The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Don’t, Iz.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t think of it,’ he says, looking across at her. ‘It breaks my fucking heart. You have to stop running this place,’ he says to her. ‘It’s not your thing. It was your mother’s thing.’

  ‘It’s fine – it’s just a job.’

  ‘You never talk about it,’ he says, shifting his weight next to her. ‘You don’t love it.’

  ‘No,’ she says. He’s right about it. But what else can she do?

  He runs a hand through his hair. ‘Okay,’ he says. He breathes in and then out. She sees his chest rise. ‘Okay,’ he says again. ‘Anyway.’

  ‘Okay …’

  ‘When you told me about the police file on the phone … I did something,’ he says softly, sadly, to her.

  He reaches for her hand. ‘We’ve figured this out, Izzy, and now you are unburdened.’

  She likes nothing about the tone of this conversation. It seems utterly wrong, somehow. He looks wretched, telling her, in what should be a happy moment, sitting out of the rain inside her mother’s restaurant.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I wrecked my bedroom.’

  ‘You wrecked it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s ruined. I swung the bean cans into the wall, cracked the plaster. Snapped the table in two.’

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ she says, the word leaving her mouth before she has time to consider it.

  He looks at her, just briefly, his face stretching into a sad smile. He squeezes her hand. It is the first time he has heard her use the word in twenty years.

  ‘You were upset,’ she says. ‘Understandably.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t upset. I knew it wasn’t me. I’ve always known it must have been someone else. And so I wasn’t upset.’

  Izzy pauses, dumbfounded. ‘Well, then … why?’

  ‘I’ve just been texting my probation officer to tell her what I’ve done. And where I’ll be: here.’

  ‘What? Why …?’

  ‘Because, Iz, I want to go back.’

  ‘Where?’ she says, looking at him frantically, her eyes desperately scanning his features.

  ‘Home,’ he says simply.

  70

  She shakes her head, not understanding. And then, all of a sudden, she does. She understands exactly what he means with a sick certainty.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not now. You can’t leave me now.’

  ‘They’re coming for me.’ He doesn’t break eye contact as he rubs his hand over his face. Eventually, he looks down at his feet, then back up again at her. ‘They’re going to recall me, Iz. It’s criminal damage. I ensured it met the threshold for criminal damage. My landlord found it. I confessed. They’re on their way.’

  ‘You could get out of it. I’ve got money. We could get you a great lawyer …’ Her voice trails off as she recalls Nick’s advice to her: there are no trials for breached licence conditions. They just get recalled – for life.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ she says. ‘I can say it wasn’t you. That you were with me. We can fix it.’ Her voice is high and panicked. Please not now. Please don’t take him away now, not now he is – finally – innocent. She takes his rough, leathery hand in hers and brings it to her face, and her tears wet his skin.

  ‘It’s not about that,’ he says. ‘No, please don’t cry, my love.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know what it’s about. You know why.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Nobody will hire me, Iz. My reputation is shot. I can’t work a computer. I can’t figure out how to scan my shopping in Tesco. I don’t know how to cook a meal or register with a GP or … I don’t know how to have a life. I’m supposed to remember to cook three times a day and shop once a week and sign on at the Jobcentre and fill in my benefit forms and collect the mail every day and remember to take my mobile phone everywhere and lock the front door and clean the bathroom and … Iz, I just can’t do it any more.’

  ‘Is it the stuff that’s passed you by? The new technology? New cars?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s the … it’s the infrastructure of a life. I don’t know how to do it. To have one. I don’t enjoy anything. I don’t eat. I don’t paint. Life is still in grey, for me, baby girl.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve been inside for a third of my life. The most vital third. My prime.’

  ‘No. It just takes time. To adjust. Move in with me,’ she says spontaneously. ‘I’ll help you.’

  ‘Iz,’ he says, looking straight at her. ‘They’re going to recall me to prison for the rest of my life sentence.’

  ‘No,’ she says, the tears coming fast now.

