She listened harder. The thrum of the washing machine. She rose to standing from her position under the tree and peered through the kitchen window. Her father was doing laundry.
Later, it would transpire that he had washed every surface in the house. Every floor. And everything that he had worn on the night she had gone missing. Even his shoes.
31
‘It looked guilty,’ Izzy says to her father now. ‘That stuff you did.’
He blinks, looking at her in surprise.
He has three empty plates in front of him, all in a row, and he awkwardly arranges his elbows around them to rest his face in his hands. Yes, that’s right, that’s so right; he used to sit in exactly this way.
‘The washing?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I was always in charge of the washing. And, anyway,’ he says with a wave of his hand, ‘you’re looking at it all wrong.’ He says it nastily, his lip curling up slightly in distaste.
Izzy steps back from him instinctively. ‘Am I?’
‘She was missing. Then. But I didn’t know she was dead. Murdered. It was just washing then. Just washing.’
‘But you cleaned so thoroughly.’
‘I’ve explained,’ he says. ‘Haven’t I? Forget it,’ he adds. ‘Just forget it, if you’re going to give me the fucking third degree.’
‘Aren’t I entitled to?’
‘Forget it,’ he says again.
She tries to breathe deeply. Of course he will be defensive. Look at what’s happened to him. Rather than rising to it, she removes the plates from in front of him. She will go home in a few minutes: it’s late. She needs to write to more David Smiths, though she doesn’t want to tell Gabe that now. Doesn’t want him to know of her doubts, that her research is concentrated on investigating any possibility of his innocence rather than considering who else could have done it.
‘I can run you home,’ she says, thinking of the walk he took the other day, to her house and back, all alone.
‘No. I like the walk – the fresh air. The space,’ he says, giving her a smile she can’t read.
He produces his pack of cards from his coat again, and they play on the bar. They share another entire cheesecake – ‘I’ll get so fat,’ Izzy says – and some wine. She beats him ten to five.
‘You must be cheating,’ he says, throwing his head back and finally laughing, the old him, his lips smeared with balsamic vinegar.
When it’s time, she watches him go. For a brief moment, the form of her old father appears before her. Lolloping into the sunlight, tennis racket in hand. Marching off to his shipping container with his burgundy art supplies bag slung over his muscular shoulder.
But just as quickly as he appeared, her new father is back. Her eyes mist over and obscure him from view. White hair, frail form, £12.99 Matalan coat. He eats one meal per day, this father, she is pretty sure. He has only one contact in the mobile phone he doesn’t remember to charge – for twenty years, he has been taken care of, hasn’t had to organize himself whatsoever – and will likely never work again.
It is after one o’clock in the morning by the time Izzy has finished cleaning. She stands, hands on the bar, thinking that she ought to lock up and go home. She sometimes extends these moments alone in the restaurant. The food sold, eaten, binned. The punters gone home. When it’s just an empty building, she can almost convince herself that it’s somewhere else.
She’s picking up her handbag when she hears it. The soft closing of a door. She freezes, her heart thundering in her ears. Please be imaginary, she is thinking. Please be an animal. The wind. Something and nothing.
She stands, feeling her heart calm down. Nothing. It was nothing.
And then she hears the second sound. A footstep. Somebody being deliberately quiet. She acts without thinking, ducking down behind the bar, her handbag clutched to her.
A second footstep. A third. This is it. All her foolishness. He’s come for her. She will end up like her mother, found days later. He knows that she ruined his alibi. He’s angry about that. Or maybe he is just psychotic. Enjoys murdering women. Wants to control them and kill them. Her mind is her enemy, trying to reason it through, and scaring herself even more in the process.
Four steps. Five. Whoever it is, they are not coming towards her, but heading across the restaurant.
Six steps. Seven.
They’ve reached the basement. She hears the sound of their footsteps change as they reach the stone. Fear thrums through her. The basement. Oh God, oh God. She hears the squeak of the old door handle. The slow drawing back of the door. He’s going to put her in the basement. The door shuts softly behind him and she stands up, her palms cold and slick with sweat. She reaches into her bag for her phone and gets it out, poised to dial 999. To dial Nick.
But first, she crosses quickly to the basement door and turns the key. It clicks. Air escapes her lungs: she’s safe. For just a few minutes, while she works out what to do. She hears movement downstairs. She’s poised to call Nick. But what if it’s something benign? And then, for nothing, she’d have to tell Nick that Gabe had been here tonight. And then what would happen? Her father would be taken away from her. Again. That warm, safe, hopeful feeling she gets, deep inside, would be destroyed. She stands, frozen with indecision.
‘Izzy?’ a voice says on the other side of the door.
It’s him. She’s so sure it’s him. It’s Gabe.
‘Izzy?’ it says again, and relief moves through her, just like stepping into a warm room. It’s not Gabe. It’s Tony.
‘Why are you in the basement?’ she says.
‘I forgot to take the wine out of my car,’ he explains.
