe, the Deputy Met Commissioner.

Hi Alix

Good to hear from you. Sorry you’re having a tough time with things. Those plates came back registered to a hire company. The car was rented from them by an Erin Jade Fair on Saturday. Hope that helps! And please give Skye a snuggle from me.

Alix reads the email twice, three times. Then she pushes her laptop away from her and gasps, her hands over her mouth. Her thoughts jump and crash into each other, violently, and then clarity descends and she picks up her

phone and calls the police.

‘I know this might sound insane,’ she begins, ‘but I think my husband has been kidnapped.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a serious-looking woman sitting on a long leather sofa in front of a tall window with velvet curtains. She wears a trouser suit and heeled ankle boots.

The text underneath reads:

DC Sabrina Albright

‘At first we didn’t take it seriously. An estate agent from Queen’s Park with a history of disappearing overnight on benders being kidnapped by a housewife in a hire car in the middle of the night. It just sounded like domestic nonsense, you know, an affair of some kind. Messy people’s messy lives. We put it on the back burner. But then, a few hours later, we got the call.’

Interviewer, off-mic: ‘The call?’

‘Yes. An anonymous call, from a payphone in Bristol.’

The audio plays a recorded police call.

‘Er, hi. I need to report a missing person. It’s my … friend. Erin Fair. And her father. Walter Fair. They live at 43A Manor Park Road, NW6. I haven’t heard from them for a long time. Not since, like, over a week ago. And Erin has special needs, and her father is quite elderly, and they usually never leave the house and I wondered if someone could go and check on them for me. Please. I’m really worried about them.’

The camera goes back to DC Albright.

‘It took a few hours for us to put the two reports together, the two mentions of the same name in the same day. Erin Fair . And then when we did it was like pow .’

DC Albright makes a head explosion gesture with her hands and arms.

‘We sent a patrol car down to Manor Park Road and, well, you know exactly what happened after that.’

***

Evening Standard , Tuesday 23 July

A gruesome discovery was made on Monday night in a Kilburn back street. Police and detectives from Kentish Town Police Station went to a flat on the ground floor of a house in Manor Park Road after receiving an anonymous phone call from a woman in Bristol who was worried about not having heard from her friend for a while. Unable to establish the whereabouts of Erin Fair and her father, and after talking to neighbours, who told of loud screams and shouting late on a Friday night more than a week before, police entered the property by force. Immediately they were aware of a terrible smell emanating from somewhere in the flat, and a few minutes later the decomposing remains of Walter Fair, 72, were discovered in the bathtub. He had been badly beaten

and left with his arms and legs tied together. Police then found Mr Fair’s daughter, Erin Fair, 23, tied to a wooden child’s chair in a storage cupboard in the hallway. The chair had been customised with leather straps and leg ties. She too had been beaten and was at first assumed to be dead, but after showing signs of life was rushed to hospital, where she is now in intensive care in a coma.

According to neighbours, the Fair family had not been seen for a while, and Josie Fair, Walter’s wife, has not been traced since the discovery was made. Police are currently

investigating her disappearance, and also the disappearance of local man Nathan Summer, who was loosely acquainted with the Fair family and who was last seen outside a hotel in central London in the early hours of Sunday morning getting into a car hired using a card held by Mrs Fair’s daughter, Erin. Mr Summer’s wife, the popular podcaster Alix Summer, had recently been recording a podcast with Josie Fair, and Mrs Fair had been a houseguest with the Summers for a week prior to Mr Summer’s disappearance, claiming to have been a victim of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband.

Neighbours say that the Fair family kept themselves to themselves and were generally ‘very quiet’.

Wednesday, 24 July

Alix collects the children from school. It’s the last day of term tomorrow and they appear outside the playground weighed down with old projects, exercise books and pieces of art, which Alix takes from them while they chatter and playfight each other. Mothers approach and touch her arm

gently, ask her if she’s OK. She smiles tightly and nods. She’s not OK. She really is not OK.

There has been no helpful response to the press reports. No sightings of the hire car. No sightings of Nathan. No sightings of Josie. Erin’s card has not been used again. Katelyn has not come forward. Nobody who knows Katelyn has come forward, even though the image of her taken from the hotel’s CCTV with the large scratch down her cheek has been widely disseminated. The drops of blood found on the floor of the hotel off Tottenham Court Road have been sent for testing and the police are currently trying to trace the sender of some messages found on Erin’s

laptop. They are targeting dog owners and dog shelters, asking them to keep their eyes peeled for Pomchis. They are looking at CCTV footage from the cashpoint machines used by whoever has been using Erin’s debit card to empty her account of nearly ten thousand pounds in cash since last week.

They are looking at CCTV of Manor Park Road to see if Josie has been seen in the area since she left in the middle of the night almost two weeks ago, and they have traced the passengers of the six buses that passed the Fairs’ home between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. on the night that Josie claims to

have been beaten by Walter to see if any of them saw anything through the window. They have traced people that Erin had been messaging in the days and weeks before her disappearance. They have been in touch with Walter’s two sons from his first marriage, who are in Canada, and they have been in touch with Josie’s employers and colleagues.

But it has now been nearly four days since Josie stole Nathan from

outside the hotel off Tottenham Court Road and there is nothing. Not one thing.

Until now. As Alix puts the key into the lock of her front door, her phone rings. It is DC Sabrina Albright. ‘I wonder if we might be able to get you along to the station at some point? To see me and my colleague DC Bryant. At your convenience. We have found some objects in the Fairs’ property. A strange selection of things. Including the edition of the interiors magazine you mentioned you’d seen Mrs Fair remove from your recycling box while you were out. And something else, something that, well … if you were able to come along and cast your eye, see if you recognise anything else …?’

‘I can be there now. Just’ – she glances around at her two children, still in their school uniforms, kicking off their shoes in the hallway, and thinks how long it would take for her mother to drive there from Harrow and says –

‘give me an hour. I’ll be there in an hour.’

On the table in front of Alix lies a Nespresso pod, a bottle of the expensive hand soap that she uses in her guest WC, her bracelet with the little hanging crystals that Nathan had given her for her birthday, a receipt from the

organic supermarket dated Alix’s birthday, the interiors magazine, a shiny teaspoon, a card from Alix’s kitchen wall that Eliza had made for her three years ago after Teeny the dog died, and a strip of passport photographs of Leon. She feels her mouth turn sour at the sight of these tiny, vital, intensely personal parts of her family ephemera on the cold institutional tabletop.

But there are other things, too, on the table in front of Alix. There is a photograph of two tiny children sitting one on each knee of a young girl, all three children beaming into the camera. There is a hair scrunchie made of pink satin. There is a rubberised phone case with gems arranged into

flowers glued to the back. There is an empty Hubba Bubba container. There is a single silver earring with a crucifix hanging from it. There is a scrunched-up paper napkin with pink smudges on it, and a large silk flower attached to a circle of elastic. She shakes her head and says, ‘These aren’t mine. I don’t know, I mean I assume they belong to her girls? But this …’ Her eyes go to the photo of the young girl with the toddlers on her knees.

‘This isn’t Erin or Roxy. But the girl … she looks familiar. She looks …’ Alix trawls her mind for the place in her life where she has seen this face before. And then she gets it and she points at the photo as her heart gallops under her ribs and says, ‘Brooke Ripley. That’s Brooke Ripley, isn’t it?

Look! And I remember Josie said Brooke had two small siblings, her half- brother and -sister? And that … hold on …’ She grabs her phone from her

bag and runs a search for Brooke Ripley on Facebook. ‘There.’ She shows it to Chris Bryant and Sabrina. ‘Look. It’s her. And …’ Her eye goes to a detail on the prom-night photo of Brooke that she had not noticed before – a large white flower attached to her wrist. Her throat burns dry, and she

clutches her stomach subconsciously with her left hand. ‘Look,’ she says, her eyes going from the photo to the flower and then to the two detectives. ‘Look.’

The detectives stare at the items and the photo on Alix’s phone, and a chill permeates the warm office.

‘There’s a key,’ she finds herself telling Sabrina. ‘Josie left it under the mattress in my spare room. It has blood on it.’

‘Describe this key?’ Sabrina says to Alix.

‘It’s small. Gold, I think, or brass. A single key. There’s a plastic tag attached, one of those that comes as part of a multipack, with the clear

plastic window, with the number 6 on it. Just that. I have it at home. I can give it to you. I’m sorry. I should have given it to you before. I didn’t think.’

‘Please, don’t worry. You’re being incredibly helpful. And this’ – Sabrina gestures at the silk wrist corsage, the photograph of Brooke Ripley with her two young siblings – ‘this could be very important. We will be doubling up our attempts to find Brooke’s family. And in the meanwhile, please just take care of yourself and your family. We’ll call you when we have anything

more to share.’

Alix gets up to leave and then stops when she remembers something that’s been nagging at her for days.

‘Was that all?’ she asks the detective. ‘There wasn’t a necklace? With a golden bumblebee pendant?’

‘No,’ says Sabrina. ‘Not that I’m aware of. But if it turns up, I’ll let you know.’

‘Thank you,’ says Alix, her fingers going instinctively to her clavicle where the pendant used to hang. ‘That would be great.’

