The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  She performs an arabesque on her stairs, in the quiet, in the dark. Nobody sees, but she feels it: her body remembers how to do it. She is still good.

  She is woken by a text in the night. She has been programmed to wake up when she hears the tone, in case it’s a David Smith, and now Pip or Steve. In case it’s information.

  DO NOT REPLY is who the text message is from. She opens it, half-heartedly expecting some junk text – about free pizzas, or two-for-one burgers – but her hands still when she swipes to reveal its contents.

  You might think you’re safe eating dinner with your father in the restaurant, but you’re not. You’re not safe at all.

  Her body is covered in goosebumps, the hairs raised.

  You’re not safe at all.

  Izzy hesitates, in the morning, deciding who to show the text message to. She slept because she knows how to sleep when terrified. She did it for years.

  Her choice doesn’t even make sense to her. Izzy is a mystery to herself. The risks she is taking. But something in her gut is propelling her in this direction. It feels right: to tell her father. To tell him is as natural to her as it is for a child who has fallen over in the street to look for their parent.

  He answers the phone on the first ring. He understands immediately. He understands the position they’re in.

  She reads out the text to him, and he says, ‘Somebody doesn’t want us meeting. They’re trying to scare you. That’s a threat. The clipping was weird. But that’s a threat.’

  ‘From –’

  He doesn’t miss a beat. ‘The person who did it.’

  ‘But what do we do?’ she says. ‘Should I tell someone?’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he says quietly.

  ‘I want to know who’s doing this to us. But I don’t want to be threatened.’

  ‘I know. But what if we work it out?’

  Izzy’s in only a vest top, the morning sun warming her skin through the kitchen window, but inside she feels cold. She hasn’t slept well, and her eyes are gritty from tiredness and worry. Her father suggests they meet at Nettlecombe Farm Lake, the only lake on the Isle of Wight. Izzy pictures the holiday cottages dotted around the green sloping hills and, sunken in the centre, the expanse of water, reflecting the blue of the sky. The idyllic location and the sunshine through the window are incongruous to Izzy, who is freezing cold with fear. What if she’s followed again? She will be vulnerable, driving alone –

  ‘Look,’ her father says, cutting across her thoughts. ‘Don’t go to the restaurant today. Meet me at the lake, and we’ll discuss my arrest. The only way to find out who did it is to keep talking. The only way out is through.’

  43

  PROSECUTOR: What was Mr English’s response when asked if he had murdered his late wife, Alexandra English?

  DI BOTHAM: He said, ‘No comment.’

  Wednesday 3 November 1999: two days after Alex’s murder

  Gabe

  ‘Gabriel English, you do not have to say anything unless you wish to do so …’

  They arrested me at the scene. Of course they did. Your mother’s body was recovered within and surrounded by my possessions, with what they regarded as my mark left imprinted around her neck.

  The police caution flooded my ears. The woodland seemed to shimmer a kind of grey colour. I blinked, but it stayed that way. Shock, somebody later said. I bent double, was sick, before they had finished speaking. The handcuffs were around my wrists and for the first time in my life – the very first time, Izzy – I was not in charge. In any other area of life you can say: enough. You can quit jobs. Get off public transport. Stay in bed.

  But not when you’re accused.

  I was taken to the station in the back of a police car while my wife lay dead in the undergrowth. I hadn’t slept for two days and I was to be questioned imminently. A lawyer would be called. My possessions searched and taken from me. My human rights meant I was allowed to ask for a cup of tea, but that’s it. How fucking British.

  The car wound its way across the island to the station, with me in the back, the world still a gunmetal grey, and meanwhile, the killer was still out there, and everybody had focused incorrectly on me, their gaze narrowed to a single point.

  Press were already gathered on the steps of the police station in the November wind and rain. A grey umbrella turned itself inside out, revealing a grey woman underneath it with a BBC microphone.

  I was sick again in the cell, then drank my tea and waited for the lawyer and stared at the wall.

  My lawyer, the man who was supposed to explain away this whole mess, to put it right, was an uninterested guy who couldn’t have been over twenty-five. His gaze kept sliding to the door while I was talking. ‘Okay, okay,’ he kept saying, once I was finished. ‘Okay, okay.’ He wrote the date on the top of a grey legal pad. His handwriting was huge and childish. I later sacked him and hired Matt.

  ‘Tape running: six thirty p.m., Tuesday the second of November,’ Detective Inspector Botham said.

  He was a slight man, dainty looking, quite short, with shaved hair.

  ‘Gabriel English,’ Botham said. ‘Please state for the record where you were on the night of the thirty-first of October, running into the early hours of the first of November.’

  ‘At my home,’ I said, rattling off the address.

  ‘And was there anybody with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where was your daughter?’

  ‘At her boyfriend’s house,’ I said. The part of my mind that hadn’t been blown apart by the discovery of my wife’s body thought: God, we sound like delinquents. Our daughter in the bed of a boy whose surname she had only mentioned once. But the thought was obscured in the dimness: the lights were off in that functional part of my brain. The spotlight was on your mother. She was the only thing not grey, to me. Vibrant, red-headed Alex.

