Tuesday, 16 July

‘When is she leaving?’ Nathan whispers sharply into Alix’s ear the next morning.

They’re standing side by side in their en-suite bathroom, over their respective washbasins. Nathan is buttoning his work shirt. Alix is smoothing in her face cream.

‘Fuck. I don’t know. I’ve told her that Zoe’s coming to stay on Saturday, so she knows that at least she has to be gone by then.’

‘Wait. Hold on. Zoe’s coming? Did I know about that?’

Alix sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘Yes, Nathan. You did know about that. It’s been in the diary for a month. We’ve talked about it. Zoe and Petal sleeping over. And Maxine and the boys are coming over too and we’re having pizza and margaritas.’

‘So, a kind of girls’ night? No men?’

She sighs again. ‘No, you don’t have to stick around. But, Nathan, please just come home at a proper time. I can’t have my sisters judging you too. It’s bad enough having her ’ – she points at the ceiling, indicating Josie in the room above them – ‘judging you. Please just have a normal night out and come home and come to bed and be here when my sister wakes up on Sunday morning.’

Nathan makes a face at her reflection in the mirror. It’s his sweetest face. She can’t help but soften to him. ‘Good,’ she says, smiling slightly. ‘Good.’

‘But all bets are off if that woman is still here come Saturday night.’

‘She won’t be,’ Alix replies. ‘I promise you. She’ll be gone.’

Josie is clutching a pile of bedding when she walks into the kitchen at eight thirty.

‘Alix,’ she says. ‘I am so sorry. Fred had an accident in the night. In fact, a few accidents. I think maybe it was that stuff we had yesterday. That brown stuff. The baba—?’

‘Ghanoush?’

‘Yes. I think it’s not agreed with his stomach. I’m really sorry, but there’s some mess on the floor too. But let me sort it all out. Just tell me where the cleaning stuff is, and I’ll do it all.’

As she speaks, Alix watches in horror as Fred dribbles diarrhoea across the kitchen floor. ‘Oh,’ she says, taking the bedding from Josie’s hands. ‘Oh dear. Listen. You take him out in the garden. I’ll clean this up.’

‘I’m so sorry, Alix. I really am. He’s never done this before.’

‘No. No. Of course. Please don’t worry about it.’

Josie throws her an apologetic look and picks up the dog and heads into the garden, where he immediately squats and empties more liquid from within himself. Nathan, who is drinking his coffee on the terrace, looks from the dog to Josie and then turns to catch Alix’s eye through the bifold doors, throwing her a horrified look. Alix shrugs and gathers cleaning stuff from under the sink. She thinks of Saturday. She thinks of saying goodbye to Josie, and then the arrival of her sisters and the opening of tequila bottles and squeezing of limes and the calls and shouts of pizza preference to whoever is accessing the Deliveroo app and the children buzzing from room to room, and she wants it so badly she can almost taste it. But for now, she has liquid Pomchi shit to clean up and soiled bedsheets to wash and, of course, a bed to redress. She retches slightly as she lifts Fred’s mess with super-absorbent kitchen towels and antibacterial kitchen spray and throws them in the bin.

‘Kids,’ she says, through gritted teeth. ‘Chop chop. We’re going to be late.’

She leaves the house five minutes later, her nostrils still thick with the smell of dog shit.

Harry, her next-door neighbour’s son, is just turning towards his house when Alix gets home half an hour later.

‘Hi!’ she says.

He turns at the sound of her voice and looks at her benignly. ‘Hi,’ he says.

‘How are you?’

‘Oh. Yeah. I’m good, thanks. How about you?’

‘Yes. I’m good too.’ She glances at her front door, then joins Harry at the turning to his garden path. ‘Roxy Fair,’ she begins quietly. ‘Do you remember a friend of hers called Brooke?’

‘Er, yeah. I remember her. She was a bit …’

She watches his face as he struggles to find the words he’s looking for.

‘A bit of a … a player?’ he says eventually.

Alix throws him a disapproving look. ‘An opinion based on …?’

‘Yes. Sorry. I mean nothing really. She was just quite mature for her age. Quite heavy-handed around boys. I have no idea if she was actually sleeping around, but that was the impression she gave.’

‘And what happened to her? After you all left school? Do you have any idea?’

He blows air from his cheeks and says, ‘She went missing, as far as I recall. Ran away, maybe? I can’t quite remember. But I do know there was some kind of falling out between Roxy and Brooke, towards the end?’

‘Oh. Right. And what was that about?’

‘I don’t know. But it was toxic for a while. Really toxic. There was a fight. Like, a cat fight? One of them got a split lip. Can’t remember which one.’

‘And Brooke. Can you remember her surname?’