Alix’s mother looks up from the kitchen table where she is sitting with Leon when she hears Alix close the front door behind her half an hour later. She

throws her a look that says, ‘Well?’

Alix shakes her head, just perceptibly, and busies herself for a moment, putting things in the dishwasher, plugging in her phone to charge, wiping

cat hair off the hob. When she’s done, she gestures at her mother to join her in the garden. They sit side by side, staring down the garden towards the back wall. The bright evening light glints gold off the windows of Alix’s recording studio and for a moment she wonders if she will ever again sit behind the sound desk, ever again take pure, focused interest in somebody else’s life.

‘So?’ her mother says after a short moment.

‘Nothing,’ says Alix. ‘They have nothing. But …’ She shivers slightly as she recalls the unpleasantness of seeing those tiny pieces of her life, her home, her family, laid out in front of her, pulled from the depths of, apparently, Josie’s underwear drawer. The thought of Eliza’s precious drawing of her with Teeny, Alix’s just departed dog, and Leon’s slightly startled-looking four-year-old face nestling in amongst Josie’s sad, faded underwear makes her feel nauseous.

‘They found some items in one of her drawers: some stuff belonging to me. Things she’d stolen from the house. Nothing valuable. Just bits.’ Her voice cracks and she clutches her mother’s hand inside hers and feels her mother’s squeeze back hard.

She doesn’t tell her mother about the corsage, about Brooke Ripley, about the blood-smeared key hidden under Josie’s mattress. She just holds her hand and stares into the middle distance, holding back the tears that threaten to overwhelm her.

‘He’ll show up,’ her mother says softly. ‘I know he will. I can feel him.

He’s out there. I reckon he’ll be home by the weekend.’

And it’s just what Alix wants to hear. She wants to think that she too can feel him out there; she wants to feel certain that he will walk in through the door this weekend, that he will have a tale to tell her over wine, that they will curl up together in bed, his body maybe smaller, thinner, his arms around her desperate with the relief of being home, that they will wait, wait to talk about Katelyn, wait to talk about the hotel room, they will heal,

come together, love, and then they will fix whatever was so broken that Nathan ended up in a hotel room with a girl called Katelyn in the first place. She wants that ending to this story and she kisses her mother gently on her cheek and says, ‘Thank you. Yes. Thank you.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows Katelyn Rand sitting on the small red velvet sofa.

‘So, Nathan was still going on and on about wanting to go home and have sex with his wife, even though he could hardly put one foot in front of the other. We ended up in a bar in Soho and I could tell his mates were fading a bit, getting restless. It was so hot that night and, I mean, they weren’t young, you know? But he kept wanting one more drink . So I said, “Listen. Why don’t you guys go? Leave him with me. I can get him home.” And then they left and I told Nathan I would get him home, but first we should have something to eat to sober him up, and I took him to the hotel that Josie had told me to get him to. She said there was a room there, booked under Nathan’s name, all paid for. Just had to check him in. Easier said than done.

Could barely keep him upright. Had to sort of prop him up while I did all the business. He kept saying, “Where’s Alix? Is she here? Is she here?”

‘And I said, “Yeah. She’s upstairs, waiting for you. Come on, sweetie, let’s get you up there.” And then we got into the room, and he said he was hungry, so I got us a McDonald’s delivery; we ate that; he drank all the miniatures. All the time he just kept saying,

“Where’s Alix? Is she coming? Is she coming?”

‘I said yeah. She’s coming. She’s in an Uber. She’ll be here soon.

And then … Well, he tried to leave. Yeah.’

She brings her hand to the back of her neck and rubs at it, smiles apologetically at the interviewer off-screen.

‘That was bad. And I was just like watching my phone for a message from Josie, telling me that she was coming, and I was calling her and calling her, and I’d locked the door and was standing in front of it. He was going nuts . “Let me go. Just let me go!” And then he started throwing stuff about, knocking stuff over. Didn’t touch me, though, but he accidentally caught me on my cheek with the edge of something sharp. And I was like trapped in this room with this total nutter, losing his shit big-time, and Josie was not answering, not answering, and then finally at about three o’clock in the morning she called. She said send him out. Tell him Alix is out

there, in a black Kia, reg plate blah, whatever it was. So I unlocked the door, let him go. Dropped some underwear on the floor in the bathroom. Sprayed my perfume all about the place. Messed up the bed. Left. Ten minutes later a thousand pounds landed in my PayPal. And that, I assumed, was that. Jesus Christ.’

She sighs, runs her hand around the back of her neck again.

‘I couldn’t have been more wrong about that, could I?’

Thursday, 25 July

Alix’s mother spends the night. She comes with Alix the following day to the end-of-term assembly in the overwarm school hall, where the doors are

standing open but no cool air is getting in. They sit side by side on a bench, their knees bent up into sharp angles, and Alix knows that her mother, though young for her age, will be glad when it is over and she can stretch her legs again. It is the end of primary school for Eliza. In the world in which she lived before Saturday night, this had been the day that Alix had been feeling most anxious about. The end of an era. The end of the safety net of a kind, nurturing primary school. No more sky-blue polo shirts for Eliza. No more Velcro-fastening book bag. No more assemblies for Alix to join in, no more museum trips for her to accompany.

And then it is over, the school spills out, the sun is shining, the summer has begun, six weeks of innocence and freedom and the beginning of a new stage of her daughter’s life and she feels none of it. They go to the park and

queue for ice creams. The children play with their friends. Alix sits with her mother, away from the other parents. They head home and Alix puts the children’s uniforms in the washing machine for the last time until September. She waits as long as she can, which turns out to be 4.58 p.m., and then she pours wine for herself and her mother.

And then, as she glances at her empty glass and considers the possibility of pouring herself another one, even though it’s not yet five thirty, her

phone rings, and it’s Sabrina Albright.

‘Guess who’s just walked into the station, Alix? And wants to see you?’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a young woman sitting in a vintage armchair placed in the middle of an empty, softly lit room.

She has blonde hair, shaved short on one side and grown to shoulder length on the other. She wears a buttoned-up pale blue shirt and black jeans.

She has many earrings in both ears and smiles nervously. On the screen below are the words:

Roxy Fair, daughter of Josie and Walter Fair

The screen cuts to the title graphics and the episode ends.

***

2.50 p.m.

Roxy picks at the skin around her fingernails and stares at the clock on the wall. She is about to find out what the hell is going on, if anyone would ever actually come and see her. A few minutes later the door opens and a pair of feds walk in, a man and a woman, Chris and Sabrina they’re called, and they smile and say how sorry they are about Roxy’s dad and then they clear their throats and open notepads and the woman says, ‘Do you know where your mother is, Roxy?’

Roxy shakes her head. ‘I haven’t seen her since I was sixteen.’

‘We’ve managed to get hold of your grandmother, Pat O’Neill?’ Roxy nods.

‘She’s in Menorca, but she’s heading back tomorrow. She says you’ll be able to stay with her, if you want?’

‘I can’t stay. I have work. I need to get back.’

‘OK. That’s fine. But you should know, if you haven’t already seen it in the news, that we are actively searching for your mother in relation to your father’s murder and the attempted murder of Erin.’

Roxy flicks a gaze at the female police detective and then at the male. ‘Seriously?’

‘Yes. There’s a lot going on at the moment, Roxy. And I think it might be best to talk you through it a step at a time, so it doesn’t get too confusing. Is that OK?’

Roxy nods tightly.

‘It sounds as if your mum and dad had a row on the night of Friday the twelfth of July. They’d been for dinner at a friend’s house—’

Roxy interjects with a snort of laughter. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘A woman called Alix Summer had recently befriended your mother. They’d been working on some kind of project together for a few weeks. This culminated in a dinner invitation on that Friday night. A few hours after your mother and father left Mrs Summer’s house, your mother

reappeared on Mrs Summer’s doorstep badly injured, claiming to have been beaten by your father.’

‘My father?’

‘Yes. That is what she told Mrs Summer. She told Mrs Summer that she and Erin had left the flat together in the early hours of the morning and implied that your father was alive and well. She then spent a week living at Mrs Summer’s house, before leaving on Saturday morning, telling Mrs Summer that she was going to her mother’s flat, your grandma, Pat. The

same night, Mrs Summer’s husband disappeared after a night out in town drinking with friends. The two events would seem to be entirely unrelated, apart from the fact that the hotel room that Mrs Summer’s husband was staying in when he disappeared, and the car that was filmed collecting him from the hotel he was staying at, were both paid for by a debit card in the name of …’

The woman pauses, and Roxy stares at her as if to say: ‘Well, go on then.’

‘Erin Fair.’

‘What, sorry, my sister, who is currently in a coma, paid for a hotel room for some random guy?’

‘We don’t think it was your sister, Roxy. We think your mother has been using your sister’s card. And here’s the thing, we’ve been investigating your sister’s bank account and, well, there had been a remarkable amount of money in there. Over forty thousand pounds. And in the last two weeks, over ten thousand of those pounds have been taken out from cashpoint

machines in Queen’s Park. And according to what your mother told Mrs Summer, your sister, Erin, had special needs. She ate baby food and didn’t leave the house and yet she had money coming into her bank account on a daily basis. All from a livestreaming company called Glitch. Do you know anything about this aspect of your sister’s life?’

‘Yeah, she’s famous.’

