The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘He said she’d been strangled, you know, at the scene. Before he saw her.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘A cop.’

  Paul almost laughs. ‘Why don’t you ask Gabriel?’

  She is tired of debating this. Tired of taking the same set of facts and looking at them from this angle and that. Tired of trying to make them fit one version or another. The truth is messy, her father said, and he’s right about that.

  ‘What did he say in his phone call to you? From the police station?’ Izzy asks again.

  ‘He said, “Paul. Izzy’s going to think it was me.”’

  Izzy says nothing.

  ‘That was his big fear, his only fear, that you were young and impressionable and that you’d think it was him. He didn’t care about the rest. The conviction. The jail time. It’s only ever been about you.’

  Paul is looking at her intently.

  She says nothing in reply.

  Izzy is serving a customer – late for their eight o’clock reservation – and taking a pashmina and hanging it up when he arrives. A man in his early twenties in a green T-shirt.

  ‘The safe?’ he says.

  ‘The safe?’

  ‘I’m here to unlock the safe,’ he says in a bored tone. ‘You booked me for tonight.’

  ‘Oh … it’s fine,’ she says, moving away from the bar with him. She appraises him – maybe he’s in his teens, actually – and he stares back at her, unblinking.

  ‘You paid online. Where is it?’ he says.

  Izzy apologizes to the woman she was serving. ‘Downstairs in the basement,’ she says. ‘Behind the wine rack. Door’s over there.’ It is easier to let him do it. ‘Sorry,’ she says, turning back to the woman. ‘This way.’ She shows her to a table, her mind reeling.

  Once they’re seated, she heads to the basement. She had better supervise him.

  She can’t see what the man in the green T-shirt is doing with his lock pick. He hasn’t checked that she owns the restaurant, or asked her why she needs it doing. It’s not exactly above board, she guesses.

  It takes him less than five minutes. Izzy stands awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs, her hands across her body in the cool, musty air; a nice respite from the summer heat.

  ‘All done,’ the man says neutrally to her.

  He leaves up the stairs, not seeming to want her to see him out. She moves towards the safe, repeating his words inside her head and trying to gauge his tone. What’s he found?

  She reaches for the little green door that her mother touched a hundred times, and opens it.

  And there it is.

  The evidence she has been waiting for.

  52

  She picks up the bundle of notes and fingers their papery outsides. They have Edward Elgar on them, the font curly. Old twenties. Unusable now, she guesses.

  There are four bundles, clipped neatly together, held firm. She flicks through them, not moving the clips. It must be ten thousand, fifteen, twenty, she guesses. Hidden for all these years in that tiny safe that, she is sure, only her mother knew about. And maybe Tony. Did he know about this cash, sitting there? It’s clearly her mother’s: it’s old money. But why was he trying to move the wine rack?

  She focuses instead on the banknotes.

  It is evidence. Finally. Not historic previous convictions or an unsupported alibi, but real, tangible evidence. And it is evidence that something else was happening. Something not in keeping with the narrative of the prosecution – or, she supposes, of the defence.

  It is new.

  She sits there, cross-legged on the bottom step in the basement, and wonders who to tell. Who to trust.

  She breathes deeply, her nose in the notes and, amongst the dust and the old papery smell, she thinks she can smell her mother’s perfume.

  Izzy decides to tell nobody. She will keep it to herself: she knows she can trust herself.

  She avoids Nick, coming home late, going to bed even later. She tells him she’s swamped with annual accounts.

  He knows it’s not her year-end, but he doesn’t say anything. She guesses he thinks she’s going through a kind of grief, a second mourning period, and leaves her be. She hears the clink of his knife against their cheese plate in the bedroom, which makes her eyes mist over.

  In the restaurant the next day, during the lunchtime service, she takes a blank piece of paper out of her printer and makes notes of what her mother could have been doing.

  Money, she writes along the top, then underlines it in red.

  Sex.

  Fraud.

  Selling things.

  Favours.

  Blackmail.

  The list goes on and on. The sordid words run unchecked from her ballpoint pen.

  Prostitution.

  Assassinations.

  They seem to get worse the more she writes, as though she is descending steps into the underworld itself.

  She sits back in her chair and stares at the depraved piece of paper, thinking.

  If there was money, her mother can’t have been acting alone. Either she was giving somebody the money, or she was receiving it. Basic economics. Supply and demand.

  She thinks of the list of names again.

  Suddenly, she knows what she is going to do. She almost doesn’t care about the repercussions. All roads have led her here: her father getting in touch, their shared memories, Nick agreeing to get the file for her, the lock picker. And now here she is. Alone, still not knowing whether her father is guilty or not, or who killed her mother. Not knowing what happened on the night of Hallowe’en almost twenty years ago which has come to define her entire life. Only knowing one thing: that she is going to put the name of every single person who came into contact with her mother into Nick’s Police National Computer over the next few days, when she can. That surely one of them will have done something with their money.

  Something naive.

  Something foolish.

  Something suspicious.

  Something illegal.

