The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘The heroin is delivered to Marcus. He brings it to the restaurant every Sunday night, late, when nobody’s there. You cut it. How right am I?’

  Alex swallowed. He watched her thin neck tremble, the pulse flutter. ‘Very. But it’s not … I never intended –’

  ‘You keep the heroin in the safe, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the money.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then you cut it, bit by bit, and Marcus filters it down to his dealers. But now … you’re getting greedy, aren’t you? Cutting it with cheaper stuff? Diluting it with kitchen ingredients. Flour.’

  ‘Right,’ she whispered.

  ‘Trying to turn more of a profit, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Look, I … I got in deep. And now I can’t get out.’

  ‘Only, the flour can cause a pulmonary embolism, did you know that?’ he said, talking over her. He’d been waiting to say this to her for weeks and weeks.

  ‘No,’ she said, her eyes widening.

  ‘Say, a diabetic injects the first go of heroin. Just a kid, wanting to experiment. We never found out what possessed him. It causes a pulmonary embolism. It renders them unconscious. They have an insulin pump and it continues – automatically – to pump out insulin, bringing the blood sugar down, low, too low, until he ends up in a diabetic coma. And dies. Your son.’

  ‘Oliver. The diabetic.’

  ‘Yes. Ollie,’ he said. His son’s lovely name – he looks gentle, like an Ollie, his wife had said after giving birth to him – sounds wrong uttered to this woman. His indirect killer. Steve would ensure they all paid for it, soon; once he had enough evidence. The head guy, Marcus. Each dealer. But first, Alex: a mother herself, and connected to his son via Pip and Izzy. How could she?

  ‘And then, what’s this now – you’re getting greedier? You’re dealing yourself?’

  ‘No, I … Marcus texted just now, as I was in a taxi home, to ask me to use the shipping container to do just one drop-off. Just one. I’ve only ever done one.’

  ‘Why?’

  She waved an old phone around. ‘The punter wanted this location. It’s right by my house. I got the text as I was leaving the taxi, so I walked here. I told Marcus I’d do it …’

  ‘Well, guess who the punter is?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me,’ Steve said with a harsh laugh that echoed in the night. ‘Why would you do this? Our children love each other.’

  ‘I … I’m in so much debt. You have no idea.’ Her face had paled. She started talking faster, panicking.

  ‘I think you’d better tell me how it began,’ he said, standing in the doorway of the shipping container.

  All around them were paintings of her. Twenty other Alexes were looking at him, too. Over their shoulders. Alexes in the bath. An Alex drinking a glass of something sparkling. It was unnerving. The real Alex was frozen, standing inside the shipping container, Steve outside.

  She was still clutching the key, appraising him, like a wild animal about to bolt. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘From the start. I only want to understand. Did you see Ollie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know why he was buying drugs?’

  ‘No. Are you going to go to the police?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know yet.’

  Alex took a deep breath. She paced backwards a couple of steps, stumbling over Gabriel’s bag. She was assessing, Steve thought, how much trouble she was in. She thought she was going to prison. And maybe she was. Maybe she ought to. He really hadn’t decided yet. Hadn’t been able to see past this point.

  ‘I was cleaning up the restaurant one night, and I found a bag of white powder,’ she said. ‘I was so scared. I was shitting myself really. I had a daughter, a reputable business. But there was a lot of it – two, three hundred grams, I’d say now – underneath the table in one of the booths. I couldn’t get rid of it. I’d owe the dealer. They could come back, looking for me. So I put it in the safe in the basement.

  ‘Then Marcus came in the next day, enquired about having lost his glasses. He gave me a meaningful look, so I asked if they were expensive. He said very, so I took the risk and got it for him. He gave me forty quid, just what he had on him, for my trouble. For staying quiet. I paid some interest on one of the credit cards with it.

  ‘The next day, he came back, late. He ordered a lasagne and asked me where I’d stored his glasses until he picked them up. I couldn’t … I couldn’t argue with him, or lie. He was a criminal. So I told him: the safe. He laughed then – a weird, quiet kind of laugh – and said he had never thought before how perfect a restaurant would be for moving drugs. I had a working safe. We had to do a big clean-up every night. And we had ingredients here that we could order in bulk, without suspicion.

