The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘It really isn’t military,’ she said.

  ‘Sure it is. I bet you ride along on tanks. Wear helmets.’

  ‘You really don’t know much about the military,’ she said with a smile. ‘Helmets and tanks.’

  ‘Hey, I’m a regular English student,’ he said. ‘Poetry and berets.’

  ‘You’ll fit right in.’

  He switched the lamp off and they lay in the dark together.

  As she was leaving, the next morning, she thought it: perhaps they wouldn’t make it. They were seventeen. His brother had died. It was a lot to process. In all the books she read and films she watched, teenage lovers didn’t make it. Especially not those under strain. Perhaps there would be no holiday, no long relationship begun early in life.

  She stared at the morning mist.

  But Pip wasn’t like other people. He was good at life. Seemed to squeeze every last drop out of it, like it was fresh orange juice. She couldn’t imagine anything that would break them up.

  Nothing at all.

  She switched her phone on a few minutes later.

  25

  ‘So you wouldn’t have even picked up her call,’ Gabe says softly.

  ‘No. That’s what I said, in court.’

  ‘The papers went to town on that phone call.’

  Izzy waves a hand, faking indifference. ‘They like all that stuff. That what could have been stuff.’ She used exactly the same phrase when she told Nick about it. It’s what she says.

  ‘How often do you think about the call?’

  ‘Hardly ever,’ she says.

  ‘Really,’ Gabe says, but it’s not a question: his tone is musing.

  Izzy thinks back to that newspaper article: Alexandra English made phone call plea moments before death.

  That call. That midnight call, five minutes before she died. Izzy had been in Pip’s bed, oblivious. Had she called as she was being attacked, or beforehand – for a chat, to impart some information? They would never know. All they knew is that she pressed ‘dial’ but that the call was cut off before it could connect.

  Izzy sometimes relives the last few moments with Pip, those last few moments before the lights were turned out on her life forever. Their ankles were entwined, afterwards, but nothing else. Their torsos were separate, propped up on his blue pillows, facing each other. It smelt different in Pip’s bed to her own: different washing powder. She loved everything about his annex. His guitar standing steady in the corner. The way they slept on the ground floor, close to the earth, and could hear the rain running down the windows. How surprisingly neat he was: a folded throw at the end of his futon, a little drawer cleared out for her things. It was like their own little flat. Their own world. She felt like she was on holiday. And more than that: she felt like life would follow a different path with him. That the barriers of the island would come down, and she’d be set free.

  ‘And what were you doing at midnight?’ the prosecution lawyer said to her.

  She swallowed, wishing she didn’t have to answer, at just seventeen. ‘I was … with … my boyfriend, I didn’t hear my phone,’ Izzy said. Pip was looking at her in bed at midnight, she guessed. He was always looking at her.

  ‘And did you have a missed call?’

  ‘No.’

  If a stranger attacked Izzy, who would she call? She sits back in the chair in the evening sunlight: Nick. It would always be Nick, no matter what.

  But that night, her mother hadn’t called her husband Gabe. It seemed, to Izzy, to be one of the most damning pieces of evidence against him, though the lawyers brushed it away. They had been rowing a lot, her father’s defence lawyer had said easily, one hand in his pocket. Why would you call someone you’ve rowed with – especially if, perhaps, it’s not immediately obvious you’re in danger?

  Her mother chose not to call her father that night. Why? Because her father was standing over her, holding the object he eventually murdered her with?

  Or maybe just because her mother had chosen to call Izzy for some reason; last number redialled, or for no reason. They’d never know. Sometimes, on days like this, when she is thinking about it too much, or late at night when her guard is down, the night seeming endless and dark, she thinks she might be able to stretch out, far into the past, and find their phones, those almost-connecting phones, and finally answer.

  ‘It’s a shame it didn’t ring,’ Izzy says now.

  ‘A shame.’

  She shrugs, irritable, wanting him to stop looking at her. All she can see are the headlines. What if she had been looking at her phone? What if she’d called her mother?

