Chris’s presence, to her, is the most companionable of anyone’s, because he never asks anything of her. They used to sit together in silence against the apple tree outside the restaurant when they were teenagers, the one she’d had cut down five years ago. Then they were housemates for a few years in their twenties. Even now, they can wash up for an hour and say nothing, or talk non-stop. There is no bullshit, no tricky conversations: her apple-tree friend.
Their fathers are brothers. Estranged, of course; her father is estranged from everybody. There is just the faintest trace of Gabriel in Chris: skin that tans easily, something about the set of his jaw, the same distance between his eyes. You would never spot it if you weren’t looking for it, but Izzy is. He moves with the same sort of energy, washing up and putting away, and prepping for tomorrow. His phone is on the counter. He’s always recording his cooking on Instagram Stories. He likes social media unabashedly. Izzy will tease him about it, but he won’t rise to it, is so assured that he doesn’t even defend himself. When the restaurant’s business boomed because of his Instagram following, he said nothing.
‘Do you ever think about my father?’ Izzy says impulsively, leaning her elbows on the table. Her mother used to do exactly this, she can remember it so clearly – pale arms folded upwards, face cupped in hands – and so she shifts position. What would her mother think of her trip to Paul’s this morning? She was one of life’s hard workers, a go-getter, so maybe she’d be proud of Izzy going forth and getting answers, finally. ‘Don’t just ignore it!’ she would shout up the stairs when Izzy had received poor feedback, failed tests, handed in below average coursework. She had tried to teach Izzy, again and again, about facing up to things, but then she had died before Izzy had properly learnt.
Chris’s movements don’t stop, but his cheeks redden underneath his dark beard. ‘Sometimes,’ he says. He’s wearing navy-blue Crocs, and they squeak on the floor as he moves. ‘Yeah, sometimes,’ he says with a little nod of his head. He rubs at his beard and then scrapes a plate into the bin.
‘Me too,’ she says. She appraises him as he rinses the plate, the water frothing over its surface.
‘Especially at the moment,’ he adds, darting a glance at her.
Izzy and Chris went to get their GCSE results together in the rain twenty years ago. She was wearing flared jeans that the damp rose up through. ‘Nice seventies vibe,’ her cousin had said immediately as he opened the door.
Her uncle Tony was behind Chris. ‘Make sure he tells us his grades before he goes on the lash,’ he’d said.
Izzy had liked that. Tony had always treated them as equals: adults entitled to celebrate, to commiserate; not teenagers deserving of admonishment. Even now, he works shifts at her restaurant and defers entirely to her seniority. He never pulls rank, or tells her what her mother would have done. The only thing he asked was never to work mornings – he’s retired, and now a night owl – and Izzy has been happy to oblige. She prefers to work the same shifts each week: Wednesday through to Sunday, lunchtime and evenings. On working days, she eats cheese with Nick late at night in bed. She hates her job, but she likes the steadiness of the working week. And, luckily, Nick does too. When they’re off, they’re rudderless, meandering, wondering what to do.
‘What do you want to do after?’ Chris had said that day, as they walked together in the August drizzle. Her feet squeaked in her rubber flip-flops on his quiet street.
‘Depends how good our results are.’
‘No, let’s do something cool, whatever they are,’ he said.
‘I want to go and sit in McDonald’s and eat rubbish,’ Izzy said honestly.
‘I get it,’ Chris said immediately.
She never got to do these things. She went to ballet school every Saturday, and on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday evenings. She was never idle, and nor would she eat rubbish. Her mother wouldn’t let her. She was one of the most active people Izzy knew. She slept little, worked a lot. Never moaned, either. Izzy sometimes tries to channel her now, late at night in the restaurant when she is tired and feeling lazy, but her mother resolutely won’t come.
‘Then we’ll do that,’ Chris had said simply. That was how he was, too: mellow, willing to do whatever. Easy company, her cousin.
When she looks back up at him now he is staring at her, a serious expression on his face. That look that says he understands her.
‘What?’ she asks.
‘He’ll come here,’ Chris says simply. He stops what he’s doing and stands there, looking at her, holding a plate in one hand, down by his side. ‘You know he will.’
