The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  Izzy hates oysters.

  She stares at him. She’s not seen him since Chris spoke to her at the pub quiz about Tony not testifying.

  ‘Fancy a walk?’ she says spontaneously. ‘Before you start?’

  It is strange to be walking next to her father’s brother along the coast at Luccombe, when she so recently walked with her father along a similar stretch of coast. They have so much in common. Their long strides that she struggles to keep up with. The way they angle their whole bodies to look at the sun and close their eyes, like lions basking. The way they walk with one hand in a pocket. Mannerisms learnt or inherited, but the same either way.

  The tide is out, the sand a wide, fawn-coloured expanse, the sky completely blue despite the encroaching evening. Izzy can’t remember the last time she saw even a wisp of a cloud. The weather has been reliably the same, every single day, since the end of April. Blue skies. Twenty-five degrees. Zero chance of rain.

  ‘Nice for you to get out at rush hour,’ Tony says. ‘Costa del Luccombe.’

  ‘Only the boss could get away with it,’ she replies with a grin.

  She looks sideways at her uncle and wonders about his childhood with Gabe. She thinks of her relationship with Chris, its roots deep as trees’, and wonders about all of the things which predated her. Did Gabe and Tony smoke roll-ups outside in the summer and talk about girls? Did they toss a tennis ball back and forth when they should have been studying? What was important to them? How did they define themselves? Music and art and sport? Did Tony ever have reservations about Gabe? What made him conclude he was guilty so easily? She’s never asked, never been able to. It would be strange to suddenly want to know why things were the way they were, and had been for decades.

  ‘Did you ever think you might go to see Gabriel?’ Izzy says as they look out to sea. The surface of the Channel looks golden, molten with sunlight.

  She feels Tony’s body language still beside her. ‘No,’ he says. He turns his face away from her, to the sun.

  ‘Not even for an explanation?’

  ‘No.’

  He turns to look at her. He has under-eye circles. He’s olive-skinned, too, but his face is more weathered and lined these days. Two fans of crow’s feet spread out from each eye. The skin around his jaw is sagging and thin. Izzy feels her face twist into a half-smile: what Gabe said about ageing in prison is true. Gabe looks ten, twenty years younger than Tony. Not healthy, though. Too thin and worn, somehow.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I felt he could never explain it to me. How could he?’

  ‘I guess even criminals have an explanation,’ Izzy says delicately.

  ‘You know, Izzy, your dad and me – and Alex. We go back.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I mean … never mind,’ he says, with a wave of his hand that is so like Gabe she almost has to stop and ask him to do it again, this facsimile of her father who still has his liberty, his money, who knows what an iPhone app is. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I do.’

  Tony pauses, hands on hips, then finds a flat rock which they sit on. It’s rough with sand and warm to touch.

  ‘He was … he was somebody who did exactly what he wanted,’ Tony says.

  Izzy can’t argue with that. He has always been so, preferring to create paintings and make pots when he should have been out earning money.

  ‘He was impetuous, artistic, temperamental.’

  ‘Temperamental?’

  ‘You know, he had this girlfriend, Babs.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They rowed so much – he was in his late teens then, early twenties maybe. Anyway, the less said about that the better. I thought he was more suited to your mum, but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Oh, it’s ancient history, Izzy,’ Tony says with a finality Izzy recognizes.

  ‘No, tell me.’

  ‘Well, he was … Alex could be evasive. And that made him weirder and weirder in the weeks leading up to her death. He was always attentive with her but … I don’t know. He seemed obsessed.’

  ‘How was she evasive?’ Izzy says. She can feel herself frowning. Her mother wasn’t evasive, was she? Take Gabe, she thinks nastily, but don’t taint my memories of my mother.

  ‘She was … they were just ill suited, I think. She was … I don’t know. She did some things I don’t agree with.’

  ‘What?’ Izzy says.

  ‘She wasn’t always honest with Gabe. I can see why,’ he says quickly. ‘Gabe was so controlling. But she’d tell him things had come up at the restaurant when they hadn’t. She would just read a book in the back office, having told him she had to catch up on accounts. She wasn’t … she wasn’t a saint, I suppose. Nobody is.’

