Nathan’s funeral was every bit as horrific as Nathan’s funeral was always going to be. Nathan knew so many people, and everyone who knew Nathan loved Nathan. The atmosphere in the packed crematorium was febrile with pain and shock. Unlike Alix, Nathan had known hurt in his life. His mother had died when he was twelve. His little brother had killed himself when Nathan was twenty-eight, just two years before Alix met him. And Nathan had dragged himself out of pain and grief and made a good life for himself. He hadn’t gone to university; he’d gone straight out to work and grafted hard for every penny he ever earned and was generous to a fault with the money he worked so hard for. And the drinking – it was so painfully crystal clear now to Alix – it was not about her, it was never about her. It was about him, about Nathan, about how he balanced out the delicate ecosystem of his damaged psyche. He didn’t want Alix to see that dark side of him. He did not want her to see him that way. When he drank like that, to the point of oblivion, it was self-medication, it was relief, it wasn’t good times and escaping-from-the-battleaxe. He hated himself like that and that was why he didn’t come home. Not because he didn’t want to be with her, but because he didn’t want her to be with him.
Nearly three hundred people packed out the crematorium near Nathan’s father’s house in Kensal Rise. Beyond the gates of the cemetery and on to the main road, the press and paparazzi kept a discreet distance. Alix wore a dress that she’d chosen to match the colour of Nathan’s eyes. The shop assistant had called it artichoke . Alix didn’t know what colour an artichoke was; she just knew that the dress was the same colour as Nathan’s eyes and that was the most important thing.
The weather was pleasant that day, four weeks to the day after Nathan’s body was brought out of the waters of Lake Windermere, not yet bloated, thank goodness, still recognisably Nathan. The month had been a blur, but that day felt sharp and clear to Alix, somehow. Being with so many people felt right, and afterwards at the wake thrown by Nathan’s company at a huge bar in Paddington overlooking the canal, with seats outside and bottomless champagne and a playlist put together by Nathan’s best friends and the children dashing about in summer clothes, and lively urgent chatter and laughter and people looking their high summer best, it felt almost as if Nathan would appear at any moment, in his element, loving every second, and when he didn’t appear it felt as though maybe he was at home waiting for her, and when he was not at home waiting for her it felt as though maybe he was away on a boys’ trip and when, ten days after the funeral, he is still not home, it is then and only then that Alix collapses. She lies on her bed, the day before Eliza’s first day at secondary school, wearing her artichoke dress and clutching a pillow, arching and un-arching her back as spasms of agonised crying rack her body at the realisation of what she has lost.
The screen shows footage of a BBC News report filmed outside a cemetery in Kensal Rise, northwest London.
The male reporter speaks respectfully and solemnly.
‘Today Nathan Summer, the husband of podcaster Alix Summer, has been laid to rest at Kensal Green crematorium in North London. Dozens upon dozens of well-wishers, friends and family have flooded through these gates this morning to say their final farewells to a man who, it appears, was loved by many. But today, still, a month after his body was discovered in the shallows of Lake Windermere, police are no closer to tracing the woman accused of killing him with an overdose of barbiturates in a kidnapping gone wrong. Josie Fair, forty-five, was last seen on Thursday the twenty-fifth of July in the village of Ambleside, where she handed her dog to a pair of strangers before disappearing completely. Fair is also being hunted in connection with the murders of her husband, Walter Fair, seventy-two, and sixteen-year-old Brooke Ripley and the attempted murder of her daughter Erin Fair, twenty-three years old. Since her disappearance, police have been following leads of sightings of Fair as far afield as northern France, Marrakech, Belfast and the Outer Hebrides, but still, to this moment, her whereabouts remain a mystery.’
The footage shows a long-range shot of Alix Summer and her two young children exiting the cemetery.
Alix is in a green dress, with a black jacket slung over her shoulders, wearing dark glasses.
Mourners come to her as she walks and offer condolences.
‘But for now,’ the reporter continues , ‘there is some small semblance of closure at least for Alix Summer as she says a final farewell to her husband. This is Matt Salter, from Kensal Green, for the BBC.’
The screen changes to Alix Summer.
She is sitting in her recording studio, wearing a yellow sleeveless top. Her blonde hair is tied back from her face.
The text beneath reads:
Alix Summer, January 2022
Alix speaks to an off-camera interviewer.
‘I couldn’t come in here’ – she gestures at her recording studio – ‘not for months and months. It felt so … full of her. So full of Josie. So, I just abandoned it. Focused on the kids, focused on getting my daughter through her first term of secondary school without a dad, on persuading my grieving son that I could be fun too. You know? And then a few months later, of course, the pandemic hit and life changed and everyone started doing things differently. Getting dogs. Baking bread. Writing novels. All of that. And I realised that it was all on me now, all of it. There was no life insurance policy, no income. There’d been a few thousand in our joint bank account when Nathan went missing, but that wasn’t going to last very long. I needed to get a job, but of course, how can you get a job in the middle of a global pandemic when you’re a single parent home-schooling two children? I felt terrified, started making plans to sell the house, downsize. But then one night, a few weeks into the first lockdown, I looked out across the garden and there was this fox, sitting by the door to my studio, staring at me. And he looked like he was issuing me with a challenge. Like, a, you know, what are you going to do now? kind of thing. Like an are you just going to sit around feeling sad about everything or are you going to fire up your engines and make something out of all this fucking awfulness? Because believe me, it was truly awful. But I knew that I had the makings, if I could only stomach it, of a truly unbelievable story.
‘So the next morning I made myself a strong coffee and took a deep breath and I unlocked the door to the studio and I thought: Right, Alix Summer, it’s all there, everything you need to make this happen, hours and hours of recordings with Josie, with Roxy, with Pat. I had access to all the news reports online. I had recorded all my calls throughout, so I had my phone conversations with DC s Albright and Bryant. I had more than enough to create something completely unforgettable, something unmissable. I got in touch with Andrea Muse, the famous true crime podcaster, and asked if she would help produce and edit. My previous podcasts had been straightforward one-on-one interviews, all recorded in one sitting, just needed polishing and a light edit before they went out into the world. This was going to be hugely different, involving complex editing skills that I did not possess. So, with Andrea on board, I started, that day. By the end of the month we had the first episode, and it went live in late May. And yes, as you know, it went viral. Totally viral. After the first episode aired, I had people contact me directly wanting me to interview them. Brooke Ripley’s mother. Josie’s friend Helen from school. Walter’s son in Canada. So week by week the podcast was becoming more and more complex, more and more multi-layered, more and more gripping. And then, midsummer 2020, close on a year since Nathan died, I got a message from Katelyn. You know – Katelyn Rand? They’d just relaxed the restrictions then, which meant I could meet up with her, face to face. So we arranged to meet in Queen’s Park, just around the corner from my house. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I was quite terrified.’