The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘How have you lived with it?’ she says. ‘All these years.’

  ‘With the conviction?’

  ‘No. With not knowing who did it.’

  ‘I don’t know. It was … I was suspended, in there. I shelved it. Until …’

  ‘Until what?’

  ‘Until I could come out. And see you.’ He gestures to the money. ‘You’ve found this, and you’ve told me about those three men. Your memories of the events have informed mine. Together, they’re more than the sum of their parts.’

  Izzy sits back, in the silence of her hot attic, saying nothing. Her father breaks the silence. ‘What happened to your dancing?’ he says.

  ‘It’s kind of tied up with Mum’s funeral,’ Izzy says.

  ‘Tell me.’

  56

  Tuesday 7 December: the day of Alex’s funeral

  Gabe

  I was not allowed to attend her funeral. That is what they told me. I sat there, my senses dulled, on remand, in Wandsworth prison, and instead, I imagined it, amongst the noise and the chaos. A white coffin, as pale as her skin. Pink roses, to match the polish that would remain on her toenails, unless they removed that, in the morgue. Who knows? I thought, staring at the wall of my cell.

  A fight broke out right outside, interrupting my thoughts. One prisoner was beating another up, to repay a debt owed to somebody else. They rhythmically thumped against my door while I watched it, not thinking much. One landed a punch, caused the other a nosebleed, and blood splattered the toughened-glass window of my door.

  The guards took a while to come.

  Izzy

  Izzy pulled a pair of black tights on.

  She had not worn ballet tights for eighteen straight days during November, when her mother was lost and then found. The audition had been at the end of November, and her mother’s funeral was now during the first week of December. It took a while to bury a body that was the subject of a homicide case, an insensitive police officer told her.

  She had attended the audition, wearing pink tights that had a slight stain around the ankle. She was selfish, she thought, as she performed the first barre exercise, pliés. Her soft block shoes squeaked against the unfamiliar wooden floor. She was selfish to miss such a materialistic thing – to angst over not having perfect pirouettes. It ought to have been unimportant in the face of her mother’s death, and yet, the piano music and disappearing into her own body were as important to her as the three meals her grandparents made her eat, as the sweet tea the police had made her drink, as the sleep she took pharmaceuticals to get.

  Her teacher had once said to her that if a ballerina missed one day, they noticed. If they missed two days, their partner noticed, and if they missed three days, the whole world noticed. Izzy had often wondered how true that was but, on the way to her audition a week ago, she could feel the truth of it in her bones. The way she walked was different since her mother’s death. Her balance was off. Her back ached more. She’d lost her suppleness. But she went. She got through it. She didn’t stumble or fall over. She hoped that the years of training would act as a kind of safety net for her, raising her standard to acceptable.

  So here she was, seven days after the audition, and on the day of her mother’s funeral, wearing tights again. Black ones.

  She dried her hair with the hairdryer until it lay fluffy around her shoulders. The attic room at her grandparents’ was cold, the tartan bedspread unwelcoming and strange, like perpetually living in a B&B or as a lodger. She had tried to unpack some things into the wardrobe last night but had stopped halfway through, her balled-up socks lined up in rows that simply ended. The rest were still in the bin bags she’d hastily stuffed her clothes into, the night she’d been taken away.

  She wondered what her father was doing right now, as she often did. Was he allowed socks, hairdryers, any possessions at all? Probably not. And he doesn’t deserve them, she thought.

  Izzy performed an impromptu arabesque, once she was ready. She’d hear any day now, about the audition. And if she got in – she looked around the attic room – she’d be able to leave. She’d be living in London.

  Maybe she wouldn’t tell anybody who her mother and father had been.

  At two o’clock, at the wake, she escaped the clutches of a morbid aunt and walked to her old house, now – officially, finally – no longer a crime scene. She rifled through the post that lay scattered in the hallway, but there was nothing for her.