  ‘You’ll visit me, won’t you?’

  ‘You can’t go back,’ she says through sobs. She can hear a siren in the distance, outside. ‘You’re innocent. You were always innocent.’

  He swallows as she says it. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I was. But … it happens. It’s happened. It’s over for me, Iz. Remember when you heard me on the phone? When I hadn’t hung up?’

  Eight weeks. Eight weeks. That’s what her father had been saying, to himself, in private. Nothing to do with the Jobcentre at all. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was saying that because that’s how long I was going to give it. If we hadn’t figured it out after eight weeks, I’d let myself go back. It was my own time limit. To stay sane.’

  ‘But you could stay out. Start over.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘When something like that happens, you … you can’t be accused and convicted of a violent crime without your life … It has ruined my life,’ he settles on, eventually. ‘It’s beyond repair. I’ll hang myself if I stay out. I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t. I won’t.’

  ‘Please,’ she says, her voice hoarse and strangled from crying. He is going to leave her for a second time, an hour after she found out he is innocent, and she can hardly stand it.

  ‘Do you know how many lies I told you, trying to protest my innocence? How twisted is that?’

  ‘I know,’ Izzy says quietly, thinking of the glass her father likely threw, of the wardrobe he bought and pretended her mother had, of the decorating he said he’d done but really it was Tony. All things said – invented – out of desperation to seem better than he was. Being accused, and convicted, had made him defensive. ‘They made you look more guilty,’ she says simply.

  ‘And that’s what it’s like to be accused,’ her father says. ‘Every no comment interview you give. Every defence. Every excuse. If there are things in your past you’re ashamed of, you try to hide them. To obscure the truth.’

  ‘But it’s over now,’ Izzy says. ‘You’re innocent.’

  ‘But I’m not perfect,’ he says.

  Izzy thinks about his previous conviction. His lies. His temper. No, he’s not perfect. But he is innocent. They are not the same thing, after all. And Izzy isn’t perfect, either. She can lose her temper, and scream and shout, but she won’t ever be a killer. She is good enough. They both are.

  ‘Jesus had to hand himself over,’ he says.

  ‘Not the religious stuff.’

  ‘But it’s true. And it helps me. That little prison chaplaincy that I went to every Sunday. It … it gave me hope.’

  ‘Of release?’

  ‘No – of acceptance. Some people don’t get the life they think they’re going to get. I’ve been out for near enough eight weeks, to the day, and we solved it. We solved it. The second I knew you’d seen enough on the computer to solve it, I did it. And now you,’ he says, holding her hand between his cool palms, ‘you can get on with your life. Knowing your father didn’t kill your mother. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I ever wanted. Your burden was heavy, and I halved it. You lost your mother but not your father. Not me.’

  ‘I have lost you, though. I am losing you.’

  He says nothing, wiping his tears away with his rough Dad thumbs, wiping and wiping even though more fall. The sirens get louder and Izzy’s bo
dy begins to shake.

  By the time the police arrive, he has a blotted mark across the shoulder of his Matalan coat, from her tears.

  She rushes outside with him to see him being driven away in the police car, his face framed in the window, looking at her, just as he had done all those weeks ago when he first came to find her.

  Izzy’s marriage ends with four words.

  Nick tells her that he traced the text and Tony was behind the threats all along. Izzy nods. Of course. Of course he was. Trying to save his own skin. That’s how the person had her number, her address, knew intimate details of her life. Tony arrived at the restaurant five minutes after Gabe left: he knew she was seeing him, and that’s why he sent that text. He was worried she’d find the phone.

  Nick stands with his hands on his hips, looking at her, not telling her the rest of it.

  In the end, she asks him. ‘And the drugs? The covert operation?’

  Nick’s eyebrows rise in shock.

  ‘I looked at your laptop,’ she says.

  He takes a step back from her, and she can tell. She can tell he’s going to do it. He’s going to turn it back around on her.

