They’d completed late in the day, and most of her boxes were still at Chris’s. It was just the two of them in their empty kitchen. ‘Domino’s, then?’ Nick had said. They’d always had pizza on Friday, and moving house was no reason to vary a routine, to him.
They’d ordered it and observed its progress on the app on the kitchen counter, like new parents watching over a baby. And she’d had this feeling: how many more evenings would she spend with this man? The rest of their lives. She was so lucky with him, her new family, with their unlimited, bountiful days stretching out in front of them. Thank God she was here, and not back there amongst the aftermath of her mother’s murder, alone.
And now. Well, now what? She believes her father, and she supposes it’s time to tell Nick that.
‘Glad you’re back,’ Nick says to her with a brief smile. ‘I have your dad’s file. I think we should talk.’
45
Nick smells freshly showered. His T-shirt has damp patches where the material is clinging to his still-wet skin. She breathes in his minty smell as he walks past her, into the living room, and she follows him.
‘You’ve got it with you?’ she says to his square-shouldered back.
‘Yep,’ he says. He looks back at her again.
His face is in profile and she stares at it. His long, straight nose that she knows as well as her own. The atmosphere feels awkward, somehow, strained. Perhaps he doesn’t want to be poking around in police files. Perhaps he wishes he was with an easy, uncomplicated woman, the kind of person he used to think Izzy was.
He sits down in their living room. All of the windows and doors are open, but it’s still stuffy.
There is a pale pink cardboard folder resting on the arm of their sofa. It looks innocuous, like a geography project or household filing. It’s unmarked. No name on it.
‘I photocopied some things and brought them home in a blank file,’ Nick says, watching her.
Her arms become goose-fleshed the longer she looks at it. Here it is. A file brought home by a police analyst. Contraband. A file whose contents up until now existed in the police station and the courtroom. A file that means the State expended money, time, resources on capturing and incarcerating her father.
‘There are about twenty files. I’ve been doing a bit each day and adding to this folder. There are two key things in there.’
‘Right,’ Izzy says. He has been doing it every day, and only now he presents it to her. How can he be so calm, so measured – so calculated?
There’s something strange about his body language. It’s angled away from her. He keeps looking out of the window, over her shoulder.
‘Well … what?’ she asks.
He turns to her, taking the file off the arm of the sofa and opening it. His fingers are long and elegant and he thumbs through the papers slowly.
She sinks down on to the chair she’s been sitting in every evening lately – when did they stop sitting on the sofa together? – and looks at him. He’s dimly lit by the lamp in the corner of the room. Half of his face is illuminated amber, half in shadow. She can’t make out his expression. It looks distorted and strange.
‘The lawyers got the previous conviction excluded …’
‘Yes.’
‘I read it in full. Her account. Barbara Johnson. He strangled her, Izzy. Exact same method. She’d cheated on him.’
Izzy’s mouth goes dry. She can hear her heart in her ears. Her stomach coils immediately into knots. He told her he bent her arm behind her back. He lied. Her father has strangled two women. Women who have betrayed him.
She thinks of the newspaper article. She thinks of the time spent alone – increasingly isolated – with her father. She thinks of that alibi. Oh, please don’t say she has been foolish. Please don’t say she is in too deep.
‘And there’s something else.’
‘What?’ she asks him.
‘He said something to a young PC, at the scene where your mother’s body was recovered.’
‘What?’
‘It was excluded by his defence team because he wasn’t under caution. I asked around …’
‘What did he say?’
‘He knew how she had been killed. Before he saw her body.’
46
Izzy feels her jaw slacken. The goosebumps disappear and are replaced by something worse: a stomach churning, a kind of rocket launch in her body that she can’t control. The fear rises up through her, unchecked. Please, no. She has been so stupid. So naive to let herself be alone with her father. To have trusted him. To have given him a space in her lovely little safe life that it has taken her so long to rebuild.
‘What?’ she says to Nick.
Her vision has tunnelled, narrowed to just a point: the bundle of pages he is holding out to her. It looks like it could be nothing. A note of a long meeting. An abandoned manuscript. A tax return. Bank statements. Nothing. Just nothing. But it’s not nothing: it’s everything. Gabriel has lied to her. She thinks of his previous conviction, untold until she found it. Until Nick found it. And now Gabriel hasn’t told her the whole truth about it, either. Are all of his memories lies, concocted over the last eighteen years? Or just altered, distorted to suit himself? Tweaked here and there to shine him in the best possible light, key details – knowing how her mother died, his previous conviction – being removed, and replaced with made-up anguish?
‘He was called DS Perry. There was a legal battle over excluding it but, eventually, they managed it. The jury never knew.’
He passes her a piece of paper bearing the word CRIMINT across the top. She stands up and takes it from him, her eyes scanning it.
‘This is an intelligence report. It couldn’t go on the record because it’s a statement made to a police officer not in the context of an official interview.’
She reads it, her eyes scanning quickly. It is signed and dated: 2nd November 1999. It is signed by Perry and sworn. An affidavit.
