Page 11 of High Season
EIGHT
That night, Nina can’t sleep.
She tries all of her usual tricks. White noise in her headphones. Lavender-scented oil smeared on her pressure points. The three-hundred-pound eye mask Ryan had bought her last Christmas that promised to engulf her in darkness like nothing she’s ever experienced before.
None of it works. Nothing slows her heartbeat. Takes her into the relief of dreams.
She gives up sometime around four in the morning.
She goes downstairs and pours herself an ice-cold glass of water, picks a waxy orange out of her mother’s fruit bowl.
Back home, Nina buys so much fruit that she keeps it in an oversized salad dish.
Plump strawberries and green-skinned mangoes.
She is compulsive about arranging them, the art of having something wholesome and fresh and beautiful on display promising an order and an aesthetic to her life that usually feels just out of reach.
She rarely actually eats any of the fruit herself, buying more than she can conceivably get through.
In summer, it often rots before she can throw it away, apples furring with mold, sugar-drunk fruit flies cavorting in her kitchen.
Now, she peels the orange, and slides one plump segment into her mouth. Chews it until her jaw aches.
She sits at the kitchen counter and pulls out her phone. She types her own name into the search bar.
Googling herself is not new to Nina. She’s always resisted having an online profile, maintaining only a private Instagram account with a small circle of friends as her followers.
Still, her silence does not stop her name cropping up in dozens of search results.
Most of the plentiful information about her online refers to her as private or elusive.
Remarks that: Now an adult, Nina Drayton has never spoken out about the case.
She is referenced in long reads about former it-girl and famous heiress Evelyn Drayton and the many scandals of the Drayton family.
True crime blogs and Reddit threads about Tamara’s death name-drop her.
Archived articles from that summer and the months following relay the timeline of the investigation, and eventually, the trial.
Nina knows these results by heart. She’s stayed up late, clicking on links that have already turned purple to show that she’s visited them before, so many times that the web pages begin to resemble bruises. Violet sprawls of text, each an old wound to be pressed upon.
Now, when the results load, Nina is greeted by fresh links. They send a jolt of surprise through her, like new trees breaking through the earth overnight in a landscape that she has known for years.
Why are people suddenly talking about the Josie Jackson case again?
Newly commissioned documentary promises to “pull back the cover” on the noughties’ most notorious murder trial
The true-crime TikTokker bringing attention back to long-ago crimes
Nina clicks on this last link. It brings her through to an article in an online pop-culture magazine with brightly colored graphics and thick, blocky text. A large picture of a young woman with veins of bright red running through her box-dye black hair, a nose ring, tattoos snaking her arms.
Imogen Faye is better known by her online moniker, truecrimefangirl_2002.
That’s the name she’s been going by since she first created a TikTok account in 2020.
Back then, Faye, who was eighteen at the time, was interested in sharing stories about her longtime fascination—the female victims of notorious murders, many of them that had taken place before Faye was even born.
But little did she know how popular her videos would become.
Now just twenty-two, Faye is one of the world’s most-followed true-crime influencers.
She attracted thousands of fans with short series about notorious murders from the noughties.
But it wasn’t until her most recent story, the infamous case of society heiress Tamara Drayton, that television producers started sniffing around her channel.
There’s a video linked below, a freeze-frame of Imogen Faye looking mid-speech, a faintly gleeful expression on her face. Nina clicks. Brings her face close to the screen.
The video quality is razor sharp, despite the informality of the background.
A bedroom, the sprawl of unmade sheets. Throw pillows.
Red-painted walls, with three framed mugshots in black-and-white.
They could seem artsy, if Nina didn’t recognize them from the true crime shows Ryan occasionally watches, even though she tells him that she hates them.
A trio of notorious serial killers, their faces impassive, faintly brooding.
If you didn’t know, you might think that they were actors or rock stars, the kind of men that the young woman beaming at the camera might have impossible crushes on.
