The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  Izzy wants to sit here and explore the feeling that overcame her as she saw her father. The feeling that arrived after the shock and the fear: the feeling of familiarity, of oh, it’s him. The feeling of seeing the man who taught her to walk, to read and to write, how to draw a cartoon dog, how to say I love you and how to laugh at herself.

  The jury in her father’s case didn’t think there was reasonable doubt; the verdict was unanimous. But what does Izzy think?

  She unlocks the front door, even though nobody’s due yet. She enjoys the peace of the restaurant. Like being somewhere official after hours. A museum or a school. It’s only when it’s full and buzzing that she feels fraudulent; when it’s full of the people who love Sancerre and foie gras and oysters, while she craves beans on toast and Vimto.

  The kitchen smells of disinfectant. A single drip of beef sauce rests between her and the letters, and she dabs at it with the pad of her finger.

  She picks up her father’s first letter.

  His handwriting. She would know it anywhere. Almost two decades’ worth of shopping lists – peas, peppers, cat food – of Christmas cheques – fifty pounds and zero pence only – of notes by the bread bin – Popped out for milk – and gift tags – To Izzy, my little lady: all my love, Dad – and school forms needing signatures. Of birthday cards and passport applications and appointments scrawled on their shared family calendar. Of his paintings, initialled by him – GDE – in a hurried loop. Those words, that handwriting – his loopy Ls, his giant Os – was the messy thread running through the middle of their lives together. She would always recognize it.

  Suppose she called him. Anonymized her number. Told him she’d seen Paul.

  He already knew where she worked. In some ways, the worst had already happened. If he became too demanding, or behaved strangely, she could simply tell the police: Nick. Her father would be recalled, restrained, kept away from her. What would Nick think of that? For some reason, as Izzy imagines it happening, she sees a look of distaste cross her husband’s face. That she’s on this side of the law, with a criminal family, and not on his side.

  She folds her father’s letter neatly across the central line, running her fingertips along the sharp edge it creates, then opens it again. He has pressed hard with his pen, and the letters have scored the page.

  Is it time to hear him out? Was seeing Paul a delaying tactic? A way of safely dipping her toe in the water?

  Or is this insanity? She can’t tell. She can’t tell at all.

  She spoons some more noodles into her mouth. She likes the very end of the Pot Noodle; she doesn’t mix the powder in, so it is deliberately sharp towards the end, almost too tasty.

  She opens Instagram listlessly on her phone and scrolls to her favourite family. Two parents. Six kids. They live in Napa Valley, California. Today, they’re sitting on the porch together. She zooms right in on the photograph and studies it closely. The kids’ little toes in their brown sandals. The just-touching knees of the parents, Bob and Sue. One of the children’s hands is curled around Bob’s thumb. The other hand rests casually on his knee, for balance. Izzy winces as she looks at it. That fat little hand, placed so casually, as though it is the child’s own knee.

  Family is everything is the caption. #FamilyOfEight.

  She knows nothing about family, she thinks, as she likes the photo and closes the app.

  But she could learn.

  I want to tell you my side of it, he had written in his letter.

  Perhaps, if she could understand it, she could put it to rest. Stop wondering whether his temper lurked behind their identical bone structure, too.

  But what if he was innocent? I swear to you, Izzy, it wasn’t me. She allows herself to imagine it for a second. Her mother would still be dead, but her father wouldn’t have done it. The image is tantalizing. She and her father on a porch, next to each other. Her hand on his knee.

  She struggles to shift the memories, like they are cobwebs across her face, to really see what is sitting beneath them. And there is something. It thrums with its own heartbeat: it is doubt. Not doubting her father, but giving him the benefit of it.

  Izzy’s hand twitches on the table. She could just do it, right now, in the empty, safe restaurant, a cup of coffee on the table in front of her. No. She’s not going to. She gets up, circles around the kitchen, staring at the phone.

  But … wait. She can’t help it. She has to do it.

  Why not? Why the hell not?