  A week later, her grandfather broke it to her: she didn’t get in. It would be fine, he said. She could help with the restaurant. Life wouldn’t always be this sad.

  57

  ‘The messy truth,’ she says, throwing her father a sad smile. ‘It’s fine. I guess I’d be retired now, anyway.’

  ‘So you stopped dancing then? Forever?’

  ‘Have hardly danced a day since.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She tries to gather her thoughts to explain it. ‘I guess I feel like ballet is … freedom, I suppose.’ She blushes as she says these words to her dad. The honesty of them. She is not used to it. She is used to hiding behind special offer stands in supermarkets when she is recognized. She is used to pretending everything is fine. ‘And I’ve not been free. Either.’

  ‘I understand that more than anyone,’ he says.

  She glances up, and sees his eyes are filled with tears.

  ‘It just goes on and on, doesn’t it?’ he says.

  She shakes her head, not trusting herself to speak. She knows exactly what he means: the losses. His eighteen years in jail, their lost decades. Her lack of parents. Pip, even. She wonders how her life would truly look now, if none of it had happened.

  ‘It’s done,’ she says tightly.

  Her father picks up a bundle of the money and flicks the edges of it.

  ‘Pass me the bank statements, then,’ he says, in a weird tone. Upbeat. He wants to solve it, she guesses. ‘Though I can’t remember the last time I added anything up.’

  ‘1998/1999,’ she says, handing him a stuffed lever arch file. She holds up a manila envelope with a red frank mark on the top. ‘Then there’s this, but it’s nothing. A few menus. A health and safety form … here’s the letter confirming Daniel was taken off the payroll.’

  ‘The waiter she sacked?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her father scans the letter, his finger following each word just like he did with the menu at the restaurant. ‘It’s very specific wording,’ he says. ‘Taken off the payroll. Not sacked, actually.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What’s this?’ He’s pointing now to one of the statements she’s highlighted.

  ‘She went to a casino,’ Izzy says.

  ‘Oh yeah, you said you’d found evidence of gambling … I remember now. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She would never do that. She’d say it was pointless,’ he says, running a finger over it. ‘She’d rather buy a pair of shoes.’

  ‘None of it makes any sense.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ her father says slowly. ‘Izzy. The problem wasn’t that she had too little money, eventually. Look: it was that she had too much.’

  ‘What?’ she says, baffled, shaking her head at him. It’s hot and dusty up in the loft. Claustrophobic.

  ‘It’s criminal,’ he says.

  She shivers with it. His shady past. His dalliances with the law. His knowledge of crime. He is changed, her father, whether or not he is guilty.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’m looking at a classic money laundering structure.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘She earns this, right?’ He picks up the notes. ‘And probably more. And she buries it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Okay: listen. I shared a cell in my Category B prison – the one before my release. I should have moved from a B to C and then to an open prison, but there wasn’t room.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘With a man called Gary. He
embezzled money from HSBC. And then he had to launder the money. He told me all about it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Izzy says, trying to withhold judgement.

  Her father is now a product of a system. That’s all. He would never have chosen to spend time with embezzlers and murderers. He was forced to.

  ‘Scenario one,’ he says obliviously, ‘restaurant makes £20,000. Salaries are £10,000. So profits are £10,000. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Izzy says, watching him scrawl the figures on the back of the letter. Seeing his handwriting takes her back to seeing his letter, all those weeks ago. Those looped Ls.

  ‘Scenario two: restaurant makes £5,000. You make £15,000 from some other source. You put £5,000 in as takings, and get rid of £10,000 paying wages not on the books. Profits are £10,000. Looks the same. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ Izzy says, nodding.

  ‘They’re called black salaries,’ he says. ‘Daniel wasn’t sacked. He was taken off the payroll, but still working.’

  He unclips the lever arch file and starts leafing through it. ‘Look. June to August. The takings go down two thousand a month, but the wages go down, too. See? So the profits are no higher. She probably never got the extended licence. Because she wasn’t opening longer. She was doing something else.’

