The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘The evidence against me starts on the night of her murder, but the story starts earlier. Iz, let me tell you it. The story. And maybe you can tell me what you remember, too. We can meet and talk about it. Piece by piece.’

  8

  PROSECUTOR: You had several rows before you murdered your wife, didn’t you, Mr English?

  GABRIEL ENGLISH: I didn’t murder her. We did row.

  PROSECUTOR: Your daughter, Isabelle, heard the end of one row, as the jury heard four weeks ago.

  GABRIEL ENGLISH: Yes.

  PROSECUTOR: And were you angry with your wife?

  GABRIEL ENGLISH: Yes. I … I was. But I didn’t kill her.

  June 1999: four months before Alex’s murder

  Gabriel

  Your mother said she had something to tell me, but I was distracted by her hair. I loved it when she wore it that way. Scooped up messily, loose red strands resting against the softest part of her neck. When we went out – though I can’t now recall a single recent date – she always wore it down and straight, but I loved this tangled mess. I couldn’t stop looking at it as she was talking to me. When I painted her, I used burnt sienna mixed with raw sienna. A dash of burnt umber. Sometimes cadmium yellow deep, if she was in the sunlight.

  We were in the basement of the restaurant, next to the wine rack.

  She turned and put something into her handbag. And … ah. Her hair was held up with a breadstick, taken from the bar at the front desk. I felt a pleasurable expansion in my chest.

  ‘So …’ she said, turning around to face me. ‘It’s just something that’s becoming a bit tricky and you – I guess you need to know about it.’

  ‘I’m all ears,’ I said.

  Alex leant back against the wall. It was dim and cool in the basement. It smelt of old stone. I loved it when she stood like this. Arms behind her, looking up at me shyly. And there we were, like it was 1970 again, and she the girl I met on the beach. (Do you know the story of how we met?) Still all that chemistry, even after all that time.

  The lines around her eyes pleated together as she frowned at me. She had turned forty-five the previous year; we’d celebrated right here, in this basement, with a few candles and a bottle of white, late. It was the frown that alerted me. Something bad was coming.

  ‘I didn’t save up for everything here,’ she said, gesturing to the basement around us. ‘I didn’t … I didn’t have the savings I told you I did.’

  ‘What?’ I said. I was panicked, I guess, disbelieving, but maybe she would have said I was angry. Her face instantly began to close down, just the way she closed up the restaurant. Backroom lights first, that frown beginning again across her forehead, moving to the front. Her eyes darkened next and then her hands dropped down by her sides.

  ‘I paid the rent deposit in cash but I put everything else that month on a credit card so I could do that.’

  ‘Which credit card?’

  She bit her lip. ‘Yours.’

  ‘Mine?’ I patted my pockets, looking for my wallet. Sure enough, the card was missing. I’d never have noticed. I didn’t use it. My vices were plentiful, but they didn’t include spending money.

  ‘I opened your statements. So you wouldn’t see.’

  I started to panic properly then, running my hands through my hair. We’d taken out a twenty-grand business loan to start up the restaurant the previous year. An overdraft on top of that, which we’d already burned through. Alex had said she had ten thousand saved from her previous events. Catering for weddings, for parties. ‘So you didn’t have any money saved?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you say you did?’

  ‘I wanted to open as soon as we could, I … I thought it would be easy to repay it once we started making a profit.’

  ‘So the debt is … how much more debt is there?’

  ‘Well, I maxed out your card.’ She winced. ‘So then I opened two more cards. And now I’m paying the interest on one with the other.’ Her eyes were damp.

  I’d never been one to worry about money, not too much. It’s only money, my mother and father used to say. They’d spent their youth travelling around Ireland, racking up debts, never paying them off, and it hadn’t harmed them. The debts would die with them, they always said laughingly while my father opened a beer.

  But this was … shit. This was bad. She’d opened the restaurant only recently – as it turned out, a year before she died – and, already, we were in more debt than we’d ever been in our lives.

  ‘What’s the total?’ I said.