  She presses the home button on her iPhone, and carefully keys in her father’s number. And then, without any further hesitation, she presses ‘call’.

  7

  ‘Izzy,’ is the only thing he says to her, after she has said hello. His accent. She closes her eyes. The kitchen disappears. She can feel only her fingertips on the cool metal table, hear only his voice. She had forgotten. His parents are Irish; they moved to the Isle of Wight in their twenties, but never lost the accent. And so neither did he, despite visiting Ireland only occasionally.

  ‘Oh, Izzy,’ he says. She doesn’t say anything back to him. There is silence for a few seconds, then a gasp.

  ‘Hello?’ she says.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he says, his voice sounding strangled. ‘I have wanted …’ He draws a shaky breath in, then breathes it out. She can almost feel it tickling her ear and neck down the phone line, it is so visceral. ‘I’ve wanted this for a very long time,’ he says. ‘Since … since you came to see me.’

  Izzy went to see him on the first day she was able to: her eighteenth birthday. It is the final memory she has of her former self. The self that would want to do something and simply go and do it. The self who wanted a career in ballet. Who left the island whenever she wanted to.

  It was a freezing cold late May, after the sweltering early May of his conviction. The spring flowers had bloomed in abundance and then withered in the frosts like fireworks let off too soon. She had looked up at the hail bouncing off the skylight in her grandparents’ attic and wondered if her father was cold in prison.

  Her grandparents thought she was with friends.

  Her friends thought she was at ballet.

  But the truth was, nobody really cared what Izzy did by then, not even on her birthday. The tragedy of the previous year had eclipsed everything. She could ask for whatever she wanted and get it. They’d go out for dessert, sometimes, even though her grandparents couldn’t really afford it. Izzy winces to remember it. New trainers, expensive pointe shoes. She had them all, a series of items she thought would begin to part-pay the debt of her tragedy, but none of them did. Not even close. Everybody was sleepwalking through that horrendous spring. They had been present in body and absent in mind, lost in their grief. In the room with her, and looking at her, but not there, not really.

  She got the ferry at eight o’clock in the morning. She’d sat out alone on the deck, on the blue benches, even though it was freezing and misty. The sea air tangled her hair and made her eyes feel gritty and dry. By the time she reached Portsmouth, her hands were red and freezing. She had nobody to remind her to take gloves. An umbrella. Spare change. A drink. The infrastructure of her life: parents. Her hands thawed out on the overly warm train to London. To HMP Belmarsh, where her father was waiting for her, amongst the murderers and terrorists and rapists.

  It was a red-brick building with a hexagonal-shaped reception. She had to put her Nokia phone, her book that she had been reading on the train, and her house keys into locker number 101 in the foyer of the prison.

  She was strip-searched next, staring dully at the wall as she removed her jumper. A woman’s cool, professional hands skimmed her torso, which goose-fleshed in the chilly room. She put her top back on, and removed her trousers, so her legs could be rubbed down. That’s how they did it: stripping in two parts. The indignities that sprang from her father’s crime were plentiful, and still in free fall.

  Metal detectors next. Just in case she had hidden something in her underwear, she supposed. A sniffer
dog – a ginger and white spaniel in a fluorescent coat. Even the dog was on duty, serious, sombre. Standing silently next to the guard, not looking at her, not jumping up, not interested in being fussed. Staring straight ahead. Doing its job.

  He had already been seated, waiting for her. He was in the corner nearest the door, flanked by two guards who were trying to look like they weren’t observing. Other inmates had nobody near them, Izzy noticed, and swallowed.

  He didn’t look like her father. It wasn’t only the sinister and unfamiliar surroundings: he looked wasted. That was the first thing she thought. Already skinny, he had gone beyond lithe. He was too tall to be that thin. His cheeks were sunken, two hollows the size of golf balls, ears protruding too much. Cheekbones forming precariously spindly bridges from his ears to his nose.

  It had been less than a year since he had killed her mother.

  She sat down opposite him, feeling both guards’ eyes upon her.