  ‘I see,’ Izzy says, reaching for the bank statements. One of them has a coffee ring on it. Izzy traces it with her fingertips and wonders if it was her mother’s coffee. If maybe just one molecule of it might contain her mother. She’ll never know.

  ‘She loved coffee,’ her father says.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yeah, drank four or five a day. Nerves a-jangling.’

  ‘Same as me.’

  Izzy looks back down at the statements, thinking. So that’s why she couldn’t find the extended licence: it had never existed. Sometimes the evidence wasn’t to be found in the presence of something, but rather in the absence of it. Something slotted into place. Finally. Finally. Things were making sense.

  ‘And … and,’ her father says, flicking the paper triumphantly, ‘Iz, I can’t believe we didn’t twig this, he was still there when I found that receipt for the mixer. Daniel was still working there right before she was murdered. It was right there, in our memories.’

  ‘Really?’ Izzy says, trying to remember. Yes, yes, that’s right. Daniel had said the mixer was new. Brand spanking. She had focused on the mixer, and on her father’s anger, that text – You will pay – as the evidence, when really she should have focused on Daniel himself. He was being paid, but he hadn’t been an employee for weeks. He was contraband.

  ‘Right. Second scenario. Casinos. You make, say, £2,000 from selling something. You need to clean the money, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You take it to a casino. You put it all in. You play for ten minutes. You take it all out. It looks like casino winnings. You ask for a cheque from the casino, though you originally paid cash. It’s classic. Classic money laundering.’ He meets her eyes. ‘She was making huge money from something – from somewhere – and burying it in the restaurant.’

  ‘I … see,’ Izzy says. ‘The planetary mixer. That’s how she could afford it. She wasn’t being reckless. She was burying cash.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But …’ Izzy says, ‘how did she end up dead?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ her father says, not breaking eye contact. ‘But I know that this,’ he holds up the cash again, ‘is illicit.’

  As he flicks through it demonstrably, theatrically, something falls out and drifts to the floor. Izzy and Gabriel reach for it at the same time, and there it is: a receipt, from Timpson’s, for a key cutting. The key to Gabe’s shipping container, no doubt.

  Her mother had made a copy.

  58

  The cash.

  The money laundering.

  The spare key.

  Her mother was doing something, maybe at the shipping container.

  When Izzy had asked her father, he said he didn’t know what had happened to the container. He guessed the lease had lapsed, and knows the container isn’t there any more.

  Izzy agonizes over it for three days. She’s sure that the men who were at the restaurant on the night her mother died will provide an answer. That she was embroiled in something.

  It could get Nick into trouble if she uses the computer to look people up. That is what whirls around and around her mind, like a spinning top. It’s not his fault. It might be the police’s fault – and the computer does belong to the police – but it isn’t Nick’s fault. There must be another way, she has thought many times. But there isn’t.

  Izzy realizes, when sitting outside with Nick one evening, that she cares more about what happened to her mother, and about exonerating her father, than anything. She will risk anything to find out. Her parents are the bedrock upon which she is built. Until she knows what happened between them, who is she? Logging on to his computer is a necessary act, she thinks, taking a sip of strawberry Nesquik – Nick is drinking red wine – and appraising him in the evening sunlight.

  It isn’t right. But she can’t help it.

  No, that’s not right at all, she thinks later, in the shower, while using his mint shower gel and breathing in the peppermint steam. It’s an unnecessary act of betrayal.

  The truth is, she realizes, as she gets dressed the next morning, she is going to do it. And so she can agonize over it, or she can get on with it. Make the mistake. Implant it firmly in the past. Take it from anxiety to regret, if necessary.

  It is a further three days before Nick works from home.

  Izzy tidies the living room around him, wiping the flagstone floors, making dinner. She has listed the names in order of who she wants to look up first. She has the list in her mind and is poised, ready for her opportunity.

