Page 72 of None of This is True

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.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

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.’

***

Evening Standard , Tuesday 23 July

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’.

Wednesday, 24 July

Alix collects the children from school. It’s the last day of term tomorrow and they appear outside the playground weighed down with old projects, exercise books and pieces of art, which Alix takes from them while they chatter and playfight each other. Mothers approach and touch her arm gently, ask her if she’s OK. She smiles tightly and nods. She’s not OK. She really is not OK.

There has been no helpful response to the press reports. No sightings of the hire car. No sightings of Nathan. No sightings of Josie. Erin’s card has not been used again. Katelyn has not come forward. Nobody who knows Katelyn has come forward, even though the image of her taken from the hotel’s CCTV with the large scratch down her cheek has been widely disseminated. The drops of blood found on the floor of the hotel off Tottenham Court Road have been sent for testing and the police are currently trying to trace the sender of some messages found on Erin’s laptop. They are targeting dog owners and dog shelters, asking them to keep their eyes peeled for Pomchis. They are looking at CCTV footage from the cashpoint machines used by whoever has been using Erin’s debit card to empty her account of nearly ten thousand pounds in cash since last week. They are looking at CCTV of Manor Park Road to see if Josie has been seen in the area since she left in the middle of the night almost two weeks ago, and they have traced the passengers of the six buses that passed the Fairs’ home between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. on the night that Josie claims to have been beaten by Walter to see if any of them saw anything through the window. They have traced people that Erin had been messaging in the days and weeks before her disappearance. They have been in touch with Walter’s two sons from his first marriage, who are in Canada, and they have been in touch with Josie’s employers and colleagues.

But it has now been nearly four days since Josie stole Nathan from outside the hotel off Tottenham Court Road and there is nothing. Not one thing.

Until now. As Alix puts the key into the lock of her front door, her phone rings. It is DC Sabrina Albright. ‘I wonder if we might be able to get you along to the station at some point? To see me and my colleague DC Bryant. At your convenience. We have found some objects in the Fairs’ property. A strange selection of things. Including the edition of the interiors magazine you mentioned you’d seen Mrs Fair remove from your recycling box while you were out. And something else, something that, well … if you were able to come along and cast your eye, see if you recognise anything else …?’

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