  ‘He said he could come once a week, drop off the heroin, and all I had to do was keep it. For now. He wouldn’t deal from here – too many known dealers in one place would alert the police. But we’d use it as a base.

  ‘I got in so deep. I never meant to,’ she said, her voice wobbling. ‘He said I could earn more if I started cutting it with him. And we agreed I might do the odd drop-off in the future. It wasn’t a request. It was an order.’

  ‘Oh, Alex,’ Steve said. ‘What a fucking fool.’

  ‘He was asking and asking how to make more money, so we started cutting corners. Lacing it with flour. Nothing harmful. So we thought.’

  So we thought. Steve was watching her closely. Her eyes were on him, the keys clutched tightly in her fist.

  ‘We’ve put less flour in it this time, but I … I said to Marcus we need to make it pure or I’m out, but he said he’d shop me, so I …’

  ‘Why …?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She started crying. Lips quivering, nose reddening. ‘You have no idea how deep I’ve got, just from a fucking bag left in my restaurant. Just a single … one single bad decision. But what could I have done? Destroyed it – and got myself killed? I had no choice. I had a family to support. A daughter who needed me.’

  ‘You always have choices.’

  ‘But then, when Oliver died, I … I had no idea flour would do that –’

  Her words seemed to ring out in the sea air around them.

  ‘You knew?’ he said. His mouth had filled with saliva. She knew.

  Anger began to bubble in his veins. He wondered if Ollie felt like this, the day he died. Like his veins were on fire. His little boy. His little boy whose first steps had been so assured, like he had just decided to master walking on those short, fat caramel-brown legs, no nonsense, no stumbling needed. He wondered if he knew he was dying; that, the longer he stayed unconscious, his insulin pump was slowly killing him. If he knew he wouldn’t get to university, that he wouldn’t get married, that he’d never remove muddy boots again and take a shower or bite into some pink candy floss or dance drunkenly to ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. If he knew his parents’ hearts were breaking.

  ‘We …’ Alex said, wringing her hands. ‘We always hear … if there’s been a death of one of our customers. We always hear. Someone leaks it, somewhere along the chain. I knew from Izzy that Oliver had died. But we found out along the chain that it had been the heroin.’

  ‘And yet you … you just kept on selling the heroin?’

  ‘I … I … I …’

  It was too much for him. Her prattling. Her nervous talk. Her excuses. That she was still dealing. It was too much.

  He reached for the first thing to hand: the cord from the art bag. She tried to make a phone call as he reached for her, but he disconnected it.

  Afterwards, his hands shaking, shocked at himself, he tried to clear his mind. Damage control. He took her phones, one black and one silver – a burner phone, he guessed – reasoning there was no way he could leave a trace of himself. He took the drugs, too, which he flushed down the toilet.

  He buried her in the woods. He wasn’t in great shape, and he had to
drag her, half-in, half-out of the bag.

  As he dug a shallow kind of grave, he saw the initials inside the bag. That was right: her husband. GDE embroidered on it in gold.

  It was a sign: the perfect way to cover it up.

  68

  Izzy looks across at her father. His face is wet with tears.

  It wasn’t him. The truth hits her right in the stomach. The doubt. The reasonable doubt. Eradicated.

  Izzy can’t observe the scale of it. It’s as though she’s arrived at the edge of the world, and she’s peering over into blackness. Infinite blackness. Steve murdered her mother. Then let her father serve time for it. Framed her father, really. Here he is. The man who robbed her of a mother. The man who couldn’t control his temper. The man towards whom all of her malicious, angry, guilty, sad, remorseful thoughts should have been directed over the years.

  ‘I couldn’t believe myself,’ Steve says. ‘I couldn’t believe that I had killed somebody. I was living in one world and then … quite another,’ he says, rubbing at his forehead. ‘I’ve never even had a temper. It was so shocking to me. Like an episode, or something. Like a breakdown.

