It’s hard to believe that here I am, writing my fourth acknowledgements section, three bestsellers under my belt, when in many ways I still feel like the bewildered drunk-on-luck woman I was the day I got my publishing deal. It is very charmed, this life I lead, and I owe that to Maxine Hitchcock, Tilda McDonald, and the whole team at Michael Joseph. So many people go into making a book successful. Sarah Kennedy, Shân Morley Jones, and the tour de force that is the Michael Joseph sales team: I’ll forever be indebted to them all.
As ever, I bothered a number of experts over email this past year. Dr Alison Malkin who very cleverly and carefully helped my diabetes and drugs plot. Imran Mahmood who is always on hand to help me with legal queries. Officer Jimmy (who would rather not be named) who met with me for an afternoon in a pub and talked me through typical days in prison while I made frantic notes. And Officer Peter Green, who let me come and give a talk at HMP Spring Hill in exchange for a tour of the open prison. That afternoon vaulted my book from a work-in-progress to a novel with a heart and soul and I will forever remember standing there in the spring sunlight with my father (of course) as I realized that this novel is really about institutionalization and the catastrophic effect of being accused of a crime. Special thanks go, too, to ex-cop Alice Vinten, who plugged away with me at my covert ops plot, trying and trying and trying to avoid the cliché of ‘the police missed this piece of evidence and got the wrong man’. I think we managed it, and it’s all down to her. Narbi Price, an artist whose guidance (and advice to go out and buy linseed and turps was right on) and descriptions gave Gabe colour and realism. To DB and to Marigold for the house buying anecdote. And to Dave Matthias for the religion help.
To my close and small circle of author friends, Holly Seddon, G. X. Todd, Claire Douglas and Lia Louis. I’d be lost without the four of you. To Sara Pietrafesa for regularly bringing me back from the brink, and to Joanna Houghton for the text anecdote (where Izzy and Nick met), and to Alice Reid who won a competition I ran on my Facebook page to have a character named after her in this novel.
I can’t begin to do justice to the help my father gives me in planning, writing and editing my novels. As my hobby has morphed into my job, he’s gone from amateur to professional with me. Our plotting sessions are more formal now: we’ve gained whiteboards and timelines but there’s still tea and laughter. Some things don’t change. He’s so good at it that my author friends wish to hire him to discuss their plots with …
And finally, as ever, I must acknowledge (though he would never expect such) the stoic man in my life: David. My books are imbued with love because you marinate me in it every day. Every interesting character I write has elements of you. You are all I know, and all I ever want to know, forever.
Prologue
Zara
London, Highbury Grammar School, August 2018
The air is warm against Zara’s legs as she strides across the football pitch. It is strange to be at school in August, like she is at the beach in the off season or in a closed shop after hours.
She is thinking about the new school term as she walks from the pitch to the surrounding fields, dry clumps of yellow-green grass littered like balled-up socks on the lawn. Specifically, Zara is thinking about stationery. She bought new pens today, a pack of three wrapped in cellophane. Blue, black, red. She’ll never use the red one – isn’t it rude to write in red? – but she likes the collection, the three together.
It’s already dusky, at eight o’clock, but the evening stretches out in front of her. She can go to bed late, get up whenever she wants tomorrow. And so tonight is going to be spent in a delicious frenzy of unpacking new stationery. Four stiff cardboard folders. Slippery A4 plastic wallets. Sticky tabs. She’ll return to school, to year ten, a new woman, she has decided. She doesn’t quite yet know who she will be. But it won’t be who she was before.
When she first hears the noise, she thinks it’s nothing. An unexplained shout on a hot summer’s evening. Her pace is slow and relaxed across the empty field, the sky a high lavender dome above her, little dried tufts of grass stuck to her trainers.
It’s only when she hears the second shout, then the third, that she stops, a fine layer of sweat on her lower back slowly evaporating as she turns, scanning the horizon for the noises like an animal looking for its predator.
Her eyes land on the bandstand. It’s been having its roof repaired over the summer. Each week, on the way home from her piano lessons, slightly more progress has been made. She squints now in the half-light. That’s where the noise is coming from. Two men. One on the stage, another halfway up the steps.
She paces forward then stops, maybe twenty feet away. Something’s happening.
Goosebumps appear on her arms as she moves back across the field to one of the greenhouses nearby, lets herself in and breathes in its familiar, hot-musk-tomato smell. She had spent so many hours in here over the spring, growing organic and non-organic lettuces for a biology experiment. She would re-pot them in her break times, moving from small pots on the windowsill to fat grow bags outside. She would lie awake, sometimes, worrying about her frilly-leaved lettuces out in the cold, which her mum had laughed at. ‘Classic you,’ she had said, a strange expression on her face.