‘Famous for what?’

‘Gaming. People pay a subscription fee to Glitch and then they get to watch players online. And my sister is one of the best.’

‘So, she earns money playing video games?’

Roxy can’t believe how old some people sound, like they live in a different world to her, but she controls the urge to roll her eyes and she says, ‘Yeah. That’s right.’

‘So, erm …’ Both detectives adjust their sitting positions. The man stares at his paperwork; the woman glances up at Roxy: ‘Where do you think your mother might be?’

Roxy lets out a rasp of laughter. ‘You’re asking me that?’ ‘Well, yes.’

‘Not going to be able to help you, I’m afraid. My mother …’ Roxy stops, her spiky façade slipping for just a moment. ‘My mother hated me. My mother hated my father. My mother hates my sister. She’s obviously taken Erin’s money to start a new life without any of us in it.’

‘But is there anywhere in particular? A place that meant something to her? Mrs Summer suggests that your mother was very nostalgic about the early days of family life. Overly so, maybe? So was there somewhere you went as a family, maybe?’

Roxy shrugs. She doesn’t see her childhood in that way. There’s no golden glow emanating from any area of it. ‘We used to go to the Lake District every summer. For a week. I hated it, all of us stuck in a caravan, or some hairy cabin with, like, spiders everywhere. But she loved it. She used to drink wine every night and go on and on about the views.’

‘Can you remember whereabouts in the Lake District you used to go?’ ‘Yes. Ambleside. Right by the water.’

Roxy watches them write this down. She narrows her eyes at them and says, ‘You know there’s no way my dad ever laid a finger on my mum, don’t you?’

‘Well, we do have photographic evidence that shows your mum’s injuries.’

‘How?’

‘Mrs Summer took them, last week.’

Roxy sighs and tuts. ‘Sorry, Mrs Summer … Mrs Summer . Who the hell is this Mrs Summer?’

‘She’s your mother’s friend.’

‘But my mother doesn’t have any friends.’

‘She’s a friend, but she’s also been making a podcast with her.’ ‘A podcast? What sort of podcast?’

‘She was interviewing your mother about her life.’ Roxy can’t help but laugh. ‘Seriously?’

‘Yes. We’ve listened to the recordings. They’re quite … harrowing.’ ‘In what way?’

‘Your childhood. The abuse. What happened to your friend, Brooke.’ ‘Brooke?’ Her heart turns black for a moment; her stomach churns.

The detectives exchange a look. ‘Yes. Brooke Ripley. She was your friend, from school. She had a relationship with your father?’

‘Had a relationship with my—?’

‘She went missing, you know, about the same time you left home, and we’re investigating the possibility that her disappearance might have been related to your parents.’

‘You’re joking, right?’

‘No. We’re not joking. We’re acting on the testimony left by your mother on Mrs Summer’s podcast recording.’

Roxy shakes her head and closes her eyes. ‘Listen. I can’t deal with this, OK? What else did my mum say to this woman?’

‘She shared hours of testimony with her. All of which pointed towards a very toxic domestic situation in your home, towards the possibility of spousal and child abuse, including the alleged sexual abuse of your sister.’ The woman stops, licks her lips, touches the paperwork with her peach fingertips. ‘By your father.’

‘My—?’ Roxy slams her hands down on the tabletop and the two

detectives jump slightly. ‘Seriously? My dad? That’s what my mum told her, is it?’

‘She said that your father left the marital bed every night and went into Erin’s bedroom, then didn’t come back.’

‘Yes. He was gaming with her.’ ‘Gaming?’

‘Yes. He was part of the thing, part of the act, you know. The subscribers loved my dad being there. He would just sit behind her and make wisecracks. He had a nickname. Pops. Erased and Pops. That was part of why her stream was so popular, because of him.’

‘So why do you think he didn’t tell your mother about it?’

‘She just couldn’t – could not deal with anything he had to do with either of us. She was so jealous of him, of the fact that we loved him. She was sick with it. You know. Sick in the head. So tell me, please, I can take it.

Tell me what she did to him. Tell me what my mum did to my dad.’

Roxy sits outside the chichi coffee shop on Salusbury Road. Her brain is on fire. It’s hot with things, with thoughts rolling and jostling and images flashing and pounding, and she acts like she doesn’t care, she acts like she’s seen it all before, but she hasn’t and her dad is fucking dead and Erin is attached to a thousand wires in a hospital room, her life still hanging in the balance. She shreds a paper napkin with tense fingers, then realises what she’s done and balls the shreds together tightly. She glances up through the plate glass and sees a woman walking hurriedly towards the shop. She’s tall, and her hair is very blonde, it looks natural, but Roxy can see the roots starting to grow back in her side parting. She is wearing flared jeans and a sweatshirt, stack-heeled trainers and no make-up. She looks like she hasn’t slept for days. She sees Roxy as she enters the café and looks at her questioningly. Roxy nods.

‘Hi. Roxy.’ She sits down. ‘God. This is …’ She seems lost for words and her eyes scan Roxy’s face as though she’s trying to remember it for later. ‘I can’t believe it’s you. I just feel like …’ Her hands go up in the air and flutter around vaguely before landing in her lap. ‘Are you OK?’

Roxy nods. Roxy is always OK and would never want anyone to think otherwise.

‘I’m really sorry about your father.’

Roxy nods again. Then she looks at Alix and says, ‘What did my mum tell you about my dad?’

Alix eyes her uncertainly and then says, ‘I’m not sure how true a lot of it was?’

‘Just tell me.’ So Alix does.

3 p.m.

‘Is that comfortable?’

Alix looks across the desk in her recording studio at Roxy, who is adjusting her headphones. Roxy nods and gives her a thumbs-up.

‘Great.’

Roxy is five foot tall and terrifying. Her jaw juts defiantly, even when she’s being pleasant.

‘This is all bullshit,’ she’d said in the café just now, loud enough for the two young mums sitting behind to pause their conversation and turn slightly in their seats. ‘I can’t believe she told you that stuff. It’s—’ And she’d been about to launch into her own telling of her childhood when Alix put her hand up to stop her.

‘How would you feel’, she said, ‘about contributing to the podcast?

Telling your side?’ ‘When?’ Roxy asked.

‘Now? I live just up there. Two minutes away. Less.’

She’d expected Roxy to say no, to be cagey and private and prickly, but she’d immediately picked up her small rucksack and started to stand up. ‘Is this going to be like a true crime podcast, then?’ she asked, and Alix had felt a shiver run through her at the realisation that somehow, through the stultifying fug of fear and dread, it had escaped her that that’s exactly what she was now doing. She was making a true crime podcast, out of the events of her own life.

Now she plays Roxy a small part of one of Josie’s recordings. It’s from the day that Josie told her about Brooke. She watches Roxy’s face as she listens, the looks of confusion and incredulity that pass across her fine features. She shakes her head occasionally, as if trying to dislodge something from her ear. Alix presses pause and waits for Roxy to speak.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen changes to a close-up re-enactment of someone pressing record on a mixer desk.

Underneath the text reads:

Over the next twenty-four hours, Alix Summer recorded nearly four hours of testimony from Roxy Fair.

Roxy’s voice plays over a blurred visual recreation of the Fairs’ apartment interior.

A teenage girl can be seen from behind, chatting to an older man in the kitchen.

‘Brooke Ripley started late at my school. Everyone hated her. I remember being glad because it took the spotlight off me for a moment. She was kind of pretty, looked older than fourteen, big boobs. And we sort of paired off just because everyone hated us. And yeah, she and I got quite close. Really close. In fact, Brooke and I ended up being, like, together, you know? I’d always known I was gay, from a really young age. But Brooke was my first girlfriend, and it was seriously intense for a while. We were really in love. Didn’t tell anyone about it, only Erin. But not Mum, not Dad. And I remember this time, it was Christmas, my dad was home. I remember that now. He was baking cookies, in his Christmas apron. We were listening to Christmas music. It was kind of nice, felt like a normal family for

once.’

Alix interjects: ‘Were you not a normal family?’

‘No. We were not a normal family. Not by any stretch. But right then, in that moment, it felt normal. And my dad was laughing and joking and I looked at Brooke and I thought: I bet you wish your dad was like mine. I remember thinking that. I remember it really clearly. I felt proud. You know? And yes, of course my mum hated it. Hated seeing us all having a laugh. All being happy. Afterwards Brooke said something like, “I think your mum hates me.” I said, “Why do you say that?” She said, “I dunno. The vibes I was getting off her.” I think Mum just really resented her, because she could tell how much I liked her. How much we all liked her. She could tell that Brooke was more important to me than her, that I loved her, you know, and she couldn’t deal with it. She couldn’t deal with anything that wasn’t about her. She was sick with envy.’

The background scene changes to a school playground filled with teenagers in uniform.

Alix asks: ‘And then there was a fight? According to witnesses, you and Brooke had a physical fight on school premises towards the end of your last term of school.’

‘Yeah. She, er, or at least I thought she’d said something about Erin. Someone told me she’d used a derogatory word about her. So I just went in, like I do, stupid, no fact-checking, lamped her. School suspended me, even though I was about to start my exams.’

The screen changes to Roxy sitting on a stool in an empty bar. She is smiling coolly.

