The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  She looks through the door and out into the foyer of the restaurant. She can hear two customers. ‘Was she actually murdered here?’ one says to the other, gazing around her. Izzy peers out at them. Locals. She can tell immediately. No rucksacks. No walking shoes.

  Izzy looks back down at the knife in her hand, wishing she was somewhere else. Somewhere anonymous.

  Three more letters appear over the next three days.

  The first says:

  Humour a man who’s lost everything?

  And the final one says just:

  Please?

  Izzy hesitates as she holds the final letter. Please? She folds it and catches something. A scent, maybe. A memory. Nothing concrete that she can latch on to, but something. Her father’s broad smile. The way his eyes crinkled. The way he’d say, ‘Fetch me a beer, will you?’ to her, and she felt so grown up as she wrestled with the bottle opener while he waited patiently. But it’s mostly just the smile. That’s all.

  Something bubbles up inside her in response to it. It’s not hope, exactly. It’s too premature to call it that. But it is something. A desire to take action, to do something. To break free of the routines and the island. To dare.

  She’ll speak to Paul. Only Paul. Not her father. There’s no harm in it, she reasons as her hands shake. She keys in his number carefully, standing there in the restaurant where her mother once stood.

  She leaps.

  Nick notices that she is leaving early, as she expected he would.

  ‘It’s ten,’ he says. There’s no question in his voice, no concern on his face as he sips a coffee. He’s just making an observation.

  Izzy feels an unexpected flare of irritation rise up through her. Nick goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and goes to bed. Sometimes, he sees his family. There are occasional parties, trips across the Solent to London that they have to plan for. The ferry. The train afterwards. And she used to like that. That they were sequestered here, on the island, safe. The island that had seldom experienced murders. Until her mother. They had their routines here, safely hemmed in by the sea on all sides. Nick didn’t need anything more, and that suited her as she rebuilt her life.

  But now … today. About to see her father’s best friend, she feels differently.

  Nick’s made her a coffee, which he proffers to her, his eyebrows raised. ‘Mellow Bird’s. Four sugars,’ he says with a smile. He makes her the same drink each morning.

  ‘I’m going to go shopping before work.’ She shrugs, taking a few gulps of the hot coffee and putting her jacket on, even though she doesn’t really need it in the warm weather. Acting casually is the best way, she decides.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. A faint frown crosses his features.

  She doesn’t often do this: go out alone. Even if people don’t know who she is, she misinterprets their glances. The interested expressions that cross the shopkeepers’ faces as they see the name on her debit card. Everyone knows, she finds herself thinking when out. Every shopkeeper. Every hairdresser. They all know.

  It’s amazing how Nick doesn’t realize. How she can open herself so fully to him, late at night, lying on their big hotel bed, and tell him everything, and how she can now keep something so secret, and he has no idea; is unable to distinguish between the two. Nobody can, she supposes.

  She thinks immediately, as she often does, of her father and the things he must have kept from her during the days when he was planning to murder her mother. Is she foolish to start to investigate? To be sucked in by a liar? She doesn’t think so, but she doesn’t know. And there’s nobody she can ask. Even this man, standing in front of her, with complete access to everything her father has done.

  ‘That’s really nice,’ Nick says. ‘Good.’ He smiles at her; a warm, genuine smile. He’s glad she’s getting out. She feels a fizz of pleasure in her stomach for this easy, kind man who wants the best for her.

  ‘Have you ever looked my dad up?’ she says to Nick.

  He stares at her in surprise, his coffee cup halfway to his lips. ‘Where?’

  ‘On your systems, at work.’

  He looks away, his mouth turned down, then straight back at her. ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘But you could access his file …?’ She tails off. She knows it’s unfair of her to ask. ‘No, of course not,’ she says to him as she pours the coffee into a flask.

  He helps her, steadying the flask, his hand warm on her own.