  She met my eyes briefly, then looked away again. I knew she wouldn’t know. She was wild, your mother. A loose cannon. She’d always spent money with no regard for anything. She’d buy all sorts. Dehumidifiers. Once, a ton of fruit someone was selling by the side of the road. She couldn’t resist. But more than that, she just didn’t think sometimes. On holiday once, she jumped off a cliff and into the sea. She’d chat to strangers at bus stops late at night. And then this.

  Debt.

  Debt upon debt.

  Alex’s green eyes were wide now. ‘I don’t know … forty? Fifty thousand?’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘We needed so much stock … the pans and the knives and all the equipment. I just typed your credit card into so many websites … to buy it all. It didn’t feel like shopping. It felt like … I don’t know.’

  ‘Shopping,’ I said nastily.

  Your mother was a shopaholic. Shoes, candles, new tyres for the car ‘because they were on offer’. She even managed to spend money sitting alone in our house, without the internet. Remember the time she paid a window cleaner? We’d laughed about it then – ‘Nothing like the shopping buzz,’ she’d said – but it wasn’t funny any more.

  ‘You lied to me. About having enough money to set up.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking directly at me. And I still loved her then. Her freckled nose. The beautiful red hair, full of breadstick crumbs by the end of each day. And her directness, too. She loved me enough to stop lying then, at least. ‘I thought I could – I thought I could make it work. If I really tried.’

  You know, Izzy, right at the beginning of our marriage, we used to count how many beds we’d slept in. I don’t know why we started, but we did. It became a long-standing joke. Sometimes we’d recite them. A hotel in Paris. Paul’s house at Christmas. The Travelodge before we went to Glasgow that time. The sofa bed at her parents’. There were hundreds of them, by the time she died. A dossier of our marriage, of the number of times we’d slept skin-to-skin. ‘Oh, we forgot one,’ she would say sometimes. ‘That blow-up airbed in France, the one that deflated by midnight.’ And now, so many beds later, and she’d been lying to me.

  The restaurant was swallowing money that first year like a hungry bird.

  ‘We forgot about VAT,’ your mother had said one night. ‘And we need a computer system for the bookings.’

  We’d inched into our overdraft, without me knowing that there was already too much debt to hope to pay off. Six months ago, we’d been solvent, and now … what were we? One step away from something scary, that’s what.

  ‘Are all the cards at their limit?’ I asked.

  Your mother nodded slowly, swallowing, her eyes wet. ‘We can’t pay the mortgage,’ she whispered. ‘We can’t pay the rent here.’

  I reached out to touch the wall of the basement, steadying myself. It had been painted white by me. I’d bought a pot of paint for £28.95 from B&Q and painted it in the sweltering heat the previous summer. At the end of every coat I’d had to wipe my face with my T-shirt.

  ‘I’ll … I’ll sell some of my paintings.’

  ‘Gabe,’ she said, and I knew exactly what she was saying with those raised eyebrows. My paintings sold for next to nothing. ‘You need to get a painting and decorating job.’

  I gritted my teeth. It was just too much, Iz. Your mother was always telling me what to do. Hang this picture frame up, even though it’s close to midnight. Shower,
you’re filthy, covered in paint. Help me strip the bed. I don’t know. Life seemed sometimes to be so hard with her, your tempestuous, hard-working, slave-driver mother.

  I told you I’d tell you my story honestly.

  She started to pull a white hoody on. I was sure it was actually yours. I’d always been in charge of the household washing. Tiny white Babygros moving through the system, from drawers to the machine to the tumble dryer. I’d always loved it. Toddler outfits, like adult outfits in miniature: tights with three-inch-long feet, tiny dresses. And now, look at this. She was wearing your hoody. You were seventeen, moving into adulthood: here was the evidence.

  ‘I need you to get more work. You don’t work a forty-hour week, do you? There’s room in your life.’

  I thought of where I’d been that day: painting a kitchen in the morning, then back for a late lunch at home. I’d made some pots on my wheel. Three bowls: for you, me and her. I was going to paint them green crystal 8650; a kind of mottled mint colour.