On the recording, she can be heard sighing.

‘I was kind of impetuous, when I was young. I was kind of a nightmare, to be honest. And that was it for me and school. I was done with it. I was done with all of it. But mainly I was done with my mother. So I ran away from home. I wanted Brooke to come with me. She said she wasn’t ready. She wanted to do her GCSEs. She wanted to go to the stupid fucking prom. She wanted to do it all properly. So I just went without her. Hoped she’d come to her senses. Hoped she’d come and find me. But instead, she just went and disappeared. Into thin air. And that was that.’

Alix asks: ‘So you running away from home – it was nothing to do with your father and Brooke? There was nothing going on? Erin didn’t tell you she’d heard them having sex? None of that actually

happened?’

Roxy raises her gaze to the camera and shakes her head.

‘I’ve never heard so much bullshit in my life.’

***

11 p.m.

Roxy sleeps in Alix’s spare bedroom that night. Despite her coarse bravado, Alix senses the soft child beneath, the sixteen-year-old girl living in a toxic environment who just needed someone to nurture her. As Alix shows her to her room, she explains that this is where her mother had slept for a week, just before she disappeared. ‘She had this key, hidden under her mattress. It had the number six written on it. I gave it to the police, but they couldn’t match it with any of the locks in your parents’ house. Do you know anything about it?’

Roxy shrugs. ‘No.’

‘You don’t have access to an outhouse or a shed or, I don’t know, some kind of storage unit?’

‘I don’t think so. Although my dad had a garage, I think. His dad kept

some old banger in it, I think. I do remember going in there once or twice, when we were small. It was all, like, dusty and cobwebby.’

‘Do you remember where it was?’ ‘Yeah. Round the back.’

‘Round the back of what?’

‘The house. There’s this sort of – what’s it called? A mews? Like two sets of garages, facing each other, about seven or eight of them, I guess?’

‘And how did you get to this mews from your house?’

‘Like out the front and then round the corner and through a gate. But we also had a window in the bathroom that opened up on to it too.’

Alix and Roxy exchange a look, but neither of them gives voice to their thoughts.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Screen shows a mother and teenage daughter sitting on a sofa in a sixteenth-century pub, with a small brown dog sleeping between them.

The mother has cropped white hair and red-framed reading glasses.

The daughter has long, blonde hair that hangs in heavy, tonged curls to her waist. The text beneath reads:

Clare and Georgie Small: holidaymakers at Ambleside Manor Lodge Park

The daughter, Georgie, speaks first.

‘We were there in July 2019. Me, my mam, my dad, my brothers. We’d just arrived two days before. It was during that heatwave we had back then. It was so hot, even up there by the lakes. We didn’t see her come. Just woke up the next morning and she was there.

Sort of waved at her across the park, didn’t we? She had a little dog with her, and she sort of waved back but I could see she wasn’t friendly. But that was OK. We weren’t there to make friends.’

Clare, the mother, speaks.

‘The lodges are built for privacy, you see. It’s not like an average holiday park where you’re all rammed in. The lodges are new, only built a couple of years ago, and they all face out over the lake and have space around them so you can’t see into other people’s properties. So yeah, we knew she was there, but we didn’t see much of her. She just sat out on her deck at night with a glass of wine staring across the lake at sunset. I raised a glass to her once. She raised hers back at me. But that was as far as any interaction went.

Then one day, about three or four days after she arrived, she wasn’t there any more. She’d just upped and left. But the car was still there. Thought that was strange. But didn’t think a lot about it after that. We stayed for ten days all told. And it was on our last day that the police arrived in Ambleside.’

Georgie interjects: ‘Just unbelievable that we’d been there all those days. Just hanging out, drinking, doing water sports, admiring the views, having fun, living our best lives, when all along …’

Clare touches Georgie’s arm and Georgie wipes away a tear.

‘I mean, what’s the matter with people? Seriously. What the hell is the matter with some people?’

Sunday, 28 July

The house feels quiet without Roxy, without Nathan, without her mother. Just her and the children on a long, overcast Sunday. Roxy had messaged her earlier from the hospital to say that Erin was still unconscious, still wired up, still in a critical condition. And all around her the news is breaking like a slow, shocking tsunami. The awfulness of it is too big for Alix to fully process. Her sisters message her constantly. They should be WhatsApping now about their upcoming holiday. They should be sharing pictures of new dresses bought and asking for reading recommendations, asking if the villa has hairdryers, making reservations for dinner as it’s

impossible to seat that many people in a restaurant without advance planning. Alix should be trying on swimwear in the mirror in her room that has a rear view and wondering if she could still get away with a bikini at

forty-five and then thinking that God, yes, of course she could and if she couldn’t now, then when could she? And she would suck in her stomach and turn this way and that and think, not bad, not bad at all for a middle- aged mother of two.

That’s what she should be doing now.

Instead, she is trapped in a Gothic, tick-tocking, slow-burn nightmare. So she is quite glad of the distraction at around two o’clock that long, never- ending Sunday, when Pat O’Neill calls her from the hospital and says, ‘Roxy’s been telling me about your podcast. About the things that Josie told you. I just think, Alix, for the sake of balance and the truth, that I should

come in and talk to you. Tell you my side of the story. Because I know you think I was probably a bad mother and in many ways I was. But honestly, you need to understand Josie properly, what she’s really like, before you can even hope to make any sense of what’s been going on.’

‘Can you come now?’ Alix says, and then she gives Pat her address and sits in the kitchen and waits for her to arrive.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a blurred dramatic re-enactment of a young girl sitting in a bright modern flat.

She has brown hair cut into a bob shape and is playing with a toy on the floor.

An actor playing a young Pat O’Neill stands in the kitchen of the flat, talking to a man. She is laughing at something he has just said.

The actor playing young Josie watches them curiously. The text underneath says:

This is the voice of Pat O’Neill, talking to Alix Summer on 28 July 2019.

‘It’s true that I was not ready to be Josie’s mother. Not ready at all.

I was coming to the end of the second year of my degree in Social Anthropology. I was at my peak. I felt so alive. So vibrant. I just wanted to keep going. Keep ploughing on, see how far I could get. And then I got pregnant and because I didn’t show, I had no idea until it was too late to do anything about it. Josie’s father was long gone by then. I can’t even remember his surname to this day. Isn’t that awful? I think it began with a K. Kelly, maybe? Anyway. Josie arrived and I was not ready. No. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. But mainly, I was not ready for Josie.’

The actor playing young Josie in the re-enactment turns and looks at the camera.

‘She was a dark child. And yes, maybe that was partly to do with me, with my style of mothering. I wanted her to be independent. I wanted her to be strong and impressive. I probably left her to her own devices too much. It’s important, though, for children to make their own mistakes and learn from them. It’s not good to never let your kids fuck up. But she was so needy. So needy. I gave her as much as I could, but it was never enough. And it wasn’t just me. She did it with her friends; I saw it happen, time after time. She was a brooding presence in social situations; it was almost as if she spent her whole life just waiting for someone to show her that they didn’t

want her. She pushed so many friends away over the smallest thing. And as for me ever having a boyfriend – forget it. Seriously, forget it. She turned psycho whenever she thought a man might encroach on our lives. She would play cruel tricks on them. Insult them. Pretend to be ill if I was going out on a date. She even made a voodoo doll once, I kid you not. I mean, where did she even get the idea from?

But yes, she made one of a man I was seeing and left it lying around the flat, with pins sticking out of it when he came round to see me.

So all of them upped and left, of course they did. And then I started seeing Walter—’

Alix’s voice cuts in. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I started dating Walter. When Josie was about thirteen?’

There is a prolonged silence.

‘Josie didn’t tell me that.’

‘Well, no, of course she didn’t, because she only told you what she wanted you to know, what suited her weird narrative. And that’s exactly why I’m here talking to you, you see. Because Josie didn’t

tell you lots of things and Josie’s run off letting the whole world think that her husband was a monster, that he groomed her, that he abused his children, and the world needs to know that’s rubbish. You need to know that’s rubbish. Walter Fair was far from perfect. He was quite controlling. Liked things done his way. He was quite full of himself, yes. And obviously I knew it was wrong that we were having an affair behind his wife’s back. Of course I knew that. But he was a loving man, a real man, he just wanted to love and to be loved. He just wanted a quiet life. And what we had was very real, very intense, and I was prepared to wait it out until he found the right time to leave his wife. At first Josie was very resistant to him, as she was with all my boyfriends. But then as she got older she seemed to become fixated on him. She would try to divert his attention away from me and on to herself. She would put make-up on when he came over and say disparaging things about me, about how old I was, how fat I was. At first Walter and I used to joke about it together, but then the jokes stopped, around the time Josie turned sixteen, and then, just after she turned eighteen, they told me.’

There is prolonged silence. Then Alix speaks.

‘ So you didn’t know?’ You didn’t know that they were together before that?’

Pat sighs. ‘Obviously I should have known. As Josie’s mother, I should have known . And I take full responsibility for the fact that I dropped the ball. I was so desperate for Josie to be independent, to have her own life. I just wanted – and I know how bad this sounds – but I wanted her to be somewhere else. Not at home. I hated it when she was at home, she cast this mood, this atmosphere. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t … God save my soul, I didn’t like her. So I never asked her where she’d been, what she’d been doing. I didn’t want to know. I was just happy that I didn’t have to deal with her. But God.