The memory of that rainy day they collected their GCSE results fades from her mind as she remembers everything that came after it: the murder trial, forensic reports, the appeal, headlines about their family. Their quiet suburban life, their family business: decimated. By what? By reporters. Police cordons. Crime Scene Investigators.
And murder.
‘I doubt that,’ she says vaguely.
Let’s not talk of this, she thinks. Let’s just ignore it. Put it back in the box. Why doesn’t she tell him? She casts about inside herself, looking for the answer. Eventually, she stumbles upon it: it is because she doesn’t want to be dissuaded. She wants to find out for herself. Finally. To find her own voice, amongst all of the others. She wants to hope.
She locks up with Chris a little later, after eleven. And even though she has company, she still checks over her shoulder. Now that Gabe is out, and she has seen him, she looks for him everywhere. Is she looking out of hope or fear? She doesn’t know. She wants to see him, and she doesn’t want to see him, all at once. A man on the street outside Tesco had his gait – his energetic walk from her childhood – but wasn’t tall enough. Another man had his exact build, but blond hair. But Gabe, the real Gabe, stays respectfully away.
‘I can’t believe it’s arrived. The day he’s out. I sort of thought it would never happen,’ Chris says as they walk across the car park. He has hay fever; his nose is red, and he rubs at it.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Eighteen years. It seemed endless then.’
Izzy shivers now in the warm air by Chris’s car. He’s unlocking it, the lights flashing and turning the bushes an amber hue, but he hasn’t opened the door yet.
‘It’s amazing how much of the trial I remember,’ he says, turning to her. He sneezes and gets a packet of tissues out of his pocket. ‘Bastarding hay fever.’
Izzy looks down at her trainers, avoiding his gaze. The trial. Her father’s police interview. Her mother’s injuries … nausea rises up through her. She tries to swallow it down, to look at it dispassionately and, suddenly, she’s sad for all the years she’s spent in denial, not opening the box, not examining it. Because she doesn’t know. She knows the basics, but none of the nuances.
‘I almost wish I’d gone,’ she says.
Chris looks at her in surprise. ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Trust me, you don’t.’
‘Because … because I don’t really know why he was convicted.’
Chris kicks a tiny piece of gravel, sending it skittering into the undergrowth. They’re totally alone out here. That’s how the island is in the off season. Isolated. Izzy has a constant stream of waiters and waitresses who’ve moved out here alone. They’re escaping things, she often thinks. They move on again after a few months, never making friends, never putting down roots. It seems amazing, to Izzy, that people come here to escape, when the worst happened to her here, but they do.
‘Because he did it,’ Chris says.
‘Are you certain?’
Izzy’s words seem to echo around them in the car park. She shivers as a gust of ocean air blows in.
‘What?’ Chris says, but it comes out as more of a guffaw. ‘What?’
‘Like, do you ever think they might’ve got it wrong?’
Chris stares at her, a tissue clutched around his nose. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Just theorizing,’ she says.
Chris eyebrows are u
p near his hairline. He brings a hand down over his beard and rubs at it, then shakes his head, folding the tissue and putting it into a nearby bin. He takes his time over it, his eyes widening then narrowing as he thinks about what to say to her.
‘Well, anyway, what do you think twenty years inside has done to him?’ he says eventually.
‘I don’t know.’
He looks at her, saying nothing. ‘Jeez,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You always did surprise me.’
‘Quiet. I’m your boss,’ she says, trying to dispel the mood, but it doesn’t work.
She can sense Chris is about to get into his car, to say, ‘Anyway …’ and pull his keys back out of his pocket, but suddenly, he speaks again. ‘It was one of the easiest murder prosecutions. That’s what they said.’
She doesn’t mind that Chris talks bluntly to her. She grew tired of the euphemisms her grandparents would use: ‘since her passing’, ‘since he took her from us’, ‘since he went away’.
The details are drifting back to her like snowflakes. Pieced together from news stories she was unable to avoid, overheard conversations, things mentioned incidentally, years afterwards.
The Crown Prosecution Service’s arguments.
A passionate relationship.
