There’s nothing in this room. Just the radio and those tins of beans.
She tells him about her visit to his mother’s.
‘I’ll go soon,’ he tells her, though his tone doesn’t match his words.
He can’t. He’s not being straight with her about that, but she knows he can’t. She shrugs, uncomfortable under his intense stare. There’s nowhere to sit down other than on the bed next to him. He used to sit on the edge of her bed, just the way he is now, and read her bedtime stories. He’d act them out with her row of cuddly toys. He’d always have the window open, in all weathers, and she liked to think of their neighbours overhearing those quiet, private moments of theirs, as she listens to Thea’s.
She looks at the beans again and thinks of everything an innocent man could have lost. His freedom. His house. His wife. His daughter. And more than that, somehow: his zest for life. Endless pottery and ball games and fine art and opinions on Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst and Tottenham Hotspur and Pete Sampras. Marvelling at the patterns fat summer raindrops made on the patio – ‘They look like inkblots!’ – and the way he loved the smell of linseed oil and turpentine – ‘It signals the beginning of pleasure,’ he once said to her.
Gabe clears his throat. ‘There’s a whole history of miscarriages of justice, you know,’ he says. ‘It’s not that uncommon.’
‘Who?’
‘The Guildford Four. The Cardiff Three. Sally Clark. Jesus.’
‘Jesus?’
‘Untrue charges from the government. Betrayal by his friends. False witnesses. Anyway,’ he says, looking at her expression, then seeming awkward, ‘we need to talk about the day … the day they found her.’
She says nothing. The religious talk has set her on edge. Comparing himself to Jesus.
‘How they found her,’ he adds.
She drops her head.
‘I know it’s the worst part,’ he says.
She looks across at him. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Let’s talk about it.’
40
PROSECUTOR: What is your explanation for where your wife was found?
GABRIEL ENGLISH: I don’t have one.
Tuesday 2 November 1999: the afternoon Alex’s body is found
Gabe
The call came from my brother Tony. Not from the police. Not from your mother’s parents. And not – as I had hoped, God, how I had hoped – from your mother herself, to say that she was alive and well. It came from Tony.
‘There are a lot of police here, Gabe,’ he said to me that afternoon. ‘Twenty. Thirty people. Forensics. I think you’d better come.’
I left the house while still on the phone, hurriedly unlocking the car while trying to ask exactly where they were, the phone wedged between my shoulder and ear.
‘The woodland near me,’ he said.
Woodland.
Woodland.
Forensics.
No.
I wish I had waited, had slowed my steps. Had enjoyed that milky autumnal light, the russet of the trees, my final moments in limbo, in purgatory. Because that was better. Better than where I was headed. Towards the end of Alex. Forever.
Sometimes, even now, twenty years on, I’ll catch myself thinking a certain way. Thinking that I’m about to see her. I’ll mentally store things up to tell her about. And then, after hours of normality, it’ll hit me. I’m not ever going to see her again. Not as the Gabe I am now. Maybe in heaven, maybe in the afterlife. But somehow I don’t think it’s that simple, do you? As Luke says in his Gospel: ‘Today, you will be with me in paradise.’
But paradise isn’t here.
I drove towards the woodland near Tony’s house. And that’s when I saw them: more police than I could count. Four squad cars. CID. A cordon, already set up – oh, my heart, Izzy, my heart when I remember this stuff and when I tell it to you. The cordon was manned at each entrance by an officer. There was a crime scene tent, and the forensic team in their bright white suits, ready. They began moving across the wood like a formation of birds, moving en masse, stealthily, inevitably, towards the end of my life.
They wouldn’t tell me whether it was her, and they wouldn’t let me in, so I could only imagine her. They wouldn’t tell me anything, as though I was just another dog walker, passer-by, rubbernecker.
We’d shared a bed for twenty-nine years and here we were, separated by a hundred coppers who later would accuse me of murder. They’d galvanize themselves. They would utilize all of their money, and all of the powers available to the State, and accuse me. Police officers, solicitors, barristers, all intent on doing a job: prosecution. Me and my lone lawyer didn’t stand a chance.
I couldn’t reach for your mother’s hands, to feel her grasp one last time, to smell her shampooed hair, to observe the curve of her back, her small, girlish hands. That’s what they robbed me of, more than anything else. Those final moments with my wife, my lover, my best friend, to see her and to close her eyes and to hold her and say goodbye. Those dignified moments in what was – to me – your mother’s death.
Instead, they read me the police caution and, later, told me about the bag.
My bag. My art bag, from my container, a place only I had access to. The bag her body had been found in.
Embroidered with my initials on the inside.
Izzy
She hadn’t yet gone back to school, though people were trying to encourage her to. And so she was in her grandparents’ house when it happened. They were fussing over cleaning out the teapot. Her grandfather was saying they shouldn’t use soap – they had the same conversation every day, without irony or self-awareness – when the doorbell rang.
She knew immediately. The sight of the police car. The formal, shifting dark shape of the officers in the frosted glass as they respectfully removed their hats. She had seen enough television dramas to know.
What she didn’t know was the full extent of it, of course.
That her mother had been found in her father’s art bag.