  It’s a forty-minute drive west to Yarmouth, right across the island. Izzy loves how the character of the Isle of Wight changes, even by driving only a few miles. From the ancient-feeling woodland of Luccombe, to Yarmouth’s pretty harbour, the lamp posts decorated with garlands of flowers. The air down here is fresh, despite the warmth of the sun, and smells of fish and salt. By the time she reaches the coast, the radio is saying it could be set to be the hottest early May on record. She listens, looking forward to the summer and the influx of grockles: the tourists who line the streets along the coast. Who hover around postcard stands and ensure corner shops stock less food and more Isle of Wight mugs, sticks of rock and tacky ornaments. Izzy prefers the natives to be diluted by the tourists: there is less chance, then, that somebody she meets will know who she is. She can move more freely across the beaches during the summer months, sand between her toes.

  Paul has moved house, and he now lives in a Georgian semi on a quiet cul-de-sac. As he opens his door, her mind is suddenly crowded with memories. A picnic with their combined families on a village green one summer day. Izzy doesn’t know why she remembers it, but she does. Paul had brought a cool bag full of cider, and Gabe had said, ‘My kind of picnic.’

  She remembers Paul turning steaks, standing under cover on the patio as it rained July rain. She remembers him taking them all out on his boat, at Nettlecombe Farm Lake, Izzy trailing a hand in the cold water which parted effortlessly around her fingertips. And here he is. The same blue eyes, the same full, round face. But his hair is white and there is a curve just at the top of his spine: the beginning of old age.

  ‘Come on in,’ Paul says with an understanding smile, and she’s grateful for that: his warm greeting, in the coldest of circumstances.

  He leads her into an old-fashioned, large living room. A family home, Izzy thinks, as she looks around. A teapot sits on the dark wood coffee table. The green carpet is freshly hoovered; Izzy can see the markings. A large family photo collage sits on the mantelpiece. One of his daughters’ weddings. She resists the urge to go and pick it up and study it.

  This is what she misses. She had the childhood, but it’s this: the infrastructure of family life, in adulthood. Family doesn’t end at eighteen. Izzy imagines her parents having attended her own wedding to Nick a few years back. Gabe would have liked the ceremony, even though Nick didn’t want to deviate from the traditional vows. Her mother would have hit the dancefloor before anybody. She was like that: unapologetic about who she was. A great cook. A great dancer. The proprietress of Alexandra’s. A fully rounded woman, Izzy supposes.

  ‘Everybody’s out,’ Paul says to her, raising his eyebrows.

  Izzy wonders how to say it. How to tell him. After a second’s hesitation, she decides to plunge right in. ‘My father has been writing to me,’ she says, then swallows. She is circling the closed box where the case sits, unopened in her mind. The basics went in but, after that, Izzy shut it.

  On Hallowe’en, 1999, her mother received a call to say her car – in for service – wouldn’t be ready. She told a waitress she was going to take a taxi home from the restaurant because she figured Gabe would have been drinking. The taxi driver gave evidence to say she entered the house. That night, Gabe reported her missing. He didn’t know she hadn’t driven home, that there was a witness. She never came home, he said. Izzy was at her boyfriend Pip’s, oblivious. Two days later, her mother’s remains were recovered.

  That is the story.

  ‘What is he saying?’ Paul says. He leans back on his blue sofa and crosses his legs at the
ankles.

  ‘He is saying that –’ Izzy swallows. ‘He is saying that he is innocent.’

  Paul merely nods. There’s no shock. No derision or doubt. And that’s all it takes for Izzy to open the box. Just a crack. Just to look inside.

  Could it be?

  Her father murdered her mother. He was waiting for her. He had already threatened her once. These have been facts to Izzy for almost twenty years. The ferry leaves the island at five past the hour. There is always at least one T-shirt day in March. And her father murdered her mother. They’re just facts.

  But what if this one isn’t?

  ‘Do you believe him?’ Izzy says, not quite able to believe she’s truly here, opposite her father’s best friend. The ground seems to move underneath her. What if she’s been wrong? Is there any chance?

  ‘Yes. I do. Because … because I know him, I guess,’ Paul says. He looks so relaxed, one arm along the back of the sofa, his eyes on her. ‘And because the evidence was circumstantial.’