On the 2nd November I attended at the scene of the recovery of the body of Alexandra English, who had been missing for two days. I was tasked with guarding the cordon and preventing entry by members of the public.
At around 4.10 p.m. Gabriel English arrived. He was very distressed. We were standing around one hundred feet from Alexandra English’s body which was inside a tent. There is no way he could have seen her.
His exact words to me were: ‘Strangulation – that’s an awful way to go.’
Izzy stares up at Nick, this stranger in her living room. ‘Did you know?’ she says. ‘Did you ever know about this?’
‘Not until tonight, today,’ Nick says. ‘He got a really good lawyer. Bal mentioned that.’
‘A good lawyer?’ Izzy says. She narrows her eyes as she looks up at him. He doesn’t mean a diligent lawyer, a hardworking lawyer.
‘A shark,’ he says. ‘One good at getting people off.’
Izzy nods, then swallows. It’s distasteful. That’s what it is. Her father has distorted the truth, removing his statement from evidence presented to the jury, acting like it was never made. The truth was wilfully deformed by Gabriel, and the defence team he paid £350 per hour to get him off. And hasn’t he done the same with her? He has rewritten history, painted his own picture, the way he wanted to portray it.
The room seems to swim as Izzy thinks of all the ways she has been foolish: suspecting her uncle, her cousin, wondering about Daniel, a man to whom her mother merely stood too close. The bank statements she has sifted through. The David Smiths she has tried to find. The time and energy she has wasted.
Pointless.
Her mind skips forward to the consequences of her naivety, of how gullible she has been.
The times she has been alone with her father.
The threats that she has told him about. The newspaper clipping. The text that said that she’s not safe. She thought he would be able to help her more than the police. But her father is a murderer. And he is angry.
Izzy presumes she sets the piece of pap
er down on the arm of the sofa, because that’s where it seems to land. Nick in front of her, his brown eyes level with hers. ‘I see,’ she says softly.
‘Yes,’ he says. He’s nodding. Her focus has narrowed just to his eyes. He has completely straight eyelashes. She has always loved those.
‘He never told me he strangled Barbara. He said he bent her arm backwards.’
‘Well, he didn’t.’
‘And he said he was informed how Mum had died in his police interview, by the police. He told me so vividly.’
Nick reaches over to touch the piece of paper just lightly.
‘He’s a liar,’ she says.
Nick is staring at her, saying nothing.
‘He said he arrived at the scene and broke down. It was the moment … he was so, so convincing. It was the moment I started to believe him.’
Something like sympathy crosses Nick’s features. ‘How many times have you seen him?’
‘A few.’
‘But the previous conviction I got from CRIS, I thought that would … that alone would make up your mind? Izzy?’
Izzy blinks, tears filming over her eyes. Everything she had thought has been incorrect. The nebulous gut feelings that told her that she was supposed to be seeing her father, hearing him out. The way she chose to turn to him rather than to Nick. The way she thought they would figure it out together. Naivety. Wishful thinking. Constructing a partnership where there was nothing.
‘I got that for you …’
‘I know. And this, too. I am grateful,’ she says. On top of everything, she doesn’t want her husband to think that she has used him.
‘How far has it gone?’ he says.
Suddenly, she doesn’t care what he thinks of her. She doesn’t need to try and cover it up any more, because it has been exposed. Her inner shame. Her inner child.
‘Really far,’ she says thickly. ‘It was … he was like a magnet for me.’
Nick blinks, saying nothing, looking at her. He sits down next to her.
She leans into him. ‘I miss it all so much,’ she says, a sob escaping.
He puts an arm around her shoulders, solid and weighty. ‘What?’ he says quietly.
‘Every day I think about people with families, you know? Your WhatsApp group with your sisters, Thea, this woman at the Chinese takeaway who always has her toddler there with her …’
‘Mmm.’ Nick rubs her back.
‘And I just wish … I just wish it was me. I wish it hadn’t been taken from me. I wish I had that,’ she says, her eyes wet with warm tears that Nick rubs away with his other hand.
‘I know,’ he says.
‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do.’ He rests his forearm on her knee lightly. ‘Yes.’ He leans into her. His body is warm and sweet-smelling: her Nick.
‘You seemed surprised I wanted to see him – my dad.’
Nick folds his lips in on themselves, dimples forming either side of his mouth. ‘I have always known how much you want a mum. A parent. It’s obvious. It makes me sad how obvious it is.’
Izzy closes her eyes. All this time, she’s been thinking she had kept it hidden, but she hasn’t. Not even close.
‘But I guess I trusted that you’re … level-headed. About your dad. You only visited him once in eighteen years inside.’ Inside. He uses the same terminology as her father.
‘I’m not,’ she says. ‘I’m not level-headed about him.’
‘No.’
She leans against Nick and lets him brush her hair away from her face rhythmically. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry.’
Izzy nods, not saying anything. He always knew. He always knew she needed a parent, and yet – did he help her? Did he get her to talk about it, the way Pip would have? No, he didn’t.
