The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘The actor,’ Gabe says immediately, with all of the recall of somebody who lives life entirely in the past. ‘When, did you say?’

  ‘September the sixth, 1999.’

  ‘Two months before.’

  ‘Yes. Any idea why?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Anyway, that’s all I found.’

  ‘Good sleuthing,’ Gabe says. ‘What’s next?’

  ‘I want to speak to the taxi driver,’ Izzy says. ‘The last person to see Mum alive.’ The words she doesn’t say hang in the air between them: except you, perhaps.

  He says nothing, thinking. ‘Alice Reid,’ he says finally. ‘It was Alice Reid.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘You going to speak to her?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says.

  ‘Are you looking into it? You know, I can think of nobody better than you – to investigate it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, remembering her grandparents talking about Alice’s evidence, and the nail it placed in her father’s coffin. And thinking of the box of evidence now in her possession, of the bank statements in the loft. ‘Maybe,’ she says again, more slowly this time, wondering if she’s really going to do this.

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ he says, ‘how pleased I am that you trust me enough to look into it … that you’re giving me the benefit of the doubt.’

  Izzy says nothing to that. What can she say? Sometimes she thinks he’s delusional, manipulative. The police, the State, the CPS used all of their available resources to investigate her mother’s murder. What does he think – that she’ll find something they missed?

  Her father tells her he has to go for another interview and she says goodbye while negotiating a roundabout. She doesn’t reach to hang up, and he hasn’t, either. She can still hear him, or somebody, rustling around a room. She hears the crinkle of a carrier bag, maybe, and she hopes he isn’t taking that to a job interview. She hears footsteps and the thump of shoes being moved on to the floor. And then she hears her father’s voice. Speaking. Without knowing she is listening.

  18

  ‘Eight weeks. Eight weeks. Eight weeks … to go.’

  Izzy drives, listening. She knows she should tell him, but she doesn’t. Instead, she just listens, her eyes on the road ahead.

  ‘And then – and then …’

  She hears him scrabble for the phone, loud noises across the microphone.

  ‘Hello?’ he says.

  Izzy pulls the car over to the side of the road, her head full of his words. His words that don’t seem to make any sense. Eight weeks until what?

  ‘Gabe?’

  ‘You’re still there. I thought I heard your car.’

  ‘I didn’t hang up – I was driving. I was waiting for you to do it. What are you talking about?’

  He laughs softly, seemingly to himself. ‘Oh, nothing,’ he says. ‘Just how long the Jobcentre have given me to find work before they stop my Jobseeker’s Allowance.’

  Izzy looks at the road in front of her. She narrows her eyes as he prattles on: he’s hopeful about his next interview, anyway. He’s pulled pints before, he’ll be good, he’ll be sure to be evasive about the last eighteen years, this time.

  She says nothing, thinking of the way he was speaking. It was almost like a pep talk, to himself. No, not a pep talk. Something else. He sounded fired up. That was it. Like somebody planning something. Setting something in motion.

  Izzy sends ten more David Smiths messages, then writes to Alice late at night.

  Alice Reid is in her early fifties and posts on Facebook every single day about her grandchildren, Theo and Frederick. They’ve been enjoying ice creams in the heatwave, crab fishing at the beach, and snuggling up watching Britain’s Got Talent together in the past week.

  Izzy wonders if Alice ever thinks of it. That she was a key witness in a murder trial. If she ever realizes the impact she had on their lives.

  She begins to type a private message.

  I hope you remember me, Alice – though maybe you don’t want to. You gave evidence at my father’s trial. I’d love to speak to you about it. Please do get in touch, if you’re able. Izzy English x

  Izzy goes quiet for a few days, thinking thoughts of insurance jobs and tempers and reasons to kill. She still writes to David Smiths every night, and checks a month of bank statements, but nothing more than that.

  She finds she misses her father, after only two weeks of contact with him. Like theirs is an established relationship already. History, she supposes. A diverted river easily becomes functional again, the water flowing freely. Knowing where and how to flow, because of its past.