  ‘Was it?’ she says.

  ‘Some of it.’ He makes a gesture like weighing scales, then lets his hands fall back on to the sofa. He pauses, still looking at her. ‘I’m surprised you’re here,’ he says.

  ‘I …’ she starts, then stops. How can she explain it? ‘Would you believe me if I said I’d really never thought about whether or not he is guilty?’ she says.

  Paul’s expression opens, his eyebrows rising, his mouth parting slightly in understanding. ‘I see,’ he says slowly, fiddling briefly with his wedding ring. ‘Yes, I would believe that. You.’

  ‘And now it’s – I don’t know. I wonder if … should I hear him out? Is it safe to?’

  ‘You should do whatever you want to do,’ Paul says. ‘There’s no rule book. I’m meeting him next Wednesday. We’re playing pool. He says he got real good in prison.’ He offers her a hot drink and disappears into the kitchen to make it. She can see his form moving behind a set of frosted glass doors.

  Izzy thinks about what she wants to do. About what she believes. She casts about inside herself, but all she can find is other people’s opinions. What does she think? Who is her father, really? What is the truth? To answer those questions seems to require impossible reserves that she can’t find. Her cheeks heat up.

  Unbidden, an image of her father being led into a Serco prison van with tiny blacked-out portholes lining its sides pops into her mind. She only attended the trial to give her evidence, and again on the final day, to see his sentencing. She stood on the pavement and watched the prison van drive away. From there, her father would go to HMP Belmarsh to begin his life sentence.

  She closes her eyes as she remembers him. Swarthy arms, even though he had been in prison for months already. Black hair, just a few streaks of grey. His tall, rangy form that seemed always to have so much energy. His constant action. Hitting a tennis ball against the wall of the house while on hold to an insurance company. The way he’d race her to peg all of the laundry out in record time. An impromptu game of rounders on a summer Sunday night, the thwack of the ball against the bat, running through evening clouds of mosquitoes and through cut, sun-dried grass.

  He appeared on the local news after his first police interview. His final days of freedom. Those messy days, those two days of purgatory, when her mother was missing and not yet found. He looked at the camera and said, ‘No, I am not under suspicion.’ His wedding ring caught the autumn sunlight as he waved his hand. His eyes flashed, the whites bright against his tanned skin.

  ‘I often thought about Gabe’s side of it,’ Paul says as he arrives back in the living room, handing her a cup of coffee. His tea slops over the side of his mug as he sits down, and he grins and rubs at the spillage on the sofa. ‘I’ll get bollocked for that later, no doubt,’ he says. ‘Jane bought this sofa from some reclamation yard. She wipes it every night. It’s practically her pet.’

  But Izzy’s not listening. She’s thinking: Gabe. Everybody called him that. Even Izzy, by the time she was sixteen. ‘I’m Gabe, and you’re Iz,’ Gabe once said to her. ‘And we’re the best of friends.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Paul says with a sad smile. ‘I felt like, if only they could find that alibi … his acquittal would follow.’

  Izzy feels cold with shock. ‘What alibi?’

  ‘The neighbour.’

  ‘Who?’ she asks.

  ‘The one who was working casually for the summer. Windsurfing instructor? Or something. Moved right after your … after it happened. That was always the biggest part of Gabe’s defence.’

  Light is creeping, dawning, in the back of Izzy’s mind. She remembers something … the neighbour. The police interview.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘David Smith? He talks about him often. Even now.’

  Izzy spoke to the police during the two days when her mother was missing. ‘So your father said that you left the restaurant that night at ten to go to your boyfriend, er …’ the policeman consulted his pad, ‘Pip’s.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He says that he spoke to a neighbour that night. David Smith.’

  ‘David Smith?’ Izzy said.

  He’d said goodbye to her several days ago. ‘See you,’ he’d said casually, walking backwards down his drive to his removal van as she was coming home from school. She’d watched his back muscles flex as he hefted a box of books. The van was already packed, and he had to nudge a chair to make the box fit.