  ‘At my work laptop?’ he says snidely.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she says, unable to stop a sob escaping with the words.

  Her husband. He could have given that gift to her – the gift of an exonerated father – but he chose not to.

  Nick begins fiddling with the teapot on the work surface. He pulls at the china lid, which rattles in the hole. He turns it around and around, the chinking noise the only sound in the kitchen. ‘Look. You know now,’ he says.

  ‘That’s not the point. You didn’t tell me, Nick. I … I really don’t think I can forgive this.’

  Nick, his status quo challenged, finally panics. ‘When I started to look into it, I found other evidence … evidence that didn’t support the prosecution. But I was so worried. I thought he’d charm you. I was still so sure he did it. And I was jealous, too, I guess. He meant more to you than I did. So I hid it. But more and more came out, and by then it was too late to backtrack.’ His voice is wobbly. He finally leaves the teapot alone.

  ‘How could you do that?’

  And then he says the four words that end it.

  ‘It was easier to,’ he says sheepishly, shamefully. ‘I might’ve lost my job,’ he adds.

  Izzy sees Nick for the real person that he is, finally. A coward. Somebody content to deceive his wife rather than have a difficult conversation. Somebody who was willing to eschew fatherhood rather than ask his wife what her issues were with motherhood: to work through them.

  He avoids her gaze while she stares at him.

  Epilogue

  4 May: one year later

  ‘We’ll finish it, then come and curtsey,’ Izzy says. She looks at the clock. Five to seven. She’s teaching the Advanced 1 RAD ballet class on a Saturday night. As she often does, these days, she looks at the clock and wonders what she might’ve been doing a year ago. Starters, probably. Slicing cucumbers. Half-heartedly making soufflés she would never choose to eat herself. Tonight, although she is looking forward to getting home and eating Angel Delight straight from the jug, she is happy here, too. Before, life began when she left work for the day. Now, it’s the other way around.

  She checks her phone during the curtsey. Nothing from anybody.

  She has lost her father and her husband, and yet – here, in the ballet studio – she is happy. She doesn’t check up on the Californian family on Instagram any more. She doesn’t need to. They – parents – are no more empowered than she is. All adults are winging it. Parents or not. Nobody is in charge: nobody knows what they’re doing.

  And here she is, teaching ballet. The night her father was recalled to prison, she stayed at the restaurant, looking at the stools they sat on in the small hours, took off her shoes, and began to dance. She performed arabesques and pirouettes unselfconsciously in her own restaurant, her feet sticking slightly to the floor in the heat. She enjoyed the expanse of the room. That she could do a grand jeté without hitting anything. She was finally free and able to express herself – happiness, sadness – in dance.

  She didn’t have the part in the middle – the ballerina career – but, she thinks, looking down at her feet in their ballet shoes, that would’ve ended by now anyway. Like her father, she has simply intermitted. Eighteen years, misguided, in the wrong direction, but she’s back on track now.

  ‘Thank you, Miss English,’ the students chorus.

  And here they are, the new generation of islanders. None of them knows who she is. Who her mother was. Where her father is. Some of the parents know, but Izzy finds she cares less, these days: she knows the truth.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says to them. ‘You all did so well.’

  She’s going to the pub quiz tonight with Chris, just as soon as this class is over. They’ve switched to a Saturday quiz. She’d tried to show him the bank statements, in the autumn, after Gabe was recalled, but there wasn’t enough evidence. It was all on Nick’s computer, and born out of the memories she and Gabe shared over the spring. There was nothing tangible. She won’t ask Steve to confess. Chris rebutted it all, like a conspiracy theorist with an answer for everything. She hardly sees Tony now, either. Izzy avoids him, and she suspects he knows why. She does the quiz and they talk about other things. It isn’t perfect, but it is something. It’s family.

  Chris runs the restaurant now. She said goodbye to it, running her hands over the tables and nodding to her mother’s sign as she left for the last time, but the truth is that she’s back often. For visits, for meals.

