The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Six weeks before she died, I got this loan,’ Gabe says. ‘To try and help her out. I didn’t tell her about it.’

  Izzy blinks. Her father, the old Gabe, would have led into a topic seamlessly, charismatically. This Gabe is a facsimile of him. Some of the same gestures. The same eyes. But faded and distorted, too.

  Izzy thinks of the insurance policy. Foul play. What if killing her had been his solution to the debt that she had put them in? She shakes her head. No. That doesn’t make sense. That is not a normal train of thought; killing is not problem-solving.

  ‘Okay,’ Izzy says.

  ‘They wanted to arrange a payment plan, after the two weeks’ grace. It was The Money People – you remember them in Luccombe?’

  ‘They’re still around,’ she says. ‘But now everyone gets loans on apps. Wonga. Payday loans.’

  ‘Apps?’ Gabe says blankly.

  Izzy puffs air into her cheeks. How can she explain what an app is? It would require so much backstory … she’s not even sure she knows herself. ‘Never mind.’

  A clock somewhere in the café chimes: it’s quarter past seven. She hopes she doesn’t meet anybody she knows here. Anybody who could pass it back to Nick, but she doesn’t care enough, can’t seem to.

  Her father puts his wine glass down and inches forward, towards her. ‘Let me tell you about what happened with The Money People,’ he says.

  14

  PROSECUTOR: The rows became violent, didn’t they? As we heard from the witnesses and the medical experts.

  GABRIEL ENGLISH: It wasn’t like that.

  PROSECUTOR: Okay, then what was it like?

  GABRIEL ENGLISH: We had rowed, that’s all. It was just a … just a normal row. A stupid row.

  PROSECUTOR: Just a normal row. For you.

  October 1999: four weeks before Alex’s murder

  Gabriel

  Alex had been unimpressed when she eventually found me at 11.30 p.m. in my shipping container. I had left the doors open, to let everything in. The salt and the sea spray and the wind and the rain.

  I had been trying to capture the frost on the left-hand side of a telegraph pole – my first real landscape piece – and the sun on the right; the way it lit up the grainy wood. It seemed almost impossible to do, every stroke I added making it worse, not better. I mixed ochre and cadmium yellow. I thought I’d known instinctively that that would be right but, once on the canvas, it wasn’t. It wasn’t right at all. I’d mixed it with turpentine, that day, and I shouldn’t have. The paint was watery, little feathery patterns where I wanted harder edges.

  I added graphite grey, instead, mixing it with linseed oil. It smelt sweet and bready. Like play dough. The smell of art. The paint formed satisfying peaks when slopped on to the canvas.

  A little later, I added a single white line on the right-hand side of the pole. And … ah. It was alive. I looked at it for a few moments, pleasure zipping around inside my chest.

  I hadn’t heard your mum approach the entrance, but suddenly she was right there, at half past eleven at night. I looked at her, and then at the telegraph pole, embarrassed. ‘You okay?’ I said. She looked tired. Creases underneath her eyes. Make-up worn off.

  ‘Is this what you have done with your evening?’ she said carefully.

  And I got it. I got her tone, and everything she was saying. She’d recently extended the restaurant’s opening hours, to try and make more money. The licence application had been arduous, and annoying, she’d told me pointedly.

  It all fell to her. The business, the childcare. Like a weighted dice that would always roll the same way. We fought it, with me being better for a few weeks, loading the dishwasher unprompted, packing your school bag in the evenings, Izzy, but it never lasted. I was crap at anything beyond my remit. A crappy husband. A typical man, I guess. I’ve had eighteen years to reflect on it, and that’s the conclusion I’ve come to. We’re lucky, us men. We can choose to dip in and out of parenthood, housework. Or we can choose to help, and boy do we get praised for it.

  ‘Are the clothes ironed? Izzy’s ballet shoes darned?’

  ‘No …’ I said quietly. ‘No.’

  ‘Of all the things you could do,’ she said. ‘You come here.’ She tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear. ‘Gabe, I don’t want to be a killjoy. I don’t want to be this way. Why do you make me this way?’ Her tone was plaintive, wheedling almost. ‘A nag?’

