The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  But then she was taken, before Izzy was fully formed.

  On 31 October 1999, the night she died, was she cashing up, unknowingly for the last time? Izzy doesn’t know what her mother’s final movements were – nobody really does. All they know is that she went missing. Disappeared. Until she was found, of course, but by then it was far too late.

  Izzy kept the restaurant name, Alexandra’s, after a lot of thought. She would be recognized anyway, even if she changed it. It’s because of the way she looks.

  In the end, she kept it because of the sign. It had passed to her, under the terms of her mother’s will. Her father, Gabriel, had painted it himself. Teal on light wood, the letters as sweeping and graceful as dancers. She remembers that the sign was laid flat on their driveway all summer when he was painting it, brought in hastily when rain started to fall. ‘The sign! The sign before the washing!’ he would shout. The smell of the wet grass, her feet damp, squeaking in flip-flops – it had been an exceptionally rainy summer – and the way he was always out, on the driveway, on his painting stool, by the time she got up. ‘It’s cooler in the mornings,’ he had said to her with a smile. ‘You should try it.’ Her mother’s cooking had become more elaborate as the wet, dreary summer went on. Her mother had been bored, Izzy guesses. Fresh blackberries baked in pies. Home-made pasta. All served up to Gabriel. Those were the ways they had loved each other. Through art and through food.

  Izzy liked to observe it.

  Before.

  It wasn’t unusual for somebody to arrive and say, ‘Alexandra’s: is this the one? The one where the owner was murdered?’ Izzy would feel her jaw tense, and say, ‘That one, yes,’ wondering privately how her cartwheeling, fun-loving mother who wore the gingham tea towel and had belonged only to Izzy and Gabriel had become something so gruesome and public. They are voyeurs, but she would be the same, if it hadn’t happened to her, she guesses. It’s hard to know what it would be like to grow up without a macabre past.

  It’s silent now in the restaurant. One of the glasses is still swinging on the rack where she has just hung it, and its reflection catches the overhead lamp, scattering chinks of light over the bar as it moves.

  As she lifts her head to look for her handbag, a peculiar feeling settles over her. A not-alone feeling. She listens intently to the silence, wondering at the small knot forming in her stomach, at the sensation of a gaze on her skin.

  She looks at the windows. They’re curtain-less, bare. From the outside, everybody can see everything she is doing, lit up, inside, alone; a moving doll in a doll’s house. She’s never thought of that before. Goosebumps break out over her shoulders and neck.

  She stares at a movement in the window. A tree, a dog walker, a waiting taxi with its indicator blinking, her brain suggests. But Izzy knows exactly who it is.

  There he is, his face pressed to one of the small Georgian windows. She would recognize him anywhere, even after eighteen years. The swarthy skin, sallow-looking unless he was on holiday. The heavy-lidded dark eyes.

  She feels fear bloom across her chest. Her body tenses. It is 3rd May, the exact date she was informed he was to be released, and here he is, like clockwork. Of course he is. She didn’t change the name of the restaurant: it is obvious it is Izzy managing it. It would have been simple for him to find her, laughably so. She has always known it might happen, theoretically. But it was easy to take a risk when he was still imprisoned. And it was so very easy to do nothing upon his release.

  The door is unlocked. Adrenaline fizzes in her arms and legs as she realizes. Her only thought is that she needs to get across the restaurant to secure the lock.

  But she can’t move. She is frozen, staring at her father’s face in the glass.

  Her mind is a snowstorm of bad memories. Her grandmother saying to the newspaper reporter during the trial, ‘He’s as guilty as sin.’ Overheard snippets about her mother’s injuries, her remains. The forensics reports. The evidence against her father. An open and shut case. A condemned man, sentenced to life, led away in handcuffs that caught the sunlight like diamonds.

  After everything, when she had gone to live with her grandparents, they had warned her that he would do this one day. She looked just like her mother, her grandmother said tearfully to her one night. The same red hair. The same pale skin. She should change her name, they said. Move away. He might come back for her. But she had never changed anything, had never wanted to. Here she is, not even hiding, in plain sight. And here he is, released from prison today and watching her through the window.