  ‘After my appeal, Iz,’ he said, reaching his hands across the table for hers, and then withdrawing them before they’d reached halfway. ‘We’ll go away – bike riding somewhere. No, camping.’ He was staring just beyond her. Lost in a fantasy.

  ‘When is your appeal?’ she said woodenly.

  ‘All going through now, won’t be long … barrister thinks we’ve got a good shot … and then we’ll be away.’

  Izzy stared at him, practising saying the words in her mind. Her lips were moving slightly with her thoughts. ‘I can’t come with you,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t come with you. I can’t even see you.’

  ‘But – the appeal.’

  ‘I can’t …’ Izzy said, drawing the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands. ‘I can’t.’

  His head sank immediately down on to his chest. She could see the bones in the back of his neck: one, two, three nodules under his skin. When he looked up again, his face was red, his lips twisted in on themselves. ‘Got it all worked out, have you?’

  ‘No, I …’

  ‘Mud sticks, does it?’

  She stood up at that. ‘Why did you do it?’ she said.

  ‘Think you know best, don’t you?’ He stretched his arms wide, like a bird of prey displaying its wingspan, right in front of her. ‘Think you’ve got me all worked out. You’re just like her. Just like your mother,’ he shouted. ‘Was,’ he added nastily, unnecessarily. He reached for the table between them.

  She backed away. He was going to tip it on to her.

  The guards stepped in, and that was that. The freezing ferry. The two-hour train journey. Those two separate consent forms. The sniffer dogs. Having her just-turned-eighteen-years-old body touched by strangers to check it did not house a mobile phone, knives, cocaine. All of it extinguished right there, along with the hope that – somehow – this had been a mistake. That he wasn’t a monster.

  She left quickly.

  ‘Izzy,’ he said, one last shout, as she was leaving. He added something else, but she couldn’t hear what, not over the noise of the visitors’ centre, the clunk of the locks, her own noisy, disturbed thoughts. Eighteen years and thirteen hours old, and look: look where she was.

  He must have known, she thinks now, looking back, in light of the conversation with Paul. He must have known she ruined his alibi.

  She shivers in her restaurant’s kitchen. ‘That visit was horrendous,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  He says nothing more. He doesn’t try to defend it. He doesn’t apologize, either. They sit listening to each other saying nothing, just being.

  ‘It’s you, Iz,’ he says eventually. His nickname for her. Iz. A soft, mournful sound, suffused with nostalgia from all the times he has uttered it. On her thirteenth birthday – ‘My little Iz, a teenager!’ and on GCSE results day – ‘God, good luck, Iz’ – and countless other times.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘You run Alexandra’s,’ he says softly.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies.

  ‘It was easy to find you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It took me two hours.’

  ‘I sort of knew you would,’ she says.

  They lapse into silence again.

  ‘My husband doesn’t know,’ she says. ‘He’s a police analyst.’ She says it almost to warn Gabe, but he doesn’t seem to rise to it, doesn’t acknowledge what she’s said.

  ‘I don’t know where to start,’ he admits.

  ‘I know.’

  He takes another shaky breath. ‘I bet they screwed it all up for you. In your little head.’

  Izzy narrows her eyes at the strange choice of words. There’s something off about it. Something condescending. Just as he wouldn’t allow her her own view then, the only time she visited him, he won’t permit it now, either. She’s thirty-six, but he’s still parenting her. Controlling her.

  ‘Who?’

  She hears a dog barking in the distance and wonders where he is. She hears a thump, a window closing, maybe, even though it’s chilly. She guesses he might like to have the windows open these days.

  ‘Her parents.’

  ‘He died,’ she says. ‘Mum’s dad.’

  ‘I know,’ Gabe says. ‘Paul passed it on to me.’

  ‘And Mum’s mum isn’t …’

  ‘Isn’t what?’

  ‘Well, she’s eighty-six,’ Izzy says. She picks up a spatula and turns it over in her hands.

  ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘they say prison stops you ageing? Ironic really.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘No booze. No parties. No hard living. Hardly ever seeing the outside: no sun. I’ll probably outlive you.’

