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A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a young, very bubbly woman. She has a mass of blonde curls tied back into a ponytail and wears large gold hoop earrings and a fitted black cardigan.
She sits on a small red sofa in a dimly lit bar and is shown rearranging herself a few times and trying to find the perfect pose.
‘Can you see down my top at this angle?’ she asks the interviewer.
The interviewer is heard saying, ‘No, you’re fine,’ off-mic.
She laughs and says, ‘Good. Well, then. Let’s go.’
The text beneath reads:
Katelyn Rand
‘Well, I wouldn’t say I was a friend of Josie’s. I knew of her. She knew of me. I lived on her estate when I was small and I remember her and her mum. Particularly her mum. Everyone knew Pat O’Neill. She was larger than life. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.’
Katelyn laughs wryly.
‘And I remember my mum telling me about Josie suddenly leaving home at eighteen and the gossip that went round at the time, that she’d gone off with an older man. Last time I saw her I guess I was about ten? And I didn’t see her again for years and years. Until I brought some stuff into that shop where she worked. Stitch, the alterations place in Kilburn, and I recognised her immediately. She hadn’t changed at all, weirdly. Pretty sure she was still wearing the same clothes she used to wear when she was a teenager! So I got chatting with her and she asked me what I did and I told her about the acting. Told her I was struggling. You know. As actors do. Made light of it. And she said – and these were her exact words – “I might have a gig for you. Give me your number.” So I gave her my number and then, yeah, a few days later she called me. And that was that. Up to my neck in it. Up to my fucking neck.’
***
12.40 p.m.
It’s a twelve-minute walk from the lush greenness of Queen’s Park to the stained grey of Josie’s street. Even on a sunny day the stucco houses look humiliated by their poor condition. Alix stares first from across the street and then from outside, directly into the windows. She sees a table in the bay. It’s a dark wood, the sort that is unfashionable these days. There are three dark wooden chairs around it with barley-twist spindles. She can make out a sofa facing towards an older-looking television. Blank walls. A kitchen open to the living room is built into an alcove at the back. The cabinets are pine clad with white plastic handles. She can make out a dark passageway leading to a door. Denim curtains are half drawn over the smaller window. Through the gap she can see a bed, freshly made with a pale floral duvet and two floral pillows, a pair of denim cushions, some white Formica-clad drawers.
It looks like a rental that’s just been vacated by its previous owners, spruced and tidied and dressed for its next occupants. It does not look like a flat that is currently being lived in. She goes back to the big bay window, casts her eyes around the room again. It is hard to believe that a domestic incident occurred here in the early hours of Saturday, that a big man beat his small wife until she was bloodied and bruised.
And where is that big man? she wonders. There is a laptop closed on the dining table. But nothing else. Josie described him as never going out. As always being home. But he is not home now. So where is he?
She looks, one more time, at the sofa. She pictures Walter and Josie sitting side by side in the aftermath of his atrocity with Brooke, silently watching TV. Then she pictures Walter, five years later, slamming his wife’s head against the wall in rage at her belated accusations.
As she turns back, she looks slightly to her left. She sees a double-decker bus rumbling down Kilburn High Road a few hundred feet away, heading south towards Maida Vale. And as she sees it, she thinks of Brooke Ripley climbing off a bus in her white column dress five years ago, just there.
Just there, in fact, at the point where Kilburn High Road meets Maida Vale.
Just there, a two-minute walk from Josie and Walter’s flat.
2 p.m.
Alix stares hard at Josie. She tries to make her face look soft, but it’s difficult because inside she feels all hard edges and spikes and darkness. Josie has her headphones on and is drinking tea out of Alix’s favourite mug. (Alix suspects that Josie knows it is Alix’s favourite mug and that is why she always uses it.) Alix adjusts the volume on the controls and then clears her throat, watching the lines jumping on the screen of her laptop. Her next question feels solid on her tongue, like something that she might accidentally swallow and choke on. She clears her throat again and says, ‘So. What happened to Brooke?’
‘Brooke?’
Alix smiles and nods. ‘Yes. Brooke.’
‘I have no idea. Never heard from her again.’
‘Never heard from her again?’
‘No.’
‘Did you never try to find her?’
Josie narrows her eyes at Alix and throws her a questioning look. ‘No. Why would I? After what she did?’
‘Well, maybe she might have had some sort of an idea about where Roxy was.’