  ‘You knew about most of the debt, anyway,’ she said, chewing her thumbnail and looking at me.

  ‘I didn’t know about the debt on my own credit card,’ I said tightly. ‘I’ll try and get some more work. I’ll advertise.’

  ‘What’s the rent on the shipping container?’ she asked, a dangerous edge to her voice.

  I rented that container – a metal box, really, perched near to the beach – for £50 a month. I could store my potter’s wheel there, my kiln, make as much damn mess as I wanted. I loved painting with the doors wide open, and I loved the way the light hit the inside of the container in the early evenings. The sea air infiltrated everything, and I’d come home smelling of oil paints, of turpentine, of linseed and salt. I loved the way the clay behaved in that shipping container. More malleable, more workable, wetter. It centred more easily on the wheel. It was my luxury, my only one. I would sit on my wooden stool in there and just paint. Some artists paced, looking at their work this way and that, but I didn’t. I sat perfectly still, with only the walls surrounding the painting, so I didn’t get distracted. Or I’d sit at the wheel and just make pot after pot. Skinny, sexy vases. Fat, stout mugs with two handles; I’d leave them hanging on hooks to get the perfect, curvaceous shape.

  ‘Fifty pounds a month,’ I said.

  ‘You could pause it.’

  But I couldn’t do that, Iz. For me, life was lived in order to experience joy. Sure, I painted some living rooms magnolia so I could pay the mortgage, but jobs shouldn’t go any further than that, for me. Life was made up of bike rides, summer tennis matches, barbecues, catching the exact curve of your mother’s neck in a portrait. I wouldn’t let her, and the restaurant, take that away from me.

  ‘No way,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a lazy man, Gabe,’ she said.

  Her words were acid on my skin. My hairs stood on end with the shock of her attack. ‘What?’

  ‘You have never liked working.’

  I took a step back, my palms up. That was totally unfair, and totally true, all at once. I didn’t have the temperament for office jobs. I didn’t like being told what to do, always being in the same place at 11.00 a.m. on Tuesdays. It wasn’t for me. She was right, but she was wrong, all at once. No, she wasn’t wrong. I had just thought that she loved that about me. That I was a free spirit. Her nomad, she once said. The person she had shared hundreds of different beds with: a life lived fully.

  ‘This is your debt,’ I said. ‘How am I in the wrong?’

  ‘Forget it,’ she said.

  I reached for her, to calm her down, to make her see sense, but she brought her arm up.

  ‘Get the fuck off me,’ she screamed. Her nostrils were flaring. ‘Forget it,’ she said tightly to me. She looked at me again, a hard stare, then picked up her bag.

  ‘Anyone here?’ you called. I saw you standing at the top of the stairs, one hand on your hip. So like your mother: skinny limbs, elegant neck. Your hair was back, off your face; you’d come from ballet. You were scowling, looking impatient.

  ‘Here,’ I called up to you from the gloom.

  Your mother said nothing further to me. She reached down into her handbag, feeling for something. Whatever she’d put in there earlier was important to her. Was that a guilty expression that crossed her face? It was only later that I thought about it. She gestured for me to lead the way out, but I followed her.

  Izzy

  Izzy’s ballet teacher agreed to drop her at the restaurant. Her mum and dad couldn’t seem to get their act together for one of them to pick her up. When she was older, she thought, she’d rule her life like a well-run ship. Everybody would always be where they said they would be. There’d be none of this chaos.

  ‘The pirouettes are really good,’ Stephanie said to her in the changing room. Izzy was just pulling on a vest top over her leotard; she’d have a bath when she got home. They stepped out together into the summer evening. It was a Friday night, nine o’clock, and sometimes, at times like this, Izzy felt like life was just beginning. The sky was clear, the moon low and big, and she could do anything she wanted to do.