  Izzy shrugs. She can see why her mother would behave this way.

  ‘Chris said something,’ Izzy says, capitalizing on the opening, trying to find answers. ‘About the trial.’ Tony stretches his tanned legs in front of him and slides his shoes off.

  Izzy closes her eyes and breathes in: she can tell exactly where she is on the island by the smell. Down here it is earthy, less fishy than Yarmouth.

  ‘What did he say?’ Tony says eventually, turning to her.

  Izzy senses his movement and opens her eyes. The sea air is whipping his hair back away from his forehead. God, their brows are identical. Izzy couldn’t have described Gabe’s until she saw it on Tony: tanned, with that single horizontal line across the middle. The high hairline. She can’t stop looking at it.

  ‘That you were going to tell the lawyers something helpful, and then didn’t.’

  ‘That’s right. I was,’ Tony says stiffly, still not looking at her, heels digging two neat divots in the sand.

  ‘Why would you testify for the prosecution?’ The words seem to die on her lips, the sentence fading as she finishes it. Prosecution. To prosecute. Such a nasty, vicious name for the people who attempted to bring her mother justice.

  Tony closes his eyes and leans back on his hands.

  ‘Because he was guilty as sin. But I guess, when it finally came down to it, I just couldn’t stand up in court against my brother. You know?’

  Izzy nods, but she doesn’t know, not this closeness, not family beyond cousins and uncles and aunts, and marriage, which still feels conditional to her. She has no siblings. No parents. The closest thing she has is a family she double-taps too often on Instagram.

  ‘I lost so much fucking sleep over it. Would it help? Would he get convicted without it? Who did I owe the most loyalty to – Gabe or your mother?’ He exhales, points his toes, and then puts his shoes back on. ‘Anyway. Let sleeping dogs lie, as they say.’

  Izzy narrows her eyes. Something feels off. Let sleeping dogs lie. Where has she heard that recently? Chris, that was right. Chris had said it. Had they – father and son – said it to each other? Had they made some agreement?

  ‘I’m glad it didn’t matter. They got him anyway,’ Tony adds.

  ‘But what was your evidence?’

  Tony turns to her while lacing his trainers up. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The curse of being seventeen, I guess. Nobody tells you shit.’

  The dynamic has shifted between them, over the years, from avuncular indulgence to a kind of respect, now that she employs him, and she has always loved that Tony has allowed that to happen. That he isn’t stuck in paternity, as Gabe can be.

  ‘Anyway. Enough of that. Lovely weather.’ His words are easy-going, his body language languid, but something is still off about his tone. Something feels … constructed about it. Perhaps she is imagining it. But perhaps there is more to this than he is going to tell her. It is easier not to testify than to have your story picked apart in front of a jury. Perhaps he has something to hide.

  ‘Nobody told me anything,’ she says carefully, hoping to prolong the discussion.

  But it wasn’t just that nobody had told her. They had become divided. Even though Tony’s family a
nd Izzy’s grandparents all believed Gabe was guilty, they stopped seeing each other. The split through their family, from what Gabe did, had been too wide.

  And so things weren’t discussed in the open, because there was no open any more. There were no family parties, no meals for ten or twenty, no cold-cheeked greetings outside pubs. Just the splintered remains after everything that had happened. A group of individuals who failed to communicate well, who couldn’t navigate the choppy waters of what happened to their family.

  ‘What was your evidence?’ she says, frustration leaking into her voice.

  Tony sighs and looks at her. ‘On the night of Hallowe’en … her murder,’ he starts, clearing his throat. He stands up and they walk closer to the tide. ‘Gabe and I were both at Alexandra’s.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And at about seven o’clock he comes to grab me, and says he saw someone coming out of the back office with your mum.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He doesn’t know. He says she emerged, then someone else emerged and went down the back corridor to the door, but he didn’t see them because the corridor was in shadow. Your mother was behaving strangely, he said. Fixing her hair. Looking over her shoulder. He went outside to see who emerged but they’d already gone, or gone back into the restaurant, anyway.’