There was passion, wasn’t there? She blinks and remembers coming home from a New Year’s Eve party in 1998 – her mother was unknowingly entering the final year of her life – and interrupting them in the kitchen. They weren’t kissing. What she interrupted was far more intimate.
‘I think it’s because your hair’s stayed red, no greys,’ her father was saying to her mother. His hips were close to hers, the two of them a blurred shadow in the corner of the kitchen. ‘No, wait, it could be because you own more shoes than anyone I know … it truly is incredible.’
Her mother had her head back, Izzy realized, as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. Her throat was white, exposed. She was laughing. ‘Let me count the ways,’ her mother said sardonically, and her father laughed too. ‘Maybe it’s because I wash your underwear for you. Pay your bills.’
Her father’s laughter intensified, and Izzy had slipped away. They had loved each other so much. It had been a source of comfort to her, her parents’ marriage, like solid bedrock beneath her feet. But, apparently, it was poisonous. She had no idea, and she lived with them. What if Izzy’s own marriage is? What if – one day – she lashes out, loses her temper? What if Nick does? How can anybody be sure?
A controlling relationship.
Her father liked to drop her mother places. ‘I’ll just wait for you,’ he would often say when he insisted on taking her to her evening yoga class. ‘I’ll just wait.’ It wasn’t sinister: he was happy to idle. He always said it was when he was doing nothing that he had his best ideas. Izzy and Gabe used to go out, often late at night, to pick her up. She remembers their shared singalongs in the car. They both liked soft rock. American rock. She introduced him to the Goo Goo Dolls. He played her the Eagles. Why were they doing that? They had two cars. Why couldn’t her mother drive herself home?
She tries to view the memory with an adult’s eyes, but can’t. She can’t make sense of it. It is like looking the wrong way down a telescope. What was normal then has informed what she views as normal now. A close marriage seems usual to her. But so, too, does tragedy. How can she possibly look back at their relationship without thinking about everything that happened afterwards?
Charm.
Her father was perfectly beguiling; he always was. Even his letter, written on plain A4 paper, the handwriting looped and childlike, has forced her to take action, to go and see Paul, to begin examining the evidence. She is already two steps down a path she never thought she’d take.
Temper. Control. Charm.
Her father was a sociopath. That is what the prosecution said.
Izzy draws her lips together.
She looks at Chris and wonders how convinced he would be of his own father’s guilt. If it were Tony’s trial.
She remembers Tony and Gabe together at a barbecue when she was a teenager. It was a Christmas party. ‘A barbecue?’ Gabe said when they arrived, seeing the smoke rising in the garden above the snow.
‘Why the fuck not?’ Tony had said in his jovial way. He opened a bottle of champagne and Gabriel effortlessly caught the cork. He was so co-ordinated, her father. It expressed itself in so many ways. His love of tennis, cricket, but in his art, too. His portraits, faces on miniature canvases, his pots, made on his potter’s wheel. He was a true artist, multi-talented, as good at drawing a caricature as he was at whittling a face out of a piece of wood.
They’d lit a bonfire. The snow sizzled as the fire melted it away. They’d eaten hot dogs and Izzy had become light-headed on mulled wine. Tony had joined her by the fire after midnight. ‘Here’s to 1997,’ he’d said. He lit up a cigarette, the rasp of the lighter loud in the night.
‘Did you come over purely to make my hair smell?’ Izzy had smiled, shifting away from him.
‘No, came over for chats,’ he said, taking another drag.
‘Get that stink away from my baby,’ Gabe had said, striding over and taking the cigarette clean out of Tony’s mouth, stubbing it out on the ground. He was always so bold in his affection for her. Charming. He was charming.
But it is not only her father who is charming her. Not directly. It is the past, too. Imagine if he was innocent. Imagine, imagine, imagine. Her history would unravel differently, like a painting almost restored to its former glory. Her mother tragically taken from her, but not her father, too. She wouldn’t have lost both parents in one evening; only one. Her tragedy would weigh half as much.
