Page 71 of None of This is True

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.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

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.’

***

Midday

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.

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