The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Why? Where?’

  ‘Mum and Dad’s. But it’s so far and I’m tired …’

  Izzy’s mouth tightens. She says nothing. Imagine skipping a family event because of tiredness, because you couldn’t be bothered?

  ‘Cooking in the dark?’ he says.

  Izzy has let the dusk invade the kitchen, not doing anything about it. Just thinking about how she’ll tell him.

  ‘You okay?’ he says immediately to her, his eyes lowering as they meet hers.

  ‘I’ve seen my father,’ she says to him as she flips the steaks over.

  The air seems to still around them. As he moves back in shock, he stumbles against the open door and activates their outside security light. Goosebumps appear all over her body as she takes in his facial expression, bleached white on one side. His brow has crumpled, but his eyes are on her, wide, wary, not blinking.

  ‘What?’ he says quietly.

  Neither of them moves, and the light turns off again.

  He switches the lamp on. ‘When?’

  He is information gathering; this is what Nick does before he reacts. In the total silence she hears him swallow.

  ‘Just now,’ she says. She doesn’t admit the first night. One small step at a time.

  ‘God, why?’ he says. Ever rational.

  ‘I …’ Izzy falters. There’s a burst of laughter out back, which makes her jump. William, she thinks. He must have people over. ‘He … he has told me he’s innocent,’ she says simply.

  ‘You don’t believe him, do you?’ Nick’s tone is as sharp as citrus.

  She wants to answer him honestly, but can’t find the words. Her eyes mist over and she realizes: she is upset he has to ask. If there was a tiny chance that his own father hadn’t killed his mother, wouldn’t Nick hear him out? She appraises him, standing in the kitchen in his suit, and finds she can’t answer. Maybe he wouldn’t. Criminals are guilty upon arrest, to Nick. He has come to believe this. He is a product of a system.

  She doesn’t ever tell him about the Instagram family, or about how she feels when she watches Thea. She pretends to be fine, inexplicably unaffected by her upbringing, but he must surely know … he hasn’t taken her at her word, has he? She watches him, standing there in her kitchen, her husband – a stranger. Does he know how she feels, deep down, or has he really never noticed? Or does he know, and it’s easier to pretend he doesn’t? A memory of Pip springs into her mind. ‘What’re you thinking?’ he would say often. What would he say now, here? He’d be boiling that kettle. Pulling her towards him. ‘What’s on your mind?’ he’d be saying. Izzy can’t think about it. Her eyes feel moist.

  Nick is silent, his body completely still, looking at her. He’s waiting for an answer.

  She blinks, then lifts her gaze to his. ‘And I think he might not have done it. He seems to act so consistently!’ Her voice is cracked and sore-sounding.

  Nick doesn’t say anything. It is as though her belief doesn’t warrant a response; it is so ridiculous. She takes the steaks off the heat but can’t bring herself to serve them.

  She wonders if – if she let him – he would simply walk into their living room and start his evening. Pretend this conversation hasn’t happened. He would like to, of that she is sure. He will pretend not to hear difficult questions.

  She dumps the steaks and chips on the plates.

  ‘Don’t you think there’s any chance he could be innocent?’ she asks.

  ‘He was convicted,’ Nick says eventually, softly.

  His tone is so gentle that her heart breaks and she regrets her previous thoughts. He licks his lips, a dart of pink tongue, and takes a plate. He walks into the living room and Izzy feels with a sudden lurch that he might put the television on. Please don’t. Please don’t turn the television on. Please don’t avoid it. Please don’t distract yourself, and consign my feelings to a box labelled unimportant.

  ‘Why won’t you even consider it?’ she says, catching up to him.

  ‘They all say they’re innocent, Izzy,’ he says. ‘Every single one of them.’

  Neither of them says anything for a beat or two.

  And then Nick says, ‘He wants you to hear his side of it, right? From the start?’

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘They all say that, too.’

  Izzy says nothing for a beat. He’s trying to protect her, she reminds herself.

  ‘Izzy. Remember where they found the body?’