  Gabe is watching her closely. She tries to blink away the tears, but she doesn’t quite manage it.

  ‘It’s okay to be sad about it,’ he says softly.

  ‘She reached out to me,’ Izzy says, her eyes filling again. She finds a tissue and wipes them. ‘I don’t know if she thought of me as she was dying.’ It’s absurd that she is confiding in him, but she can’t help it. He’s her dad.

  ‘I knew I’d get you talking,’ Gabe says. ‘Close quarters.’ He gestures to the kitchen.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘All the other prisoners used to confess to me,’ he says. ‘They’d tell me all sorts. Murders and robberies and money laundering. And then I’d blackmail them with their secrets for extra chocolate.’ He lets a laugh out.

  ‘You didn’t,’ she says.

  ‘I did. I did.’ He doesn’t look as though he’s just told her something unsavoury, something inhumane, and Izzy is relieved when he changes the subject. ‘What happened with Pip?’ Gabe says now, knowing when to push, and when to change the subject.

  ‘It wasn’t very nice.’

  ‘You always seemed so good together. Quite adult.’

  ‘I guess so,’ she says, not wanting to get into that, too. ‘But I met Nick, anyway …’

  ‘What’s he like, this husband of yours?’

  ‘He’s …’ Izzy thinks. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to describe him as he is. Safe. Steady. Good at facts and figures and at sorting things with a level head. Likes routines. Why? She probes around inside her mind and finds the answer: because she knows Gabe would be surprised to discover she had ended up with such a man. ‘He’s very funny,’ she says, which is the last thing Nick is.

  ‘Oh, good,’ Gabe says, his face stretching into a smile that makes him look too thin. ‘Funny people take the edge off life. My last cellmate was funny. Nice guy, Keith.’

  ‘Yes,’ Izzy says, wanting to change the subject again. ‘But the timings of that night. They said she arrived home at just before twelve … and that she was dead by the early hours.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But they don’t know if she was killed in the house.’

  ‘No. Nobody knows exactly where she died.’

  ‘And the mobile phone masts –’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Your first call to her pinged the Shanklin mast, not Luccombe.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shanklin is the nearest mast to where she was found.’

  ‘I know that, Iz. But they were inaccurate then. Not like now. There were fewer masts, so the distances varied … I told you.’

  ‘But if you never left the house – if you were only just outside it, in the garden – it couldn’t have been you.’

  Izzy sits for a moment, thinking of that neighbour. Lost somewhere. An unknowingly important witness. He’d clearly never seen Gabe’s story in a newspaper. Had never realized he held the key.

  Or … he had moved days before, just like Izzy thought. He couldn’t corroborate Gabe’s alibi, because it was made up. Gabe’s phone pinged the Shanklin mast because he was murdering her mother right where she was found. She meets her father’s eyes as she thinks it.

  ‘Did your lawyer ever trace the removal van? When it was returned?’

  ‘Yes. The first of November.’

  Izzy sucks her lip in, thinking. Do you return a removal van the day you finish with it,
or a couple of days after – once you’d bought new furniture and transported it home, perhaps? She wasn’t sure.

  ‘He gave the house keys to the agent on the first. The agent gave evidence.’

  But giving the key back doesn’t mean that’s when you moved out, Izzy thinks.

  ‘Izzy,’ Gabe says suddenly, urgently. ‘Forget about David Smith. You were in the restaurant that night.’

  ‘Yes. I was.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’ Izzy says, staring at him blankly.

  ‘Who was there? I want every person.’

  Izzy gazes at him as she realizes. ‘I see,’ she says. ‘This is why you’re here. Because I have information.’

  ‘I want to know who killed my wife,’ he says urgently.

  Izzy slides her hands off the table, curling into herself, away from him.

  ‘And yes – you can help.’

  ‘But you have to get me on side first.’

  ‘Are you on side?’ he asks.

  ‘Not really. I don’t know.’