“Hi, true crime besties,” truecrimefangirl_2002 gushes into the camera. “Boy, do I have a story for you today. Real, hot-off-the-press, juicy, exclusive gossip for my murder girlies.”
Nina has already watched this video so many times, she could almost mouth along. She recognizes the American accent, each dramatic pause, each tattoo that snakes the length of this girl’s arms.
“So, you probably remember the Tamara Drayton case.”
A picture of Tamara flashes on the screen. Nina’s chest still clenches. Her sister. Blake’s twin. The traces of her brother, so familiar to Nina, echoed in the face of a girl that Nina barely knew. Barely remembers.
“So, this case slaps , it’s literally one of my faves.
It was big back in the noughties. Super rich family, pretty famous in the UK.
The mom’s a big deal, some kind of socialite like they have over there?
Anyway, they have this crazy huge mansion in France, always throwing these big, glamorous parties.
Like, you have got to be seen at these things, you know?
But then at one of these bashes, Evelyn’s oldest daughter, Tamara Drayton, gets found unconscious in the pool.
At first, they think she’s dead, but they pull her out and Bingo!
She’s got a pulse. Or at least she does for a few hours longer, before she dies at a local hospital.
So, yeah. Like, some real Agatha Christie shit.
Except for not really, because the whole thing actually ends up being pretty cut and dry.
Turns out Tamara’s sister, Nina Drayton, who was just five years old at the time, saw exactly what happened.
And oh boy, was she quick to point the finger. ”
The picture of Tamara is replaced by a photograph that Nina has seen dozens of times before. Josie Jackson, back when she was sixteen. Frowning from beneath a blunt-cut fringe. Furious. Defiant.
“Nina says that she saw the babysitter, Josie Jackson, drown her sister. Turns out, these girls had a longstanding feud and a fight got out of hand. Little Nina Drayton even testifies in court. And this is a huge deal. She’s one of the youngest people to ever give evidence in a murder trial, and basically the entire case rests on this.
So, Josie Jackson gets convicted. Case closed, right? ”
The girl grins broadly. A tongue piercing glints in her mouth.
“Besties, no. Wrong. Because we true-crime junkies are sleuthing hard, and lots of us think Josie Jackson is kinda fire, right? I mean, she seems low-key badass. And there is so much about this case that doesn’t make sense.
And at the heart of it is Nina Drayton, a little girl whose testimony changed everything.
So drop a like if you are obsessed with this case, too, and you want to know the truth because I am—”
Nina exits the video. Without the whine of Imogen Faye’s voice, the kitchen feels eerily quiet. Light is beginning to filter through the patio doors, the sun rising early at this time of year.
She can’t sit here waiting for morning. She’ll go insane.
All of a sudden, Nina has an urgent, desperate desire to run.
Outside the light is pale, the air cool. The sky is glazed yellow with the promise of a new day.
Nina deliberately chooses a difficult route.
Up the winding roads to the top of the hill.
A run that will make her legs ache, her lungs burn.
That will generate enough pain to put her back into her body instead of keeping her trapped in her head.
Her muscles are coiled tight. They only loosen when she begins to run.
Exercise has always been this to Nina. A punishment and a pleasure.
Every time her feet hit the ground, a wave of elation pulses through her.
Proof that she is pushing herself. A promise that she is making herself into a better, stronger, thinner person.
A more likable person. All the things that Nina wants to be and fears she isn’t.
Running is the one thing that stops her thinking too much.
The one thing that quashes the anxiety that so often rages beneath the surface of her skin.
When she weaned herself off her anxiety medication last year—with the help of a new therapist, an expert in obsessive-compulsive disorders who had a less laissez-faire attitude to pills than the psychiatrist she’d seen since childhood—running had filled the gap.
She had spent countless mornings since then discovering Ryan’s side of the city, pounding across London as the light turned from indigo, to a dusky gray, to the blanched brightness of an English spring.