The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  She blinks, looking up at Nick now. She can’t explain that, especially not to him.

  ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ she says again, but she knows her argument makes no sense, is illogical. He would murder, but he wouldn’t threaten her. Sure, Nick would say.

  Abuse, she tells herself. Violence. Violence against women: against vulnerable women. Killings, strangulations, disappearances, lies, mind games. That is who her father is.

  ‘Are you going to tell work?’ she says.

  He looks at her, brows lowered, his mouth forming a thoughtful pout. ‘Maybe,’ he says easily, but doesn’t elaborate.

  She wonders what would happen if the police needed to look into her father. His licence conditions. His past. They would get the file, surely. They would see it had been retrieved.

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ Nick says, catching her worried expression.

  ‘But won’t th –’

  ‘Leave it with me. I can speak to his probation officer.’

  ‘Okay,’ she whispers.

  ‘Then if he’s done anything … he’ll be back to prison for life. Proper.’

  She thinks of her father’s eight cans of beans. Single key to his single room. His single pink bed. Of their shared memories, their shared grief. The way they understood each other. She is abandoning him to the abyss; to loneliness, forever.

  No. Stop it. He is a murderer. He is sending things to her house, designed to scare her. This sympathy, it is misguided: a poison.

  48

  Izzy gets up in the middle of the night. She has two missed called from Gabe, and three texts.

  Nick stirs, but doesn’t wake, and she walks across the deep, soft carpet of their bedroom and downstairs.

  In the kitchen, she stares out at the blackness of their garden. The fronds of the palm trees are completely motionless in the still, humid weather.

  There’s movement outside. Izzy thinks of the text and the car and her hands go cold, but then she sees that it’s just Thea, letting herself out across the access and into her own garden.

  Izzy unlocks her door and follows suit. It’s after two, and she throws Thea a look of surprise that she manufactures in the moment.

  ‘Can’t sleep,’ Thea says. ‘Just trying to cool down, but it’s impossible, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ Izzy says, wishing that was all that troubled her: a bit of summer heat.

  ‘How are things?’ Thea says slowly. ‘You were saying – about your dad …?’

  ‘Oh, I think we can forget about that,’ Izzy says.

  Thea nods, standing on her little patio, her feet bare on the flagstones.

  ‘I just felt …’ Izzy starts to speak, the warm, close night air and the darkness a kind of safe embrace, enabling her to unburden herself. ‘I was taken in by him, for a while,’ she continues. ‘I guess I just so wanted – a family. Like you have.’

  ‘Oh, Izzy!’ Thea says in surprise.

  Izzy looks across at her. She’s in a towelling dressing gown of the kind not sold any more. It’s sage green, the belt double-knotted around her waist. Her face bears the expression of a slow realization. She is no doubt cycling back through the things Izzy has done, the way she has imposed herself upon their family, dropping by too casually, too often, full of excuses about why she was there.

  ‘But you can make your own family,’ Thea says, taking a couple of tentative steps towards her. ‘Now that you’re an adult. You can leave it all behind you.’

  Izzy steps towards her and – unthinkingly, it seems to her – Thea holds her arms up and Izzy steps into the embrace that she’s craved. Thea doesn’t smell like her mother or feel like her mother but she is a warm body and her grasp is firm. She stands there with Thea for just five minutes.

  Five motherly minutes.

  Later, still not asleep, she finds the printout of her father’s previous conviction and scans for the name.

  Barbara Johnson.

  She types her name into Facebook and scrolls and scrolls until she sees what she’s looking for.

  Barbara Johnson. Profile photo: a woman in her sixties, wrinkles around her eyes, sunglasses on top of her head.

  A redhead.

  Izzy sits up straight in bed the next morning. She has been woken by something, though she doesn’t know what. Only that it is something.

  Nick has gone to work, and she sits for a second, listening to the complete silence of their cottage.

  They had made love last night, Nick’s dark eyes on hers.

  She peers out of the bedroom window. It was just a fox. Her entire body relaxes.

  They often get foxes in their garden. They were both up early a few months ago. It was a misty spring morning, a chill on the soles of her feet as she made coffee. As she flicked the kettle on to boil, the light of it glowing blue in their kitchen, Nick came up behind her, and pointed outside. ‘Look,’ he said. It was their first spring in the cottage, and they were still learning about it. How to run the Aga; what grew, and when, in the garden; the noises the ancient floorboards sometimes made.

  Izzy followed his gaze.

  There was a fox in the garden asleep, inexplicably, on their garden table.

  ‘Oh!’ she said.

  ‘And look,’ he said, pointing again.

  There was a second one, in the grass. It ambled up, on shaky legs, and headed for their back gate, where it must have come through.

  The other fox remained sleeping on the table as they watched it. She couldn’t stop looking at him as she poured the water into their mugs.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ Nick said, poking his head into the kitchen later, and they stared at the fox for a little while longer.

  It had been one of those mornings, she supposed. One of those mornings that stood out because it hadn’t been ordinary. But there was something else, too. The warmth of his body next to hers. The way he touched her hip to get her attention. The way they had laughed at the foxes, and they had texted about them throughout the day. Will he still be there when we get back? she had asked as she ate soup at the restaurant, and he had responded immediately: Hope so!