  He turns his hands over in a defeated gesture. ‘You know it’s about more than what information you have for me, Izzy. Obviously.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course.’ He holds her gaze.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Okay. Chris. Tony. Marcus. Hmm. A couple of other waiters. Was one called Gary?’

  ‘Okay. That’s four names. Anyone else?’

  Izzy thinks back. She can remember looking forward to going to Pip’s, and thinking dreamily of him, but nothing else. The shift has blurred into all of the other waitressing shifts she undertook around that time. There is nothing to distinguish it, so it has faded into oblivion. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know.’

  ‘Tony also mentioned somebody called Babs,’ Izzy says, watching Gabe’s expression closely.

  ‘That’s my ex-girlfriend,’ he says dismissively. ‘Were there any other men there?’

  ‘He seemed to indicate something had happened? With Babs?’ Izzy can feel that she is being led away from explanations, towards what her father wants to talk about, but she’s powerless to stop it. Perhaps that is just his way. The way he is, has always been: dominant and full of energy.

  ‘He heard us row once. Is all. Took exception to it. Butted in, in the name of chivalry, which was actually just stabbing me in the back.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, said men shouldn’t shout at women.’ Gabe jumps at a sound.

  She follows his gaze, and sees Nick’s car pulling up in their driveway. He’s early.

  ‘You have to go,’ she says to Gabe. ‘My husband’s home – and he doesn’t know.’

  Stomach acid sloshes around as she stands and gestures to Gabe. ‘You can cut through the back garden,’ she tells him. He can walk down the shared access and out.

  Adrenaline floods her body as she imagines Nick realizing that she’s been seeing her father; that he’s here with her, a convicted killer, invited into their home. She swallows. She stands in the kitchen, looking at Gabriel, and watching her husband in his car.

  ‘Now,’ she says.

  He puts his coat on, even though it is warm outside, and leaves without argument.

  ‘Ah,’ Nick says as he walks in. ‘I wondered if you’d be home already.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, her cheeks burning, thinking of Gabriel, walking down their access way just a few feet from them.

  He will have to walk home again. Five miles to her. Five miles back.

  It’s only once she is in bed, waiting for sleep to come, that the fear joins her, barely knocking on the door of the silent bedroom before letting itself in. That note. That horrible, horrible, personal note. Who could have sent it?

  She tries to forget that the last person to hand-deliver a letter to the restaurant was Gabe himself.

  26

  Izzy goes straight to the attic when she gets home from work the next day. She made an excuse to leave early, saying she had a headache. Chris gave her a look, but she no longer cares whether he believes her. She dithers for a few minutes, looking inside the boxes, and eventually she decides to look through her father’s art collection.

  She’s thinking of affairs and insurance claims. It makes a sickening kind of sense to Izzy. Her mother got her father into debt – debt that was in his name. If she had then been having an affair, too, wouldn’t that be the perfect trigger for her father to lose his temper, or to plan her murder, knowing it would solve his debt problems, too? If he believed she didn’t even love him, after everything …

  She opens the box containing her father’s pots and paintings, and is immediately assailed by memories. The portraits Gabe used to paint of her mother, all on small canvases, less than the size of a handprint. He used oils – ‘Acrylics are for babies,’ he would say – diluted with linseed oil, turpentine. Some of them still smell of it, even now. That sweet, doughy smell. It takes her back. He had begun to play with texture, in the last days of his art. Using cording and ribbons to mark the paint. Those are his most accomplished paintings. Her mother’s hair, tumbling around her shoulders, stippled and textured by cord.

  She disturbs a raft of pots at the bottom of one of the boxes as she removes the portraits. They thump together as she dislodges them – her father was a sturdy potter, making mugs and bowls with thick clay sides and bottoms, never using delicate china – and she reaches in for one. It is a perfectly formed, miniature vase. Big and round at the bottom, like a breast, curving snugly in her palm, then sweeping in at the neck, so slim and dainty. It would hold a single flower at most. It’s grey, unpainted, with just the top varnished. The clay has formed a toasted line around the rim, speckled eggshell brown.

