The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  She wouldn’t have been surprised, then, to know that they are now married, but she would be surprised to know that they were childless. That she hadn’t processed and conquered her fears about what had happened to her parents. That she wasn’t ready to move forward and have a family of her own. That the whole concept still felt alien to her.

  She turns slowly now, looking around the loft. She glances at the open hatch and wonders why she didn’t lock the front door. She should have thought about it, planned it out better, like Nick would. She’d love for him to help her right now. She stares at the hatch and feels the eerie sensation she has carried around since she was seventeen: it is loneliness, she guesses. But it isn’t temporary. She is alone in the world, in this attic. She has tried to turn the feeling into self-sufficiency, and she succeeds sometimes, but other times it is just impossible, like trying to magic water into wine.

  She turns and walks across the beams, balancing delicately, making her way to the first box. It’s labelled Bank and so she starts there, removing the lid and putting it on the floor. Next to it is a box of her father’s artwork, which she can’t bear to open, not yet. She’ll start with the bank statements: safety in numbers.

  The box’s cardboard sides are sagging, the Sellotape fuzzy and ineffective. It is strange how things become eroded even when kept safe, away from everything. Time itself has damaged it.

  She breaks open a lever arch file. She flicks through the bank statements. July 1997. December 1998. She leafs through a few more before she realizes there is no order to them whatsoever. How was her mother running a business?

  She spreads them out on the floor of the loft and sorts them into chronological rows. She works quickly in the heat, unclipping statements from folders and rearranging them.

  The walls are insulated with fibreglass. Tiny particles of it drift down on to her arms which she rubs at, irritably, making it worse; like nettle stings. Soon, her chest is covered in sweat, and her arms are burning uncomfortably, but she carries on.

  She finds the profit and loss account for the restaurant’s first trading year and frowns at it. The outgoings are high – high wages, high food costs. She leafs through, looking for invoices, and finds a few, folded in half and stuffed into a plastic wallet. Her mother bought high-end food, and often. In small quantities, too. She sold the dishes for three times the price of the ingredients, not five or six. She paid twice the minimum wage. Izzy raises her eyes to the beams above her. No wonder they were in debt. A clutch of old recipes sits in the back of the folder. She opens it with interest. Half a teaspoon of lemon juice, her mother has written. Next to it, she’s written or a whole teaspoon – testing. Next to that: yes, a whole one. The care that went into it.

  An invoice for wine is next, the paper stiff and slightly yellowed. Her mother bought twelve bottles for £5 each but sold them for £30. Izzy never scrimps on wine: those who care enough to order expensive wine can tell.

  Izzy sits back against a beam. So her mother was cutting corners. Wow. Izzy can hardly believe it. Her organized, fearless mother. Drowning in owning a business. Making strange decisions.

  It is an odd feeling to objectively observe her mother’s failings. She was only ten years older than Izzy is now when she died. Still, Izzy thinks, as she holds the invoice, it’s nice to feel something that she once touched. Perhaps she was the last person to touch this very piece of paper. Except the police.

  She becomes engrossed in the papers, not thinking about anything else, the hatch letting in a steady stream of cooler air. She wonders if she’ll see what she wants to find: evidence of her father’s truth, and not of his lies. The police took a cursory look at these statements but, by then, they had their man. But still. It’s nice to look at them. To see if they tally with what her father has told her. And maybe – just maybe – she’ll find something else, hidden here, waiting for her.

  She looks back at the overdraft. She never felt or witnessed her parents’ poverty herself. Maybe no teenagers did, back then. She had a cheap mobile phone, sometimes no new clothes for the entire school year. But hadn’t that simply been how things were? She had had as many ballet lessons as she had wanted. New pointe shoes every other week because she broke them in too fast. Leotards and leg warmers and soft block shoes – shoes designed to transition from ballet flats to pointe shoes. The things she needed grew and grew. A pale blue leotard for her Advanced 2 exam. A piece of resistance rubber through which to flex her feet, to improve her arch. Ankle weights, to increase her strength when holding her legs in the air during développés. Surgical spirit to soak her toes in, to toughen the skin up.