  ‘I’ve got my centre right,’ she said. ‘Just in time.’ The audition was in November. Sometimes, it seemed like time was meted out around that, and only that, as though everybody else’s future revolved around it, too. Every morning, she calculated how many days there were to go. It was currently one hundred and twenty-six. She imagined it every morning, too, as she put her hair up. The ferry crossing to London. The cold of the changing room. The unfamiliar ballet studio, a patch of rosin for dipping pointe shoes in, over in the corner, so they didn’t skid. It would leave chalky marks over the sprung wooden floor. Her reflection in the mirror as she began the ensemble. The cut of the ribbons, tucked into her ankles: she had to hairspray the ends so they didn’t fray, but it left them sharp. If she let herself, sometimes her mind would wander past the audition, and to the following September. Ballet school. Bunk beds, jetés on the roof terrace, performances and … more than that. Freedom, she supposed. Adventure. A career that might take her all around the world. Her boyfriend Pip was going to visit her every Friday, they had decided. If she got in. ‘I’ll get the train to you,’ he had said to her cheerfully. ‘I love trains.’ That was how he was. Open-minded and optimistic. He loved nothing more than doing. Seeing things. New places. Travel. He found the good in everything. Even a seasonal traffic jam. ‘Well, let’s put some tunes on,’ he would say.

  Stephanie dropped her outside.

  ‘See you,’ Izzy said to her.

  The lights of the restaurant were on, so Stephanie drove off, leaving Izzy alone. The restaurant was set back from the road, with a gingham awning and an outside area. The last of their regulars was just leaving. Izzy remembered his full name – Marcus Scott. That’s how he always used to introduce himself to people. He had white-blond hair. Izzy liked him. He was always smiling, often chatting to the locals. He wasn’t from the Isle of Wight, but had settled there a few years back, seemed to want to put down roots, make friends, unlike most of the people who came in to eat alone: they’d come in most nights for a few weeks and then move on, the transient trade of island life. Marcus would occasionally help carry sacks of potatoes into the kitchen for her mum.

  Chris, who washed the pots, had already left that night. Her uncle Tony had picked him up. He’d started working in the restaurant alongside Izzy while they were studying for their A-levels. They would giggle into the washing up about her mother’s neurotic outbursts.

  Izzy crossed the car park. In the distance, she could hear the rustle of the sea against the sand.

  She eased open the door to the restaurant. She could hear the murmur of her parents’ voices as she weaved her way between the tables. They were downstairs, she realized, crossing to the basement door and pulling it open.

  ‘Get the fuck off me,’ she thought she heard her mother say.

  There was a pause. Some shuffling.

  She stopped, listening. She frowne
d, a hand resting on the door. Surely not.

  ‘I said last time would be the last time, and I meant it,’ her mother said.

  ‘Don’t talk back to me,’ her father said.

  ‘Anyone out there?’ Izzy said as she went inside. She stopped as soon as she saw them. The silence. Their faces. They’d stopped speaking but their expressions remained the same. She knew them well. The air seemed to shiver with resentment.

  ‘Here,’ her father called to her, though she could see them plainly. Her mother reached down into her handbag. Izzy looked, and saw leftovers there, foil wrapped like a swan. Her father’s eyes tracked her movements.

  The atmosphere followed them out, despite her father trying to talk to her, and edged into the car with them. Her mother glanced over her shoulder and held Izzy’s gaze, for just a second. Then she looked back at her father, who was staring at her mother. Her father was always staring at her. Whenever they went out together, all three of them, Izzy would be forever catching him looking at her mother: over menus; as he held doors open for her; gazing across at her in the passenger seat of the car. It had always been so clear to Izzy how much he loved her. He had never hidden that, never been embarrassed by it. ‘Oh, I’m so soppy over her,’ he once said to Izzy.

  Nobody spoke on the way home. Something was amiss. Izzy thought about that appraising look her mother gave her often.

  Izzy’s mother went straight upstairs when they got home, and into the bath. Her father went into the kitchen. Izzy lingered in the hallway, not knowing what to do. She could hear her father on the phone.

  ‘I’ll sort it, okay,’ her father was saying into the phone. His tone was off. It was tense and angry. The okay was gritted.