That she had been wrapped in a sweater belonging to him.
That he had strangled her with the rope cord from the bag – it had always been covered in paint, but he said it worked just right for his art, and he didn’t want to buy a different cord – then buried her body in the woods, so that it would take the police time to find it, and so that some of the forensic evidence would be corrupted by exposure.
That he had then reported her missing.
That in the purple bruising covering her mother’s neck was the printed pattern of the cord from her father’s art bag. That he had branded her, just as he had marked his paintings with his signature style.
41
Her father sits back heavily on the bed, his back against the wall. ‘That was the last moment I thought she might still be alive,’ he says. ‘She was already long dead, by then, apparently, but I still think of that as the last time … the last time that I saw her. Even though I … even though they wouldn’t let me.’
He reaches a hand up to wipe at his face. His fingernails are dirty – Izzy winces – and he rubs at his eyes. She isn’t sure if he is crying until he brings his hand away and she looks at his eyes. They’re red and watery. She has never once seen him cry. Not ever.
She sits next to him on his bed. It yields too much under her small frame. It must be horrible to sleep in. Spongy and cheap, like a waterbed.
‘I’m sorry, it’s just … they made me relive it, all the time, back then. But not so much recently. I just said I’d done it, and was sorry, in my parole hearing.’
‘Nick said you would have.’
‘It was the least worst option,’ he says.
Izzy stares at him. He seems to be sadly used to rocks and hard places. To having the least worst option. But she’s glad he has been honest with her.
‘Makes sense,’ she says.
Izzy continues to looks at him carefully. The black car has been playing on her mind. And the presence of her uncle at the restaurant on the night her mother died. So
mething is niggling somewhere, in the corner of Izzy’s vision. She can’t even say what. So she suspects Tony? Is that what she’s saying? She doesn’t know. It’s ridiculous, but it was ridiculous to Izzy that Gabe killed her mother, too.
‘During the investigation … was everyone else looked into?’ she says.
‘Do you have a theory?’ he says, looking across at her, his elbows on his knees.
‘Well, it was probably someone she knew.’
‘I guess.’
‘Chris and Tony have always been so adamant about your guilt. And everybody – Mum’s parents, as well – is so closed about it. I wonder. Isn’t it logical to wonder if anybody has anything to hide?’
‘You suspect them?’ he says, his eyebrows raised, his eyes narrowed, looking at her thoughtfully. His tone isn’t sceptical but respectful, instead. He admires the conclusion she’s come to; the care she’s taken over it, the thought that she has given to it. ‘Tony was … he was with Auntie Julia. And her parents were with each other.’
Izzy winces under his gaze. She can’t tell him about Tony. Not until there’s something certain to tell. Her father has already lost too much. ‘No, I just … I’m just keeping an open mind.’ She swallows down the distaste of suspecting another relative of hers. Wouldn’t that be just as bad?
‘Maybe that’s why he didn’t testify,’ Gabe says thoughtfully.
‘Was it in his nature to do you a favour?’
Gabe pauses, then says, ‘No. He was pretty black and white, really. If he felt it was the right thing to do, he would have done it. But I don’t remember his exact reasons in the …’ he waves a hand, ‘in the mess of it all. Anyway …’ Her father looks at her, biting his bottom lip.
‘Well …?’
‘Matt told me you went to see him.’
‘I am investigating,’ she says, throwing him a weak grin. ‘You still see him – Matt?’
‘Yes. He cares about me, I guess. We get on.’
Izzy nods. Perhaps she had taken Matt’s loaded silence for suspicion, when actually it had been professionalism. Confidentiality. Loyalty.
‘I wondered, you know,’ he says. ‘For years, inside. And nobody would discuss it with me. Nobody. Everyone said to move on. Do the time.’ He pushes his hair back from his face, widening his eyes. ‘And now you’re here. And you’re listening. And it’s not just me and God any more. I was in my own head for so long, you know? Hard to know what’s real. But reliving the truth of it is hard, too. The messy truth.’
‘The truth of it,’ Izzy echoes.
He nods, and the flimsy bed bounces up and down. Their legs are almost touching. There is a photo of them together, like this, somewhere, sitting on a stone wall in a French campsite. Her legs half the length of his, little red T-bar shoes on her feet, white socks, grubby at their tops with sand from the beach. He was swarthy next to her pale skin. Spanish-looking.
‘How could I explain the messiness of it to that bloody parole board? That I don’t know who took the bag, and who put her in it in the woods? It makes no sense to me. Death doesn’t, but especially not your mother’s. It’s a riddle I haven’t been able to solve for eighteen years. Nineteen this October.’ He starts to say something else, then stops, his words subsumed by proper tears. A rogue sorry escapes through his hands.
Izzy says nothing, watching him, her heart pounding.
‘And then the questions,’ he says, ‘and then you.’ His sobs have subsided into a gentle stream of tears.
His face is wet and Izzy is ready, she is so ready, to reach over and wipe his tears for him. This is how it should be. He cared for her when she was young, and she should care for him now he is old. This is the cycle of life. She shifts closer to him.
‘Me?’
‘And then I lost you. I didn’t care about liberty. I lost her, and I lost you. In the same day.’