  ‘I don’t mean to,’ I said. ‘I so don’t. I just … I just got in at ten myself and I wanted to … I wanted to come here and paint.’

  ‘What do you think I would like to do?’ she said. It was a good point. She always went for the jugular, your mother.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  I stared at the painting. I’d been experimenting lately, using the cord from my art bag to stipple the paint, making it look knitted and creased in the borders. It was beautiful. It was working. I felt that private satisfaction that comes with creating something good. Something true.

  ‘You always say you understand. But you never fucking show it,’ she said. ‘You could have paid a bill or two. Renewed the car tax – remember that’s due? Done some of the filing. Made us a meal: I haven’t eaten. Thrown away the pile of crap you swept up but never quite emptied into the bin. Hung the washing out that’s been in the machine since this morning. God, anything, Gabe. Anything except paint a fucking frosty telegraph pole.’

  Something bright fired off in my stomach. She could tell it was a frosty telegraph pole! I shouldn’t have been pleased about that, but I was. You see, I was there, in my sea-air shipping container, the smell of linseed oil and turpentine all around me, the woman I loved in front of me. It was hard to be sad in that set-up, even when she was angry.

  ‘I couldn’t resist it. And, who knows, somebody might buy this –’ I gestured to the painting, ‘and then that’ll … that’ll help.’

  ‘You’re a fucking dreamer, Gabe,’ your mother said. ‘Wake up.’

  I started a new paint job the next day – a living room in magnolia. I had to take it, didn’t I? The woman who rang me was amazed when I said I could start that day.

  I was halfway through the first wall when the call from The Money People came. I should have been expecting it, really. The guy had been kind to me so far, in hindsight rather like Hannibal Lecter at his politest. The loan had relieved the pressure for a month. I’d used it to pay a chunk off each credit card, and reserved some for the interest. But the money had run out again, and soon I’d owe interest on that loan, too. I hadn’t told your mother. She wasn’t sleeping, had lost weight.

  I drew a squirrel on the wall with a small roller and looked at it. My magnolia squirrel. I picked up the large roller and dashed over it. It disappeared completely, magnolia on magnolia, like it was never there. It’s her bloody debt, I was thinking moodily as I painted. But I knew that wasn’t fair. She’d messed up, sure, but it was the only time she’d ever done so. I had messed up hundreds of times. Thousands. So many things missed. Forgotten sandwiches, suncream, passports, tax returns. Other things had been prioritized. Sports. Art. I would be better. I would be a better husband to her. And it started here, in this bland living room. A reckoning in magnolia.

  I slopped the rest of the paint on the wall. It was easy to be good at painting a room; it only required uniformity. I was neat, and fast. I’d prepared the walls with sugar soap, cutting in around the masking tape. I had the doors open – French doors, flung out on to the patio – but the acrid smell of the magnolia masked the delicious autumn smokiness. Mushrooms pushed up through the dewy grass. Every now and again a burgundy leaf drifted down from the purple beech tree at the back.

  I finished the room in four hours, its character leached out of it. I surveyed it in the amber autumn sunlight. It would have looked nice a deep green, I thought. It would contrast nicely with the brass curtain rail.

  We’d stayed in Venice, me and your mother, years back. On a Teletext holiday. You were almost two
, and stayed with my parents. The walls of the hotel were teal. Calypso teal, to be specific, if I had been painting them.

  I’d unpacked completely, and your mother had laughed at me. ‘We’re here for three nights,’ she said drily, still in her flip-flops and jacket she’d worn on the plane. ‘I don’t think you need to hang your belts up in the wardrobe.’ But she was smiling at me in that way of hers, that indulgent way. Her ears moved up just a fraction when she did it.

  ‘I can pretend we can afford this, then,’ I had said, gesturing to the ornate wardrobe. ‘Like it’s ours.’

  She had raised her eyes heavenwards. I saw the white of them flash, but it wasn’t annoyance. I’d have liked to paint that affectionate exasperation. I’d have used titanium white, mixed with Mars black: the colour of her black eyelashes fluttering against the whites of her eyes.