She unlocks the door. He’s standing halfway up the stairs, his hands on his hips, a puzzled smile on his face. He gestures to the wine rack where several bottles are sitting on the floor. ‘I was up when I remembered – rather do it at one in the morning than get up early to come round.’
That’s right. He’s a night owl.
‘God,’ she says, relief making her unburden herself, forget her reservations. ‘I thought you were him. I thought you’d come for me.’ She leans forward, placing her hands on her thighs like a runner just finishing a race.
Tony comes for her, his arms open. ‘No, Izzy – no,’ he says softly.
She stands, enfolded in her uncle’s arms, feeling sick, her legs shaking.
She can’t resist looking in the cellar the next morning. She doesn’t know what possesses her. Something about Tony’s body language. His tone had been relaxed. His words, too. But there was just something … something in the set of his jaw. Something a little too practised about his confused expression.
She hates going down into the cellar. It’s one of the reasons Tony sorts the wine. It’s half the size of the restaurant, with low ceilings and a damp smell, like sour washing. She hardly knows what’s down here. She has made many discoveries over the years – that is often the way, when you inherit a working organism like a restaurant. She took it on passively, reluctantly. She has reworked it piecemeal, over the years, altering the menus, the prices, the wages, the layout of the main room. But she’s never really overhauled it fully. She hardly goes into some areas – the little store cupboard off the kitchen, which is still full of plates from the 1990s, and the basement.
She can see immediately that the wine rack has been fully stocked. Red at the bottom, white up top. The surplus is left standing along the wall.
She walks upstairs, leaving it be. She’s almost at the top when she looks back and notices. The wine rack is at an angle. Just slightly. You’d never be able to tell if you weren’t looking for it.
She crosses the basement again and approaches the side, which is sitting a couple of inches out from the wall. She peers down behind it, but the wine rack has a solid back, and so it’s completely dark. She gets her phone out and finds the torch, then shines it behind the rack. It glints off something. A small door?
Izzy blinks, then drags the
wine rack out further. She stares at what it reveals: a safe.
32
A memory pops, fully formed, into her mind, as she looks at it.
Her mother putting things in the safe. Yes, of course. How could she have forgotten? It had a double-sided key. An old brass thing, more like a cross than a key. It’s funny how she remembers the feel of its weightiness in her palm exactly.
She gets her phone out and calls Gabe, the man she thought had come to murder her last night. God, how foolish she was. Why would he? She’s his daughter. But then, Alex was his wife.
David Smith pops into her mind, but she leads him back into the box and locks it. That’s nothing to worry about. It’s not. It’s just not.
‘I’ve found something,’ she says when Gabe picks up. ‘It might be nothing, but –’
She stops speaking as she tries to consider whether she should mention Tony. No. Not yet. She’ll try and open the safe. Withhold her judgement. And not worry Gabe about his brother in the meantime. And then she’ll see what she finds. And if it leads her to Tony, then …
‘It’s a safe.’
‘A safe?’ Gabe says.
‘In the basement. Behind the wine rack.’
‘Oh!’ Gabe says. ‘Oh, wow.’
‘It’s locked – I don’t have a key. I don’t know where Mum’s set went?’ she says.
‘You know, you could really be on to something here, Iz,’ he says. ‘The police never really searched Alexandra’s. And they certainly wouldn’t have bothered tracing keys.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they had their suspect.’
‘I see.’
‘Has anybody else had control over these premises?’
‘No, not really. Granny and Granddad did come here – before I became the owner, properly – and Chris and Tony have always worked here.’
‘Those people are all so convinced of my guilt,’ Gabe says lightly.
‘Hmm,’ she says, thinking of Tony’s easy manner last night.
Gabe seems to be thinking.
‘So it hasn’t been opened in two decades?’ he says.
‘Probably not. Not by me, anyway. What do you think’s in there, Gabe?’
‘I don’t know. But if your mother was keeping secrets, might she not keep them in there?’
‘Do you think she was keeping secrets?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ he says.
Izzy suddenly feels cold, down here alone in the stone cellar.
‘What should we do, then?’ she says.
‘We should hire a lock picker,’ he says decisively. ‘I know a few. Guys who’ve served time. Great burglars.’
Izzy doesn’t laugh, though she almost wants to. ‘Don’t use those,’ she says. ‘I’ll find one.’
‘Right,’ Gabe says. ‘But where were we? In our chats?’
‘Day two, missing,’ Izzy says. ‘The day they searched your shipping container.’
33
PROSECUTOR: Who had the key to that location?
GABRIEL ENGLISH: Me.
PROSECUTOR: How many keys were there?
GABRIEL ENGLISH: Just mine. One.
PROSECUTOR: One?
GABRIEL ENGLISH: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: Had you checked it when your wife had been missing for two days?
GABRIEL ENGLISH: No.
PROSECUTOR: So you had a sheltered place where somebody could be.
GABRIEL ENGLISH: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: And you decided not to check it at all during the time your wife was missing until the police prompted you to do so on the second day?