  Paul said you saw him, a text comes through on a sunny Monday morning from Gabe.

  I did, she replies immediately.

  Communication – intimacy – is her Achilles heel. She could become drunk on it, and it would never be enough. She sometimes imagines Thea watching her as she goes about her day. How good Izzy is at the business side of things. Witty remarks she makes. Even time alone with Nick. She is constructing herself with these parental figures, she knows she is, and yet she can’t seem to stop. Doesn’t know who she is without them.

  What did you discuss? his immediate response comes back.

  Oh, yes. That’s right. She remembers now. He always replied so quickly.

  Within a few moments another text comes in. She can’t delete them as quickly as they arrive, in case Nick should ever glance at her phone.

  Come to the hostel, won’t you? We can talk more. It’ll be better than getting shouted at in cafés – better we’re not seen.

  No, I … Izzy drafts and redrafts the text message, politely declining.

  Before she can send it, though, he calls her.

  ‘It’ll be nice,’ he tells her. ‘We can have tea and catch up. And we could even watch Dawson’s Creek,’ he jokes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘We can play cards, and just spend time together,’ he adds.

  And soon she is putting her shoes on, sleepwalking her way out of the house and to the car. Following that rare thing: intimacy. Family. Love, she supposes, as she starts the ignition.

  It will be the first time they are alone together.

  19

  ‘Welcome to my humble abode,’ Gabe says. She has driven to Shanklin, where he is housed. That is the term he seems to use, and she has adopted it reluctantly. It’s what looks like a B&B set alone on a strip of land between two huge housing estates.

  Three teenage boys are standing near the door as she pulls up. Two in tracksuits, one in a shirt and tie, smoking. They stare at her, hostile, as she drives past, trying to find somewhere to park.

  She finds a space and walks past an off-licence on her way. It has bars running around the inside of it, like a cage. Not a single bottle of wine or packet of chewing gum can be picked up. The shopkeeper sits there, like a caged lion, watching her warily. Outside, above the sign – General Convenience Store – somebody has graffitied the word cock.

  Gabe is waiting on the steps of the B&B when she walks up. ‘It’s shit, I know,’ he says, raising an eyebrow at the rubbish collecting in the road, at the strange luxurious cars, their blacked-out windows, a cluster of three- and four-year-olds playing football alone over the way even though it is a weekday morning. The youths have moved on, somewhere.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ she says, trying to look behind him, hoping the bail hostel is neat, and clean. She can’t imagine him sleeping in filth. She just can’t.

  The smell of marijuana drifts on the breeze.

  ‘What is a bail hostel, exactly?’ she says as they step inside.

  ‘It’s a room, here, with a load of other … well, mostly ex-convicts. Some drug addicts. You get a room – or a shared room, if you’re unlucky.’

  ‘Is it … can’t you …’ All of the restrictions on his strange little life cluster into her mind. Can he cook a meal? Does he have a sofa? A key?

  He
ignores her trailed-off question, clearly not wanting to answer, and leads her up a set of brown-carpeted stairs. They have metal nosings on the end of them like they are in a hospital or secure unit of some kind.

  His door – dark, cheap wood – jams, and he puts his weight behind it to open it. Izzy has been wanting to paint all of the wooden doors in her cottage white, but she’s been waiting to find out if listed building consent is needed. She runs a finger over the splintered wood as she steps into his room.

  ‘Should I be here?’ she says. The first thing she notices is the temperature. She starts sweating immediately. The window isn’t open, and she looks across at Gabe, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s something else, but she jumps as her father closes the door behind them, and they are alone. She is on edge, suddenly wondering if this is stupid. Reckless. The hairs on her arms rise up.

  She stares at the closed, single-glazed window, covered in mould and condensation. ‘Bit hot, isn’t it?’ she says, trying to distract herself, but Gabe only shrugs.

  ‘Why do you ask if you should be here?’

  ‘Because you might have … I don’t know. Rules to follow?’