  She drives to the coast. She needs to be alone for this. Away from Nick. Away from the restaurant. Away from anybody who can overhear her or judge her as she takes the plunge. What she is doing is either clever or foolish, but she wants no witnesses: she needs to feel as though she is at the end of the world.

  She parks at the Devil’s Chimney car park. The steps are carved into the rock, narrow and dark, and it suits her mood. She wants to bury herself in the forest, in the path carved through the cliff. As she descends the stairs, she thinks about all of her messages to all of the David Smiths in London. They would be able to corroborate her father’s innocence, but that isn’t what she’s doing any more, not really, not with this. It isn’t about whether or not her father did it. It’s about what happened. The messy truth of it.

  The stairs are covered with ivy, waving in the breeze, so green it shivers, moving like it’s alive. When she’s right in the middle of the forest, completely on her own, she retrieves her deleted messages, and calls her father.

  He answers immediately, jumpily, in that animalistic, startled way of his, his brain always scanning the horizon for hazards.

  ‘Hi, hi,’ he says. ‘Hi.’

  ‘I got into the safe,’ she says.

  Izzy takes a deep breath. She counted the money last night, when everybody had gone. She doesn’t know where to keep it, so she’s separated the bundles and put one into each of her locked desk drawers.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there was eighteen thousand pounds in there.’

  ‘Shit,’ her father says, not questioning her silence, her estrangement from him, her doubts. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Look, were you involved in something with her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I need you to tell me the truth.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right, then. Well, then the money was hers. Hers alone. And I guess … I guess it is a clue.’

  Izzy sits down on a moss-covered rock and feels the heat of her
phone against her ear, like another person really is here with her. She breathes in the cow parsley wafting around her, the verdant, sensual summer. The sun is warm on her skin in dappled parts, but the rest of her is cool in the shadows. It’s finally set to rain tomorrow, ending several weeks of drought. A storm and flash floods, they’re saying.

  She hears her father blow air into his cheeks, then expel it slowly.

  ‘So she was buying or selling something,’ he says.

  She closes her eyes against it: like father, like daughter. The same thought processes. The same phrases. Oh, please let this be something. Please let him be innocent.

  ‘I think I’m going to try and look up some of the men on Nick’s computer.’

  ‘I think that’s a good idea,’ he says. ‘Money changes hands. Someone else was involved.’

  ‘I will,’ she says.

  ‘Look, I’ll come over. We can go through everything. You can explain properly. Show me the cash. I think we should look at the bank statements again. I … I have a theory.’

  Izzy hesitates for just a second before she agrees. He hasn’t harmed her yet.

  53

  ‘Where are the statements?’ he says. He’s standing in her kitchen, holding a cup of tea – the most middle class of drinks – and the bundle of likely illegal cash. He’s flicking through it.

  ‘In my loft.’

  ‘I like small spaces. Used to them.’ He passes her the cash.

  He climbs the ladder quickly, arriving next to her in the hot loft. She retracts the stairs up with them, even though Nick isn’t due back for hours. The hatch closes, and she clicks the light on, and here they are, in the tiny, hot loft, alone, together.

  ‘There,’ she says, taking the lid off one of the box files and passing it to him. ‘Accounts and wages.’

  ‘What’s that one?’ he says, pointing to the second box.

  ‘Property stuff – the lease. Insurance documents.’

  Her father leans back on his hands. His upper lip is sweating.

  ‘You know, sometimes I forget you’re no longer this scrawny seventeen-year-old ballerina with a boyfriend with a daft name. The Izzy of then.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she says, thinking of the Gabe of then, too, and all that they have lost.

  ‘You’re all grown now, and so smart.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You never finished telling me what happened with him. Pip?’ There’s a question in her father’s voice.

  ‘He fucking ghosted me,’ she says bitterly.

  ‘Ghosted?’

  She rolls her eyes. ‘You need a twenty-first-century translator,’ she says.

  ‘Be mine,’ he says. He always was so charming.

  ‘He blanked me. Three days after Mum died. Later, his dad, Steve, emailed me. A fucking email. Said it was too much for him, with his brother dying and then my mum. That he was depressed.’

  Izzy winces as she recalls seeing them in the petrol station. She wishes she hadn’t messaged them. The scorned ex, from years ago, getting in touch even with his father. She blushes as she thinks of it.

  ‘People,’ her father says.

  ‘Yeah. But then two weeks later, my first time venturing back into town after everything, I saw him. He was fine. Out drinking. As soon as he saw me, he turned his whole body away from me.’ Izzy could still cry when she thinks of it, even now, almost twenty years on; a fact which embarrasses her.

  ‘Well, depression’s invisible, you know.’

  ‘I know. But even so.’

  ‘Yes. Owed you a text at the very least.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve lost track of the number of people who “ghosted” me, if it helps.’

  ‘I bet,’ she says with a bitter smile.

  ‘Are you ready to discuss it yet?’

  ‘What?’ She shifts, uncomfortable on the hard floor, and her father passes her his Matalan coat. She lifts herself and sits on it. It’s warm from his body heat.

  ‘The strangulation. Your mum’s and Babs’s. I can explain them.’