GABRIEL ENGLISH: No. Because I … I knew she wouldn’t be there. She never went there. I was looking. I was looking for her.
Wednesday 3 November 1999: two days after Alex’s murder
Gabe
They – this is how I had come to think of them, the police – were checking my shipping container in the morning, and so I accompanied them with the key. We walked. It was less than ten minutes from home, you probably remember.
My relationship with them had become strained, like a couple not yet ready to admit it was heading for divorce. Still sharing a bed, still watching television. Uneasy silences and small talk while each assessed the other.
What do I remember about that morning? I remember the way the light hit the pale sides of the container, that honeyed autumnal light even at nine o’clock in the morning. And I remember the way I felt, the way I’d felt for days, like I was full of anxious poison.
They let me unlock the two doors at the back. The sun blinded me as I did so, and I fumbled with the key. Earlier, they had asked me who else had access to the container, and I’d told them nobody. Not even the man I rented it off. He had given me the only set; he’d joked he was ‘a good sport that way’.
The container opened up like a pair of French doors, two together. It smelt of art. That’s the only way I can describe my container. Art, and home.
Do you know how much your mother hated that container? Even before we were in debt, she hated it. Treated it like a competitor, a rival. When I packed up my art bag to go there in the evenings (I was always transporting oils around, because I was never not painting) she’d raise her eyebrows, but say nothing.
But sometimes she liked it. When it suited her, I guess. If I left my container late, she liked me to give her lifts home from the restaurant. So much so that I’d started surprising her. Turning up when she didn’t expect it. She would always be delighted. She’d turn the heat up, take her shoes off, curl her legs up on the passenger seat – no seat belt – and doze. She said it was the only time of day when she wasn’t in charge.
The two police officers – one short, one taller and thickset – stood like sentries as I opened the doors. The container was undisturbed since the last time I had been there. An easel to the left housing a half-finished painting which their eyes roved over. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smells from before. The sweet, Play-Doh smell. That’s the oils themselves, Iz. Then the mellow, doughy smell of the linseed oil I used to mix them with, the paint becoming gluey, forming stiff peaks like your mother’s meringues. And then the acerbic cut of the turpentine I used to wash the brushes with. A kind of citrus mouthwash, that’s how it smelt. All together they were … they were me.
‘This the extent of it?’ one of them said to me as he walked towards the back of the container.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just a little spot to paint and store my things.’
They poked around for a while, lifting things up, removing them.
It was right before we left that I realized it was missing. My hand was on the double doors. I blinked. Looked, then looked again. Where the fuck was it? It must have been at home. It must have been at home.
I didn’t say anything. I was too scared to, Izzy. They were already questioning me closely. That would make it all so much worse.
Later, I told the court I hadn’t noticed. But I had. That’s the truth. It wouldn’t have saved her, anyway, if I had spoken up.
She was already dead.
Izzy
Her father left with them, to go and look in his art shipping container. There was something off about his body language. She knew him well, and she knew what his hunched shoulders meant, what his stiff walk signified, as they left the driveway and turned on to the street.
She knew he didn’t want them to be looking there.
She stared at them as they disappeared from view, her hand against the cool windowpane. He hadn’t glanced back at her, not once.
Pip rang her after that.
‘Any sign?’ he said immediately, his voice soft and comforting down the telephone to her, like being pulled out of a stormy sea and deposited on warm sand.
She removed her palm from the glass and it left a misty mark that slowly faded, leaving just the grainy film of her fingerprints.
‘No,’ she said sadly.
They didn’t find her mother’s body that morning, but they did find one of the clu
es that would lead them to her killer.
Or rather, they should have. The clue was, as is often the case, in the absence of something. Something that should have been there, but wasn’t. Something belonging to her father, kept in a place only he had access to.
34
‘You thought I looked …’ Gabe says.
Izzy is sitting on the bottom step of the basement, holding the phone to her ear, and she stretches her feet down on to the floor.
‘I thought you looked like you knew something. That day, you looked like you didn’t want to go.’
‘I didn’t want to go anywhere, Iz. I didn’t want to leave in case she came home. I didn’t want to check places where bodies, not people, would turn up. And I didn’t want to waste my time. She wasn’t in my shipping container. She was … away. She was on a weekend away we’d forgotten about. A restaurant management course. Something.’
‘Yeah. I remember feeling that, too.’
‘And they were checking the container because they were focusing their efforts on me – the suspect. When I wanted them to be finding her.’
‘I know,’ she says.
‘Or finding my alibi. You remember him, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she says carefully.
She hangs up shortly after that, making excuses. Before she goes back upstairs, she calls a lock picker. He’s booked up until June, but she takes the next slot.
She shouldn’t have called Gabe. She was excited about the safe. She forgot herself, and all his lies. But she’s glad she called him.
This is what she does: she vacillates. She is suspended in indecision. She is frightened of her father but offers him meals, company … what next? Money?
The Evidence Against You Page 21