The shock, when I found out. The pure horror of it. And you know, when Walter and I were together, Josie used to tell me I was disgusting for being with a married man. And then she went right in there and snatched him away from his wife, and from me.’

‘So, in your opinion, Walter didn’t groom Josie?’

‘Groom her? You mean manipulate her into a relationship with him? No. I don’t think so. I think she saw him, she wanted him, she got him. She didn’t care who she hurt. She’s never cared who she hurt. She’s – and this is a terrible thing to say about your own child, and obviously, I’ve been far from perfect myself, but I really think Josie has a heart of stone. A heart of pure stone.’

The screen turns black and then changes to Pat O’Neill sitting in a community hall.

She shakes her head slightly. There are tears in her eyes.

***

6 p.m.

For a while after Pat leaves, Alix feels numb. Her mother comes over and cooks something for the children to eat, serves it to them, sits with them while they eat it, listens to their chatter, creates a sense of calm and peace which Alix is currently incapable of doing.

‘I think he’s dead,’ she says to her mother when they’re alone together in the garden later on.

Her mother looks at her with concern and says, ‘No. Surely not.’

‘No. He is. I can feel it. All this time I’ve been thinking that Josie was weird because Josie was damaged. All this time I’ve been thinking she was crying out for help somehow. That she needed me. But now I realise she

was never crying out for help. She never needed me. She did have a plan though. The whole time. And I was just a cog. And so was Nathan.’

‘But why? Why would she want to hurt Nathan? She barely knew him.’ ‘Look. She made it clear to me that she thought very little of Nathan, that

she thought I’d be better off without him. She even asked me once how I’d feel if he died and then seemed really disappointed when I said that I would be sad. And when she first suggested that I should make a podcast about her, she pretty much told me that she was embarking on a project of change and that she wanted me to document it.’

‘You think all this was deliberate?’

‘I don’t know how exactly, but yes, I think it was. I mean, she obviously knew that Erin had all that money in her bank account and then somehow found a way to get her PIN, to extract all that cash, to pay someone to lure Nathan to that hotel. She knew that Nathan was going to be out that night because he told her and, you know, when she left that day, I was surprised about how easily she went, how she didn’t make a fuss or try to stay, and

now I know it was part of the plan too. And I really think she took him to kill him, Mum. I really do. Every second we’re sitting here is a second lost for Nathan. And I don’t know what to do, Mum. I just don’t know what to do.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows Tim, Angel and Fred.

The text underneath says:

Tim and Angel Hiddingfold-Clarke, current owners of Josie’s dog, Fred

Angel is feeding Fred a small treat.

The camera zooms in on him eating it, then pans back again. Tim starts to talk.

‘We genuinely had no idea that Josie was a wanted woman. We’d been enjoying our honeymoon, hadn’t watched any TV , read any news. It wasn’t until we started messaging our friends about this crazy thing that had just happened, this woman giving us her dog, that we started getting replies going, er, you know that might be the woman that the police are looking for? And we were like, what woman? And then we went on to the internet and saw the photos of the woman, Josie, and yeah, it was her. And yes, of course, we went straight to the police. Absolutely.’

Screen switches to DC Sabrina Albright.

‘We got a call from the Cumbria Constabulary on Saturday the twenty-seventh. They’d had a call from a couple of holidaymakers who’d been handed a small dog to take care of a couple of days before. They said the photographs of Josie Fair they’d seen online matched the woman who’d handed them the dog. They said this all occurred in broad daylight, in an area busy with tourists; they said it happened in a flash. But they were able to give us more of an idea of what Josie was wearing, that she was trying to disguise her appearance with a hood and sunglasses. They said that she left heading towards the main village of Ambleside, carrying a small handbag.

‘We immediately started a street-to-street, house-to-house investigation. But it wasn’t until very late on Sunday that we had a breakthrough. A family dining in a restaurant in the village told us that a woman matching Josie’s appearance with a small dog had been staying at their lodge park. They said she’d arrived the previous Sunday in the middle of the day and had gone by Thursday morning. We contacted the management and they confirmed that yes, Mrs Fair had booked a lodge online two weeks earlier. They told us that the lodges were accessed via a keycode and that they had not had cause to meet with Mrs Fair face to face and that they were unaware that she had left the park on Thursday as her booking went all the way through to the following weekend and she had not notified them that she had checked out. We dispatched a team there

immediately and entered the lodge just before midnight on Sunday night.’

The screen shows archive footage of police cars arriving at the lakeside park, late at night, their blue lights reflected in the dark surface of the water. The audio is a police recording from the night.

‘Water rescue team are going in. I repeat, water rescue team are going in. Stand by.’

Then the screen fades and changes to an artistic shot of the lake, with gentle music playing in the background.

It is daytime and the sunlight sparkles off the surface of the water. A flock of birds swoops and whirls overhead.

The camera follows the arc of the sun until the whole screen is burnt white.

***

11 p.m.

Roxy calls Alix that night, just after Alix has climbed into bed. ‘How’s Erin?’

‘Still nothing,’ says Roxy. ‘But they say her vitals are improving all the time. They reckon she’ll wake up within the next few hours. What about you? Have you heard anything?’

‘Not yet. I suppose it’s getting a bit late now. But hopefully tomorrow.’ Alix pauses. ‘Your grandma told me about her and your dad today. That Walter used to be her boyfriend.’

‘Ew, yeah, I know. Gross, isn’t it? The whole thing … my family. I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry? What for?’

‘Sorry you got involved. Sorry she dragged you in. Sorry you ever had to know about any of it.’

‘It was my choice, Roxy. I went to her, remember? I didn’t have to go to the alterations shop that day. I didn’t have to agree to her suggestion to

make a podcast. I didn’t have to let her stay here after she claimed your dad had hit her. I could have pulled the plug on it at any moment, but I let myself be controlled by her. It was all me, ultimately. All of it.’

There’s a short pensive silence and then Roxy says, ‘What was it about my mum? Why did you want to do it?’

Alix stops and gives the question some thought. Then she says,

‘Honestly? I think I was bored, Roxy. I think I was bored and I was having problems with my husband, I was filled with anger and resentment, with

this low-level rage, and your mum came along with her stories that made my problems pale in comparison and I think it just stopped me focusing on the shit in my own life. That’s all it was. A distraction. I overrode all my

instincts when I said yes. And I think I did that deliberately, because I’ve been following my instincts for so long and making good decisions for so long, and a bit of me just wanted to see what would happen if I ignored them. If I was a bit reckless. You know, like when you’re driving down windy roads and you deliberately close your eyes for a second, just to see what happens. So that’s what I did. And now, well, here we are.’

They end the call and Alix slowly places the phone on her bedside table. She is about to pick up her book when the scream of a fox disturbs her. She gets out of bed and walks to the window seat overlooking the garden. Here she pulls her feet up under her and watches for a while as two foxes play in the garden in the warm moonlight. She and Nathan have sat here together before, watching foxes through the window, and she feels the echoes of

those moments running through her, from her head to her feet. Nathan in boxers, a toothbrush in his mouth, coming over to sit next to her, the smell of him – what was it? A sort of solid smell, like cars, like books, like trees. And the sheen of the skin on his back. And the reassuring feel of his weight next to hers in the bed, which even though she always fantasised about having her own room, she always appreciated. And then she remembers a moment a few weeks ago, in the recording studio with Josie, when Josie had been telling her the untrue story of how she and Walter had got together and she remembers Josie saying, ‘Well, as we’re birthday twins, it’s only fair that you should tell me about when you met Nathan. What was it like? Where did you meet him?’

Alix quickly pulls on her dressing gown and heads quietly through the house and out into the garden, where the foxes stare at her boldly for a moment before disappearing into the foliage. She unlocks the doors to her recording studio and puts on her headphones, searches through the

recordings until she finds the one she’s looking for. And there is Josie’s

voice, that odd, hollow voice with no inflection and emotion, asking Alix, ‘Where did you meet him?’ and Alix’s reply follows.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The camera pans back from the burnt white of the sun and on to drone footage of the calm rippling waters of Lake Windermere.

The drone drifts slowly down the length of the lake as Alix’s voice carries over the film.

The text below reads:

Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, June 2019

‘I was almost thirty when we met. I was starting to worry that I was never going to meet anyone. I was working in publishing at the time, it’s a notoriously girl-heavy industry, the chances of meeting anyone were slim to zero. I was living with my sister Zoe. We were perennially single. Zoe was two years older than me and had already given up. But I still felt like he was out there. You know? I could smell him, almost, hear him coming. So I just kept putting myself out there. Time after time after time. But nothing. No one.’

Josie’s voice interjects: ‘I can’t believe that. A beautiful woman like you.’

