The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  She expected he would be there waiting for her. Nervous, even. Her test had been after school, and he’d have been keeping his fingers crossed for her all day.

  And yet, here he was, and he had forgotten. Her mother, too. But it was her father’s reaction that she was missing. He was big on emotions, on praise. And now he had disappointed her.

  ‘You’re a free woman, Iz,’ he said. ‘Your life has changed.’ And then he reached for her hand and picked it up, raising it in the air and giving a whoop, but it was flat and strange. He was flat and strange. But at least he had said it. What she wanted to hear.

  Izzy’s mother used to take a bath every day. Not at the same time, but every day, regardless of what had happened. Before the lunchtime shift, at 11.00 a.m. When she got in at midnight. Sometimes, during holidays, she would begin and end a day with one. Through winter snow and frozen pipes and summer hosepipe bans, she would take baths. It was always steaming hot, always twenty minutes, and she never took anything in with her. No book. No wine glass. Only a towel.

  Izzy was brushing her teeth while her mother was soaking that evening. They were open like that. Nobody minded being walked in on. It wasn’t unusual for Izzy to catch a glimpse of her mother dressing in the morning, through a half-open door. That was family life. That was their family life.

  Her mother’s eyes were closed, her arms draped along the edges of the stand-alone bath. It was a copper tub, its sides mottled and imperfect. Her mother liked it because it retained the hot water well. Its sides became warm, she said.

  The sash window was right next to the bath, open just a few inches, letting in the early-autumn air. The windowsill held a bottle of shampoo, a bottle of conditioner, a green cracked soap and a handful of shells from Luccombe beach. Every day, her mother wiped up underneath the soap, but it would soon leave its scummy footprint there again.

  ‘Driving really will change your life,’ her mother murmured. ‘Sorry we forgot. We’re … we’ve got some things going on.’

  Izzy glanced at her mother, toothbrush in her hand. Her chest was freckled and her hair was tied up, a few wet strands hanging down by her ears. The bathwater was murky, a steaming pinky grey, the bubbles long popped.

  It was unusual for her mother to offer up any sort of apology. She just didn’t think to say sorry. Izzy always thought she was modelling how to be. How to be strong.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Izzy said, with a mouthful of toothpaste. ‘It wasn’t a big deal or anything.’ She tried to convince herself she agreed with the Izzy who was speaking. But she didn’t. It was a big deal. She had taken to driving – her instructor said she was so co-ordinated, and she had blushed and smiled to herself. ‘I am a dancer,’ she had said, feeling full of life and personality, sat in the car in her capacity as a young adult with him.

  ‘Where will you go on your first solo trip?’ her mother said.

  ‘Pip’s,’ Izzy said. ‘But I’ll be able to run Chris back sometimes.’ Chris had so far failed his test four times. Tony and Gabe had been ribbing him over it. Izzy had said nothing, aware of the pressure of it, the repeated failure. She hadn’t yet told him that she’d passed first time.

  ‘And how’s that going? Pip?’ her mother said. Izzy looked back over. Her mother’s face had creased into a smile, but when she opened her eyes, they looked sad. Nostalgic, even. ‘First love,’ she added, which seemed to confirm it. Her mother reached for the soap and began lathering her arms.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Izzy said. Fine didn’t sum him up, though, not really. He’d taken her to the beach early on in their relationship. They’d skipped school. Izzy had never been to the beaches as a tourist, as an adult. They’d held hands and let the surf wash over their bare feet. In some ways, he was a lot like her mother: spontaneous, fun, broad-minded.

  ‘How are they all?’ her mother said, her tone tentative. Pip’s older brother, Oliver, had died over the summer. Diabetes. Pip’s mother had often admonished Ollie over his blood sugar readings, his thirst levels, his weight. He’d always been teenage-boy sanguine about it. Telling her his new pump – they’d gone private to get it – would control it for him, not to worry. But he had been wild. Drinking too much. Bringing girls home. They hadn’t known what to do with him. Even the high blood sugar readings hadn’t scared him into behaving. And then it had been too late.

  ‘A bit sombre at times, as you can imagine,’ Izzy said.

  She loved the way he’d say, ‘Get your ass over here then, English,’ when she hovered awkwardly in the doorway of his bedroom. The way he always made her make a wish whenever they were out together and saw the moon. ‘Wish on it,’ he would say. The way he held her hands all the time: at school, in his bedroom. The way he wanted to know everything about her. No game playing. Just a constant text conversation that had been lasting for a solid seven months now: Izzy’s phone bills were horrendous, something her mother privately admonished her about, but paid on the side, without telling her father.