  ‘What did you do that evening?’

  ‘I told you all this when she disappeared. Was she killed that night? Or later?’

  God, why hadn’t I checked my container before the police did? Sometimes, it sounded reasonable: she had never been there on her own, and only I had the key. Other times, it sounded like the most unreasonable thing in the world, like somebody who was looking for their house keys and checked everywhere except the lock.

  ‘Tell us again.’

  ‘I went to the corner shop, I went home, I watched television, I spoke to the neighbour at around eleven forty-five for half an hour.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I checked around the house for her. Looked in the car. Called her mobile. Called the garage who had her car, but got no answers.’

  ‘And you were in your house making these calls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The mobile phone records say you weren’t at your house.’

  ‘Well, I was. And then I waited for her. I thought she’d … I don’t know. Got distracted. Forgot to come home. Gone somewhere en route.’

  ‘Why didn’t you use the landline?’

  ‘We just didn’t. I always favoured my mobile …’

  ‘So when did you worry?’

  ‘I guess after twelve.’

  I was trying to sound composed, but my mind disobeyed me. It needed to be clear, to map out my evening neatly for the detectives, but I was shrouded, instead, in memories. My God, I kept thinking. She is dead. She is dead she is dead she is dead. Never again would I see her clear green eyes open, first thing in the morning, fluttering into comprehension. Never again would I see the curve of her bottom, bigger since childbirth, and want to paint it a luminous white, using big, arcing strokes. She’d hate that portrait, but I thought it should be celebrated, that bottom, and its middle-aged bigness.

  In my mind, Alex turned to smile at me while we walked around Venice together, on that weekend break. The backs of her calves had caught the sun. They were red and blotchy and beautiful.

  ‘Why didn’t you check your container? It’s another space that you an
d Alex owned, one where she could have gone. Mr English, you didn’t check it once – until we did.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘How often would you usually go to the container?’

  ‘Most days. But I didn’t feel like … I didn’t feel like painting.’

  Alex triumphantly winning a game of mini golf, a few years ago, her arms raised at the final hole after she putted her ball. She’d worn a hoody and I’d laughingly pulled the hood up. She’d made a face at me, her ears sticking out.

  ‘Painting. Right. So in those two days, it never even crossed your mind to check it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were concerned for her welfare.’

  I swallowed. Concerned. How I would long to be concerned now. She was dead. Dead. Could it really be? The facts, the truth, kept rolling over me like thunderclaps, and all I could do was startle in surprise, standing in the rain, waiting for the next one.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When she was missing.’

  ‘I worried about her. I called her. I spoke to everybody she knew. Her parents. Her friends. Old colleagues.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A few waiters and waitresses. A few customers. Everyone who knew her. I called the accident and emergency departments of all the hospitals.’

  ‘And so we require just a little more detail about your movements on that night. What did you do between ten thirty and twelve thirty?’

  ‘Is that when you think she died?’ I said, my head snapping up to look at them.

  God. She had died immediately and been put in there … She had been in those woods for two damn days. My wonderful wife who loved shoes and telling me off and spending money. My wife, not next to me in our warm bed but murdered, out in the cold. Left alone, her body chilled and crawled over by insects and discovered by a dog walker.

  ‘I … I didn’t do much of anything really.’

  The opening night at Alexandra’s, the speech she gave, bronzed champagne twinkling in her glass, the whites of her eyes bright. Hair a burnished red in the lamplight.

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Neither, none. I didn’t do anything,’ I said, sobbing, looking at the grey table and my grey hands and my grey tea. What if the world never became colourful again? ‘I paced.’

  Alex reprimanding me, holding up a blue shrunken jumper from the washing machine. ‘This is the size of a cat’s jumper!’ she had said. ‘Cats don’t wear jumpers,’ I’d said immediately. And God, her laugh, her laugh, her laugh.

  ‘Did you go out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why was a mast near to your container and the woodland where her body was recovered pinged by your mobile?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  I felt, rather than saw, my lawyer shift uncomfortably next to me.

  ‘Okay, so can you prove you stayed in your house that night?’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Did you call anybody on the landline?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you have anyone over?’

  ‘No. But the neighbour saw me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘David Smith.’

  ‘Can we contact him?’

  ‘Yes. Definitely. We talked for around twenty minutes, and then he was in and out of his house all evening. He can confirm my whereabouts. That I didn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘So what time did you go to bed?’

  ‘I don’t know … after I called the police. Three? I didn’t sleep.’

  ‘Had you discovered something, that evening, Mr English? Something that angered you?’

  ‘No.’

  Alex with a towel wrapped around her hair, emerging from the bathroom steam with a bright red face. ‘I’ve been exfoliating,’ she would say to me with a grin. Alex holding you for the first time, when you were just born, covered in vernix, and our lives had been changed for four minutes and an entire lifetime. Alex sucking the end of a ballpoint pen, blotting her lip, during that crazy first month when the restaurant had just opened.