  We’d been wanting to travel since you were born, Izzy. No offence. We thought we’d pack you up with us; a baby on my back. But it was so much harder than we thought. You were a settled baby, but only if you were in your cot at 7.00 p.m. dead on. Our bed count had stalled. ‘We have slept in our own bed for five hundred nights, I reckon,’ your mother once said to me as we locked up for the night. ‘Five hundred and one, soon.’

  ‘I know,’ I had said, trying to gauge her mood. But she wasn’t down, not really. Just factual. ‘We can go somewhere. She’ll be fine without us for a weekend.’

  ‘Alright, then,’ she’d said, with that look in her eye. That dangerous, impetuous look I’d loved so much. The holiday was booked the next day.

  We didn’t care about racking up countries. It wasn’t that. We cared about what it meant to us to be nomadic. We got it from my parents, I guess. Irish travellers. But you don’t want that, I’d told her. The lack of fixed abode. No regular GP, no school for your children. But we did want to go everywhere and feel our full, true selves. We wanted to see New York City – your mother adored When Harry Met Sally, she wanted to go to that damn diner – and eat in a shaded courtyard in Provence. But we had no money, no time, and no flexibility, either. Instead, we had started to live out our nomadic dreams in other ways. We were both self-employed. Our own bosses. It was our way of sticking up two fingers to the establishment. We were the next generation, once removed from travelling.

  When we got home, she took herself out somewhere. She wouldn’t tell me where. She was mysterious, your mother, at times, whereas I was an open book. Three days later, an ornate wardrobe was delivered. It cost £5,000.

  ‘Are you joking?’ I’d said, when I saw it.

  ‘But I bought it for you,’ she’d insisted. So charming, so childlike almost, in the excited way she presented it to me. But it annoyed me, Izzy. She never asked. She never let me buy what I wanted. She bought things for me.

  Anyway, the walls of that living room were magnolia, sadly, not teal, but I was remembering that holiday when my phone rang. The Money People. ‘Someone will be over in half an hour,’ a man’s voice said.

  ‘Half an hour?’ I echoed.

  ‘For the sum due yesterday.’

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t, really. I was too shocked. ‘I don’t have it,’ I said, eventually.

  ‘You need to get it.’

  As soon as I hung up, I wondered why I didn’t tell him to meet me somewhere else. My shipping container. Your mother was at home. I tried to call him back, but he’d withheld his number.

  I had never driven home so fast. I had to sort it.

  Your mother was already in when I got home. She was wiping the dining-room table. I guiltily realized that they were my crumbs, from that morning. Her eyes flicked to me as she did it, and I thought of the other Alex, in Venice: carefree. Then I thought of how carefully I had washed up my paints at the shipping container the previous night, and cringed. I cared about them. I was meticulous about them. And nothing else, to be honest.

  My reckoning in magnolia was bollocks. I was a shitty husband. I had taken Alex’s debt and made everything so much worse by getting a 2,000-per-cent-interest loan. I couldn’t admit that to her: more crumbs. More collateral damage of being married to me.

  The man from The Money People would arrive in ten minutes. I just had to get her … out of there. Upstairs, away from the door.

  I should have told her to go take a bath. Go to bed. That I’d bring her tea and cake. That sort of thing would have worked, in hindsight, but I didn’t do it.

  Instead, I asked her to go somewhere for me. ‘You’ve just come back,’ she said irritably. Two deep gouges appeared on either side of her mouth as she pursed her lips. I could only see them sometimes. Other times, she appeared as she always had, to me: youthful, nineteen-year-old Alex. It was only when I looked back on my paintings of her that I saw the differences. Crow’s feet. A gentle sagging of the skin around her jaw. She wasn’t any less beautiful, though; she was more so. She was more Alex, somehow.

  ‘I forgot Izzy’s lunch stuff, for tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s something she can have. I’ve got to make a call, anyway.’ She brought her phone out.

  ‘Who to?’ I said, stalling for time.

  ‘What does she need?’ Alex said. ‘I’ve been at Mum and Dad’s. You should’ve said sooner.’

