The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  As she drives home, she looks out to sea, and thinks of the first eerie autumn–winter spent with her grandparents. Tony would visit often, but conversations were shut down like closing doors whenever she tried to discuss his brother with him: ‘That’s enough, Izzy. Let’s talk about someone worthwhile.’

  He had never before been so proprietary, so dictatorial, and hasn’t since.

  Why? What was he hiding?

  The thought arrives before she can question it, examine it. Guilt? Why was he so insistent the case never be talked about, picked over, examined?

  Was he worried what Izzy might find out? About her father … or about him?

  Izzy lets herself in through the front door, and at first she thinks Nick isn’t in, even though his car is on their driveway. The lights are off, and it’s getting dark. She feels relief – her shoulders relax, and her heart lifts as she thinks of pottering around the house by herself – but then she hears the sizzle and crack of something frying in a pan. She shakes her head. Nick. This is Nick. What’s happening? Why is she thinking like this?

  She pushes open the door to the kitchen and breathes in: sauces, fried onions. A set of hot-dog buns on the counter. The ketchup out, ready. Hot dogs.

  ‘Making your favourite,’ Nick says.

  His tone is so easy, his movements so fluid, she wonders if they could forget the person who is dividing their relationship in two, and remember each other. Can Izzy remember him? Nick with his steady, self-sufficient ways, his brilliant memory. She hugs him from behind, their first physical contact in a while, and Nick slowly rubs a foot up the inside of her ankle.

  The sausages begin to burn in distinct stripes as they stand there, and the onions are on too high a heat, the fat splattering the silver hob in messy globules, but Izzy doesn’t say anything.

  Tiredness overcomes her as she sinks into the kitchen chair. She almost fell asleep on the drive back, the tail lights of the cars on the roads blurring hypnotically as her blinks became slower and slower. In the end, she opened the window and let a blast of air stream in.

  Nick’s work laptop is open on the table, the screen dark.

  ‘How’s work been?’

  ‘Oh, fine, fine. Same old.’ He hardly ever elaborates. He turns the sausages instead of saying anything further.

  It’s only when they’re sitting opposite each other, a bottle of red open, a plate of sausages in front of them with a pair of tongs neatly lined up next to them, that Nick says it.

  ‘Look. I wanted to talk to you about it. Him.’

  ‘What?’ Izzy says, one delicious bite in.

  ‘I looked him up on CRIS.’

  ‘What’s CRIS?’

  ‘The crime reporting system we use.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. She sees now. Her favourite meal. He is sweetening a blow.

  She doesn’t ask. He will tell her. She swallows, wanting to delay the moment. The moment that he tells her he’s found something. God, what’s on the crime reporting system? All of the things that convicted her father rise to the surface but she pushes them down again.

  ‘Will you get in trouble for it?’ she says, stalling for time.

  Nick seems to consider her question. He has ketchup on his thumb and he licks it off. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t think so. My activity isn’t monitored. It’s not ideal, but don’t worry about that: it’s my decision.’ For you he has added silently, she can tell; the subtext sits heavily in the air between them.

  ‘Okay.’

  He finishes his hot dog and lays his hands flat on the table. His thumbs are gripping the underneath of it, like he is about to turn it over. He seems to consciously drop his shoulders, like he’s just been told to relax. ‘So …’

  ‘Okay, just say it, please,’ she says, putting her hot dog down.

  The sausage flesh inside is pink and oozing and her stomach turns over with nausea.

  35

  ‘He has a previous conviction,’ Nick says quietly. ‘It wasn’t disclosed at the trial because his lawyers got it excluded.’

  Izzy’s mouth turns dry. A previous conviction? A criminal record? Her father? Her shock is ludicrous, of course. Her father has the pinnacle of criminal records. But this previous conviction is from before she knew him. Before she existed. How could it be? In her mind, the night he killed her mother, her father transformed. But this would indicate he was always dangerous. Always, therefore, pretending. The thought chills her.