She won’t always feel this way, she tells herself. Surely she won’t. Surely, one day soon, the pain and the destruction that her father has inflicted will stop, like an overflowing river spreading and spreading and spreading until finally it dries up.
‘We’ll sort it,’ Nick says.
And so here it is, the truth she has been searching for. Of course: Occam’s razor. The evidence against him.
Her father had been convicted of domestic violence in the past. He had sent a threatening text to her mother.
He had no alibi for his whereabouts that night, and the last place her mother had been seen was walking into the house he was waiting in. He spent the time while she was missing cleaning the clothes that he had been wearing.
Her mother had been found murdered by and buried in an item belonging to him, taken from a place only he had access to.
He knew how she had died before he had seen her body.
If the simplest explanation is true, then her father is a murderer. What other explanation is there?
And here is another truth: her husband loves her.
Unconditionally.
She deletes Gabe’s number that night.
47
Izzy’s eyes feel black the next morning. Her father has texted her – of course he has – but she has ignored it. Nick hasn’t gone to work. It must be serious, she thinks, as she opens the door to the back garden from their kitchen.
She will have to tell him about the newspaper article and the text. She knows she will. It’s just a matter of when. She wants to drip-feed it, as though she can control his judgement that way. He was sympathetic, last night, but he also abhors people who make silly mistakes.
She stands outside and looks at the sky. The exact same blue as yesterday, when her father had cried by the side of the road. She thinks of his tears, of his reliance on her, of his fake, gilded memories, fabricated over eighteen years. Perhaps he believes them himself, like a truly insane person. He’s lived with his lies for so long he has become them.
Nick comes up behind her. His hair is messy, his belt undone. She loves all of his guises. When his hair is neat and his ears look bigger and his face leaner. And now, when his hair is messy and he looks like a hipster. That’s what Izzy likes most about the terrain of a long relationship; all the forms she sees her husband take.
‘Look,’ she says. She clears her throat self-consciously. ‘The other day I received a newspaper article. I don’t know … I didn’t tell you … it was about Dad. And there’s been a text.’
‘What was it?’ Nick says, releasing her.
She misses the warmth of his body, feeling suddenly cold in the sun.
‘It was about the crime, and stuff.’
‘Right.’
‘But where my mum’s name was written had been crossed out – and mine was written, instead,’ she says softly.
Nick says nothing. The only way she can tell he has heard is because his nostrils flare, his upper body tenses, as if ready to fight.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Can I see them? What did the text say?’
‘Yes.’
She goes inside and fetches her phone and the newspaper cutting from her handbag.
‘I see,’ he says, when she passes them to him. He looks directly at her, the weak sunlight lightening his dark eyes to a lion-like gold. ‘Did you tell Gabriel about these?’
She drops her head. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes,’ she whispers. ‘That’s why he suggested being alone more … because somebody knew. Somebody knew we were trying to solve it.’
Nick closes his eyes. ‘Izzy,’ he says softly.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’
‘Okay,’ he says, exhaling.
‘You think he’s sent them.’
He pauses, looking thoughtfully up into the sun. Running that mind of his over the facts. ‘Two things spring to mind.’
‘What?’
Nick’s eyelids flutter. ‘Somebody who knows he’s guilty could be warning you.’
‘But … who?’ Izzy says, her mind racing.
‘Often an inmate.’
‘Oh.’
‘Someone who spent so many years with him … they sometimes write
to family members. Or get someone on the outside to write, to warn them.’
‘But they wouldn’t know he’d seen me.’
‘Unless he told them.’
‘Oh. What’s the other explanation?’
‘Well, sometimes people with form like Gabriel … well, they might play games.’
‘What games?’
‘Cat and mouse,’ Nick says quietly.
She turns to him. His slender hand is raised to his forehead, shielding the sun from his eyes. ‘It’s, you know. Pretty typical.’
‘Of what?’
He looks directly at her now, removing his hand and placing it back on his hip. ‘Abuse.’
He says it factually, which she’s grateful for, though she allows her mind, for just a moment, to imagine another Izzy, here with him. Izzy who complains about her parents interfering in her life. Who is utterly different to this Izzy. Never needy, never shameful, never jealous. The Izzy to whom this didn’t happen.
‘He wouldn’t do that,’ she says.
They’d ridden everywhere on their bikes the summer before her mother had died. Izzy’s ballet teacher had suggested some extra cardio, and Gabe had obliged. He’d bought her a bike he’d seen advertised for sale in the paper, from a blue-green shed a few streets down from them. He should have been working, she thinks now, looking back, but she didn’t care then. Not at all. They had cycled to the coast. Her thighs had burned, but they had reached the clifftop. They could see Portsmouth in the distance. It had been worth it, especially when they had cycled down again. They hadn’t gone fast. Her father had led her down a slow, winding path, past a patch of bluebells so vivid they seemed to move and shimmer. The sun on her bare arms. The wind in her lungs. Her hair trailing out behind her. She had felt as happy as it was possible to feel, as though a fizzing tablet of pleasure had been dropped down her throat and into her stomach.
The Evidence Against You Page 27