  I stood in the kitchen, in front of the bread bin, hoping she wouldn’t open it. ‘Everything. Bread. Cheese.’

  ‘So you want me to go out while you faff around?’ she said. It was arch, caustic even, but she always was. I loved it and hated it equally. She could be so incisive, so cutting, so funny. I found so much to admire in her. I was a little in awe, I suppose. But that didn’t mean she was always nice.

  I looked at the clock. Six minutes to go. ‘Yes,’ I said boldly, and she threw her hands up. I walked towards the hallway, trying to tempt her upstairs, at least. ‘I don’t want to have a domestic,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not a domestic. It’s you appreciating what I do,’ she said. ‘But no, I’ll go buy the sandwich meat. The bread. The fucking bananas.’ She found her boots in the hallway and picked them up, then turned to me. Four minutes to go. She was holding the boots in her slim arms, one hand underneath the heels, like a baby. Just the way she used to hold you. That’s what I’d loved most about you being young. You had been half possession and half human, slowly forming into your own person as the weeks passed and the baby fat melted away. And now, where were you? I wasn’t even sure. Perhaps, I thought, staring at the boots in Alex’s arms, I would paint those arms holding those black boots. Nobody would know what they meant, of course, except me. But wasn’t that just lovely?

  ‘Anything else?’ she said sarcastically, looking up at me as she laced up her boots.

  ‘No,’ I said. I saw a car pull up outside on the drive. BMW. Dark windows. This was it, right on time. I couldn’t let her go out. She’d see him. She’d find out. She’d sleep even less. Her face would crease even more. Her beautiful burnt-sienna hair would go grey with the stress of it.

  She reached for her bag just as I heard the front door slam.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go.’

  ‘I’m ready now.’

  ‘I said I’ll go.’

  She reached for the door, and I had to stop her. I just had to stop her. I reached out to block her path. I grabbed her arm, too tight. Too rough. Her mobile phone skittered on to the floor, its black case cracking.

  ‘Gabe!’ she said. She wrenched her arm away from me, but the damage was done. Her eyes stared up at me, two Winsor Green rounds of shock and sadness. Usually, she’d shout and swear. She’d tell me off. But not this time. ‘Gabe,’ she whispered, wrapping a hand around her upper arm. She winced with the pain. And then she took her boots off and went upstairs. She didn’t ever hear the bailiff. I told him to meet me at my shipping container the next day, when I was alone. I got us another month to pay, in the end. But everything was different by then.

  Izzy

  ‘I said I’ll go,’ her mother was saying
as Izzy approached the back porch. Her voice was reedy and plaintive. I’ve said I’ll go, now stop it. That’s what it sounded like. Stop whatever it is that you’re doing.

  Izzy paused by the back door. Perhaps she shouldn’t have come this way, through the back garden and into the porch where neither of her parents knew she could hear them in the hallway.

  She turned away from the door, not knowing where to look, what to do.

  ‘Gabe,’ her mother shouted, not frightened now.

  Izzy raised her eyebrows. Her mother had texted her earlier, saying she was at work. But she was home. Early, Izzy guessed, which was rare.

  ‘Stop being such a drama queen,’ her father said nastily.

  Izzy closed her eyes, pressed down on the handle, and went inside. Her mother was walking up the stairs. Her father was loitering in the hallway, looking sheepish. Izzy stared at the spot where they’d been standing. What was happening?

  She had passed her driving test twenty minutes ago. Eventually, her father arrived in the kitchen. He had a screwed-up ball of paper in his hand, which he threw expertly into the bin on the far side of the room. ‘Score!’ he said.

  ‘Five minors,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’ He looked clammy, ill even, she realized, looking closely at him.

  ‘Are you alright?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Five minors. Two for hesitation. The others were just –’

  ‘Your driving test! Of course. You passed?’ Slowly, the tension seemed to leave his body as he straightened up and looked at her.

  ‘Yes: five minors,’ she said, trying not to be hurt. He had forgotten. All the way home, she had rehearsed how she would tell him. Not out of nerves, but out of excitement. Would she run in, brandishing the pass certificate? Or maybe she would slip it into the conversation casually. Either one a performance they would both remember.