  She can’t believe that just yesterday she was suspecting Tony. And why? Because a wine rack moved? She has been so foolish.

  ‘What for?’ she says, her voice dry and brittle-sounding.

  She finds she is holding her breath. Her brain throws options into the nothingness, and she wishes she could stop it: a caution for a drunken fight. A speeding ticket. Theft of a supermarket trolley. Affray, on a stag do. Not returning money a bank deposited in error. Over and over again, she thinks of acceptable crimes. Victimless crimes. Identity fraud, sending phishing emails, accidentally leaving Tesco with a packet of toilet rolls. Oh, please let it be one of these. Let it have an explanation. Let it not be violent.

  ‘It’s for domestic violence,’ Nick says. He pushes the plate of sausages to one side and reaches for her hands. ‘The victim was his girlfriend.’

  Babs. Izzy knows it before he tells her. The woman her uncle told her about.

  ‘What …’ Izzy says. Saliva fills her mouth. She really may be sick. She can’t look at the sausages, and she pushes them further away from her so she can’t smell them, either.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nick says. ‘I brought a printout, hang on. I knew you’d want to see.’

  He strides into the hallway and comes back holding a piece of paper. It’s A4, plain paper. ‘Page 1 of 1’ written in the top right-hand corner. She scans it.

  Assault occasioning Actual Bodily Harm contrary to s47 Offences Against The Person Act: suspended sentence (12 months). 15 May, 1969.

  She looks for his name at the top and, sure enough, there it is: Gabriel David English.

  ‘What did he do?’ she says, staring at the paper in shock.

  This was it. This was all of it. Everything they’d accused him of. Domestic abuse.

  The behavioural patterns. Charming behaviour. Controlling her mother. Keeping tabs on her. Spying. Escalation. Hitting her, they said. Verbal assaults. That text. That bruise on her arm. Frightening her. He denied it all, but look: she holds the paper in shaking hands, the black text blurring as tears fill her eyes. Look. Here is evidence. Real evidence. Not her half-remembered memories. Not her father’s false accounts of his.

  Domestic violence. She thinks of the newspaper cutting and her stomach turns over again. Oh Jesus. She needs to get away from Nick. She needs to think about this, this foolish thing that she has allowed to happen. That she has done.

  ‘I don’t know much yet – that’s all I’ve got. The file will come soon. But I wanted you to know …’

  His body language has changed. She looks at him, trying to pinpoint exactly what it is. He puts his plate on the kitchen counter and asks if she’s okay. She nods quickly, not wanting to discuss it. That’s it. She realizes as he walks out of the kitchen. Those shoulders are up again. The chest puffed. He is … triumphant. He is right.

  Rage starts off like a Catherine wheel in Izzy’s stomach. How dare he use this to score points against her? Her jaw clenches and she stands and opens the back door and breathes in the scented garden air. Don’t get angry, she tells herself. Don’t lash out, or you’ll be just like him, like Gabe.

  She doesn’t share her cheese and biscuits with him, later. She eats them alone, in the kitchen, standing in the light of the refrigerator, thinking of the newspaper cutting, of her father’s betrayal of her, of how stupid she might have been. Of course her father’s memories have convinced her. They are not, after all, his memories, but his own accounts of his memories. The difference is subtle but vital. He has had almost twenty years to construct them. His own
case. And look: he’s lured her in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nick says later, as she climbs into bed.

  She thought he was asleep.

  He opens his eyes in the half-light and looks at her.

  She says nothing.

  ‘It’s so understandable,’ he says, his tone softer.

  Finally, finally: here it is. The sympathy. The understanding. It is easy to give it when you are in the right, Izzy thinks bitterly, unfairly.

  ‘The way you are is … I’d be the same,’ Nick adds, clueless about her nasty thoughts.

  The way you are. Izzy is vulnerable, exposed, as if she has been cut open, there on the bed, and everybody can see all of the things she does to try and cope with what has happened to her. The Instagram family. Watching her neighbour too closely. Keeping people distant. Wanting approval from anybody senior: doctors, teachers, even the health and safety inspector at work who wore reading glasses and a kimono.