  ‘I went home and tried to pretend. But after three days, I hadn’t eaten or slept … my wife begged me to tell her the problem, so I did. By then, Alex had been found. We decided to tell Pip. Otherwise he would’ve carried on seeing Izzy. We had to keep it secret forever, between us. She agreed to give me an alibi if it came to that. But it never did.’

  Izzy closes her eyes. That’s why. Pip. Three days after her mother’s death. He had no choice. It was a family secret. Just as her family’s secrets were cracked open in the courtroom, Pip was forced to keep his hidden, against his will. But how could he do that to her? Would she have done it to him? She really doesn’t think she would have. She thinks of the way his eyes met hers when he was leaving the petrol station, and the betrayal seems to rise up through her.

  He let her believe he didn’t want to be with her any more, despite how much they loved each other. Despite all of their promises.

  He let her believe her father murdered her mother.

  But how could he have done anything different? He couldn’t tell her: she would’ve told the police. And then his father would have gone to prison. And wouldn’t Izzy protect Gabe in just the same way?

  Izzy looks at Steve, her eyes glazed over in shock. How can he feel sorry for himself, when he has taken everything from her? He was robbed of his child, so he took her parent. It is a cruel kind of vigilante justice he has imparted, for no logical reason.

  ‘Why her?’ Gabe says.

  Outside, the rain begins. It’s so sudden and so strong that it sounds like hail on the roof. Izzy looks out into Steve’s tiny garden. Rain begins bouncing off the crooked paving slabs.

  ‘I was just going to talk to her,’ he says. ‘Confront her. And then I was going to get proof and shop the others – maybe her, too, I don’t know. But then: she knew. She knew about Ollie and was still dealing the same stuff. God, I just lost it. And then I had to hide – obviously. I’d killed somebody. I went totally dark on the whole thing. Until the police knocked on my door a couple of years later and asked me if I knew anybody who had dealt Ollie heroin. I had to give a statement. Otherwise they might’ve suspected.’

  ‘So you lied again. Said you’d never been to the restaurant.’

  Steve blinks, looking surprised at how much they know. ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Did Pip ever … want to tell me?’ Izzy says tentatively.

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes,’ he says earnestly. ‘I’ve lived in fear of it for twenty years. I’ve lost everything over it. My wife left. Pip is often withdrawn now. Will only see me on his terms. They kept my secret for me – but at the cost of everything.’ His shoulders shake, as though his body is still crying when his eyes have stopped, and looks at Gabe. ‘What’re you going to do?’ he says.

  Her father says nothing, fiddling with the cuff of his coat. He doesn’t seem angry like she thought he’d be. He seems listless, melancholy.

  Izzy is studying Steve. So her mother wasn’t killed by somebody involved with drugs. Or a man with whom she’d had an affair. But instead … by somebody who, like herself, was grieving. And grief isn’t logical. Izzy started to run a restaurant that she hated, gave up ballet. She did things which didn’t make any sense, too. They were just self-destructive: internal not external.

  ‘I guess you’ll tell the police,’ Steve says.

  Izzy swallows. The police. Nick. He has betrayed her. He’d solved most of the case, he was only missing one piece: the knowledge that Steve had lied, but even without that he suspected her father’s innocence. But can Izzy betray him? If they tell the police the truth – unless Steve confesses everything – Nick will lose his job, or worse.

  Steve pushes his fists into his eye sockets and sucks in a ragged breath. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I wanted him back. I thought it’d bring him back. If I punished her. But instead, I just took her from you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gabe says.

  Steve wipes his eyes and looks at Gabe. ‘If I could go back … I’d never do it. I’d stop myself. I wish I could go back.’

  69

  ‘We could tell the police,’ Izzy says simply to her father when they leave.

  They haven’t said much more to Steve. What can they say? They’ve left it open-ended, messy. The only way they know how.

  ‘Why would we?’ he says, standing outside, his jacket clutched to him. He puts it on immediately and pulls the hood up, pulling the drawstrings tight so that only his face is visible.

