‘No need,’ he says with a wave of his hand. ‘Need the exercise. Only done laps of a yard for twenty years.’
‘Sometimes walking can help you to work things through,’ she says, thinking of Tony’s evidence.
‘Yes, exactly. Like Elijah fleeing to Horeb.’
‘Huh?’
‘Elijah fled to the wilderness, in the Bible. There, he found God.’
Izzy says nothing.
Gabe looks around her kitchen. ‘This is so … you,’ he says.
She tells him the story of how they came to buy it. ‘And Nick – where is he?’ Gabe asks.
‘Work,’ she says quickly.
He is staring at her iPad which lies discarded – she watches recipes on YouTube as she tries them out. ‘An iPad,’ he says. ‘We had those in the open prison. No internet, though. Just games.’
She goes to speak, then pauses. Eighteen years in prison. No internet. The things he won’t know about. It must be like being an alien. Smart phones. Digital SLR cameras. LED light bulbs. Airbnb. Alexa. Uber. Netflix. Broadband. Deliveroo. The demise of landlines, CDs. She shakes her head. She can’t imagine.
‘Tony told me about the stranger in the back office.’
‘The stranger in the back office, indeed,’ Gabe says, a weird half-smile playing out on his features. ‘That’s what I’ve been getting to. One of the things,’ he says, putting his coat on the spare kitchen chair, ‘that I have been getting to.’
‘What’s your theory?’
He shrugs, his angular shoulders lifting upwards and then dropping again. He is this way sometimes. Monosyllabic. Sometimes amazingly eloquent, other times stunted. She supposes it is one of the effects of prison.
‘Tony’s theory is that you were angry with her,’ she prompts.
Gabe blinks. ‘I bet. I discussed with Matt why Tony didn’t volunteer that information to the police. I knew he’d seen, because we talked about it afterwards. Matt and I thought about calling him to the witness box, to testify about the person in the back room – that it might shine the light on someone other than me – but Matt had, I guess, the same concerns as Tony.’
Izzy shivers. Concerns. That’s a mild way of putting it: Tony’s evidence gave Gabe a clear motive.
The back door is flung open. She can hear Thea and her daughter out there. She’s back now, properly, for the summer. Izzy goes to fill the kettle. ‘Tea?’ she says, and Gabe nods.
Thea and Molly are sitting at Thea’s wrought-iron table. Molly has brought home Indian chai tea, and they’re laughing about whether or not to serve it with milk. Izzy allows herself to imagine, just for a moment, not that she is Thea’s daughter, but that she is Molly’s mother. She’s made it: unscathed. She had a child, and the world didn’t cave in. She’s happy. Fulfilled. Less alone.
Izzy watches them as she gets two mugs down from the shelf. Molly’s feet are up on the chair opposite her mother. Thea pats them casually, as she offers to try one cup with and one without milk. It’s an intimate gesture. Was Izzy once privy to these things? She can’t remember. It’s amazing how scant the memories are from before the age of seventeen. As though childhood is only important to the parents, and not the child. Izzy remembers how she felt – safe, happy – but not anything much more specific than that. Did she and her mother share a pot of tea in the garden one time? Maybe. Hopefully.
She turns to look at Gabe. He’s staring out of the front window, at the fields opposite, seemingly lost in thought, his face cupped childishly in his hands.
Motives. Izzy’s mind is whirring.
Daniel Godfrey was sacked. That is what Izzy is thinking as her father gazes out of the window. Her mother sacked him. What if she had been having an affair with him? Had been in the back office with him?
But even if her mother had been having an affair, does that mean her father would kill her? Of course not: it’s a leap for any normal person. For a man who would laughingly draw a caricature of anybody she asked. A man who’d once eaten so many sweets in the cinema that he’d made himself ill.
Izzy watches Molly show Thea something on her phone and thinks guiltily again of her father’s alibi that she decimated in one seemingly innocuous police interview.
Perhaps Gabe kills women who betray him.