  Izzy’s mother’s dressing table had been covered with pots Gabe had made for her. Ring holders, a necklace tree, pots for her make-up brushes. Odd pots that he’d discarded because they’d collapsed, but glazed anyway for her. Mismatched little dishes, espresso cups, giant misshapen mugs, all stacked. The rejects, her father had called them, but her mother kept them all. She’d had to move them to get to her blusher, to her foundation, to her hairbrush, the things she used every day.

  Izzy searches through the boxes, looking for something, anything. A third figure, a man in one of the paintings, maybe. A love triangle depicted. Anger. Something hidden inside a pot. But instead, she finds the exact opposite: here is a love story, chronicled carefully by her father, when he was supposed to be out doing something more worthy.

  A portrait of her mother, from behind, customary breadstick holding her hair up, orange tendrils hanging down around it. The details disappear at the neck, her torso left suggestively bare. Her mother looking out across the fields at Luccombe, evening light transforming her hair from red to amber. Her mother bent low over a mixing bowl. Two slender arms along the bathtub, painted from behind. Her mother at the coast, hair whipped around her face by the wind, laughing. Hundreds of portraits of her mother. Of her mother’s life. Izzy lingers over them. She had forgotten the set of her mother’s eyes, so widely spaced. She had forgotten a particular expression she had when she was amused, a lopsided smile, indulgent-looking. And then, the most intricate portrait of her feet. Toenails painted pink. Yes. She remembers now. It’s like meeting an old friend on the street.

  Her mother. Here. Preserved by the man accused of murdering her. Izzy’s mouth tightens as she tries not to cry.

  At the bottom of one of the boxes, she finds dozens of her old pointe shoes. She handles the pink satin carefully, the memories forming. Darning the ends of them, so they didn’t slip. They’re still dusted with a sticky substance – rosin, kept in a silver tray in the corner of the room. Each dancer would dip the end of their shoe in it, the action like stubbing out a cigarette. Izzy looks inside. She was a purist. Never used padding. The inside is lined with drops of blood from where the knuckles of her toes would bleed.

  She puts them back after a while, and looks again at the paintings. She wonders if Nick would paint her this way. Of cou
rse he would, she thinks guiltily. And what would she paint of him? His long, lanky limbs. His thick hair. The way he makes everything fun; that life with him is never fraught with difficult conversations or unexpected moodiness but instead consists of cheese plates in bed, picking holes in true-crime documentaries – ‘That would never happen,’ he will say – and knowing he will always be where he says he will be.

  God. What is she doing, risking that? Her marriage. The most sacred thing in her life. She’s been mad. She’s got to tell him. Of course she has. She thinks back over the past few weeks: hiding her father’s note, the bank statements spread out in their attic, right above where Nick sleeps, without him knowing. Lying about a urinary tract infection. That man who saw her and Gabe together in the café, and who could mention it to anybody. Word can travel fast on the Isle of Wight, as she learnt the day her mother’s body was discovered.

  What has she been thinking?

  She’s got to tell Nick.

  27

  She cooks Nick a proper meal – steak, chips, peppercorn sauce – and prepares to tell him. Her rush of guilt in the loft has dulled slightly. Perhaps she will tell him that she’s seen her father, but not that he’s been here. Not that they have been alone together. She’ll tell him a half-truth, she thinks, as she seasons the steaks.

  She has the radio on as she cooks. An expert is discussing the recent dry weather. There have been grass fires by the sides of the road. A hosepipe ban is being considered by some of the water companies. She thinks of her father’s boiling, tiny room and turns the radio off.

  Nick leaves the door open when he arrives. ‘I swear, this is the only house in the whole of Britain that’s actually cool,’ he says as he arrives. He kisses her forehead absent-mindedly as he goes through the mail. He is always like this. Having a conversation about one thing and doing two other things, too.

  ‘We were invited home this weekend, I meant to say.’ He gestures to his phone bearing a string of customary family WhatsApps. ‘But I couldn’t be arsed.’