‘Yeah, I can. It was Ripley.’

‘And Brooke spelt …?’

‘B-R-O-O-K-E. I think.’

‘Amazing!’ Alix flashes him a smile. ‘Great. Thanks. Say hello to your mum and dad for me, won’t you?’

Josie is gone when Alix gets back inside. The kitchen still smells faintly of disinfectant and shit, and she opens up the sliding doors to let fresh air in. Then she makes herself a coffee and opens her laptop and googles ‘Brooke Ripley’.

There are many, most of them too old to be Roxy’s Brooke. She opens Instagram and searches for her there. There are five. None of them looks quite right, but she clicks on each in turn. They live in places that someone who’d been brought up in Kilburn would not end up living, at least not at the age of twenty-one. None of them looks quite right either. Then she goes on to Facebook and searches for her there. She clicks first on People but runs once more into a seam of unlikely candidates, before clicking on Posts . And there – her heart stops and then races – there is her name, Brooke Ripley , highlighted, in a sequence of posts about a missing girl.

Alix clicks on the first post. She reads the first few words: ‘Please help! Anyone in Kilburn/Paddington/Queen’s Park/Cricklewood areas. My beautiful niece, Brooke …’

And then she starts.

Josie is standing in front of her, clutching Fred.

‘Oh!’ says Alix. ‘You made me jump!’

‘I’ve cleaned the floor upstairs,’ she says. ‘And opened the window to let some air in. If you want to give me some fresh bedding, I’ll pop it on.’

‘Great. I’ll get some out for you next time I go up.’

‘Again, I am so sorry. He seems fine now. I think he just needed to pass it through his system. I’ve never fed him anything like that before. He clearly wasn’t built for it.’

‘Bless him,’ says Alix. ‘Poor little thing. Are you up for some more recording this morning?’

Josie nods. ‘Absolutely. Yes. Let me just get myself a coffee.’

‘Great. I’ll just pop to the bathroom. See you soon.’

Alix shuts her laptop and heads upstairs to grab some fresh bedclothes for Josie from the cupboard on the landing. She leaves them at the foot of the stairs, intending to let Josie do it herself, but something makes her carry them up the stairs to the top floor. The door to the spare room is ajar. A breeze ruffles the curtains through the open window. The clothes that Josie was wearing when she arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning are hanging, laundered and fresh, from the freestanding rail. The pyjamas that Alix lent Josie are folded neatly on the stripped bed. In the en suite a damp towel hangs from the rail, and on the glass shelf above the sink is a tube of Alix’s foundation that she has no recollection of having ever put there, and also a tube of her mascara. She picks them up and looks at them curiously, as if they might offer her an explanation.

Then she sets about remaking the bed in the fresh clothes. She stuffs the pillows into their cases, shakes the duvet into its cover and tucks the sheet under the mattress, and it is as she is doing so that she feels something hard and cold. She locates it and pulls it out.

It’s a key. It’s attached to a fob with the number 6 written on the internal paper label. The fob is streaked with dried-on blood. Alix drops it, as if it is white-hot, then slides it, quickly, urgently, back under the mattress and closes the bedroom door behind her.

Josie is waiting for her in the kitchen. She smiles. ‘Ready?’ she says.

Alix nods.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a woman walking through a park with a chocolate Labrador. The sun is setting in the sky behind her and is a deep, blood red.

The next shot shows her sitting in a small armchair, next to a blazing wood fire in a grate, the dog at her feet sleeping.

The woman has a glass of red wine in front of her and her legs curled up beneath her. The text underneath says:

Ffion Roberts, Brooke Ripley’s aunt

The woman called Ffion opens up her laptop, which is briefly shown on screen.

It shows a Facebook post.

The camera returns to Ffion and shows her reading the post:

‘“Please help! Anyone in Kilburn/Paddington/Queen’s Park/Cricklewood areas. My beautiful niece, Brooke, went to her school prom on Wednesday. She told friends that she was going to meet ‘a friend’ afterwards and her schoolfriends said goodbye to her at the bus stop outside the prom venue, on Shoot Up Hill in Cricklewood, at just after nine p.m. We have CCTV footage of her getting on the number twenty-eight bus at nine eleven and getting off again near the top of Maida Vale at nine twenty-two. After that, we don’t know where she went, but she is not answering her phone and her mum and all her family are worried sick. If you have any idea who she might have been going to meet on Wednesday at nine thirty, please, please let us know. And please share this as far as it will go. The police have been informed but there’s only so much they can do.”’

She closes the laptop and looks up at the interviewer. Her eyes are filled with tears. Her face crumples and it is clear she is about to cry.

‘I’m sorry.’

She turns away from the camera .

‘I’m really sorry. Could I just have a minute?’