  ‘Try, then.’ She looks at the money, a tangible little pile of purple notes that anchor her to something else. To his innocence, she supposes. To an alternative explanation. To the messy truth.

  ‘I did put my hands around Babs’s throat. I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d do what a jury would do – conflate the two. That I had done such a thing so foolishly, once, would mean I would do it again. That I … that I liked strangling people, I suppose.’

  ‘You lied to me, and you excluded it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it fair to exclude things from trials?’

  ‘It is if you think they’ll lead to a miscarriage of justice. I wasn’t trying to kill Babs. But it was a … loss of control.’

  ‘A loss of control.’

  ‘I was angry with her. She’d cheated on me, and I had just found out. I didn’t tell you because I knew how it would look … It was wrong, obviously. I stopped almost immediately. Tony is prickly about it because he thought he ought to have stopped it. He heard one of our bad rows, before that one, and warned me.’

  ‘I would never do something like that. I would never do that to Nick.’

  ‘No. But … I don’t know. Some of us do. And we’re not monsters. Just human. Fucking fools. Young foolish men.’

  She says nothing to that, not agreeing, not disagreeing, wondering if he is deluded. But one thing is for sure: he wants to find out. That is what he wants. And that is what she wants, too.

  ‘And the confession … They insist on calling it that,’ he says. ‘Let me tell you how it really was.’

  54

  Tuesday 2 November 1999: the afternoon Alex’s body is found

  Gabe

  There is the cordon and there is the tent and there are the forensics. And she is dead and she is dead and she is dead.

  I thought of the things I’d never see again. The soles of her feet. The way they curled up behind her as she walked, her catwalk model walk. I’d never see those feet again, those toes, the nails always painted pink. ‘Pink clashes with my hair, but I don’t care,’ she had once said, in a fake Liverpudlian accent: hurr, curr.

  The crook of her elbow. She rubbed this Vaseline cream into it. She had dry skin, eczema, burned easily. Both sun and windburn. Sensitive skin. I’d never see those elbows again, never see her twisting her slim torso to rub it in, never be able to take over and rub it in for her.

  The back of her ribs, her spine. Bending over forward in the bath – God, she loved the bath – to rinse her face. A satisfyingly straight, neat row of spinal nodules; her perfect form.

  Her easy, crinkled smile, the way she laughed at me sometimes, good-naturedly. I’d never taste her tomato and garlic sauce again, nor plunge a spoon into a chocolate pudding of hers.

  Those bright eyes of hers, catching a slice of sunlight: the restaurant faced south, and she always had the curtains open, shielding her eyes with her hand as she served people.

  The smell of her perfume in the crook of her neck.

  How much she loved to buy shoes. Buying shoes and ridiculing me: her main hobbies.

  The world had turned to grey but my hearing seemed acutely heightened. I could hear the crunch of the leaves underfoot as the forensic team descended. The murmur of shocked spectators’ voices. The rustle of the tent.

  And then: more than a murmur. A person addressing me.

  ‘Looks like she’d been strangled,’ a man said, making a gesture around his own neck. The man who found her, I thought.

  And it’s so funny, the things you think … the things you think when you finally find out what happened to your wife. All I could think about was this fucking documentary I watched where someone who was strangled was actually still alive, and they were resuscitated because the paramedics realized in time.

  I screamed something. That she’d been strangled. That it was painful. I’d seen that on the same fucking documentary, and couldn’t get out
of my head how much pain she’d have been in.

  Later, the dog walker denied ever saying anything. He sold me up the river. Worried he’d get into trouble with the police, I suppose.

  Like all of us.

  55

  Izzy looks at her father and thinks of what he said to Paul when he was in custody. And his lies and his shady behaviour – they don’t fall away. But something else joins them: love. She loves him. Of that she is sure.

  That is the evidence. That is the truth.

  ‘It was stupid,’ he says now. ‘I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t thinking of you, my baby girl, and I should have been.’

  ‘You were thinking of her. Understandably,’ she says.

  ‘There should be laws against using statements made at the scene, or questioning me so soon, Iz. I was in a shock so deep that it took me … well,’ he gives a tiny, sad little laugh, ‘I don’t think I ever did come out of it. Not yet, anyway.’ He reaches for the money again, like he is tying himself to the present, to the evidence that might exonerate him. ‘Anyway. It was my fault. Not legally, but … I failed her.’

  ‘Who was the dog walker?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Once Matt got it excluded it didn’t matter.’

  ‘Was it easy to get it excluded?’

  ‘Easier than the previous. It was a remark made off the record to a police officer when I wasn’t under caution.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It was like falling down a well, that day. I thought I would disappear from the grief and the shock … just disappear. The world transformed. I was not fit to be making any statements to any police officers,’ he says. ‘Not one little bit. That’s why we got it excluded.’

  ‘Did Matt believe you?’ she says. She can’t help but ask.

  ‘Maybe. He always said he did. But he was being paid to say that, I guess. All his clients say that. That’s the thing, Iz. They all say it.’

  ‘But you really didn’t do it.’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’ He doesn’t break eye contact.