  ‘I wanted him to be good, I suppose,’ she says.

  ‘Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so,’ Nick says. He looks up at her, his head in between their pillows. His eyes are soft and wet, too.

  36

  Izzy sleeps on it.

  When she wakes, she has a text from Gabe: How’re you?

  She blinks, reading it, then closes the messages app on her phone. He’s an abuser. Her father assaulted one woman, then murdered another.

  But what if …?

  Her mind idles over the possibilities. He was young. He has an explanation. Neither is an excuse. But she wants to know. She can’t just leave it, loose ends and all.

  Should she at least hear him out? Ask him about it? She sits on her bed, looking out over the fields across from her house, thinking.

  Does she owe it to him?

  No.

  She wants to ask him. That is the truth, she realizes, as she unwinds after a busy evening at Alexandra’s.

  She wants to dislodge this unhappy stone and replace it with the other feeling that’s been bubbling up through her recently: hope. She’s not felt it for decades. It isn’t coping or making the best of it. It’s the belief that there is something better on the horizon.

  She thinks of the newspaper cutting. Who could that be from? Not him. Why would he do that? That is something she can’t fathom. Why would he threaten her? And even if he is a killer, a sociopath, why would he kill her? She thinks of the alibi she ruined for him, but dismisses the thought again. The truth is, if he did kill her mother, she doesn’t know why. And so she has no idea of the danger she’s in. If any. He might be a monster, but he’s definitely an enigma.

  So maybe it’s from somebody warning her about him. But does anybody truly know him? She knows him better than anybody, after all.

  She wants to ask him about Babs, and so she will.

  She dials his number. Turning to him – even after nearly twenty years’ absence – feels natural. Like she is a normal thirty-something with a broken boiler, a picture that needs hanging, the oil in her car topping up. She calls her father like thousands of women have done before her.

  Something in the back of her mind is calling her foolish. Reckless. Looking for parents in the wrong places, chasing down danger, but she doesn’t care.

  ‘Your previous conviction,’ she says, her tone icy. She can’t help it.

  She closes her eyes, and wishes she hadn’t called him. That she could see his eyes. Those eyes of his that are nothing like hers, except the way they both squint at the sun; like just-woken animals. She remembers a photograph of them skiing, taken back in 1998. They were both looking at the camera like meerkats.

  ‘I … oh,’ he says.

  She can imagine his mouth moving, forming an O. He will be pulling a hand back through his dark hair. No. She corrects herself: his hair is white now.

  There’s an awkward pause.

  ‘I’ll tell you about that,’ he says, recovering fast.

  She shouldn’t be telling him, shouldn’t be on the phone to him, she thinks.

  ‘But in the meantime, in your entire childhood – which is after Babs – was I ever violent?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Short-tempered?’

  ‘No. Mum was,’ Izzy says, feeling guilty.

  Her father was always easy company. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said of various misdemeanours, changing the TV channel and offering her a Quality Street. ‘The things I did in my youth …’

  ‘Right,’ he says now. ‘And anyway, we’ve got a good thing going, haven’t we?’ He waits a beat. ‘I’m so enjoying this, Iz. I … I missed you. I waited thousands of days for this, and … God.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she says, her throat tight. ‘Don’t guilt-trip me. Don’t manipulate me.’

  ‘But didn’t you miss me?’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t allowed to.’

  ‘Allowed?’

  ‘Granny and Granddad, it was … it was tough. They were tough.’ Izzy looks down at her jeans, embarrassed. She wasn’t merely taken away physically, she was forced to take sides. Pulled away into her mother’s narrative. A tragic woman murdered by her husband. A husband who wouldn’t tell anybody where she was. A husband who then put everybody through a trial. It was easier, in the end, to take a side.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Your case was off limits. They didn’t … I don’t know. They didn’t care about me. They didn’t let me do anything, or talk to me. It was dark, I guess.’

