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.
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.
***
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.’
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.
***
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.
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 .
***
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.
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.’