  Her mother gave Izzy the money for her ballet audition. Only her mother had really known what ballet had meant to Izzy. She got it. ‘It’s so healthy to be in your body and not in your head,’ she had once said to her. The money had been in an envelope. It had been saved up, maybe. Weeks and weeks of saving twenty pounds here and there. Izzy winces to think of it.

  Something makes a noise in the corner of the loft, a kind of skittering sound, and Izzy stops, the papers in her hands, not moving, not wanting to breathe. She waits for it to happen again, then exhales slowly when it does. It’s just birds. They must be nesting somewhere up here. She hears a flapping noise, then a rustle, and then silence again.

  She pulls a pile of statements on to her lap and begins leafing through them, laying them out on the floor, when she hears another noise. Her heart races. It’s a voice.

  ‘You can’t think that way,’ it’s saying.

  She stops, an ear cocked. It’s Thea. Of course. She vaguely remembers the seller telling her once that the loft was shared, and divided up much later. ‘Yes, yes,’ Izzy had said impatiently, thinking that she didn’t care about any of the flaws in that beautiful pink little cottage.

  ‘Really,’ Thea is saying.

  Izzy scoots closer to the partition and listens, feeling guilty and voyeuristic, but unable to stop herself. Thea must be on the phone.

  ‘I think that’s a very sad thing to think about yourself.’ Thea’s voice is so maternal, so warm, so suffused with everything Izzy lacks that she feels her eyes moisten. ‘And most definitely not true.’

  Izzy still has the clutch of bank statements in her lap, but she’s not looking at them any more.

  ‘Don’t make decisions when you’re tired, sad or hungry, anyway,’ Thea says.

  Izzy shakes her head and looks down, studying the statements. £19,950 DR. Overdrawn. She sits back. Perhaps there was no money. Perhaps there was debt, like her father says. Perhaps that was why there were rows: perhaps the arguments were justified. Not domestic violence, but family life. A marriage under pressure. She sets the statements down, thinking.

  Her phone starts vibrating on one of the beams.

  ‘Hi,’ she says, picking it up.

  It’s Nick. ‘Where are you?’ he asks.

  ‘Why?’ she says, though she knows it’s incriminating.

  ‘Free for lunch,’ he says, sounding hurt. ‘Thought I’d come by the restaurant.’

  She closes her eyes. He hasn’t done that for years.

  ‘I’m not there,’ she says. ‘I’m at the doctor’s.’

  ‘Why?’

  Her mind races. Not contraception – he knows she has the implant. ‘I needed antibiotics,’ she says lamely. ‘Water infection.’

  He pauses for just a split second. He can tell: of course he will be able to tell. ‘Okay,’ he says tonelessly. ‘Don’t worry.’ And then, ‘Too much Angel Delight and not enough fresh fruit. Cranberries.’

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ she says with a laugh.

  He hangs up and Izzy sifts through to the credit card statements. There they are. Gabriel English’s Halifax credit card: maxed out. Thousands and thousands. The minimum repayments made, and then missed, over and over again. Izzy’s eyes scan over the numbers. She has always found maths easy, but uninteresting, same as running a restaurant. She turns the last statement over, feeling the imprint of writing on
the back.

  August – £250 extra jobs

  September – sell car? Sell painting? Plus 80 extra hours’ P&D

  October – Get credit card in Tony’s name … ask him.

  It’s her father’s handwriting. She stares at it. And there it is. Tangible evidence.

  A contemporaneous note, as the lawyers would call it. Evidence of him trying to solve their debt. Not evidence of his innocence, exactly, but of his version of events. Evidence of a reason for the rows doesn’t make him innocent, she tells herself, but she likes looking at it anyway.

  She grabs the rest of the statements and works backwards, turning them over, looking for more. There’s nothing for two years, until 1997. Izzy had been fifteen. The paper feels thicker, older, underneath her fingertips, and she recognizes Gabriel’s handwriting immediately.

  Gone golfin’ x

  PS: I picked Izzy up from dancing. She was so good. I saw her while I was waiting. She’s the best in that class, hands down.

  Her mother has written back beneath it. Izzy touches the letters, like relics she has uncovered from another time.