‘He thinks I was angry then,’ Gabe says as she sets his tea down in front of him. He shakes his head from side to side quickly. ‘But I wasn’t. I was confused.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Then let me explain,’ he says. ‘Let me tell you about the night she went missing … the night she died. Let me tell you what I do know.’
24
PROSECUTOR: And what time did you hear your wife come home?
GABRIEL ENGLISH: I didn’t.
PROSECUTOR: And yet a taxi dropped her off, and we heard the driver say she watched her enter the house.
GABRIEL ENGLISH: No … I don’t know where she went. But it wasn’t inside.
PROSECUTOR: Did you murder her there, in the house, and carry her out? Or did you force her into the boot of your car and murder her somewhere else?
Hallowe’en, Sunday 31 October 1999: the night of Alex’s murder
Gabe
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if your mother’s car hadn’t been in for service. If she hadn’t had to get a taxi.
Don’t you find, Iz, that when something goes missing, sometimes you focus on the anomaly? A missing wallet, say. You’d switched handbags. You’d check the bags over and over, wouldn’t you? Because of a disruption in the routine? For ages, I thought your mother’s disappearance was connected to that taxi. To that taxi driver. I was in custody from the day of my arrest, so I had to wait months to find out what each witness would say. I was in the dark. Even after I saw her give evidence – small, slight, harmless – I wondered. I don’t know what I think now. My mind roves over the facts, like looking for that missing wallet. I check the same places over and over again. The taxi driver. That night in the restaurant. The debt.
I took you to start your waitressing shift at 7.00 p.m., Izzy, you probably remember. You wanted to drive yourself, but I wanted the car. I came in with you, as I often did. To see your mother. To see Tony, and Chris, too. Is it weird that I have fond memories of that evening? It was the evening before everything changed forever. I guess that’s why, in my memories, it seems sweeter – the air had that dewy autumnal quality – and the restaurant seemed to burn twice as brightly on the horizon as we approached it.
You disappeared into the kitchen as soon as we arrived. I ran my fingers over a scuffed wall I’d repainted. It looked good. I was looking for your mother. You know I always was. Looking for that red hair, her slender freckled arms as she handed out plates, took down orders, issued directions. To exchange a glance, a kiss. To join up with her and to be reminded that in all the hard work and tedium, there she was.
She was nowhere to be seen.
‘Alright?’ Chris said, brushing past me with three stacked plates. One had a smear of gravy remaining which his thumb was resting in.
I didn’t respond to him. And that’s when I saw what I saw, Izzy. Here is what happened.
My elbows were resting on the bar. I had a perfect view of the back corridor, in shadow, and half of the door to the office. A palette of dark browns and blacks. Your mother emerged, red hair held up by her breadstick. She straightened out her white shirt. Her body language was strange. Self-conscious, I guess, if I had to say. Or maybe guilty: I’ve seen a lot of guilt.
Her eyes flicked left, and then right – two flashes of white. I watched her move across the restaurant, and that’s when I saw the second figure, in my peripheral vision. A man, I thought. Tall, blurred, already retreating down the corridor. A white arm extending to close the door. I froze, stunned. Somebody had been in there with Alex.
And then I followed him out, but it was too late. He’d either come back into the restaurant via the main door, left completely, or gone into the kitchen.
I sat on a red tasselled stool that your mother had bought from a local store – ‘It’s so impossibly kitsch,’ she had said – and I asked him.
‘Why was Alex in the back office with someone?’
‘With … who?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A man.’
He leant down underneath the counter and grabbed a can of Coke.
‘I doubt that,’ Tony said easily.
‘What, you think I made it up?’
‘No need to be upset,’ he said, raising his palms to me. His muscles looked defined. So much waiting on tables, I guess, carrying all those plates of food.
‘I saw her. And then I saw someone else emerge. They looked … I don’t know. They looked weird.’
‘Probably telling a waiter off. Or dealing with the accountants. Or any number of things,’ Tony said.
I left pretty soon after that. Your mother was busy. I’d ask her later. Turned out, there was no later, as you know: for any of us.