  It had been sweet, sipping her soup and smiling at text messages from her husband.

  When they returned home, the foxes had gone, of course. And they had never been back. But Izzy has never forgotten that day. It had been right somehow. Just right.

  It was just a fox.

  But that’s when she hears the noise again. Footsteps.

  There’s somebody downstairs, in her house.

  49

  She remains sitting up in bed, listening, her body flooded with adrenaline. Should she call the police? Should she wait it out?

  She hears nothing for a few seconds, then the same thing again. Light footsteps.

  She grabs her phone, pulls her dressing gown on and walks downstairs slowly, trying not to make any noise on their ancient wooden staircase.

  She emerges into the kitchen, her breath held, her muscles tensed.

  There’s nobody there. She checks the living room, then the hallway. There’s definitely nobody there.

  But she heard somebody. She did. She spins around, and that’s when she sees it.

  The kitchen door, swinging uselessly.

  The lock burst open, the wood caved in, like it’s been hit with something, injured, the wood splintered and buckled, its insides spilling out.

  ‘I’ll make sure he’s spoken to,’ Nick says on the phone. ‘I’ll make sure his accommodation is searched. If it’s him, we’ll find out.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘If it’s him?’

  ‘Yes.’ Izzy fingers the broken lock. A splinter pierces her finger and she removes it, wincing. ‘I don’t want another trial.’

  ‘There’s no trial for recalled lifers who’ve breached their licence.’

  ‘Really?’ she says, surprised.

  ‘No. We just investigate it. And report them, and then they go back.’

  ‘So who decides if it’s true?’

&nbs
p; ‘The police.’

  Izzy tries not to let her mind unpick that particular injustice.

  That night, she dreams of her father’s shipping container. Had he taken her mother there, alive, or dead? Or gone there to collect the bag and then headed back out, premeditated?

  She dreams of her mother, and of herself, dying in exactly the same way. Strangled, the breath squeezed out of her neck, her lungs.

  As she lies half-awake, covered in sweat, she realizes. If her father murders her, he’ll deny it. And in another twenty years, some poor redhead will believe him, with his brown eyes, his easy manner, his charming texts, his skinny elbows and his vulnerability. They’ll be lured in, and it will happen again, and again, and again. Memories and falsehoods and lies and charm. Strangulation and paintings and death. Izzy has been fooled. Everybody can be fooled.

  They have to stop him. Nick will stop him. He will do it for her, her husband who has kept her safe for all these years.

  They’ll ensure that Gabriel can’t do it again to anybody. That he is locked up, recalled back to prison immediately. Public protection, punishment, deterrent.

  But until then, her father hangs like a spectre over her, her body imbued with fear even as she tries to sleep. She will never be free from him, not really. He lives inside her. She is half him.

  50

  It is only a matter of days before he turns up at the restaurant. Of course, of course he arrives, right when he used to, at close to midnight, just as she is hanging the glasses up, warm from the dishwasher. It is just like the first time he arrived. The fear is just the same.

  His face is at the window, just how it was, all those weeks ago, when this whole business began. He is framed in one complete window, a floating head. He looks thinner than before, if that’s possible, his brow creased, his hair whiter. He must be motioning for her to open the front door, because she sees a movement in the night, his arm flapping in his Matalan anorak.

  God, he really is too thin. She can see his cheekbones, like he’s wasting. She could invite him in, feed him up – really, what’s changed? He’s never tried to harm her, never.

  No, she tells herself. She recites the evidence against him in her mind. She will be strong. She will not let him in. She turns away from him and back to the dishwasher.

  He raps on the window.

  He knew how she’d died.

  He moves to a second window, presses his face to the glass.

  He’d done it before.

  Izzy busies herself in the kitchen and, eventually, he shouts her name, ringing out clear in the warm night.

  ‘No,’ she cries out, wanting, childishly, to put her hands over her ears, for him – for this dilemma – to go away forever.

  She walks to the letter box and prises it open with her fingers, the metal cool on the tips of her hand. ‘Please go away,’ she says, out into the night. A stream of warm air drifts inwards.

  ‘Why?’ he says. He comes to the letter box, too, and his eyes meet hers, framed in the rectangular box.

  ‘I know about what you said as Mum’s body was found. I know about the strangling, I know it all,’ she says. ‘Don’t contact me again or I will call the police.’

  She lets the metal slam shut, removing her fingers just in time. The sound seems to reverberate around the restaurant. She shivers, wrapping her arms around her body, wondering if her mother had an encounter exactly like this, right before she died.

  Izzy doesn’t get frightened often. She’s never allowed herself to be. Where some people may spend the rest of their lives living in fear after something like her mother’s murder, Izzy never did. The worst had already happened, she reasoned. Or rather, the worst could happen – the very worst – so there was no need to rehearse it. Move on, she used to say to herself, always parenting herself inside her head.

  But now, standing alone in the kitchen, too frightened to even reach into her handbag for her phone, too frightened to move, staring at her father, his face once again framed in the glass window, Izzy is frightened, after eighteen years of peace.

