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.
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.’
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.’
***
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.
***
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.