Alix says: ‘Ha. That’s not how it works. Trust me, it isn’t. And then, one night, just before my thirtieth birthday, I was on my way home, and I was drunk, and I remembered that I had something to collect from the dry cleaner’s. I’d been meaning to pick it up for weeks, but for some reason I chose nine o’clock on a Tuesday night when I’d just had half a bottle of wine and a gin and tonic to do it. And there was this guy in front of me, collecting shirts, bright red hair, taller than me, nice shirt, nice body. But it was the voice. That was the first thing. This voice. So confident. But not arrogant. Just a really good voice. And then when he’d paid, he turned round and I saw this face. I can’t explain it. I saw this face and I thought: It’s you. It’s you. Like

I’d already met him? Like someone had already told me about him? But of course, nobody had. Nobody had told me. I just knew. I said something cringey like that’s a lot of shirts and he stopped and looked at me and I was drunk and he was sober and I think he just thought he’d play with me a bit and he said, “Yes. I eat a lot of shirts.” And then I said, “Sorry, I’m a bit drunk,” and he said, “Yes, I

know.’ And he just looked at me and his eyes were this colour, I don’t even know if there’s a word for it. Just the most incredible shade of nothing. And I got my dry cleaning, and he took me to the pub. And that was that. Two years later we were married. A year after that I was pregnant with Eliza.’

The soft drone footage stops abruptly.

The scene changes to a shot of the inside of an empty recording studio.

Josie’s voice plays on the audio.

‘Do you still love him?’ ‘Of course. Yes.’

‘But, like, really love him. Like you did back then, in the dry cleaner’s? When you didn’t know anything about him.’

‘It’s a different kind of love. But yes, I do.’

‘You don’t ever think that your life would be better if you were on your own?’

‘No. No, I don’t.’

‘And yet you call yourself a feminist.’

‘Yes. I do. And I am. You can be happily married and a feminist.’ ‘I don’t think so. I think that you can only be a feminist if you’re

single.’

‘Oh. That’s an interesting counterpoint. Can you elaborate?’

‘I shouldn’t need to, Alix. You should understand what I’m saying.’

A short pause follows.

Then Josie says , ‘You have to be free in order to be in control, Alix. You have to be free. No baggage. A clean break. Like your friend Mari le Jeune said, the one from your podcast. Remember what she said, about clean breaks. Remember?’

The audio fast-forwards and rewinds briefly, before another voice plays over the video.

The text on the screen says:

This is the voice of Mari le Jeune, the subject of one of Alix Summer’s previous podcasts from her series All Woman .

Her words appear as moving text on the screen.

‘And as awful as it sounds, death is a clean break. There are no grey areas. No ambiguity. It’s like a blank canvas in a way …’

The voice of Josie Fair returns.

‘Don’t you ever think, Alix, that everything would be easier if they were dead?’

The screen turns black .

***

12.45 a.m.

Alix presses stop and pulls off her headphones. She leans back into her chair, lets her head roll back and exhales loudly. There it was. There it was, all along. She hadn’t got it at the time. She’d had no recollection of what Mari le Jeune had said about clean breaks and death. She’d thought Josie was rambling. But really she’d been giving her her warped manifesto, laying it out for Alix to see. And she’d totally missed it. This , Alix realises now, was what Josie had wanted to share with Alix when she approached her outside the children’s school with that slightly desperate air about her. She’d had a revelation and she wanted Alix to be the depository for it. And she’d shown it to her during this interview and Alix had blown it. She’d totally blown it.

She thumps her fists against the studio desk and cries out in rage and frustration at her own stupidity. ‘Stupid! So stupid!’

And then she pulls herself together when she hears the ringtone coming from her phone and sees DC Albright’s number on the screen. She glances at the time. It’s nearly 1 a.m.

Her stomach rolls over and she breathes in until her lungs are full. Then she presses ‘answer’ and waits for Sabrina to speak.

The drive is endless. The children are at Maxine’s and it is now almost two in the morning. Alix thinks back to Sabrina’s words on the phone, what

feels like a lifetime ago, but was only an hour and a half. ‘He was definitely here, Alix. It looks like he was held by force in the lodge. There’s evidence of restraint. Of struggle. And there are tracks leading down to the lake. So what we’re doing, Alix, is we’re going to launch a water-rescue operation, right now. We’re also going to be sending boats out across the whole lake, in case they’ve taken off on water. I think, Alix, you should make your way up here, as soon as you possibly can. Is there anyone who can drive you?’

She and her mother have been on the road for nearly an hour and they’re barely out of London. Alix feels jittery and hollow. She hasn’t eaten all day. All that is in her stomach is the glass of wine she had with her mother in the garden at nine o’clock. She should eat, but she can’t eat and she doesn’t want to stop for food and make this journey take any longer than it already is. She scrolls through her phone, mindlessly, aimlessly, painfully. She

looks at all the messages that she’s been sent over the past few days from people she hasn’t seen or thought about for years and years, but who all

love her and care about her, and she wants to reply to them all, but she cannot, she doesn’t know what words there are or how to arrange them or what use it would be anyway, so she shuts down her messages and stares instead into the darkness of the night, the occasional beam of light from oncoming cars heading into London as she heads away from it, and the miles go so slowly and the Lake District is so far and her husband is out

there somewhere and she’s about to find out where and she loves him so much and hates herself so much for bringing that woman into their world, their messy, grubby, broken and perfectly imperfect world, the world she thought that she didn’t want but which she now knows is the only thing, the only thing she truly wants: her family, her home, her bad husband, his benders, the desperate, inglorious, ridiculous normality of it all. She wants it, she wants him, she wants that, she doesn’t want this , this endless journey, her mother’s knuckles white on the steering wheel of her car, the blinding lights, the grinding hunger in her gut, the sickening nothingness of it all. She wants Nathan back. She wants him back. And then she feels her phone thrum under her hand and she switches on her screen, and there is a message from a number that she doesn’t recognise. Her breath bunches up in her lungs and she presses on the message to open it up. And when she

sees what it is, she knows, even before the call that follows shortly afterwards from DC Albright. She already knows.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows grainy footage of a female news reporter at dawn. Behind her is a sea of police lights and police officers and reporters holding microphones.

Beyond is Lake Windermere, with the rising sun reflected on the surface of the water. The text underneath says:

Lake Windermere, 5.27 a.m., 29 July 2019

The reporter speaks in a reverential tone of voice.

‘I’m here this morning just outside the beautiful Cumbrian village of Ambleside, on the banks of Lake Windermere, where overnight a grisly discovery was made. The body of North London man Nathan Summer, who went missing from a Central London hotel in the early hours of Sunday the twenty-first of July, was found in shallow waters, just here, a few hours ago. Police had entered a lodge, just behind the lake, and discovered items belonging to Mr Summer. This instigated a full-scale water-search operation overnight with the sad discovery made at around two thirty a.m. Mr Summer’s family have been notified and are on their way here as I speak. The hunt for Josie Fair is still ongoing. This is Kate Mulligan, BBC News,

Ambleside.’

The screen fades to a re-enactment of a woman in the passenger seat of a car at night, pulling a phone out of a handbag at the sound of a text notification.

She turns on the screen and opens the text. On the screen is a voice message.

She presses play. The text below says:

This is the voice message that Josie Fair sent to Alix

Summer. It arrived five minutes before Alix Summer was notified of the discovery of her husband’s body.

‘Alix. Hi. It’s me. I’m not sure what to say. I don’t know what happened. What I was thinking. It wasn’t my intention. None of it. The whole thing. I was trying to be helpful, trying to show you how much better your life could be without him. I was just going to keep him for a few days and then leave him somewhere to find his own way back to you, but it all went wrong, it’s all a disaster. It makes me look like I’m evil. But I’m not. You know I’m not, Alix. That’s why I wanted to share my story with you, because we are alike, you and I. We’re both idealised wives with disappointing husbands. We’ve both been living in the shadows of awful men who chose us because of what we represented, not for who we are. We both had more to give, more to offer. And now Erin will wake up and say things about me too, and those things won’t be true, Alix, you have to believe that.

They won’t be true. Everything I told you was the truth. We know that. You and me. You’re the only person in the whole world I can trust to know the real me, Alix. Please, tell the world that I’m not a bad person. That I’m just a normal person coping with bad things. Not just the bad things I told you about, but other things. The thing I wanted to tell you about, the real end of the story, the darkest, worst thing of all, but I lost my nerve, I couldn’t do it and I wish I had because now, because of this stupid mistake with Nathan, I’ve blown it. Now nobody would believe me anyway. So please. Don’t believe the things you’ll hear. I’m so sorry, Alix. I really truly am. Goodbye.’

Monday, 29 July

DC Albright steps back to allow Alix to peer inside the lodge. Alix wears paper covers over her shoes and has been told to go no further than the entry. The lodge is still a crime scene, but she had begged DC Albright to at least let her see it, the place her husband spent his last days. She has to

know. And as she stands in the entrance she is comforted in some strange and probably inappropriate way by the fact that the lodge is beautiful. It is modern and stylish and airy, with large windows on all sides, incredible

views of the lake from the front, and the countryside elsewhere. It resembles, in some strange way, Alix’s house in London with its aqua- themed cushions and copper kitchen taps and pastel-painted tongue-and-

groove cladding. It even has a window seat in the kitchen area, overlooking the front balcony. It’s gorgeous. Alix wonders at herself for taking comfort from this, wonders at herself and her values and every last aspect of herself as she has done constantly for the past week. Who is she? Why is she?

What has she done? What should she do? Is she a good mother? Has she been a good wife? Good sister? A good friend? A good woman? Does she deserve what she has? Is she shallow? Is she irrelevant? Does she want to be relevant? Is she a feminist? Or is she just feminine? What more could she have done for Josie? And women like her? What more could she have done for her marriage?