There is something about the tone of her father’s voice that makes Izzy’s body still. The pain marbled through his words like watercolours. She stops moving completely, sitting there on the bed next to him.
‘And maybe you did nothing wrong,’ she says softly.
She appraises his tears, the self-conscious way he wipes them away while apologizing. There is something authentic about it. She stares at his shaking hands. He couldn’t fake that. He couldn’t.
Those tears. They count for something, despite the evidence. Despite her father’s DNA underneath her mother’s fingernails – signs of a struggle, the prosecution said. Despite where she was found, and how. Despite his lack of alibi and his phone call having lit up a mast near to where her mother was found, despite him washing all of the clothes he was wearing that day immediately, guiltily.
Despite all of that, those tears count for something. The tears and the other things: the way he told her about the last day he saw his wife. The shape of his body when the sobs overcame him. A million unmeasurable things: the tone of his voice, the things that seemed to be important to him. Not the loss of liberty, but the loss of his wife and daughter. She can’t explain it, but something has shifted.
She could believe him. She can feel the truth of it like a tangible object inside herself. She could do what his own mother has done, and choose.
Izzy is ready. She is ready to help him.
‘I made a list,’ Izzy says, after a pause. ‘Of everybody at the restaurant that night.’
And, just like that, he moves his hand from his forehead and places it on her knee. She lets it sit there for a few moments, just like the photograph of them that was taken all those years ago.
It is the moment. It is the moment she chooses to try and believe him.
42
Izzy spends her time in the shower thinking of the black car. As she lathers shampoo into her hair, she wonders if she should have told somebody about it. Her father? Nick? Somebody who could help. But what was it, really? Her father has enough to worry about, and Nick … God, she doesn’t want to tell Nick. Doesn’t want to open up that topic again, doesn’t want to have to answer his questions about how often and why she is seeing her father. But she’s not stupid. She can see what’s happening. Her marriage, constructed so carefully during her twenties … it’s crumbling, like cliffs exposed to the elements.
She turns her mind away from it, away from that possibly benign black car, away from how seldom she and Nick entwine their ankles in bed, and thinks instead of the men at the restaurant. There must be something hidden in her memories.
Marcus. White-blond Marcus with his pale blue eyes used to come in every Friday. She racks her brain. What else? What else? But there is nothing. The things she knows about him – that he liked lasagne, that he spoke very basic French – she can’t remember how she knows. They are just facts that exist in a vacuum, the background information rubbed out, leaving the knowledge but none of the context.
She thinks of Daniel Godfrey, the waiter who was sacked. He had a motorbike. He used to bring a McDonald’s into the restaurant at the start of his shift, which irritated her mother. But that’s all she has on him.
As she is towel-drying her hair in the bathroom, an image springs to mind.
Daniel waiting for her mother to finish serving somebody. He wanted to book a day off. Yes, that’s right. He was standing by the end of the bar, just watching her.
As her mother turned to leave the table she was waiting on, she took two steps, then stopped. Seeing Izzy. Two steps, a pause, then her mother resumed, the pause infinitesimal, and continued towards him.
She hadn’t wanted Izzy to see them interact. That’s it. That’s the impression she got.
Izzy hasn’t thought of it for years, has dredged it from her memory through sheer force. But when was it? There is nothing to anchor it to.
But, nevertheless, it is something. Is it? Or was it just a pause, just an innocent pause? All of her memories are littered with this – this detritus, these loose ends. When somebody dies so suddenly, they leave things behind that don’t make any sense. Ordinary oc
currences loom large and seem extraordinary, and it’s hard to tell if the past is littered with mere clues or coincidences.
When she goes downstairs to lock up before bed, she sees Nick’s laptop on the pine kitchen table. He must be working from home tomorrow.
The thought appears in her mind uninvited. I could look anybody up on that. She knows he’ll leave it unattended at least once, the next day. He always does.
No, she thinks. She’s not that desperate for information. She wouldn’t do something like that.
Before she goes to bed, she checks her Facebook inbox. Her message to Pip remains unread, the friend request still pending. Perhaps he’s not logged in since. Or perhaps he just doesn’t want to hear from her. Perhaps, once again, she is reaching out, inappropriately seeking intimacy, when she ought to keep her counsel, become somehow self-sufficient.
She clicks around on his profile. She idly searches his friends for Talbots and Easons. There are a few hits. Carly Eason. Jemima Eason. They must be cousins or something. Steve Eason is the last. His father. How must it feel to be Facebook friends with your own father? To see him casually for barbecues and at Christmas, to phone him up, to trust him.
She brings up his profile. And there is his smiling face, holding up a philosophy book written by him. The familiarity of that photograph makes her open the message box. She writes quickly, before she can change her mind.
I’m trying to get in touch with Pip, she says. She leaves her mobile number.
As she ascends the stairs, she thinks of her father. Imagine if he was innocent. How light she’d feel. She would go out shopping. Hold her head high. Take the ferry to London. Visit Liberty and Jo Malone and Abercrombie & Fitch. Take a ballet class, just for kicks. She’d be … free.
The Evidence Against You Page 24