  She is frightened for her life.

  51

  It is a few days later when a man emerges, in the early summer sunshine in the car park of her restaurant.

  It is her father’s best friend, Paul, the man she met nearly six weeks ago in his house, when she was right at the beginning of this mess.

  ‘He sent you,’ she says to him now as she walks to her car. She ought to be frightened, but isn’t. It is hard to be frightened when faced with a benign relic from her past, as familiar as a duvet cover not seen since the 1980s.

  ‘Yes,’ Paul says. He spreads his arms wide. They’re tanned, the hairs on them still dark. He removes his sunglasses and looks at her properly. His eyes are a vibrant blue in the sunlight.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To protest his innocence,’ he says. ‘That’s all he ever wants to do.’

  Izzy looks down at her shoes, knots forming in her stomach. ‘Don’t you think twice about this stuff? Being sent to defend a murderer to me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m his daughter,’ she says, looking up at him. ‘But I want to move on. I’ve lived with it for so long.’

  She doesn’t tell him of the threats she’s been receiving. She doesn’t tell him of the fear she has felt every night for weeks as she locks up the restaurant, as she walks alone to the bank, as she locks her car on their drive. She doesn’t tell him that, for the first time in her life, she just can’t take the risk. That, even if he is innocent, it almost doesn’t matter to her because she never wants to feel as threatened and pursued and confused as she has for the past six weeks. She doesn’t bother to say any of it. She shouldn’t need to.

  ‘Okay. I just need to tell you one thing,’ he says. ‘Then I’ll leave.’

  ‘Why would you do him a favour?’

  ‘Because of Megan,’ he says. Paul’s daughter, born much later than Izzy. She can only be twenty or so now. Izzy hardly remembers her. Little details spring to mind: a brown-haired tomboy. She wore trainers with bright blue laces.

  ‘Right,’ she says faintly in the car park.

  A cloud of mosquitoes blooms, just to the left of Paul, gathering and then dispersing in the evening air, coming from nowhere, disappearing to nothing.

  ‘I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about our chat. And all the things that made me think your dad was innocent. I remembered another thing.’

  Izzy shrugs, saying nothing.

  ‘He called me when he was first arrested,’ Paul says. ‘So he got allocated the duty solicitor. He was naive, I guess. They let him have his call and … it was me.’

  ‘Right,’ she says.

  Paul pauses, straightens his shoulders, then breathes in and out. ‘I remember his exact words. I always have. I never told you, because they’re not evidence. He always said to just leave it – to leave you in peace. But they are … something.’

  ‘To leave me in peace?’ Izzy says quietly.

  ‘Yes, he never wanted me to contact you. I think he thought you had been through enough, I suppose. That you should be left alone until … he always said to me that he would speak to you when he was out.’

  They are like the two contrasting sides of a coin. Tails: the father with the previous conviction, who planned to murder her mother and who covered it up. And heads: the father whose best friend unequivocally believes in him, whose parents stand by him, who waited for the best, most opportune moment to attempt to reconcile with his daughter, who did it gently, compassionately, slowly. They are night and day, these two men.

  ‘What did he tell you on the call?’

  ‘I’m getting to it.’

  A greenfly lands on her arm and she brushes it away irritably.

  Paul crosses his legs at the ankles and reaches a hand out to steady himself on the roof of his red car. The sun is heating the back of Izzy’s neck. She will get burned if she’s not careful. Her mother used to wear factor 50 year-round, and
still went pink in the sun.

  ‘I guess I always believed him because none of the things they were saying were a surprise to me.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The conviction … the text messages. The temper he sometimes had.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I have known him since we were eighteen. He’s always been the same. Reliably wild.’ Paul smiles a nostalgic, private smile. ‘He was the liability on nights out, you know? Always ended up in a shopping trolley. Would threaten to lamp someone at the bar for rudeness.’

  ‘But then he killed someone.’

  Paul inclines his head, like, you might think so.

  ‘He wasn’t a stranger to lying, too,’ he says. ‘To suit himself. He’d tell me he’d sold paintings for more than he had. Ego, I guess.’

  ‘So he’s violent and a liar.’

  ‘No, he’s mildly temperamental. And he’s never lied about anything big. He’s not immoral. He’s just human. And those human traits loom large when you’re accused. I see those pieces of evidence for what they are: props to the prosecution’s case. They weren’t the substance of their case. And we all have something, if brought out in court, that would make us look guilty.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘I know I do.’ Paul shrugs.

  It’s a strange gesture, here in the car park, as they discuss her mother’s murder. Izzy thinks of Nick. What if he were found murdered? He’d been looking into the police file for her. They’d been rowing. What if he’d been killed with a knife that looked like it had come from her kitchen – the bread knife that’s been missing for several years? It could happen. And she would look guilty.

  She finds her mind wants her to keep opening this door, to keep probing, so she does. What if she had been accused of something years ago, when the restaurant was first reopened? There’d been that waitress she had to sack, that awful, awkward exchange – ‘I’m just not that happy with your work’ – oh, but what if that waitress had been found somewhere? Would Izzy have been questioned? Definitely.