Her boy sits inside headphones every night with eyes wide staring at a screen. Her girl cries over mean things said to her by other girls on the

piece of plastic and glass she allows her to have access to. Her husband hands her cash as if she had a gun to his head. She sits in her recording

studio pulling words out of women who’ve had a much harder life than her, who have suffered and survived, who have worked so hard and succeeded against all the odds. And there she sits in a twenty-thousand-pound recording studio built for her as a birthday gift by her husband whom she hasn’t had sex with for over two months and who would rather go drinking in Soho with strangers than come home to her body offered to him like a

cookie jar for good behaviour – and what sort of feminist rewards men for not behaving badly with offers of penetration? She is not a feminist, she is not anything; she is a trinket, a flibbertigibbet; and for a moment, yes, she can see herself from Josie’s perspective, she can see what Josie saw in her, the big gaping space in her soul that she filled with things that couldn’t hurt her, and she knows why she agreed to work with Josie: because, subconsciously, she wanted something to hurt her, and here she is now, staring at the last four walls her husband ever saw, and she is hurting, she is hurting so badly it feels as if fingers are inside her gut shredding it into

pieces and she grabs hold of the doorframe with both hands and curls into herself and howls.

8.30 a.m.

Erin groans and Roxy sits upright. She stares at her sister for a moment, to see if she does it again. A second later she does, and Roxy turns round to call for a nurse.

The nurse appears and watches Erin from the other side of her bed, takes her pulse with her fingers, peers into her eyes, calls another nurse, who

looks at the stats on the equipment that surrounds her bed and then smiles and says, ‘Well, hello, Erin! How lovely of you to join us!’

Roxy leans forward, closer to Erin’s face, and sees a small smile begin to break out. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Fuck. Erin! Hello!’

The smile grows bigger for a moment and then shrinks again as Erin takes in the details of her surroundings. ‘Where am I?’ she whispers.

‘You’re in hospital. You nearly died.’

Roxy sees a thousand pictures flood her sister’s only-just-returned

consciousness within the space of a few seconds. She sees the emotions play out as the memories flood back. ‘Mum …’

‘Mum is—’ Roxy begins, but then stops. She doesn’t know what to say. Mum is what? Mum is where? ‘Don’t worry about Mum,’ she says, taking Erin’s hand in hers and squeezing it softly.

‘And Dad. Is he …?’

Roxy nods, tightly, and holds on to her tears. She needs to stay strong for Erin. ‘He didn’t make it. But it’s fine, sis. Be cool. It’s fine. I’m here. So’s Grandma. She’s just gone to get us something to eat. We’re here. And the

world – oh my God, Erin, you know how many people signed your vigil book on Glitch, when you went missing? Like a hundred thousand people. A hundred thousand people signed it. Hashtag SaveErased. You were viral out there for a while. And now I can tell them that you made it. You’re back! Erased was not erased!’ She’s babbling and she knows she’s babbling but she doesn’t want Erin to fall into a dark pit of remembering, not yet, not this soon after waking up. She’s pleased to see Erin smile at her words, and she squeezes her hand again. ‘You’re a fucking legend, sis. Seriously. A legend.’

Her grandmother returns then with bacon rolls and bad coffee and immediately puts them down when she sees that Erin is awake. ‘Oh my God! Erin! You’re awake! I can’t believe it. I go away from you for five minutes and that’s when you decide to wake up!’ She sits on the side of Erin’s bed and takes her other hand in hers, brings it to her mouth and

kisses it. ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ she says. ‘So, so much.’ ‘What day is it?’ asks Erin.

‘It’s Monday. The …?’

Roxy looks at the nurse, who says, ‘The twenty-ninth.’ ‘The twenty-ninth.’

‘I feel funny.’

Roxy and Pat both laugh indulgently. ‘I feel hungry.’

They laugh again and the nurse says, ‘We’ll get something ordered for her. Soft food, isn’t it, Erin? I hear you like soft food?’

Erin nods.

‘We’ll sort something out for you. Some soup maybe.’

The nurses finish their examination of Erin and then leave, saying the doctor will come as soon as he can. Grandma passes Erin a cup of water. And then it is just the three of them, and Roxy and her grandmother chatter and burble, trying to keep the inevitable tide of darkness at bay for as long as possible. But then, a few minutes later, it comes.

‘Oh my God,’ Erin says, her eyes filling with tears and terror. ‘What happened? What happened! ’

‘It’s fine,’ says Roxy coolly. ‘I’m going to tell you exactly what happened. OK? I’m going to tell you word for word.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen flicks to blurry footage of a garage door then pans across a small London mews.

The text beneath says:

Shortland Mews, London NW6, 30 July 2019

The audio is a crackly recording of a police phone call.

‘We’re approaching the garage now, with Mr Roberts, the owner of the block. Mr Roberts is opening the main gates and we’re getting ready to go in.’

The footage shows a hand with a key in it going towards a large rusty padlock. The key has a tag attached with the number 6 written on it. The key turns slowly, and the click of the lock is magnified on the audio.

The film slows down and the screen goes black …

… The screen changes to footage of a BBC News report.

A newsreader announces the headlines as the familiar BBC theme music fades out.

‘Good evening. Earlier today, at around eleven thirty a.m., the human remains of a young woman were discovered in the boot of a car in a garage in Kilburn, London, by the Metropolitan Police. They are believed to be those of Brooke Ripley, the young girl who went missing from her school prom in June 2014. The garage was leased by Walter Fair, the seventy-two-year-old man found murdered earlier this week in his flat, while his adult daughter, Erin Fair, was found barely alive and tied to a child’s chair in a cupboard. Erin, twenty- three years old, had last been seen by friends online whilst gaming in the early hours of Saturday the thirteenth of July. A hunt for her had been carried out by her legion of online followers after they heard something strange happening during her last livestream, and a global campaign was ongoing to find out what had happened to her. She has told of surviving her ordeal by sucking on the strands of a floor mop in a bucket of dirty water left on a shelf in the cupboard

where she’d been abandoned. Meanwhile, Josie Fair, Erin’s mother, is being sought in connection with the suspicious death of Nathan Summer, the London estate agent found in the shallow waters of Lake Windermere early yesterday morning. Anyone with any information about Josie Fair or her current whereabouts is urged to contact the London Metropolitan Police at the first possible opportunity.’

The screen changes to DC Sabrina Albright.

She shrugs and shakes her head sadly, just once.

‘When we found Brooke, she was still wearing her white prom dress. The fabric disintegrated when it was touched. Literally just turned to dust, like a butterfly’s wing. Poof.’

Sabrina Albright smiles tightly. Her eyes fill with tears.

‘Sad,’ she says. ‘So very sad.’

***

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a woman of around forty. She has long dark hair and wears tortoiseshell-rimmed reading glasses and a white T-shirt.

She sits on a fold-out vintage cinema seat in the middle of an empty cinema.

The interviewer asks her off-mic if she is OK and she says, ‘Yes.

I’m good. Let’s do this.’

The text beneath says:

Abigail Kurti, mother of Brooke Ripley

The screen changes briefly to the re-enactment of a police officer turning the key in the padlock, with dramatic music playing in the background.

Then it flicks back to Abigail Kurti sitting in the empty cinema. She begins to speak.

‘Brooke left home at about six o’clock. She looked amazing. I mean, she always looked amazing, but that night, in that white dress

…’

The photograph of Brooke Ripley in her prom dress comes up on screen briefly.

‘And then she just didn’t come home. I mean, we didn’t know what to think. Brooke was a dramatic girl, you know. There were always tantrums and noise with Brooke. She hated my husband, her stepfather; they rowed all the time . She was rarely at home, and she had run away before. But this – I knew this was different. I thought it was to do with a boy. I didn’t know anything about Roxy Fair. I knew there’d been a fight at school, but I thought it was just another school hallway scrap, you know? Very Brooke. I didn’t know that Roxy and Brooke had been friends, or, or lovers . I didn’t know anything about Roxy, I didn’t know where Roxy lived and so I couldn’t see any significance in the fact that Brooke got off the bus at that stop. And I had no reason really to think that that’s where Brooke might have been heading that night. And God, I wish more than anything that I’d known. Then I could have told the police. They would have gone round and questioned them. That woman …’

Abigail’s voice cracks. She puts the back of her hand to her mouth and smiles tightly.

‘Sorry.’

‘That’s OK. Take your time,’ says the interviewer off-mic.

‘That woman would have been stopped. There and then. Before she had a chance to hurt anyone else. And Brooke might have been saved.’

She begins to cry and the screen fades to black.

***

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Screen shows Roxy Fair sitting on a sofa, but this time Erin is sitting next to her.

Erin wears her hair long and parted down the middle. She has on a baseball cap with her gaming logo embroidered on it and a matching T-shirt.

The text beneath reads:

Roxy and Erin Fair

Then new text appears below, typed letter by letter.

Erin Fair was recently diagnosed as having ASD. To compensate for living with her disorder in a toxic and dysfunctional environment, she developed various habits and coping mechanisms. These include talking in a very soft voice. As some of her words are hard to pick up on, we have provided subtitles for Erin’s spoken words which will appear below.