  ‘But some of them are innocent,’ she says, ignoring his question. ‘Some of them really must be! Don’t you remember the Birmingham Six? Angela Cannings?’ Izzy has been reading about them all. She has the Wikipedia page for Miscarriages of Justice open on her laptop, each tab a new name.

  ‘Oh, the Birmingham Six! Here we go …’

  She’s surprised to hear disdain in his voice. ‘What do you mean here we go? Here we go, my wife is in touch with her estranged, guilty and –’ her voice breaks, ‘much-missed father? Here we go.’ She hears the caustic emphasis lacing her words and tries to stop herself. Don’t lose your temper. Don’t lose control.

  ‘Just because their convictions were overturned doesn’t mean they were not guilty,’ Nick says, spearing a chip. ‘Besides, the percentage is vanishingly small.’ He reaches for the remote control.

  No.

  ‘But –’

  ‘It’s Occam’s razor, isn’t it?’ he says, talking over her, his voice raised. He hardly ever raises his voice. ‘The simplest explanation is true …’ He pauses. Then, ‘Where have you seen him? Alone?’

  ‘In a café,’ she mumbles.

  ‘Alone?’ he persists.

  ‘I didn’t know anyone there. But we weren’t alone. No.’

  ‘That’s so stupid,’ he says. But it’s not cruel, the way he says it. It’s pitying.

  ‘He’s not dangerous,’ she says now, though she doesn’t know that. Not at all.

  Nick doesn’t say anything, but the expression on his face does. He puffs air into his cheeks. ‘You’re in deep,’ he says, still looking at her. The gel he would have put in his hair that morning has been rubbed out during his working day – he is always messing with his hair – and now it looks dulled and fluffy.

  ‘I’m not in deep,’ she says. ‘I just think … what if he is innocent? Or what if he … what if there’s more to what he did than meets the eye?’ The words seem to ring out in their silent living room. She doesn’t know what she expects. For Nick to seriously consider it, for him to ponder it with her, to reassure her, even, that her judgement isn’t completely off, that he, too, would feel tempted? But whatever she wants, she doesn’t get it. She wants collaboration but, here, she finds defence.

  ‘Izzy …’ Nick says, his hand still on the remote control, slim fingers curled around its edges.

  ‘I want to hear him out. I want to see him again.’

  ‘You believe him,’ Nick says. ‘This is why you asked me if I’d needed the file.’

  ‘No. Yes.’

  ‘You’ve used me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to believe him.’

  Yes, Izzy thinks. Exactly that. He has articulated it exactly, with the full force of his intellect behind the thought process, but with zero empathy. And is that so bad? The anger has left her now and she’s filled with only sadness, instead. How could they begin to raise a family – even if she was ready? They disagree on so much. The steadiness that Nick has represented for her, with his even temper and penchant for routine, suddenly feels hollow.

  When she hasn’t answered for five seconds, Nick finally does what he has been waiting to do ever since he got in. He turns on the television – a mid-week football match he recorded earlier – and sits down.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ she says. ‘Of the evidence?’

  ‘You’re missing the biggest piece.’

  ‘What?’ she says.

  He turns to her, fixing her with his gaze, and says, ‘It’s just that, when a woman dies, i
t’s almost always the partner. When a child dies, it’s almost always the parents. That’s life.’

  ‘But that’s not evidence. That’s circumstantial.’

  He doesn’t bother replying.

  His words reverberate in her mind as she turns away from him.

  Partner. Child. Parents.

  It’s late, and Izzy’s throat is still tight with tears. Unhappiness. Longing, maybe.

  She can’t stop thinking about how she wanted Nick to react. Their ostensibly solid marriage is being rocked by her family, as she always privately feared it would be. And instead of talking to Nick about it, all Izzy is thinking of is Pip.

  Pip Talbot, and how he would have reacted. And how they parted ways.

  She types his name into Facebook. It asks her if she means Philip, and there he is. Smiling at the camera, skiing sunglasses raised into his hairline, a faint butterfly suntan across his features, the mountains in the background.