  At last, she meets his eyes. She can’t help it. There is something natural about it, like a plant turning towards the sun. His eyes crinkle ever so slightly – is he smiling? Izzy’s mouth falls open in shock. Here she is, being greeted politely by a murderer.

  Other memories crowd in. She thinks of the red bicycle he used to own, the way he joyfully commuted everywhere on it. She thinks of his myriad sporting hobbies, the way it was rare to have a conversation without him tossing a tennis ball up and down, or bouncing it on the tiled kitchen floor.

  She thinks of the way they watched every single episode of Dawson’s Creek together, the year she turned sixteen, when she should have been revising for her exams, their knees tucked up on the sofa, the ragged tartan blanket shared between them.

  Later that same summer, he had whooped and swung her around on her GCSE results day. ‘I only got Bs!’ she’d laughingly said. ‘Your Bs are perfection to me,’ he had said, as excited as she was. There was no dampening of it. No dismissing of her teenage emotions. Just joy.

  He must see her expression, because he steps backwards, and now she can see his face and upper body framed in the window, his arms raised up in a gesture of defeat. No, not defeat. A gesture of peace. I mean no harm, he is saying, palms to her. She stares and stares at him. His aged figure is skinny under his coat. Cheekbones protruding. Hair greyed out, as if he used to be in colour and is now in monochrome.

  A second later, a letter slides through the box in the navy-blue front door. She looks at the white envelope caught in the bristles, still warm, no doubt, from his touch.

  After a few seconds, she advances towards it, locking the door before she takes the letter. She hesitates, but she knows she will open it. The worst has already happened to her, when she was seventeen. So why not?

  She peers out of the tiny window at the top of the door. The street is empty. She recalls his gesture, and she knows instinctively that he won’t try to come inside, that he won’t be waiting anywhere. But how can she know that? She thought her father would never have murdered her mother … and how wrong she was.

  She stands by the locked door, hands shaking as she tears at the envelope, and begins to read.

  3

  She keeps her phone in her hand, fingers poised to dial, as she grapples with the locks on the front door of the restaurant. She’s amazed at herself, at her lack of preparation for an inevitability she was in deep denial about. She is good at denial. Too good. She has never once read about his trial. Never even heard him out. She didn’t need to. The evidence against him has surrounded her like smoke; she’s breathed it in even as she’s tried to ignore it. Her father’s police interview. The DNA. The last text message he sent to her mother. Where and how she was found.

  She drives to Nick’s work too quickly, the street lights blurring around her like a long-exposure photograph.

  Once in the car park, she catches her own eye in the rear-view mirror. She had never realized how much she looks like him, having not seen him since she reached adulthood herself. Her grandparents took down every photograph of him. The ones Izzy kept are hidden away in her attic. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Everybody has always commented on how much she resembles her mother – the long red hair, the green eyes – but the rest of her is her father. High cheekbones. Skinny, long limbs. She is half of him. At least, she hopes she is only half him. She thinks of the cross words she had with one of the waitresses recentl
y, of the surge of rage she felt when another had called in sick. Was that normal? What if she is …? No. She won’t let herself think it. She is not like him. She is good: she tries to be good.

  She gets out of her car and walks towards the lit-up entrance to the police station. She looks over her shoulder, just once, then pushes the door open. The metal handle is warm in the heatwave.

  It is only once she’s inside that she realizes: she hasn’t looked over her shoulder like that for years.

  She hasn’t yet told Nick about the letter. It has always seemed to Izzy – on first dates before she met and married Nick, and upon being introduced to people – that if she says it out loud, it will be more true, somehow. My father murdered my mother. He’s doing time. That is the way she says it, if she chooses to. Dispassionate and clear. But the older she gets – when surely she should be beginning to process it? – the easier she finds it to keep secrets, even from herself. She simply pretends. She pretends all sorts of things. She pretends Thea is her mother. She pretends she has two brothers, that they live abroad but that they’re there for her, just like Nick and his family WhatsApp group. And, more than anything, she pretends that her father didn’t kill her mother. And, if she ever gets angry, or annoyed, she pretends that this doesn’t mean anything. That she doesn’t have a temper. Because she doesn’t. She knows that. But maybe her father thought he knew that too?