  ‘And so you …’

  ‘I didn’t tell anybody. No.’ Tony stops walking as their feet meet the water.

  Izzy dips the heel of her shoe into the tide and watches the sand wash away from it.

  ‘I just thought how bad it looked. For him. And he didn’t tell anybody, either. He didn’t tell the whole truth in court.’

  She looks out to sea and wishes for a moment that her mother had left more behind. That she had a sister, another child, a best friend. Imagine if she could piece her mother back together again. From her university years. From her childhood. From everybody who ever met her. The obstetrician she must have seen. Her dentist. The man she rented the restaurant off. Her property solicitor. Her GP. A patchwork quilt of the woman Izzy barely knew.

  ‘Do you know that I didn’t corroborate his alibi?’ Izzy says to Tony, wanting to return the sharing of information. Of intimacy.

  ‘I remember,’ Tony says.

  ‘Who told you?’

  Tony looks up at the sky, evidently thinking. ‘I’m not sure,’ he says eventually. ‘I just know.’

  Izzy stares at her sand-covered shoes, wanting, suddenly, to escape. To cross these seas, and leave the island. Disappear into London. Does Gabe know, too? She can’t ask him, can she?

  They walk slowly back to Alexandra’s. The sand yields satisfyingly underfoot, like freshly fallen snow. Tony says nothing as the restaurant looms into sight. When they reach the foyer, Izzy heads downstairs to the basement. There are a couple of old boxes in the corner next to the wine rack that she wants to look through. More evidence.

  Tony follows her.

  ‘I want to investigate some things a bit more,’ Izzy says over her shoulder to him. ‘What was happening in the run-up to her murder.’

  Tony nods in the gloom of the chilly basement. ‘Those boxes?’ he asks, pointing to them.

  ‘Yes.’ The property information lives here, in those boxes, and the financial information and her parents’ possessions – those Izzy has been able to track down – are in Izzy’s loft.

  He shrugs as he turns to leave.

  ‘Was he angry?’ she calls up to him spontaneously. ‘About Mum and the person in the back room?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tony says, glancing down at her and making eye contact. ‘He was furious. He thought … he thought he had been betrayed.’

  ‘This came for you,’ Katie, one of the waitresses, says to Izzy when she arrives back. ‘After the usual post.’

  Izzy takes hold of a letter and heads to the back office. The peculiar not-alone feeling has settled over her shoulders again. The envelope has no stamp. Her address is typed on a sticky label. It’s been sealed with Sellotape which she peels off.

  She sits on the chair and opens it.

  23

  A newspaper cutting falls out. One article, folded neatly in half. The top of the paper is jagged, crimped. It has been years since she has read a proper newspaper.

  Her hands are shaking as she unfolds it. She is never usually nervous. That part of her has been dulled.

  On one side is a political story, but it’s when she turns it over that she sees her parents’ wedding photograph. They’re standing next to a set of fairy lights which shine too brightly, darkening the rest of the photograph. Her mother is smiling at the camera, little happy creases either side of her mouth. Gabe’s looking at her, half of his face in shadow. His hair is dark, spiked up. Her mother’s is pinned back. It looks auburn in the photo, not bright red.

  Izzy stares at the headline: WIFE-MURDERER CHARGED AT SCENE OF BODY DISCOVERY.

  It’s not unusual for Izzy to get mail of this kind. From fanatics. From people who want to know more about the crime. From people planning a trip to the restaurant. But there is usually a note. She checks the envelope, then spreads out the article.

  She remembers seeing it for the first time, just a glimpse, the paper removed swiftly from her grandparents’ table. Her cereal had tasted bad, the milk sour, her stomach acidic with it. Her mother was dead. Her father was under arrest. He hadn’t told them. He had been charged at 4.00 p.m. when her mother’s body was recovered, but they found out at 6.00 p.m. from the news. Husband charged in wife killing, the Breaking News headline said on the television. That’s how they found out he had been charged.