  He looks exactly how she thought he would. Free and easy. The thought is somehow comforting.

  She presses Add friend, opens the message box, and begins to type.

  28

  Izzy wakes with a start. The threatening newspaper article is her first thought, always seeming worse in the small hours. She looks at her phone to discern what’s woken her. A Facebook message. Her heart speeds up as she wonders if it’s Pip, but it’s one of the David Smiths.

  Next to her, Nick snores softly.

  Afraid I lived near there, but not on that road as I can recall. In London now, David has typed.

  Where were you based? Izzy types back to him. Which road?

  She waits for a long time before it comes back.

  11 Dolphin Street, he writes eventually. Sorry, had to look it up.

  That is nowhere near where Izzy lived. She locks her phone with a sigh. He has become nothing. Another insignificant David Smith in a whole wasted sea of them.

  But, anyway, what use would it really be? An alibi might confirm her father’s innocence, but that, in itself, would ask a wider question: if not him … who did it? And even if – even if – she figures it out, then what? She’s not exactly going to get peace of mind either way.

  She’s awake now, at 5.00 a.m., so she goes to look through the bank statements for May 1999. She’s moved the statements from their loft and into their spare room, hidden away in a drawer.

  She is sitting in the cool spare room, her feet flat against the wall, the folder on her lap, when she sees it. Blackjack Casino: +£1,100.

  A credit from a casino on the business account? Izzy frowns at it. Who was gambling? Her mother? Gabe? She can’t imagine either of them doing so. They never even bought lottery tickets. Never watched horse racing. Nothing.

  If her mother had put her father into debt and then gambled – trying to help, but failing – her father’s motive would be so clear. Anger. Her mother was gambling with their future, and her father had been angry.

  She gets her phone out to text Gabe, but a text immediately comes through from him. Up early, too. He was never an early riser.

  I have been thinking of the newspaper clipping, he writes.

  I have found evidence of gambling in the bank statements, Izzy types. Why the newspaper clipping?

  Tell me again exactly what it said?

  It had Mum’s name crossed out and mine replaced, she replies. It said ‘Alex’ was found in undergrowth, but they’d written ‘Izzy’.

  Her phone rings and she answers.

  ‘Let me help you,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re being threatened. We should try and figure out who it is.’

  ‘Maybe we should just tell the police,’ Izzy mutters, wanting to grasp on to the real world. For authority. To avoid being drawn into her father’s underworld.

  ‘The police won’t help,’ he says quickly, easily. ‘I think we should meet – but alone. I have a theory. I could come to Alexandra’s. After hours?’

  ‘Why?’

  Izzy thinks of all of the evidence they have discussed so far. The debt. His lack of alibi. The text he sent to her mother. And the lies he’s told, too.

  ‘Don’t you think that, maybe, somebody doesn’t want us speaking?’ he asks.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The person who did it.’

  Something expands in her chest, then seems to click into place. Yes. She wants to know. She’s ready to know.

  ‘But who?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know …’ He leaves a significant pause.

  ‘Okay,’ she says softly. ‘Come by tonight. After eleven thirty.’

  She hangs up, thinking of her smart, protective husband’s warnings. She is trying to be brave. She is trying not to be scared. Not knowing who to be scared of.

  On the way to work that afternoon, Izzy takes a detour. She hasn’t been back to her parents’ house since she moved out. Not even when it was eventually sold – at half its original value, due to the sinister connection, to a single mother who was pleased by the bargain and intrigued by the crime – and not when it popped back on the market, years later, and there had been an open house. It would have been easy to go, but she couldn’t. It was still too soon.

  The months after the trial are fuzzy. She guesses the house was emptied and their possessions sold, but she doesn’t remember it, or wasn’t told.

  Rainsdown Lane is a perfectly normal street. A cul-de-sac of 1960s detached houses. Theirs – number 20 – is on the end, by the road, on a corner. Izzy could see the sea from one of the bedrooms. David Smith lived at number 18. It’s easy for Izzy to see why he would be the only witness to her father’s innocence, or otherwise. The houses are on their own, set apart from the rest, with only a fast main road opposite.