I stopped at the corner shop. I have fond memories, too, of browsing those aisles, piled high with stock, my trainers making squeaking noises as I picked up fabric softener, a few beers, a pizza. Kids in Hallowe’en costumes rushed by me, buying bags of sweets, last-minute broomsticks, a witch’s mask. Freedom, I guess it was. The last shopping I ever did. Until I got out.
I’d make the house nice for Alex’s return, I decided. Do some tidying. Some useful chores. Then ask her, later, when she was relaxed, who the man was.
It looked perfect by 11.30 p.m. I had always been good at making rooms looks nice. Your mother wasn’t. She’d watch films with the main light on, but I knew how to do it. Four or five candles. Lamps. Throws.
For the first time in months, I was looking forward to something. To the winter. To Christmas. To the future, I supposed. We had spent four weeks frantically earning money as The Money People’s new deadline approached. Your mother had started operating the extended opening hours at the restaurant under the new licence. I had taken on too many decorating jobs and rushed them but, somehow, everybody was pleased. We had paid off an extra thousand in a month. It would be a tricky few years, but your mother had laughed properly for the first time the previous night. Head thrown back, mouth wide open.
When she wasn’t home by 11.45 p.m., half an hour after the restaurant closed, I rang her mobile, but she didn’t answer. I walked outside, hoping to see the headlights of a taxi in the distance. She would never pick up her phone to me if she was almost home – she was a pragmatist, just like you – but there was nothing.
‘Up late,’ David, our neighbour, said. He was loading an end table into the back of a very full removal van. An end table, Iz. Could I really recall these details if I was lying? If I had, at that precise moment, been where the prosecution said I was, murdering your mother, then hiding her body? The legs of the table were white, the top oak, maybe beech. A light wood. Need to know more detail? David had a barbed-wire tattoo around his upper arm. I thought it strange he was in a T-shirt in October, but he was sweating with the exertion of packing.
‘Just wondering where Alex is,’ I said easily.
‘That the old redhead or the young one?’
‘The old one, I guess,’ I said.
‘Not seen her.’
‘Right. Don’t worry.’
We made small talk for a few minutes more. Afterwards, I rang everybody I could think of. The restaurant’s landline: no answer. Your mother’s parents: they had no idea where she was. I had a bad feeling, and I’d never been a worrier. But I worried about her, it’s why I drove her everywhere, so I called everyone. Hospitals, friends, the police. And all the while my phone calls were pinging a mast across the island, lighting it up like a Christmas tree. Incriminating me, with its inaccuracy, without me even knowing. I was in the house, Izzy. Pacing around the garden, at most. That was all. But two different masts lit up. The one near to our house, and the other near to where she was found, a quarter of a mile away. We tried so hard to explain why. That, sometimes, one mast is down, so it re-routes to another. They were always so fucking inaccurate.
But it was no good. It all added up, didn’t it?
The evidence.
Izzy
‘What time are you in until?’ Chris said to Izzy the second she arrived.
Izzy shrugged. ‘Ten, eleven? Depends how much there is on …’ she said vaguely.
‘Right, right,’ he said, nodding quickly.
She looked across at the bar. Her father and Tony were standing talking.
‘Why?’ Izzy said.
Chris shrugged, saying nothing. He glanced over his shoulder just as his uncle did, too. Both of them looking towards the corridor. ‘Off with lover boy tonight?’ he smirked, but Izzy ignored him.
‘When will you be back?’ Izzy’s mum asked.
Izzy tied the strings of her black apron behind her back. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow.’
She couldn’t believe she was getting away with it. No, not getting away with it, she reminded herself. Couldn’t believe that she had … arrived. Into adulthood. Spending the night with Pip, with the full knowledge and blessing of all of their parents. Izzy had got the pill from her GP, the green prescription tucked neatly into the inside pocket of her handbag. She’d started it eight days ago: she was ready.