  I had never experienced death. I’d been lucky. But now, at over forty, I found I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Where was she? Not her body but – she?

  Alex was still missing, in a way. She was in absentia. Elsewhere. But where? Maybe I could find her. Be the first human ever to do so; to find somebody in the afterlife. I closed my eyes. Maybe I could paint her home. If I captured her likeness so completely, she would be delivered back to me.

  ‘Gabriel, we are just simply trying to work out why somebody would behave this way,’ Botham said, his expression earnest, his brow wrinkled.

  I had never felt somebody concentrate on me so intently. I was a grey specimen in a grey lab.

  ‘I didn’t behave in any way,’ I said tightly.

  ‘Where was the key to the container?’

  ‘On my keyring.’

  ‘The whole time?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and I could see, then, that they thought it was me.

  They were closing in, surrounding me on all corners. There was no escape.

  ‘Anybody borrow it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where was the bag?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Surely you noticed it had disappeared from the shipping container?’

  ‘No.’

  I don’t know why I lied, Izzy. Actually – that’s a lie, too – I do. Because I felt like they were on to me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The freight train of the police, the prosecution, the State. And let me tell you: when the State wants to put you away, they make sure it happens.

  ‘Why did you choose the woods?’

  ‘I didn’t. I can’t answer your questions. It wasn’t me. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ The world was darkening now, grey to black, and I was surrounded by Alexes, all the Alexes I’d ever known, pale skin, red hair, green eyes. ‘Somebody else must have, because I didn’t put her there,’ I said through my fingers, through my sobs.

  At that point, my lawyer held his hand up, halted the interview, took me next door and advised a ‘no comment’.

  I took his advice. I wasn’t in a fit state to do anything else.

  Later, they told me that she had been strangled. Strangulation. One of the most painful and traumatic ways to die. No doubt she looked at her attacker as they did it.

  The world regained its colour eventually. But nothing else was ever the same again.

  Izzy

  Identifying the body did not fall to Izzy. Her grandparents did it. She waited for them in a side room painted entirely pink.

  There was no morgue. No unveiling of the body dramatically from beneath a sheet. Later, her grandparents told her they’d simply been shown photographs of her mother’s body. Izzy didn’t ask to see them. She knew she would never forget them.

  They came into the room with the pink walls and pink chairs and sat down next to her. All it took was a nod from her grandmother. Izzy didn’t know what she was supposed to do, so she nodded back.

  ‘It’s her,’ her grandmother said.

  ‘Okay, then,’ Izzy said.

  She knew she sounded dispassionate – uncaring, even. She didn’t mean to. She just simply didn’t know what to say, sat there in that little pink room. She stood up and looked at her grandparents with their iron-grey hair, their matching beige slacks.

  ‘Izzy. There’s more.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She was found in your father’s art bag, in the woods.’

  Izzy said nothing. She couldn’t say anything. Her mind was skittering, her thoughts crawling over themselves like ants in a nest.

  ‘Did she look like herself?’ Izzy said eventually; a sentence she would recall for years afterwards. A strange thing to say. So disconnected from what she had just been told.

  ‘Yes,’ her grandfather said, after a brief look was
exchanged with her grandmother. ‘Yes, don’t worry about that.’

  Later, she saw the photographs for herself, after one of the prosecution’s medical experts came to her grandparents’ house to relay his findings to them.

  Her mother had been strangled and her arteries compressed. Blood strangling, not airway strangling, the pathologist called it. Clear marks, striated in tones of mauve and purple and green and yellow, like a gruesome sunset.

  Her eyes were open.

  44

  She finishes speaking. They’re sitting on some decking overlooking the lake.

  All she is thinking is: he knows. He knows about the alibi. Why else would he mention David Smith’s name so specifically to her?

  ‘I’ve never thought how traumatic your interview would be,’ she says, deliberately not asking.

  ‘Nobody thinks about the accused, and rightly so, for the most part,’ Gabe says with a sad shrug. ‘But it was … it was a trauma. I think something happened to my brain that day. I’ve not been the same since. Not even now, when so much time has passed. And I’m no closer to being Gabriel again. No painting. No sport. No joy in life, either.’

  ‘You painted your flyers.’

  ‘I coloured them in. And I hated every minute of it.’

  Izzy sighs. Her father was never the type to turn positives into negatives. She thinks about his failed job interviews and his cans of beans, and her heart seems to drop in her chest. It is all hopeless. He can see it, and so, too, can she.

  He is not Gabriel. Gabriel is somebody from the past who he aspires to be.

  ‘I mean … none of it makes any sense. Why would you use your own bag to dispose of her body?’ she says.

  ‘They say it was a crime of passion. That we were at the shipping container or in the house and I lost my temper. That I wasn’t thinking straight. Or that I forgot about the initials. That the art bag was identifiable.’

  ‘I see,’ Izzy says, looking out over the lake, its surface a flat, opaque blue, not a single imperfection or ripple on it.