  She counts the traffic on the main road as she sits in her car. One car. Two. Three. Three cars in as many minutes. Maybe not a single car went by at midnight that night. There were no witnesses.

  Her mother’s hair had been found in the boot of her father’s car. It was one of the many pieces of evidence the Crown Prosecution Service used to tell their story, Izzy gathered from sitting on the landing and listening to her grandparents, that he had killed her in the house and transported her body, or that he had transported her alive, and killed her near to where she was found.

  The defence had evidently batted it away; that evidence was easy to rebut, compared to the rest. They were married, the barrister had said, while Matt Richmond and Gabe had looked on. Your hairs would be in the boot of every single car you’d ever owned, he had said, gesturing to the jury, who nodded mutely, considering it.

  Her mobile phone had never been recovered. The text from Gabe and the call to Izzy were recovered from the provider, but her phone had never been found. The prosecution said her father had disposed of it in a panic, as he knew how damning his communication with her would look. The defence said what they’ve said all along: that they do not know.

  A row of conifers divides the two houses. Gabe’s car would have been on the drive, and so the taxi must either have parked where Izzy is, or on the other side of the road. She isn’t sure which. She didn’t see the taxi driver give evidence and she hasn’t found it reported anywhere, either. She is depending on the recall of her grandparents, and Gabe, both unreliable in their own ways.

  She looks across at the house. Little details pop out at her that she had forgotten. The three steps up to the front door, worn right in the centre, dipping just slightly from thousands of footsteps. The hook from the hanging basket that used to sit to the left of the door, which is now empty. The two frosted-glass panes either side of the centre of the door.

  The door is in plain sight. If the lights were on, Izzy would be able to see the entire hallway when the door opened. She waits for a few minutes, looking at it contemplatively, then moves across the street. The view is the same. The trees might have obscured the door, back then, but Gabe was pretty good about maintaining them. He liked to do it, and was good at it – ‘Topi
ary is art,’ he once cheerfully said.

  She starts the engine again as she stares at the house. She now has a question for Gabe.

  Did Alice Reid ever describe the interior of their hallway?

  29

  Izzy says goodnight to everyone, as she always does, at eleven thirty, but she hangs around, waiting. She takes her shoes off and hums as she wipes areas of the restaurant she hardly gets to: behind the till, the wooden rack the knives and forks sit in.

  Gabe comes at midnight, exactly when she said.

  ‘It’s so hot out,’ she says as she opens the door to him, still in his anorak. Outside is warmer than the air-conditioned restaurant. The paving slabs are body temperature underneath her bare feet. Like the height of summer. Like being abroad.

  There’s an amber alert for next week. The unseasonable early heatwave is due to continue. People are being advised to walk their dogs only late at night or early in the morning. The beaches are heaving every day, people covering the sand like ants.

  ‘I feel the cold,’ he says.

  They sit opposite each other at the bar.

  ‘Any food going spare?’ Gabe says, his tone jovial.

  She looks at his slim arms, and her stomach flips over.

  ‘Alex used to bring home the most amazing leftovers,’ he adds.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Hang on.’

  ‘Does Nick talk about work much?’ Gabe says.

  The question comes out of nowhere, and Izzy pauses on her way to the kitchen.

  ‘Not much,’ she says carefully.

  ‘Interesting, that you chose to marry a policeman,’ Gabe says, his tone light.

  Izzy opens the fridge and begins pulling things out, her face hot.

  ‘How’re the job interviews?’ she says to him. ‘And the flyers?’

  He laughs, a faint, disbelieving puff of air escaping his mouth. ‘They’re not interested in hiring somebody whose skillset consists of beating people up and making noodles in a kettle.’

  Izzy looks away, embarrassed. This imposter isn’t her father. He can’t be. She wishes they could wind the clock back, somehow. That he hadn’t become this man.