  ‘I don’t have any licence conditions relating to you. Bizarrely, in the distorted eyes of the justice system, you are not a victim of my alleged crime,’ he says. ‘Only Alex is.’

  Alex. He hardly ever uses her mother’s name around her. It brings to mind the things she’s remembered and found out about Gabe and Alex. The artefacts of her parents’ marriage. That shared kiss in the dimness of the kitchen. Their love notes on the back of bank statements. Their history of counting beds slept in, if that isn’t a fabrication by Gabe.

  She looks around the room. A neat, single bed. Pink bed sheets. A table. A miniature fridge. A radio on the inside shelf of the wardrobe – the door is missing, and she likes that he has capitalized on that.

  She looks again at the mouldy window and removes her cardigan. If he is here – if he is living here amongst the grime, has been imprisoned before this – and he is innocent, she won’t be able to handle it. She just won’t.

  A dog is barking incessantly outside. Six barks, seven. A pause, and then it begins again.

  ‘Staffie left outside all day,’ Gabe says ruefully to her. He sits down on the bed and rubs at his temples.

  It’s a new mannerism. She sees his hair has thinned there, and wonders if he has simply rubbed it clean away.

  ‘Nah, mate,’ somebody shouts loudly outside, and Gabe looks up irritably.

  She looks at the bed, at the tiny wardrobe containing all of his belongings in a pile on the open shelf – socks, trousers, T-shirts all jumbled up together – and at the coffee ring on the table. Next to that is a small bowl and a single plastic fork, smeared with dried tomato sauce.

  She notices a stack of papers on the windowsill. ‘What’re they?’ she says, pointing to them.

  To her surprise, his cheeks colour, and his shoulders rise as though he is suddenly cold and trying to keep warm. She has never seen him make such a gesture; the father in her memories is energetic but relaxed, too. Confident. Never tense like this. She watches him, trying to work him out.

  ‘Nothing … nothing,’ he says with a wave of his hand, but he picks the papers up and he hands them over.

  The first sheet is a drawing of a large detached house. He’s used coloured pencils on thin, cheap paper that’s curled up and stiffened. It has his old flair – a wisp of smoke coming out of the chimney, the green depicting the grass and the hedges. A mobile number is written at the bottom in calligraphic font. Handyman: No Job Too Small alongside it.

  She leafs through them. The next one is the same. There must be fifty of them. ‘You made these?’ she says, but as she utters it, she looks again. The house has a blue door. The first one is red. She looks back at the first sheet. They’re different. She leafs through them. Different shades of green, slightly different handwriting. They’re all different.

  ‘They’re not copies,’ she says.

  ‘Yes. Couldn’t get to a printer.’

  ‘What, so you … you just did them yourself? Again and again?’

  He shrugs, his cheeks still pink. ‘I don’t know, Iz … I have too much time. Lots of time. It doesn’t matter.’

  She opens her mouth to tell him about the software she has on her iPad for sketching. About the printer she owns that was £20 in Tesco. The way you can pay a company £5 to print your every Instagram photo, but finds she doesn’t know where to start. He probably doesn’t even know what Instagram is.

  ‘I enjoyed colouring.’

  ‘Is this the first time since …’

  He nods quickly. ‘I’m rusty. You can tell,’ he says, gesturing vaguely to the angle of the first house against the horizon behind it.

  ‘You could’ve photocopied them.’

  ‘There aren’t photocopiers in newsagents any more,’ he says. Newsagents. Some of the language he uses is so antiquated. What do people say, now? The Spar. Londis. Budgens. They’re not newsagents. Many of them don’t even sell papers. Does he know that every major newspaper has a website, these days? She supposes not.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  ‘And anyway, it’s expensive.’

  She looks at him. For the first time, he’s given her a measure of his budget. What would it be – ten pence per sheet? Embarrassed, she gathers up the flyers and straightens them into a neat pile.

  ‘I thought I could be a jobbing handyman again, anyway,’ he says. ‘No interviews. No DBS checks. Can come and go as I please.’