  Actually, he came by tonight, she practises as she meets Nick in the reception of the police station.

  He crosses the foyer to her, gives her a distracted kiss on the top of her head, and takes her hand. ‘Do you have leftovers?’ he says to her. He is well trained to expect leftovers. Sometimes, she wishes he wouldn’t ask. That he would say, ‘Fancy a pizza?’ on the way home, instead. It’s unfair on him, she knows. She has always appreciated his solid nature, his routines and his rules.

  Perhaps if he hadn’t asked about the leftovers, she might’ve told him. Two roads diverge in front of her, and she takes the easy one: something she and Nick often do. ‘I was just thinking about chips,’ she says instead. They walk three paces to the door.

  Headspace, she decides. She’ll give herself some headspace, and speak to him later.

  But by the time she has decided to throw the sea bass away, and she has asked about his day – ‘Nothing, just a series of tedious driving offences to look into’ – it is too late. Time up. She can’t bring herself to say anything. Nick would be astonished it wasn’t the first thing she said, and so … the moment passes, like a train rushing through a station.

  Nick puts his phone on the arm of the sofa when they walk in. The screen is intermittently lighting up and darkening again. Nick’s sisters and parents text all day long. Photos of pets and children and the quote of the day signs on the London Underground. Nick hardly ever responds, but reads every single message almost the second it comes through. Izzy is waiting to be asked to join.

  She can only imagine how the conversation would play out with his family if they knew about the letter. Can you believe it??? Robyn would say. Dani would respond with a string of shocked emojis.

  Izzy looks around her at their tiny cottage, not even big enough for a hallway. They bought it two years ago, having sold their terraced house too quickly, an offer within forty-eight hours. ‘Oh shit,’ Izzy had said when they accepted the asking price.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Nick had said with a wave of his hand. ‘It’ll focus our minds.’

  He drew a map on Rightmove, set up the filters: three beds. ‘You know, just in case,’ he’d said with a hopeful smile. Izzy had ignored him. She always does. Motherhood is fast approaching her, in her mid-thirties already, and she is not prepared for it. Her own father murdered her mother. How can she step into a parental role with such an ugly, gaping wound in her past? Victim and villain play out in her mind whenever she thinks of it. What if there’s something awful running through her core, just like in her father, and parenthood – and all its stressors – exposes it?

  They had spent their Saturdays viewing properties. Izzy was easily swayed by a granite kitchen, a well-placed skylight. ‘No, focus!’ Nick would laugh. ‘It’s on a massive road.’ Or, ‘No way! A notorious burglar lives near here.’

  They’d been searching for four months, their buyers sending increasingly frustrated solicitor’s letters, when they drove by the cottage in Luccombe. A home-made wooden sign stood in the garden, pointing at an angle. ‘For SALE’ it read, in shaky felt-tip pen. A mobile number was listed. Nick slowed the car, and Izzy looked across at him.

  ‘We could just ring the bell,’ she said, looking at the cottage’s pink exterior, at the climbing wisteria, at the lamp-lit windows on the first floor.

  ‘Flip you for it,’ Nick said with a grin. It is exactly the sort of solution he suggests: something dispassionate, fair, logical. He was already angling his body, grabbing a pound coin out of the pocket of his jeans. ‘Call it.’

  ‘Heads.’

  ‘Tails. Bad luck,’ Nick said. He reached over and unlocked her door, then pointed to the house. ‘Go and English them up.’

  Izzy had blushed with pleasure. She loved how he had taken her surname – such a sullied name, marred by the media, the courtroom, her father – and made it light again. English them up. Just like her brave, hard-working, fearless mother.