‘Don’t think on it, Izzy. It’s enough to drive you mental,’ Chris says now, touching her shoulder ever so lightly. He used to do that all the time when they were housemates. It meant lots of things to them: Want a cup of tea? and Sorry everything turned out this way for us. Both. Neither.
She shakes her head but doesn’t say anything more. Her father is a sociopath. A murderer. It ends here. She will not let herself be charmed by him.
Later, Izzy hears Nick’s footsteps on the stairs. She’s in bed before him, tired from the events of the day, but also hiding away from him, not sure what to say. As he walks into their bedroom, she works up to the question.
‘Do all criminals say that they’re innocent?’ she asks.
‘Convicted?’ Nick says, without missing a beat.
This is why Izzy loves talking to him. He can always keep up. Is usually three steps ahead of her. Where would she be without him? She can still recall the exact emotion she felt as they exchanged their wedding vows. They were each other’s. Her past was behind her.
‘Yes. People like my dad.’
‘Oh yes, the vast majority of them,’ Nick says. He begins to whistle as he gets a shirt out for the morning. ‘Baljinder interviewed your dad.’
Izzy’s lips draw a thin line. She doesn’t know how she feels when she thinks about Nick’s boss. He arrested her father, and he sees her husband every day. He must have a view. Do they ever discuss it?
‘No exceptions?’ she says lightly.
‘Why?’ Nick replies sharply. He hasn’t missed what she’s angling at.
‘No reason … nothing.’
Izzy can sense Nick weighing up whether to say anything. He avoids confrontation more than anything else. He would rather be overcharged in a restaurant than query a bill. He slowly twists the knob on their wardrobe, evidently thinking.
‘It would be insane for you to see him,’ he says eventually. ‘Insane.’
‘I know. I know. I just wanted to hear about … I don’t know. Someone innocent.’
‘I had a guy once that I wondered about,’ Nick says. There’s relief in his voice. That he’s said what he needed to say, and moved on. ‘But there was no evidence against him except circumstantial. Like, zero. Mistaken identity, maybe. In hindsight. He had the same distinctive tattoo as this other serial offender.
’
‘Hmm. So if I went into a prison …’
Nick turns to her, eyebrows raised. ‘Lots of them would say they’re innocent. Yes. That they were framed. That their identical twin did it. They were nowhere near, in another city. Et cetera.’ He catches her expression. ‘Sorry,’ he adds. ‘Usually they just say that they don’t know, but that it wasn’t them. Even if they pleaded guilty, to be honest. That’s the easiest defence.’ He lifts his hands up. ‘Don’t know, wasn’t me. Wasn’t there.’
Izzy thinks about that alibi that she ruined and a strange feeling settles over her shoulders, like she’s put on a cardigan of fear.
There’s something about the set of his shoulders as he turns away from her. They look tense, braced. Is he annoyed? Maybe he wishes she was normal. That she didn’t have this wound in her past. Maybe he has been pretending it hasn’t happened, too.
‘Identical twins … crazy,’ Izzy says, wondering what, if she let him, her father would say to her. Would it be as outlandish as that? What is his defence? Not his rebuttal of the prosecution’s evidence but … his real defence. The truth.
‘Some of them, the scariest ones,’ Nick says, shutting one of his drawers with his hip, ‘even believe their own lies.’
6
Izzy sits in the kitchen of her restaurant before it’s open, her nails tapping out a rhythm on the metal table. In front of her sit her phone, her father’s letters, an instant coffee and a beef Pot Noodle which she will bury deep in the rubbish once she’s finished it. Her stomach sinks as she thinks of what lies ahead of her this evening: a full shift. All the prep. All those meals cooked, eaten, the leftovers binned. Sometimes it feels so pointless to her. She’s never much liked eating out, is always happier at home with Netflix and a tub of ice cream. But what could she do instead? She’s too embedded here. The owner. The daughter of the founder. And could she really leave it? The place where her mother spent so much of her life? Izzy sometimes thinks she stays just to try and absorb any last vestiges of her mother that might remain here. The way she always erred on the side of sunny optimism. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she’d say when her father worried about things. ‘Lighten up.’ She would never mind leaving late, coming in early, experimenting during her days off with new dishes.
The Evidence Against You Page 4