  She nods enthusiastically. ‘Yes. Great idea. Some money for you. To spend how you like.’ It could work, she is thinking. It could really work. He’d have somewhere to go each day. He could save up, rent a flat. Paint pictures in his spare time. Just like how it used to be.

  ‘I’m going to put them up on the Sainsbury’s noticeboard,’ he says.

  The optimism she had felt in her chest evaporates, leaving her deflated and sad. There is no longer a Sainsbury’s noticeboard. This isn’t how people advertise themselves any more. She should tell him about Google Places, about Facebook for Business, about TrustATrader. But where would she begin?

  ‘Maybe leafleting people’s houses is better,’ she says instead. ‘The nice estates in Newport. Maybe the people with scaffolding up. They’ll want the finishing touches done. Plastering and painting.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he says softly, just looking at her.

  She puts the flyers back on the windowsill. They look childish and strange in the light from outside, sitting there on the grubby windowsill, its wood beginning to rot.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says, turning his gaze away from them. ‘Where were we?’ He stands and advances towards her.

  She takes a sudden step back, bumping into his wardrobe. She can’t explain why she does it. She flushes with embarrassment as his eyes meet hers, hurt. She thinks again of the job interviews. Would she employ him to paint her house, co-exist comfortably with him in close proximity?

  ‘Where had we got to with our discussions?’ he says.

  ‘Four weeks before her death,’ she says, instead of saying what she is thinking.

  ‘Okay, yes,’ he says, sitting down on the bed.

  There’s nowhere for her to sit so she stands, hovering by the wardrobe awkwardly.

  ‘Next, I need to tell you how I came to send that text.’

  ‘What text?’

  ‘The text the prosecution went to town on. Two weeks before your mother died.’

  20

  PROSECUTOR: You sent that text to threaten your wife, didn’t you, Mr English?

  GABRIEL ENGLISH: No.

  PROSECUTOR: Your wife wasn’t doing as you wanted, was she, Mr English?

  GABRIEL ENGLISH: It’s not how it looks …

  October 1999: two weeks before Alex’s murder

  Gabe

  I stopped by the restaurant late in the day. Somebody had scuffed a w
all, and your mother wanted me to touch it up quickly. ‘With your neat hand,’ she had said beguilingly on the phone. She was in the back office when I finished. I walked into the kitchen, on the hunt for her delicious leftovers.

  The second I saw it, I stared at it in shock. A massive planetary mixer. Silver. Standing on the work surface like a spaceship. Even through my disbelief, I noted with mild interest that it was entirely reflecting its surroundings. I’d have to use yellow ochre to paint it: it was reflecting my bright, sunshine-coloured T-shirt perfectly. How good that would look, a portrait of a planetary mixer, its owner reflected in it.

  ‘This new?’ I said to Daniel, one of the waiters, who nodded, smiling at me.

  ‘Brand spanking,’ he said. ‘Thousand pounds.’

  I turned to him in shock. ‘One thousand pounds?’

  The receipt was easy to find: of course she’d left it on the counter, folded asymmetrically: £888 plus VAT. My stomach dropped. What the fuck? She didn’t need a mixer. She’d never had one, she wasn’t replacing one, it was new. Brand spanking, as Daniel said.

  I called her immediately. She was at the cash and carry. ‘What is this mixer?’ I said.

  Daniel disappeared into the main restaurant area, sheepish, embarrassed by my tone, no doubt.

  ‘What?’ she said. I could hear a till ringing up purchases in the background. She loved it there. She went too often. Fucking shopping.

  ‘The eight-hundred-and-eighty-eight-pound mixer.’

  ‘We needed it.’

  ‘That much – on a fucking mixer? Did we need it more than we needed to pay off The Money People? Halifax? Barclays? The Woolwich?’

  ‘You afford your container,’ she said coolly.

  It was a low blow. My shipping container. My only hobby. My escape. Was that monthly spend foolish? Then call me a fool.

  Alex didn’t say anything to me after that. I waited a few minutes, but she disconnected.