  She’s the best, full stop x

  She looks at it for a few minutes longer, this glimpse into her parents’ marriage, and thinks how far back their lives go. She has lived for thirty-six years without children, but any child of hers would never consider that, just as she hasn’t. Maybe there are more clues, hidden deep in the past. She brings the next lever arch file down, ready to search through, but pockets that note. That evidence that they were happy, that love note from her father to her mother, about their daughter.

  11

  Chris drums a rhythm on the table in the pub. They come here every Monday night to a quiz. The restaurant skips an evening service. Her mother kept the restaurant open seven days a week, Izzy learnt last night. All that heating, lighting, staff, food, and nobody ever does anything on a Monday.

  They have only missed a handful of quizzes in over a decade. Even after Izzy moved out, and in with Nick, who never comes. ‘Nick would absolutely boss this,’ Chris once said during a particularly tricky round. ‘He would find it boring for that exact reason,’ Izzy said back. And it is true: Nick does find the pub boring. ‘I can drink at home,’ he says. ‘With the television.’

  Izzy and Chris attended their first quiz a few years after her father was incarcerated. Afterwards, at their house, Izzy ate frankfurter hot dogs when they got in, boiled in a saucepan, stuffed in cheap bread, and Chris laughed and said, ‘Don’t tell the manager.’

  Chris picks up a biro now and writes their team name on the sheet. Shazam for Robots. It’s a years-old joke between them. They won, one week, because they identified all of the robots in a picture round. Another team accused them of cheating and Chris said, seamlessly, ‘Oh yeah, we just Shazam’d them,’ while Izzy looked on, unable to stop laughing.

  ‘Been revising?’ Chris says. He sips his drink – he drinks endless Diet Coke – and pulls his phone out of his pocket. Izzy’s always liked his easy company, his small talk, but tonight, she wants something different. She craves a female friend. Wine, feelings, over-analysis. That’s what she wants. Someone to whom she can say, ‘My father is out of prison and says he didn’t kill my mother.’ Someone unconnected, open-minded. Everybody she has surrounded herself with is male, and most of them are involved: Chris, Tony. Nick wasn’t there, but is a hardened cynic. Izzy has always shied away from having girlfriends. Tears and book clubs and probing questions. Denial is impossible around women. But now, she wants a friend. A true female friend.

  ‘How’s the love life?’ Izzy says, flashing Chris a tiny grin.

  ‘Gonna bin her off,’ Chris says, drumming with one hand on the table. He reaches for a beer mat and fiddles with it.

  ‘No! Why?’

  ‘She used hashtag blessed on Instagram. Loser.’ He picks up the beer mat and gestures, a kind of what can you do? He chucks it on to the table and it skids across and lands in Izzy’s lap.

  ‘I think that’s forgivable,’ she says, picking it up.

  ‘Nope.’ He opens Facebook and begins mindlessly scrolling through it. When they first moved in together, she couldn’t believe how much he used his phone. It was off the charts. He had multiple chargers. Plugs that had five USB ports in them. A charging block so he could still use it in the bath – he loves to tweet from the bath – and long leads that stretched from the plug to his bed. ‘It was that or move the bed,’ he had said.

  He slips into his own world now, as she takes the picture round from him. ‘It’s photos of James Bonds,’ she says, passing it back to him. ‘No idea.’

  He scribbles a few names into the quiz-sheet boxes. She sips her wine – house white, the cheaper and sweeter the better. When he’s finished, he looks up at her.

  ‘Take it you’ve heard nothing?’ he says.

  ‘From Gabe?’

  ‘Yep.’ He puts his phone down on the table, face up.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  He’s staring closely at her now, but his expression is unreadable, impassive. She looks back down at the table. She has isolated herself by not telling anybody, but the truth is that nobody understands. Nobody is here with her. She is alone with it, the reality of her father being out; she’s forced to be. Chris’s uncle killed his aunt, but her father killed her mother. It is incomparable. Chris doesn’t understand. Nick doesn’t understand. Thea wouldn’t understand. The Instagram family wouldn’t understand. Izzy herself doesn’t: look at her, sleuthing alone in the attic. It is not understandable.