  ‘No,’ Gabe says. ‘Please don’t say they made it worse for you.’

  ‘I never wanted to say.’

  ‘I thought you’d be well looked after.’

  ‘I was. I was never hungry, or cold, or whatever.’

  ‘But you didn’t feel loved,’ he says softly.

  ‘No. I guess not. Not for me. I had to fit in with them.’

  ‘Well, I love you,’ he says.

  Izzy closes her eyes and leans in to the words. She is drowning in them. She is choked up, unable to speak. He loves her.

  ‘Anyway. Babs,’ he says. ‘I was seventeen years old.’

  She steps out into the garden and holds the hot phone to her ear. The paving slabs underfoot are still warm, even though it’s nearly midnight. Birds are nesting in the trees just beyond her garden, the bushes shivering with their movement.

  ‘I had this girlfriend, Babs,’ he says. ‘God, I loved her.’

  She immediately thinks of Pip, and how much she had loved his floppy hair, his raspberry lips and his adventurous spirit. ‘What happened?’ she says.

  ‘She was cool,’ he says. ‘Smoked. Bell bottoms. Liked art, liked me. But, Izzy, we were a disaster. The best, when things were good, but we were awful communicators. It was pretty volatile. She lived in this little flat above a greengrocer’s. I always used to take her up an apple, as a joke, on my way through. We’d paint and chat. She loved The Beatles, had this huge poster on her wall of the Help! album. Used to quote their lyrics all the time. Anyway, one day we had one of our rows – the kind that start off about one thing and end up being about things said during the row. Tony witnessed one, once, but this time, someone in the greengrocer’s called the police.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We were shouting. I was louder, I guess. My voice carried. She scratched my face. I bent her arm behind her back.’

  ‘Oh,’ Izzy says. ‘Why?’

  ‘She came at me. But more than that, I was angry. It was wrong. But she was … we’d have these rows where she wouldn’t let things drop. I’d say, “Leave me to calm down,” but she wouldn’t. She’d come after me. She brandished the hot iron in my face once, as a threat.’

  ‘So you intended to hurt her.’

  ‘I lost my temper,’ he says measuredly. ‘As did she.’

  ‘But when men hit women …’

  ‘That was a two-way street. She hurt my face as much as I hurt her arm.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that now,’ Izzy says tightly.

  ‘Anywa
y, it went all the way to trial.’

  ‘What – she accused you?’

  ‘No. But the police came, and she was honest.’

  ‘Did Mum know?’

  ‘Of course,’ he says quickly. ‘And my parents. Go and see my mum, if you want.’

  ‘She’s on your side, right?’

  ‘Yes, she is. But she has an interesting perspective. It might help you.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  Izzy thinks of the worst of her behaviour when she was seventeen. The way she would career around roundabouts while texting, no regard for lives at stake. The way she would sometimes hoard a hundred mouldy mugs in her room without thinking that her mother had to collect them up, had to take out the rancid, stiff herbal tea bags. That time she kicked her bedroom door when she hadn’t been able to understand her chemistry homework. The faintest of dents was evident, afterwards, which she was ashamed to look at. Could she have ended up in a similar situation, given the right circumstances? An awful row, recorded forever?

  She screws her nose up in frustration. Was she trying to twist the facts to suit her? It felt like it, sometimes; like they were malleable, changeable. Like she might be looking at things through prisms that refracted and misdirected the truth, over and over. She couldn’t tell. Who could? She could only go on how she felt, here in the garden, her father explaining himself patiently, quietly, on the end of the phone to her. Her father telling her that he loved her.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Even when I asked?’

  He pauses, thinking, she guesses. ‘How did you find out?’ She doesn’t answer that and, eventually, he says, ‘Do you know why people exclude previous convictions at trials, Iz?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘It’s because if there is even a hint of a defendant having done something in the past, the jury can’t move beyond it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They convict. And, I guess, I didn’t want you to do the same. It’s not relevant. I was a different person then. As you are different to the teenage you.’