  The owner let her in, and Izzy turned and beckoned Nick inside. Before they’d seen the kitchen, before they’d been upstairs, Izzy said, ‘I want to buy your house.’

  During the conveyancing process, the seller became aware of who Izzy was but, luckily, didn’t mention it. But as Izzy moved in and she moved out, Izzy felt her curious eyes appraising her. The island was divided into the natives who knew, and the tourists who had no idea about red-headed Alex English and her daughter. Izzy could spot a native a mile away.

  She closes the door of the tiny coat cupboard now. There are so many impractical things about their cottage – the low ceilings, the uneven floor in the bathroom – but she doesn’t care. She puts her shoes in the rack that they’ve had to squeeze in underneath the bay window. Nick has started his chips, perched on the arm of the sofa, using the wooden fork. As she looks at him, she thinks of the letter.

  They said I was guilty. The press. Your mother’s parents. The lawyers and the jury. And they no doubt told you that, too. But have you ever examined it for yourself?

  I want to tell you my side of it.

  Izzy had blinked. He was guilty. Of course he was. He had been arrested, charged and convicted. There was no doubt. That was the point: beyond reasonable doubt.

  But … he knew her so well. Nearly twenty years on. Even just in a letter. He knew that she had not read about it. That she had kept it in a box in her mind.

  By the time his trial rolled around, she had been living with her mother’s parents for several months. Stilted, 1970s-style meals. Conversations that began and were snuffed out almost immediately like candles that failed to ignite. Sentences left hanging.

  They drove her to his trial in their car on the day she was called to give evidence. She took a flask of coffee with her. Izzy is a believer in things like this: small pleasures, even when life is hard. Like little pinpricks of light in a dark sky. A hot cup of coffee every morning got her through those early days. Each morning coffee signalled another day done. One more step towards … something better, she supposed. She hoped.

  The newspapers had speculated about how she had arrived with her mother’s parents, what it meant. She had taken sides, they said. But she hadn’t. Not by then. And maybe she never did, not explicitly, anyway. She just did what she had to do to get through those intervening years, behaving passively. She accepted his guilt stoically, like a child taking a spoonful of medicine every day. She didn’t think about it, didn’t question anything, looked forward each morning to her Mellow Bird’s coffee with its four sugars and didn’t realize, along the way, twenty coffees later, thirty, one hundred, one thousand, that, in not choosing, in doing nothing,
she had chosen.

  Let me tell you this, Izzy: I am innocent. It is not just something I said to try and get out of a prison sentence. Not a tale some lawyer spun.

  The truth is, I didn’t do it. I swear to you, Izzy, it wasn’t me.

  He had written out a mobile number. At first, she thought it was his. But then she read the text, looped carefully across the page, right along the fold of the paper.

  Speak to the person who knows me best. I know you won’t want to be alone with me. But maybe you can speak to him?

  Paul Wakefield. Her father’s best friend. Izzy hasn’t heard the name for eighteen years. Paul used to call her father Tin Cup. It was a long-standing joke between them that Izzy had never understood. He was forever letting himself into their house, two tennis rackets held in one hand. ‘Yes, Gabe can play out,’ her mother once said laughingly. But she had always liked Paul, Izzy thought. He would help her with the company accounts, sometimes, late at night. They’d have a bottle of red.

  Paul. With his steady job as an engineer, his little family, his holidays to the Costa Del Sol and to Disneyland. His whole, full, functional life. His own mind. His own judgement.

  And he thinks her father is innocent. If he can … could she?

  4

  Another letter comes the next day. It is waiting for her when she arrives at the restaurant. A white envelope. Hand delivered, bearing her name on the front.

  It is only one line long:

  I promise, you won’t regret speaking to Paul.

  Izzy sighs as she folds it up and puts it in her pocket. Her instinct is to shy away from it, she thinks, as she slices a celeriac. Even when she tries to make her mind consider her father’s guilt, it veers away from it, like two magnets automatically repelling each other. Eventually, years ago, she stopped trying.