Concealed by forgotten, spindly, grey-green plants, she looks carefully through the leaves and into the bandstand. She can see the figures clearly. Two boys, a couple of years older than her, maybe sixteen. Not men, as she had first thought.
She shifts her weight on her feet, poised to intervene. But no. She can’t bring herself to. To leave the safety of the greenhouse. She puts a hand on the windowpane, just looking.
She watches it unfold, staring so hard her eyes go dry and painful. Something horrendous is happening, but something important, too, and so Zara forces herself to keep looking, not glancing away for even a second. She counts, instead. One second. Two. Three.
It’s over in ten.
1
Lauren
London, Islington, November 2019
Lauren watches Zara walk into the kitchen. She’s wearing a white blouse and a black skirt. Her legs are long now, somehow gamine, like a deer’s or an antelope’s. She seems to have grown since witnessing the crime last summer. Taller and more womanly, but more adult in a nebulous way, too. The way she holds herself. She’s poised. Her daughter is so beautiful, just standing there in a patch of November sunlight, that Lauren feels pride bubbling right up through her like pink lemonade.
‘Feeling okay?’ she asks. Zara’s role in today’s trial has become part of their lives this past year. Piano lessons, their jobs, walking the dog, and the various meetings associated with Zara’s evidence as a witness. At each one, she has seemed to mature even further. Speaking up, giving opinions, organizing the family. ‘We’re at the solicitor’s at seven, remember,’ she said once, and Lauren thought: who are you? This brave, bold girl with principles and a superb moral compass. Her daughter, the almost-adult.
Zara shrugs and Lauren waits. This is what they do. Lauren asks, Zara shrugs, Lauren waits, then Zara speaks. She is as circumspect as her absent father, who left Lauren before Zara was even born.
‘I mean – it’s the right thing, isn’t it?’ Zara says.
‘It is absolutely the right thing,’ Lauren replies as Aidan walks into the kitchen. He is always running late, and today is no exception. His belt is undone, shirt untucked, a pair of socks in his hand.
‘But,’ Aidan adds, raising his head in a sort of backwards nod at his step-daughter, ‘you don’t have to do it. You don’t. It’s not too late to say no.’
‘No,’ Zara says on an exhale. ‘I’m ready.’
They ride in an unmarked police car, on the advice of their solicitor, Harry. ‘More anonymous,’ he had said lightly. ‘And all three of you in the back is best. Harder to distinguish you that way.’
Lauren has been impressed with his dedication since Zara gave her statement about that night to the police. Not a single slip-up. Zara’s id
entity has been protected by an injunction, by redacted documents, by law. Today, she will enter the courtroom through a back door shown to them last week, and give evidence from behind a screen, known to the jury and the public only as Girl A. And why? Because she was the only witness to a brutal murder. Her daughter, who Lauren shielded from swear words on the television and scenes of a distressing nature, witnessed a man being murdered when she was just fourteen.
Lauren is almost intimidated by this version of her daughter. So self-possessed. So sure. Lauren hasn’t been sure of anything for years.
‘Scarf on,’ Aidan says as they do a slow loop behind the Old Bailey, ready to be deposited at the back entrance. ‘Face covered.’
Zara obliges, wrapping a black scarf around her head, saying nothing, her dark eyes – so like her father’s – the only visible feature, scanning the world outside.
As Lauren looks at her, all grown up, ready to testify in court, she feels a dropping sensation in her gut, like they have just driven over a low bridge, though she knows they haven’t. She stares at the weak November sunlight darting out from behind buildings, across at Aidan’s profile, and down at her lap. Zara’s hand is still in hers. It has lost all its childhood chubbiness, around the knuckles, in the past year. Lauren explores the unpleasant sensation within her. Similar to grief. Time’s passing: she hasn’t felt it for years, not since Zara was tiny and Lauren’s days were punctuated by joy and sadness commingled; the potent ingredients of new motherhood.
It’s just because she looks grown up, she tells herself now. But really, she knows it’s more than that. Something is coming. This, her stomach is telling her, is the last time they will be here, relatively carefree, together, the sunlight on the backs of their necks. She squeezes her daughter’s hand tighter, just for a second, not wanting to frighten her, not wanting to admit it, not even to herself.
2
Aidan
London, The Old Bailey, 2019
Aidan watches as Zara is led, an animal to slaughter, into the witness box in the empty courtroom. He is not sure that this is the right thing for her to be doing, but his voice has been lost in the crowd. The Crown Prosecution Service do not have her best interests at heart – of that he is sure – no matter what they might say. To them, she is a commodity. She has knowledge, and that knowledge is going to be extracted from her, and then she will be discarded. They have placated Aidan with promises of anonymity, with assurances that she is doing the right thing, but Aidan thinks, rather, that it’s the right thing for them, but not for her.