  A father of one of the little students walks in. Izzy stills. God, he looks just like Pip. He isn’t Pip, but the resemblance is there. The floppy hair. The languid smile, sort of sarcastic, even though he hasn’t spoken. She checks: no wedding ring. She looks at him – brown eyes, not blue – and casts about inside herself. Yes. This is what she wants. Not cowardly, smart, complicated Nick who – when it came to it – didn’t love her enough. Not somebody who was perhaps a choice born out of the psychology of murder, of thinking her father was no good, a waster. A coward, too, in his own way.

  Someone new. Someone with whom she could be her whole self. Izzy the ballet dancer. Izzy the woman who likes fish finger sandwiches and who once solved a crime. The Izzy who can lose her temper with abandon and never worry about it. No longer the Izzy who needs parenting, who chooses a safe man because she needs anchoring. She smiles shyly up at him.

  She could find him: someone she could love with all of herself. As much as her father had loved her mother.

  She calls in to see her grandmother on the way home. She has deteriorated over the past year. She often doesn’t recognize anybody. Today, though, her eyes look clear and bright. She turns to face Izzy the second she walks in through the door.

  ‘Alex,’ she says, ‘you look lovely.’

  Izzy’s eyes fill with tears, but she nods, saying nothing. Letting her grandmother believe it, that Alex is alive and well. That she never died. That she is here, with her: with her mother.

  Later, at home, still thinking of the man she just met, Izzy lets herself into her house.

  ‘Hi there,’ Thea calls from her driveway.

  But Izzy only waves. She doesn’t need her any more. The validation she sought from Thea and women like Thea wasn’t because she was missing a parent: she was missing herself. She validates herself now, embracing her flaws. She likes to eat crap food, and doesn’t wish to run a restaurant: and so what? It’s her life.

  ‘Are they treating you well?’ she says to her father the following Monday. Visiting hours are two until four, and she hasn’t missed one yet.

  ‘It’s home,’ he says softly.

  His body language has changed. He is no longer stooped. No longer skinny. He’s pasty, but healthy looking. There is fat in the places there ought to be – in his cheeks, no bones prominent – and on his arms, which look strong again.
He is fed and warm and clothed, and he is happy.

  It’s nothing like the first time she visited him, when she had just turned eighteen. No shouting, no anger, no depression, from him. He belongs here, now. He had to change, to survive it, to adapt, but then he couldn’t change back.

  At first, she used to pretend it was a nursing home and that she was visiting an elderly parent, as so many children had done before her. But now she thinks nothing of it. He lives here: it is his home.

  ‘I’ve been teaching a little art class,’ he says.

  She blinks, trying not to let him see how she truly feels. In prison, he is diminished – speaking joyfully of being able to get Sky Sports in the east wing while the west wing of the prison lie about, bored – and of laundry duties and lifting weights in the yard. He doesn’t enjoy the summer weather or the seasons or Christmas or Easter. But it doesn’t matter, to him. Here, he is able to teach an art class. He didn’t pick up a paintbrush on the outside.

  Here, now, however unfair it is, he is at home. At rest. And she is here, to visit him. Because they love each other. No matter what.

  ‘Fancy a game of pontoon?’ he says.

  She deals. They play for an hour, father and daughter. In companionable, familial silence.

  This is family.

  In all its fractured forms.

  Six months later

  1 January

  Sorry for the late response. I was indeed your father’s neighbour. I had no idea about the trial. I do remember seeing him: we chatted for about half an hour and I remember he didn’t leave his house all evening.

  If I can help at all, please do let me know.

  David S.

  Acknowledgements

  I dedicated this novel to my agent, Clare Wallace, but really every novel should be. No author could manage much of anything without their agent, but only she knows why this novel specifically warranted a dedication. To the fantastic rights team at Darley Anderson too, who continue to sprinkle my inbox with translation joy, and to Camilla Bolton who read and gave notes which assisted me so much.