‘Our mother didn’t want our dad to like us and she didn’t want us to like him. She wanted him all to herself and she wanted us all to herself. She wasn’t happy when we went to him or had fun with him or loved him. She wasn’t happy when he was with us and tried to

show us any love or affection. She controlled every element of our relationship with our father and his with us. It became worse and worse as we got older and older. When we tried to bring friends home, she would make them feel really unwelcome, and when Dad tried to organise fun things to do as a family she would find ways to sabotage them. And obviously there were other challenges in our family too. The fact that Roxy had oppositional defiant disorder. My issues. She didn’t let my father have anything to do with his first family in Canada. He used to have to sneakily Skype with them when she was at work, and one day she pretended to go to work but didn’t, she sat at the bus stop outside and then Dad looked up from his Skype call with his sons and saw Mum staring at him through the window. She didn’t talk to him for days after that, so my dad just Skyped them from my bedroom instead. She didn’t like us seeing our grandma because she was the enemy. She told us all these lies

about her, that she used to be a prostitute, brought tricks into the house, that she used to beat her and starve her and of course we were small so we believed her. But then our dad told us it wasn’t true, that Mum was just jealous of Grandma because she’d been with Dad before her.

‘But it got really, really bad when my dad got the job up north, when he was only home at the weekends, and we were alone with Mum. She couldn’t cope with us. Particularly couldn’t cope with Roxy. She took Roxy out of school when she broke my arm, which’ – she throws a playful look at her sister – ‘by the way, was kind of an accident. I mean, she did it in anger during a fight, but it wasn’t done maliciously, but the social services tried to intervene, based on things me and Roxy had said at school about our home life, and Mum pulled Roxy out of school for nearly two years and said she was “home-schooling” her. Which was bollocks. She just let her watch TV all day. And then when Dad got back at the weekends, she’d leave all this fake “learning” stuff around the flat to make it look like she’d been teaching her. And she’d leave Roxy tied up to the Naughty Chair in our bedroom. Sometimes for like hours. And she said if either of us ever told our dad that he would leave us and go back to his other family in Canada, and we’d never see him again.

Dad would come back at the weekends, and she would act like everything was just so happy and wonderful. I think he knew. He did know. But he was trapped too. He had nowhere to go. He was getting old, and he’d already lost two of his kids and he didn’t want to lose us too. He stuck it out, for as long as he could. Tiptoed round her. Did everything he could to keep her happy. And then one night Dad couldn’t sleep, and he walked past my room and heard me online. I guess this was about four or five years ago – it was after I finished school anyway, when I was gaming full-time – and he walked in and all my followers were like, “Oh my God, is that your dad?” And I was like, “Yes, this is Pops.” And he said hi to everyone and he wanted to know what we were doing, and he pulled over a chair and sat down and watched and after about an hour or so he was totally into it. And it was great having him there, because I talk so quietly, it’s hard for me sometimes to create the sort of energy that gamers want when they’re watching online, and he was there

giving it all the energy, all the vibes. He was so much fun, and everyone loved him, and so he started joining in more and more and of course no, we could not tell Mum about it. No way. She’d have put a stop to it, pronto. She’d have killed it dead. So Dad used to wait for her to go to sleep at night and then sneak in. And it was Dad who helped monetise it all, got me on Glitch, managed my subscriptions, opened my bank accounts. He did all of that for me. He was the one who made me famous. And we were planning a trip to Nevada for a convention that summer, the summer he died. I was going to play in front of a live audience, for the first time. Then when we got home, I was going to move out, move down to Bristol to live with Roxy. I was breaking free. It was all happening. It was all within reach. And I think she knew it. She could smell it. And that’s why she latched on to Alix Summer, made up that whole crazy story about Dad beating her and Dad abusing me. She wanted to disappear from her life before she lost control of it completely. Wanted to stop all the freedom and all the escaping. Roxy had already got out; she wasn’t prepared to let me and Dad get out too.’

‘And Brooke?’ the interviewer asks off-mic. ‘What can you tell us about Brooke?’

Erin sighs. ‘I was home with my mum. It was just the two of us. My father wasn’t in London that night. He was working away so it had nothing to do with him. Roxy was in Bristol, so it was nothing to do with her. And I was in my room, in another world. But then I heard voices. A girl’s voice. And I recognised it. It was Brooke, Roxy’s friend. She used to be over a lot in the months before but we hadn’t seen her for a while. I went to my door and peered through. I saw Brooke standing by the living-room door; her body language was like she didn’t want to stay. She was wearing this nice white dress. It was long. Down to her ankles. And my mum was saying, “She’s not here. She’s run away. It’s your fault.” And Brooke was saying, “No. No, it’s not my fault. I loved her. She was running away from you.” And then I saw my mum just …’

Erin pauses, closes her eyes for a moment and then opens them again, smiles awkwardly and continues:

‘She hit her. She hit her so hard. Around her face. And Brooke just stood there. She touched her cheek. She said, “See. See, that’s why

Roxy ran away. Because of you. Because you’re fucking mad. You’re just totally mad. Roxy hates you, you know. She told me that. She hates you.” And then Brooke picked up the hem of her skirt and turned, and I put my head back inside my bedroom and closed the door and I heard her stamping down the hallway towards the front door but then I heard this crack. This crash. And I heard this noise, this choking noise. I didn’t dare look. I just stood there, my adrenaline pumping so hard I could feel it in my blood, listening to these sounds of struggle, of violence. And then …’

She closes her eyes again. Roxy reaches across and takes her hand, squeezing it.

‘And then it went quiet. And I did not leave my room for a very long time. Not for a very long time.’

Interviewer asks off-mic : ‘How long?’ ‘A very long time.’

Interviewer: ‘Did you tell anyone what you’d heard?’

Erin shakes her head.

‘Not even your father?’

She shakes her head again.

‘Not then. No. But recently, I did. About a year before he died?’ ‘And what did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything. He just sort of shook his head and sighed.

I think he might have said fuck .’ ‘And what happened after that?

‘Nothing. Nothing happened. Life went on.’ ‘And you never said anything to your mother?’

‘No. I never said anything to my mother. I just cut myself off from her.’

‘Why?’

There is a short pause.

The camera zooms in on Erin’s and Roxy’s entwined hands and then pans out again.

‘Because I was scared. Scared that if she could do that to Brooke, she could do it to me.’

‘So what really happened that night?’ the interviewer asks off-mic . ‘The night she turned up on Alix Summer’s doorstep claiming to have been attacked by your father?’

Erin sighs.

The screen changes to a dramatic re-enactment of the night.

An actor playing Erin is in a messy bedroom at night, her face lit up by her computer monitor. She has headphones on and is interacting with online friends.

She pauses and removes her headphones.

She goes to the door of her room and puts her ear to it. Erin’s voice continues in the background:

‘They came home. I heard them at the front door at about ten o’clock. It was quiet for a while and then a few minutes later I could hear shouting. Really bad. I opened my door and watched through the crack. My mother was accusing my father of being an embarrassment. Saying that he’d shown her up. That she’d been ashamed of him, and my dad did what my dad always did, just sat and took it. But then, out of nowhere, my mum called him a paedophile. She was screaming it at him, over and over, saying that he had abused her and now he was abusing me and then I heard my dad start to shout back. He was saying that he’d had enough of her, that he couldn’t take it any more, that it was the end of the line. And then he said she was mad – “You’re actually mad” – and was telling her that she was stupid, and that was when I heard my mother scream, it was like an animal scream. And there was a bang and a crash and then suddenly it just went quiet. I walked in and I saw my father on the floor. I thought he was having a heart attack. His hands were up against his chest, there was blood running from the side of his head, and I ran over to him and was going to try and, I don’t

know, try and resuscitate him or something. My mum just stood and watched. She said, “It’s too late. He’s an old man. It was always going to happen sooner or later.” And she turned away and I said, “But we need to call an ambulance!”

‘She said, “I already did. It’s on its way.” I said, “Why did you call him a paedophile? Dad was not a paedophile.” And she said, “He had sex with me when I was sixteen. He was forty-three. What’s that if it’s not a paedophile? You put him on a pedestal but he’s nothing that you thought he was. He’s nothing at all. Just a dirty old man. A sad, pathetic, dirty old man.” And that was when I went for it. I said, “And you’re a murderer ,” and I picked up the remote control and I

ran to her and I battered her with it. Just battered her and battered her and she didn’t fight back, just put her hands up around her head, and then, suddenly, she made this weird noise and she pulled herself up and she pushed me, really hard, and I fell onto my bum, winded myself so I could barely breathe, and she put her foot into my guts and pressed down so hard and I couldn’t push back against her and my father was groaning, trying to get to his feet, and she just kicked out at him with her other foot and he was still clutching at his chest, making the terrible noises, and my mother, she stood above us both, and her face – there was nothing there. And she kept saying, “I am not mad. I am not stupid.” She said, “It’s you. It’s you.

You two drove me to this. You two. All I do is look after you both and all I get is hate. I can do better than this. I can do better than all of this.” And then I don’t remember anything after that. Just woke up and I was in the cupboard. Tied to a chair. And Dad was … well. We all know what happened after that.’

Erin shakes her head sadly, and the screen fades to black.