  Nick has a screen shield on, but leaves his work laptop unattended while he goes to boil the kettle. She only has a few minutes. She thanks God for his meticulous tea-making skills. He always leaves the bag to brew for a couple of minutes.

  She reaches over and looks at the laptop, then slides into the chair Nick’s been sitting on. It’s warm from his touch.

  It’s just a normal laptop. Windows. Outlook is running. Funny how it looks like any mundane office computer. He could be an accountant or an IT manager or an admin assistant.

  She minimizes Outlook.

  There it is, in the corner. An application – CRIS. That’s what he said, didn’t he?

  She opens it. There are five fields, and name is the top one. It looks ancient, like a computer program from the 1990s, the text blocky and strange.

  There, she types them. One by one.

  Daniel Godfrey.

  Nothing. No hits.

  Geoffrey Adams.

  Nothing.

  Marcus Scott. The blond restaurant regular.

  She presses ‘enter’.

  The program seems to stall, this time, loading something where before it had responded instantly.

  Izzy isn’t prepared for what pops up. She has been thinking about affairs. Falsifying the restaurant records, maybe. Fraud, sex, tax evasion.

  Anything but drugs.

  59

  Arrested on suspicion of possession with intent to supply. 14/07/2002. Police bail. 15/07/2002. Not charged.

  Izzy blinks. Drugs.

  Not charged. She frowns at that.

  She has Outlook back open and the laptop on the table by the time Nick comes back in with his tea. He has made her a cup of coffee.

  ‘What are you even doing?’ he says, sounding mildly amused.

  She jumps, her heart thumping, even though she’s no longer at the laptop.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re just … I don’t know. Faffing about, being weird,’ he says with an easy grin.

  Izzy ignores him. A man who’d been at the restaurant on the night her mother was murdered was involved with drugs. Her mother had almost twenty thousand pounds in cash hidden in a
safe. It couldn’t be.

  Could it?

  She takes a walk and calls her father. For once, he doesn’t have the answers. His silence is shocked.

  ‘Drugs?’ he says, eventually. And then, ‘Drugs.’

  ‘Is this … is this even possible?’ she says.

  ‘She never even smoked a cigarette. Barely drank. No. She was a bit – spontaneous, sometimes. But no. Not drugs.’

  ‘Why would she?’

  ‘It could be something and nothing,’ he says. ‘A coincidence.’ And then he adds, ‘Leave it with me. Do you remember Marcus Scott? I honestly think I never met him.’

  ‘He had such distinctive hair: white-blond.’

  ‘Will you have a think? About what else you might remember. Maybe we can work out if it’s a dead end.’

  ‘Okay,’ Izzy says. And then something occurs to her. ‘Maybe Mum ensured you never met him,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Anyway, anything I remember might just be because I’m trying to remember things.’

  ‘I know that well,’ her father says.

  Izzy has reached the public footpath into the fields that sit opposite her house and she lets herself in at the kissing gate and on to the parched, yellow long grass.

  She thinks of all the small things she can remember from back then. Contextless childhood memories.

  One ballet class from a non-specific time when the ceiling had sprung a leak; she can’t remember whether it was summer or winter, nor how old she was. All she remembers is the way the pianist slowly stopped as the drips began, his fingers stuttering on the keys as the melody became fragmented.

  Izzy remembers fingering her necklace – a St Christopher given to her by her mother that she never much liked – as she walked to her GCSE geography class. For no reason at all, she guesses, she remembers particularly that day the feel of the warm metal disc in her fingertips, the chalky smell of the maths classrooms as she walked by them.

  She remembers more easily the events leading up to her mother’s murder. They have been amplified and emphasized because of the legal system, the police and the media, as though the universe has underlined them for her. She remembers checking what time the sun would set on that day – the day her mother would die – because she had read somewhere that it got earlier by one minute per day in the autumn, and she wanted to check. She did so on the dial-up internet, before school, and it had made her late.