The curtain is drawn tightly around her by an usher, secured by Velcro, which Aidan cannot resist reaching out to check. The usher glances at him, and he shrugs helplessly.
‘You’ll be in the public gallery,’ their solicitor says to them. Harry’s young. Mid-thirties. He drinks bright-green matcha lattes and he gets on with Lauren, but then everyone does. They’re both fast thinkers, fast talkers, gesticulators. Aidan feels like a Neanderthal in their meetings.
Harry runs through Zara’s account with her once again, quietly. He perches like a flamingo behind the box, one leg against the wall’s wood panelling.
Aidan and Lauren hover in the corner of the courtroom, talking quietly.
‘It should be quick,’ Lauren says. ‘I think.’ She runs a hand through her ashy-blonde hair. His wife is sometimes beautiful and sometimes plain, though he would never say so. Aidan finds her fascinating in this way. Her features are slightly irregular, somewhere around the nose and mouth. She is interesting to look at, he once said while drunk, which he regretted.
‘She’ll be okay,’ he reassures her, though he doesn’t mean it, isn’t sure. How could he be? He stares up at the windows above and wishes that they hadn’t done the right thing. That they had done the wrong thing. The easy thing. That Zara had closed her eyes and walked away. Pretended it had never happened.
Zara is almost at the end of the questioning. She has told the jury – from behind the screen – what she saw. About the two sixteen-year-old boys, youth football team players, who surprised a homeless man sleeping in the bandstand during the school holidays. She’s told the courtroom in her clear, precise way that she used to know Jamie, the victim. That she would wave to him whenever she walked by him, sometimes on the street outside school, sometimes in town, depending on when he was moved on.
She has told the courtroom, too, about the discarded roof tile the defendant, Luke, picked up, while his friend – accused only of perverting the course of justice – watched on. She tells them about how Jamie lay helplessly, covering his head, asking him to stop, until he was silent. Aidan dreams about what she saw. A bloodied man, a murderer standing in the twilight. He wakes itchy with sweat. Zara doesn’t know how much this thing will affect her, later. Her teenage brain hasn’t caught up yet. He wishes he could take this thing she’s seen from her, and the nightmares that will surely follow, and subsume them into himself instead.
‘One final question,’ the defence barrister says. He has a pink mark on his nose from pushing his glasses up with his knuckle, which he does every few minutes. ‘Can you talk me through the movements of the defendant, his co-accused and the victim?’
‘The movements?’ Zara’s disembodied voice asks from behind the curtain.
‘The victim died on the steps at the front of the bandstand, you say. Yet by your own account, the defendants surprised him while he was sleeping in the far corner.’
‘Jamie was backing away from Luke,’ Zara says.
‘I see,’ the barrister says, leaving a drawn-out pause. Aidan looks across the public gallery at Luke’s parents. He feels a morbid fascination with them. They are parents whose child has done something unthinkable. Parents desperate to believe it isn’t true: not their kid. Aidan knows that feeling well, or, at least, a watered-down version of it. One Christmas, his daughter from his first marriage, Poppy, called him an unimaginative twat because she didn’t get the £500 pair of trainers she wanted. He ate his Christmas dinner alone, heart in his feet, thinking: I messed it up. She was supposed to grow up to be nice: humble. That’s what children don’t realize. They don’t realize they are avatars of their parents. Like Aidan has taken his heart out of his chest and has to watch it walk around outside his body. And the heart doesn’t even know. The heart wants Gucci trainers.
‘So – Girl A,’ the barrister says. ‘Why would Jamie have come towards the front, when there were steps all around the perimeter of the stand? Why wouldn’t he have run away from the defendants, rather than towards them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But he did?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Was he facing you, or was he facing the other side when they approached him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he stand up at any time?’
‘No.’
‘And yet you say he ran away.’
‘No. He did – he did run away.’
‘Right. And so – here’s what I think happened. The boys disturbed Jamie, who then retaliated. That’s what went on, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘He stood up, confronted them, and, in self-defence, the defendant reached for the roof tile. Isn’t that correct?’
‘He did stand up but …’
‘Do you know Jamie has a history of violent behaviour and that Luke does not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He did confront them, didn’t he?’
‘Not really,’ Zara says, her voice a whisper behind the black curtains.
Lauren turns to Aidan. She’s frowning at him, his wife who is at the moment in her beautiful guise. She doesn’t look away, not even as the barrister labours the point, and then – like a gun going off – he realizes what her stare means. Zara has lied, her eyes are saying. Zara is lying.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2019
Copyright © Gillian McAllister, 2019
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Cover photos © Arcangel Images
ISBN: 978-1-405-93466-4
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The Evidence Against You Page 35