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.’
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.’
***
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.’
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.’
***
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’.