  She fingers the faded headline. She had forgotten. She had forgotten that he had never told them himself.

  She turns the clipping over, checking there’s no handwritten note in a margin. And that’s when she sees it. An indentation. Something has been struck out on the other side. She turns it back over.

  Alexandra has been neatly crossed out with a black ballpoint pen. In its place is one word: Izzy.

  Izzy’s phone rings, sending adrenaline firing around her chest.

  ‘Hello?’ she says distractedly, still holding the newspaper cutting.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Gabe says immediately.

  She traces the neat line through Alex’s name. Hers is written directly underneath it.

  ‘Sorry, I just got this … I just got this thing, in the post,’ Izzy says, unable to resist the pull of his concern, his tentative tone, his fatherliness. His ability to immediately spot when something is amiss with her, even over the telephone when she has uttered only one word. Even after eighteen years. ‘I got this newspaper cutting in the post just now.’

  ‘An article?’

  ‘Yes. About you.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one with your wedding photo. The Island Echo.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘I don’t know. Unstamped envelope. Through the restaurant door. But they’ve altered the article.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s got my name. Mum’s is crossed out and my name … is in its place.’

  Gabe says nothing for a few seconds, then says simply, ‘God.’

  ‘I don’t understand … I don’t understand who would do that,’ she says.

  ‘Nosy people. Judgemental people. Mad people. Like that man in the café. I got a prank call the other night telling me to go back to prison.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, sitting down on the chair and leaving the newspaper cutting on the desk.

  ‘Somebody probably saw us the other night. They’re an armchair rescuer, you know. Think you shouldn’t be seeing me. Decided to write to you. That kind of thing. The letters I got in prison, Iz …’

  ‘I used to get a few,’ she says.

  ‘Really. Don’t worry. Standard nutcase behaviour.’

  ‘I see,’ she whispers. And then, in part to distract herself, without thinking for a second whether or not she should tell him, she says, ‘I spoke to Tony about the evidence he
didn’t give. About Mum being in the back office with a man that night.’

  ‘I’ll just come over,’ Gabriel says immediately. ‘I can explain more easily in person. You free this evening?’

  ‘Okay. I can be. I can leave here, now.’ She looks again at the newspaper. ‘I want to leave here.’

  ‘Good.’

  Her hands are shaking as she folds the newspaper cutting up. ‘Where should we go? The café again?’

  ‘I’ll come to yours,’ Gabe says decisively.

  ‘No, I …’

  ‘Let me take care of you. Make you a pot of coffee and sort this out,’ he says. ‘Without anyone else interfering.’

  ‘No, but –’

  ‘No arguments,’ he says.

  And, just like that, in the face of the threatening note, her reservations evaporate. The way he cajoles her into meeting. His inconsistent accounts of the past. They don’t matter. There are explanations for them. She so wants that to be true.

  And so she gives him her address.

  She arrives home swiftly, and sets herself up at the kitchen table, which she wipes, then laughs at herself. As if he would judge the cleanliness of her surroundings; her father who shared a cell with a man who smoked Spice.

  He hasn’t arrived after an hour. After an hour and a half, and three cups of Mellow Bird’s, the doorbell finally goes. Izzy looks at the clock in the kitchen. Half past eight. They only have an hour until Nick will be home, and her stomach lurches.

  ‘You took a while,’ she says gently to Gabe.

  He takes off his jacket. The tag is still inside, dangling off the bottom, and it swings as he bundles it up.

  ‘I walked,’ he says.

  ‘You walked?’ Izzy calculates the distance in her mind. It’s five miles, maybe more. As he brings a hand to his upper lip to wipe a sheen of sweat off it, she sees that he is shaking. ‘Why didn’t you just …’ the words die on her lips. But of course. He doesn’t have a car, and no money either, probably. And yet, here he is. In her hour of need.

  ‘I would’ve fetched you,’ she finishes lamely. She remembers all the times he took her to ballet classes, to meet friends, waited up to bring her home from parties, eyelids drooping as he drove.