Page 88 of None of This is True

Wednesday, 28 October

In October of that year, just before the second national lockdown is imposed, DC Albright phones Alix.

‘We’re closing off most of the investigation now, clearing out some boxes of evidence, and I have something for you. The bits and pieces that Josie took from your house last year – I thought you might like them back? I can drop them over this afternoon.’

DC Albright arrives just after four o’clock, when the children are both back from school and the puppy is in hyper mode, leaving hot puddles of pee in her wake as she turns circles of excitement at the appearance of somebody at the door.

‘Sorry, Alix. I can see you’re busy. I won’t keep you. But I just wanted to say, I listened to your podcast, the whole thing, and it was amazing. It really was. You know, for a detective, it’s rare to get that level of deep, deep insight into a criminal you’re still trying to hunt down. And her voice – just listening to it, it put shivers down my spine all over again. It was like reading a novel, you know, I just couldn’t stop listening. And that last line! My God! I did laugh out loud! And of course, it’s sent lots more info our way.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Most of which is total nonsense and time-wasting. But a couple of leads worth following up. Someone who thinks they saw her in Northampton last week. We’re looking into that. So yeah, we’ll keep you up to date with everything. And fingers crossed. Soon enough. I mean, ten grand won’t last her forever, will it? She’ll have to plug back into the real world at some point, start leaving a trail again. It’s just a matter of time. Anyway, here you go. Here’s the things. We returned the other things to Brooke’s mum, but she said only a couple of bits belonged to Brooke. The corsage. The hair scrunchie. She said she’d never seen the phone case before. And Roxy and Erin didn’t recognise it. So yeah, that’s a mystery. One of many.’

She smiles warmly at Alix and then she goes. Alix goes straight to the kitchen to get pet spray and kitchen roll to mop up Matilda’s accidents and then she sits at the kitchen table with the jiffy bag in front of her. It takes her a minute to summon the will to open it. She pulls the objects out, one by one, and lays them in a row. She is horribly aware of where they have been, of what they imply, but also aware that these are small and important pieces of her that Josie had stolen, and suddenly the need to reinstate them in her home overrides her distaste about where they’ve been and she gets quickly to her feet and moves about her home, replacing each object in turn. She finds the small space on the cork board where Eliza’s drawing had once been and pins it back into place in the exact spot it had been taken from, feeling a strange satisfaction as the tip of the pin meets and inserts into the same hole. She puts the receipt back inside the Livingetc magazine and takes it to the front door and places it halfway down the pile in her recycling bin. She takes the Nespresso pod and replaces it in the jar in her recording studio, puts the teaspoon in the dishwasher and the hand soap in the guest WC beneath the stairs. She is about to put the passport photographs of Leon back in the messy drawer where they’d once lived, but decides against it. He looks so young, so awkward, so fed up in the photos. But they are him, caught at a moment in his life when he hadn’t known pain, loss or grief, and she wants to celebrate that, so she takes another pin and attaches the strip to the cork board, and touches it tenderly. And then lastly there is the bracelet. The delicate golden bracelet that Nathan had bought her for her birthday, and as she stares at it she hears the echo of her voice, calling through to the husband that she no longer has: Nathan! Have you seen my bracelet? The one you bought me for my birthday? and then she rewinds fast past that moment to the memory of Nathan giving it to her a year earlier, clipping it together gently on her wrist, which she held against this table, right here, this very spot. And she upturns her wrist and she calls through the house to her son, her flame-haired boy, ‘Leon! Baby! Can you help me with something?’ And he appears in the doorway, his pale eyes blinking.

‘What?’

‘Can you do up my bracelet for me?’

He puts his iPad down on the kitchen table and walks towards her. He smells of boy, of home, of hair, of love. She can hear his slightly nasal breathing as he stands over her, concentrating on feeding the loop in the clip, missing a couple of times and then saying, ‘There. It’s in.’

He’s about to wander off again but Alix draws him close, her arms around his thin waist. ‘We’re good, aren’t we?’ she asks him. ‘Us three? We’re good?’

Leon nods, rests his chin against her head and says, ‘Yes. We’re good.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Screen shows a dramatic re-enactment of a postman dropping a pile of letters through the letterbox of a Victorian terraced house.

An actor playing Alix Summer picks up the letters and takes them into a kitchen, where she begins to open one.

The text below reads:

On 2 November 2020, two months after the release of the last episode of Alix Summer’s podcast, Alix Summer received a letter in the post.

The screen changes to Alix Summer reading aloud from the letter in her recording studio.

‘“Alix. It’s taken me a long time to know what to say to you and how to say it. I listened to your podcast this summer. Basic bitch? Really? I’ve been under attack all my life, Alix. All my life. And now from you too.

‘“When I first met you, I thought you were special. I thought it was some kind of destiny. Finally, someone who got me, who understood me, someone who realised how hard my life had been. And I gave you my truth, Alix. And what did you do with it? Turned it into some tacky ‘true crime’ rubbish, when not one minute of it was true. None of it. And as for Erin and all her lies, I knew she would lie. Of course she would lie. Her and Roxy, trying to make me look bad when it was them all along. The fact that you bought into their act makes me think less of you. I am so disappointed in you. I really am.

‘“And I did not take Nathan from you on purpose; I told you that already. I explained: it was an accident. I was giving him the right dose but it stopped working and he was making so much noise and so I had to give him more. How was I supposed to know that it would kill him? But still you’re holding it against me, acting as if I knew what I was doing, acting as if there’s something wrong with me when there isn’t. It’s the world that’s wrong – you and I both know that.

‘“Fate has brought us together twice now, Alix, once on the day we were born, then again on the night we turned forty-five. Maybe it will find a way to bring us together again and maybe then we can get back to where we were. I hope so, I really do.

‘“Please send my love to your lovely children, especially Leon. I had such a soft spot for him. A lovely boy. A delicate boy. Keep him safe.

‘“Josie”.’

Alix folds the letter in half and puts it down on her desk.

She looks at the interviewer and shakes her head wryly.

The text below reads:

At the time of broadcast, Alix Summer has not heard from Josie Fair again.

SIXTEEN MONTHS LATER

March 2022

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