  ‘To make him pay,’ she says over the noise of the rain. The road is a river, already, moving and shivering like a snake.

  Her father’s eyes flicker. Contempt, she thinks.

  ‘Since when does making people pay help anyone?’ he says, looking at her levelly.

  All along, she thought he held a grudge, had a vendetta against her, but he doesn’t. Not at all. Not even after everything he’s been through.

  They start walking to Izzy’s car. He’s fiddling with his phone, holding it up, and she wishes he would stop.

  ‘But he … all the damage he’s done –’

  ‘Is done. Besides, what’re we going to say – that we hacked into the police computer? Get your husband sacked?’

  Izzy doesn’t say anything to that. They reach her car and get inside. The steering wheel is hot to the touch; it was only a few minutes ago that it was sunny. The windows steam up as they sit there, rainwater evaporating off them.

  ‘Then what was it all for?’ she says to her father. ‘We did it – we actually did it. We found out who and … Will you stop texting?’

  Her father puts his phone in his pocket immediately. ‘It was for you,’ he says.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘So you knew.’

  ‘That you were innocent,’ she says.

  Her father looks thoughtfully across at her. ‘That your father didn’t murder your mother,’ he says. ‘I wanted to lift the burden of that story off you. Make it untrue. That’s all I wanted.’

  ‘I see,’ Izzy says quietly, thinking.

  ‘Anyway – look. Can we go to Alexandra’s?’

  ‘Okay,’ Izzy says. ‘Why?’

  ‘You know, it wasn’t me. But it kind of was, too,’ he says, not answering her question, as she pulls away from the kerb.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Why was she dealing?’

  ‘Because of money,’ Izzy says.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But it was her debt.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, the debts were her fault, maybe, but the context is … our marriage. I could’ve worked harder. Supported her better. Definitely. Then she wouldn’t have had to resort to all that.’

  ‘She loved us enough to risk everything to get us out of it,’ Izzy says firmly.

  That is what she has chosen to believe: it is medicinal optimism. Just like the cups of coffee during the bad times, so too is th
is belief. Her mother wasn’t reckless with their lives. She was selfless. Misguided, maybe.

  ‘Did you ever think we’d do it?’ she says.

  Here he is, her father. No molecule of guilt remains. The stain’s been lifted. He never did it. Never would. Izzy can’t even begin to think about the time lost. The suffering inflicted upon him during the miscarriage of justice. No, she thinks pragmatically – the way she always has. They will move forward, past this. To dwell on it would only let it take more. She concentrates instead on what’s been left behind: love.

  ‘I knew you would,’ he says. ‘It’s all down to you. And finding that safe.’

  Izzy swallows. She won’t tell him about Tony. What good would it do for him to know the woman he loved cheated on him? That his brother sold him up the river, willing to hide evidence so his own affair wouldn’t be exposed? No. She’ll let him think that his relationship, her mother’s love for him, was pure.

  He’s already lost too much.

  ‘Look, Izzy,’ he says, breaking her thoughts, ‘I want to tell you something, but I want to do it at Alexandra’s. Where I first saw you again.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, looking sideways at him.

  But his tense tone matches his facial expression, his fidgeting. She stops at a set of traffic lights and looks at his eyes. They’re apologetic. He is somebody about to give bad news. What is it? That he knew, already, what had happened on the night Alex disappeared?

  They pull up outside the restaurant. It’s mid-morning, not yet open for the lunchtime rush. It’s as quiet as it was at midnight when he arrived to share more memories with her.

  Her father gets out of the car and crosses to the front of the restaurant. Izzy opens it and they go inside, out of the rain, sitting opposite each other. The Alexandra’s sign that he painted twenty years ago squeaks as it swings in the gusts coming in off the sea. Izzy looks out: it’s wild. Waves breaking on top of each other, several feet high, sea spray being flung at the windows.

  ‘Imagine,’ Izzy says, turning away from the window and sitting down on a bar stool. ‘Imagine if we’d just figured it out then. If I’d heard you out. If the police had done their job in 1999.’