  ‘Round one,’ the announcer says. ‘Question one.’

  ‘We were talking last night about his trial. I guess because he’s out. Dad was saying … do you think your dad will look him up?’

  Izzy glances across the pub. The doors are open, but no breeze gets through. It’s airless, like the middle of August in May. Two people must be smoking outside: Izzy can only see their long, sunset silhouettes thrown across the paving slabs. They’re passing the cigarette between them. Shadowed hand to shadowed hand.

  ‘I said, it’s been almost twenty years. I mean …’ Chris says.

  ‘You said he’d come to see me.’

  ‘You’re different,’ Chris says.

  She feels a flush of pleasure: she’s different. She’s his daughter. It is just like how Thea would do anything for her daughter Molly. Gabe will do anything for her. The thought arrives in her mind, fully formed, but she tries to suppress it. Of course it’s not the same. Gabe doesn’t care about her. Clearly, he doesn’t.

  ‘Dad’s got in touch with Gabe’s probation officer, anyway. Just in case.’

  Izzy blinks. Yes. That friendly woman who, a year ago, had asked if Izzy wished her father to have any conditions attached to his licence regarding her. ‘No, no,’ Izzy had said, not wanting to discuss it, avoiding it, but inadvertently paving the way to this situation they now find themselves in. She had forgotten all about the probation officer until now.

  ‘Your dad did?’

  ‘Which country beginning with G …’ the announcer says.

  Izzy tries to tune him out. ‘His probation officer?’ she prompts, talking over the announcer.

  ‘Shh,’ Chris says.

  He listens to the rest of the question while Izzy anxiously chews on the skin around her fingernail. Stop it, she tells herself. Usually, she’d change the subject. She’s been playing it cool for eighteen years, after all. She covers up the way seeing families on the street makes her feel. She says, ‘No, it’s fine,’ when people joke about killing someone, their faces falling as they realize who they’re with. She never makes the point that everybody’s problems could be worse: they could be hers.

  But everything has changed since her father stopped by the restaurant. She isn’t cool now. She is desperate.

  ‘Probation officer?’ she prompts, when it’s quiet again.

  ‘Yes. She keeps an eye on him for the duration of his licence.’

  ‘How long’s hi
s licence?’

  ‘Life,’ Chris says. His eyes narrow slightly as he looks at her, his brows lowering into a puzzled frown, like he can’t quite believe she doesn’t know that. Not even Chris knows how deliberately she has avoided this topic. She closed her eyes whenever she saw the newspapers. The less known, the better. Until now.

  Izzy stands up, needing to think. Needing to think somewhere he can’t see her facial expressions. ‘I’ll get you another,’ she says, tapping the side of his full glass as she gets up.

  She stands at the bar. It’s too warm in the pub. Her hair feels heavy against her neck. Her mother’s hair. The exact same shade of red. Unmissable.

  She can’t believe she had forgotten that call she’d taken. That there is a system that governs her father’s actions, his movements; something bigger than just father and daughter on the telephone. Something bigger than just her own private thoughts about it. She swallows as she orders a lemonade. Is he allowed to be contacting her? What does his probation officer think? Is he considered dangerous? Worthy of keeping an eye on, as Chris said? After all, Gabe has come to see her, and only her. ‘He’ll come for you,’ her grandmother had said, and she wasn’t wrong.

  She puts Chris’s Diet Coke on the table in front of him.

  ‘Should keep me going,’ he says, eyeing both glasses. ‘Question four was about eggplants – easy peasy,’ he adds.

  ‘How did your dad contact the probation officer?’

  ‘He rang the probation service.’

  Chris shakes his head just slightly as question five is announced. Izzy looks at him closely. Something is off about his expression. ‘Don’t think on it,’ he says to her. ‘Everything’s fine. You’re fine.’

  ‘Is your dad seriously just never going to see him again?’

  ‘What … are you going to?’

  ‘Well, it’s a small island.’

  Izzy thinks about how often she runs into people she knows. Almost every day. Everybody knows everybody. They won’t be able to avoid him forever.