Marcus, one of the regulars, was making his way through his lasagne. He always ordered the same thing. ‘Too much tomato,’ he said. His white-blond hair caught the lamplight. He and her mother seemed to have an in-joke about the tomatoes on the lasagnes; she’d heard him mention it before.
‘Well, let me know?’ her mother said, ignoring Marcus.
‘It’ll definitely be tomorrow morning. I need to pick up my school bag.’
Her mother’s expression changed. It dropped. Like, maybe, Izzy didn’t need her any more, which was kind of true.
I’ve got teapots, I’ve got loose-leaf tea, I’ve got books, Pip had texted her earlier. They were going to retreat to his annex in the garden, curl up in bed, and read and drink and talk. ‘And ignore the world,’ Pip had said.
‘Okay,’ her mother said quickly. ‘Okay.’
Chris adjusted his T-shirt. His skin was so pale; he hadn’t been away that summer. He looked at her. He would never be permitted by Tony to go and stay at a girl’s house. Her mother and Tony often clashed over parenting – Izzy was given such a free rein – and she knew Chris was jealous.
It had been raining all day, and Izzy was privately pleased. Was it possible to be this happy? It seemed, just recently, that life had opened up for her – just completely opened up like a fat, blooming flower. She now inhabited a world full of text messages that made her stomach turn over with pleasure, of shared beds, solo driving, rain on the windows, of doing whatever she wanted. Of being in control, she supposed, of her whole life. It seemed so easy, to build a life she loved.
The atmosphere in Pip’s house was sombre, which was why they wanted to sit in his annex and ignore the world. She’d told her mother about Oliver’s death but Alex had obviously forgotten, because she’d hardly mentioned it since. She could be this way sometimes. If things didn’t directly affect her, they ceased to matter. Her father had asked how the Easons were doing, but he was different. Her uncle Tony had. Chris had. Even Marcus had, after she had told him a few weeks back. But her mother hadn’t.
As she left, at just after 10.30 p.m., running out into the sea air, finally free, she saw her mother in the restaurant window, raising a hand to her in a wave. She had her silver phone in her hand and it caught the street lights as she moved.
Pip met her in his little annex which sat forty feet away from the house, down at the bottom of the garden. Izzy’s shoes were wet with autumn rain.
‘How are you?’ s
he said to him.
‘Better now,’ he said.
There was a futon in the corner, dressed in a blue-and-white checked pattern. It was piled with cushions and throws. There was a mini fridge in the corner.
‘Hey, you’re totally self-sufficient,’ she said, looking around. ‘The world could end and you’d be just fine,’ she added.
‘We’d be fine. More than fine.’
He had a window seat at the far wall. The view wasn’t spectacular. Just the hedges at the bottom of the garden and, beyond that, the neighbour’s house, visible through the wet leaves. They had a trampoline. But the night was wet and wild, and she settled on to the sill, leaning against the navy-blue mismatched cushions.
Pip came and sat beside her. He folded her legs into his lap. The wall was cold and hard against her shoulder blades, and she shifted slightly. She liked the feel of his hands across her ankles. His grip was firm but gentle. A warm index finger worked its way inside her jeans.
‘How’re your parentals post-row?’
‘They’re fine. They’re totally fine. They really do like each other. It was just a blip,’ she says.
‘They met young, right?’
‘Yeah, really young. Like in their teens.’ She looked at him, but his expression was neutral, his head leaning back against the window, his eyes closed.
She stared out of the window and into the night. Rain splattered the window lightly.
They slept in his bed together. His annex had no curtains on the windows, and every now and then a sweep of headlights from the road illuminated the bedroom, the covers, his sleeping form. She switched her phone to silent and slipped into his arms, forgetting the world around them, forgetting everything except his smell. He did the same, and locked the annex.
‘No problems in here tonight,’ he said. ‘No bullshit, no nothing. And, anyway, soon you’ll be up and away, off to the military dance school.’
She had loved him for that. That he could see, somehow, at only seventeen, that there was a world beyond the Isle of Wight, school, their families.
The Evidence Against You Page 17