  Izzy’s hands still over the spatula. What does he mean by that? No. Nothing. It was just a flippant remark. Nothing.

  He takes her pause for scepticism, and says, ‘I did have the stress of being innocent.’ But he says it so quickly. Defensively. ‘Anyway,’ Gabe continues. ‘You got my notes? How’s about a meeting?’

  ‘Yes. I did. And I … I’m calling because … because I only want to know why,’ she says simply. ‘I can’t meet you.’

  ‘You want to know why what?’

  ‘Why you killed her. What happened.’

  He says nothing, then says, ‘Okay.’ His teeth are gritted. She can tell in that way families have of interpreting each other. A kind of shorthand, a code. A million clues filter into it: his tone of voice, the beat before he answered, how loudly he said it.

  ‘And then at least I’ll understand. And try to move on,’ she says, thinking. Just the other day, she had been chopping vegetables, and the prattle of the other kitchen staff had been irritating her. She’d gripped the knife too tightly, wanting to fling it across the room. What if she had? Was she transforming into somebody who couldn’t control herself?

  ‘You’ll never understand,’ he says, and there is something almost snide about it. Angry.

  She messes with the spatula. Of course he’s angry. It’s only natural. And he’s not angry with her. Just … with the world. She imagines what her mother would say. Her tough, strong mother. ‘You’re delusional, Izzy. He’s a killer,’ she might say. Or, ‘Hear him out. I loved him.’

  ‘But I’ll tell you. From the beginning,’ Gabe says.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But, Iz.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It wasn’t me. I swear it. On my life. On yours. Before God.’

  ‘God?’

  ‘Yeah. I read everything I could in prison. The Bible. The Qur’an. Everything.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So when I tell you I’m swearing before God, I mean it.’

  She looks down at the table, her eyes damp. He had always been an atheist; a closed-minded, scientific type who would compare God to the tooth fairy. But here he is: changed. Of course he is changed.

  She had become obsessed with reading about wrongful convictions on the internet during the trial. ‘He is not one of those,’ her grandmother had sai
d. ‘He plotted to murder her, and then he did it, and then he has denied it, so far, for every day of a five-week trial.’ There was something compelling about her grandmother’s green eyes – so like her mother’s – meeting hers, telling her something she believed so completely, that a court and a handful of lawyers and twelve members of the jury were using their time to investigate, to deliberate. Of course he had done it: why would they bother otherwise?

  The night after he was convicted and sentenced, Izzy read an article about him in the Isle of Wight County Press – ‘SAVAGE WIFE-KILLER GETS LIFE’ – shredded the paper, and moved on. And then the money came from her mother’s parents, the money that had reopened Alexandra’s. And life began again. Not the life Izzy had really wanted, but a life nonetheless. And she took it.

  But today. Today, she remembers those wrongful conviction articles.

  ‘So what happened, then?’ she says.

  ‘I have no idea. As I said in court.’

  The oldest defence in the book. It wasn’t me. I don’t know. Just like Nick said.

  ‘But I do know some things which might help us. Let me tell you my side of it,’ he says. His voice is louder. The Irish brogue has been rubbed off from around the edges, softened, as he has become more animated.

  ‘All my adult life I’ve believed you were guilty,’ she says. ‘You never wrote. You never wrote to say all this.’

  ‘I haven’t wanted to mess with your head. Until now – until you were older, and I was out. But I’ll keep coming here. Until you listen.’

  Izzy cocks her head. Is it a threat? Or is it what an innocent man would do?

  ‘I mean … I didn’t mean that how it sounded,’ he says quickly. ‘I’ll never come back again, if you want.’

  And that’s what does it. His apology, combined with the fact that he came to the restaurant on the day of his release. Desperation and restraint. Putting her first, even though he doesn’t want to. Parenthood, she supposes, thinking of the Instagram family, of the way Thea still organizes her life around her adult children even though she is in her fifties. It’s a lifelong job.