  ‘But he’s moved.’

  ‘We thought as much,’ the policeman said, making a brief note. Then, his voice suddenly serious, ‘When did he move? Your father is adamant they spoke. He said you’d vouch for that.’

  She felt her mouth slacken in shock. An alibi. Her father was constructing an alibi. She had read about them, watched crime dramas featuring them, and here was her father, in the wake of her mother’s death, asking her to corroborate his – in this, the most indirect of ways.

  ‘When did Dad say this?’

  ‘In his initial interview … yesterday.’

  Izzy blinked. ‘No – David … he moved.’ Izzy had seen the removal van drive off. One of the doors hadn’t quite closed because of all of his stuff. It had flapped as he drove down their street.

  Izzy stared at the wooden table, overcome by the very particular feeling of having had a significant life moment without even realizing it.

  As she left, she turned to the policeman. ‘You won’t tell him I told you the truth about David, will you?’ she said.

  ‘No. We won’t. Don’t worry,’ he said.

  She nodded. Surely her father was mistaken? At the time, she had hardly thought anything of it. The police were just following all lines of enquiry.

  But then her mother was found.

  Izzy stares straight ahead now, thinking of that alibi. She wishes, looking back, that she had understood much sooner. But the policeman’s casual tone, his presumption, had fooled her, just for a moment.

  ‘I looked into it a bit. David’s tenancy ended on the first of November,’ Paul says, running his finger over the rim of his mug. ‘So the defence team thought he might’ve been there that night. They really tried so hard to trace him. But it was tough then. No Facebook, you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ Izzy says, her voice barely above a whisper.

  What if … God, what if she was wrong? What if it hadn’t been his final trip? What if David Smith actually moved out several days later?

  The main part of his defence. And Izzy … she decimated that alibi. Did her father know? Is that why he has directed her to Paul? Not to protest his innocence but to let her know that he knows?

  She shivers with the sinister thought. Surely not.

  ‘The police were pretty sure your mother died that evening. The pathologist gave a window of between eleven and the early hours of the morning. Gabe says he was talking to David Smith for part of the evening and that David would be able to verify, because he was packing his van, that your dad didn’t go anywhere at all. If only the
y could find him.’

  Izzy sits, stunned, staring at Paul.

  An alibi. Something to eradicate the doubt. What if her father had one? It is as though another door has opened, letting in just a chink of light. Could it be?

  David Smith must be one of the most common names in the UK. But what if she could find him, and he could confirm he did talk to her father that night? It would change everything. Absolutely everything.

  Where is he now? Would he even remember? She supposes not. Maybe he doesn’t even know. The murder wasn’t national news. If he left the island, he might never have heard about it.

  They arrested her father two days after her mother went missing, within hours of discovering her body. Gabe never told her himself. She found out from the police. Her mother had been found. She had been murdered. Izzy’s father was arrested at the scene. Even now, today, she still can’t think about where and how her mother was found.

  Izzy gleaned from overheard snatches of her grandparents’ conversation that the prosecution at the trial had run parallel arguments against her father: both that he had planned to murder her mother and that it was a crime of passion. They moved fluidly between them, twisting, it seemed to Izzy, the facts to meet each. It didn’t matter to them which was true: it was clear he had done it. It was clear to everybody that he had done it. The evidence against him was overwhelming. The jury had looked bored when she was cross-examined, their eyes on her but not looking, not really.

  But what if … what if there is a different story? Another story? One he has had eighteen years to concoct, Nick would say, but Izzy doesn’t agree.

  That very first contact her father has made with her has opened up the door to something. To doubt. That’s all. Just doubt.

  Reasonable doubt.

  5

  Only her cousin, Chris, is still here in the restaurant with Izzy, stacking the dishwasher. It’s late and her eyes are tired.

  ‘How’s things, anyway?’ Chris says, his head bent as he stacks the plates in identical neat rows. ‘Hardly seen you.’ He is broadly set but meticulous, an easy multitasker. The perfect chef.