  She’d had a Chinese meal with Pip’s family the other day. They were richer than Izzy’s family, that much was immediately clear, but they also took a care over things that her family didn’t. Ambience, she guessed. Even after what had happened to them in July.

  They were a blended family. Pip and his mother. Oliver and his father. They had a doormat with four surnames on it. Pip’s mother’s maiden name, Pip’s father’s surname, Oliver’s mother’s surname and Oliver’s father’s surname. It said: Welcome to the Hill, Talbot, Clarke, Eason Residence. Izzy’s feet had stilled as she’d looked down at it, trying to work it out. She had liked it. That they were proud of how they had come together, even though it wasn’t perfect.

  Pip’s mother had lit red candles all along the dark wood mantelpiece. They kicked out a red wine-y sort of scent which Izzy breathed in deeply. A whole crispy duck sat on the table, pancakes steaming in wicker pots. She poured Izzy a glass of white wine without asking her. Pip’s stepfather raised a glass to Oliver. It was nine weeks since he had died.

  Later, they retired to a tiny room off the hallway. It had two sofas in it, soft brown cotton. A log burner between them, footstools covered in plaid blankets. A giant television, facing them. Pip’s mother had made hot chocolate for everyone, boozy for the adults. ‘Not romcoms again,’ Pip’s stepfather Steve had exclaimed when the credits began to run.

  ‘You need it,’ Pip said. ‘Rest that academic brain of yours. Romcoms over relativism,’ he said, squeezing Izzy’s knee.

  Izzy fizzed with pleasure. Pip was funny, and nothing drew her in like a sense of humour. She was enchanted by him.

  Steve was a lecturer at the Isle of Wight College, in philosophy. He laughed loudly. ‘I don’t do relativism. It’s modal realism.’

  ‘That has less of a ring to it.’

  ‘You can appreciate it on a higher level, anyway,’ Pip’s mother said to him, and they all laughed. They hadn’t been afraid to laugh, even after tragedy.

  ‘They seemed fun at the restaurant,’ her mother said.

  Pip’s family had eaten at Alexandra’s early on in Pip and Izzy’s relationship. Her mother had surprised Izzy; she’d been courteous and calm, stopping with them for almost their entire meal, delegating the running of the restaurant to other people so she could be with them. They’d all shared a huge cheesecake she had baked especially, with mini eggs on it. She’d bitten into one, while looking at Izzy, and smiled such a sincere, happy smile. As they said goodnight outside the restaurant, Izzy could smell the sea which – since their day at the beach – had begun to remind her of Pip. She looked up at the moon and thought: we made this happen. Their families had met because of them. Because they loved each other. It was the first moment she felt like an adult.

  Izzy spat the toothpaste out and rubbed some moisturizer into her face. As she went to leave the bathroom, her eyelids heavy, ready for sleep, she saw the mark on her mother’s arm.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said, feeling able to ask, here in the steamed-up, tiny bathro
om.

  ‘What?’ her mother said, her eyes closed again. Her tone of voice was strange. As though the conversation was over, suddenly.

  ‘On your arm.’

  Her mother’s eyes snapped open and focused on Izzy. ‘Right,’ she said, sitting up. Her breasts sagged. Water lapped precariously at each end of the bath.

  ‘What is it?’ Izzy said.

  ‘I knocked the kitchen shelves at work,’ her mother said. But Izzy just knew she was lying. It was obvious: everything about it. Her mother shrugged, steam rising off her shoulders.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I just bumped into them,’ she said.

  ‘It looks sore.’ It was red and angry. More a slap mark than a bruise.

  ‘It’ll heal.’

  Izzy stared at it. It was large. With four distinct striations. Fingermarks, a few weeks before her mother died.

  15

  ‘I heard you arguing,’ Izzy says now to her father. ‘It went on. It got nastier. Didn’t it? I remember … God. It’s all coming back to me now.’

  He averts his eyes from hers. ‘I don’t recall that. She just walked off.’

  ‘I remember it, because it made me stop and think. You said she was a drama queen.’

  ‘I didn’t. But she was.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘She didn’t remember about your driving test, did she?’ he says snidely, and the atmosphere changes. There’s something about his expression. His teeth are gritted. And he’s changed the subject. Yet again. Away from the difficult topics, back to things that suit him, that paint him in a favourable light.

  ‘I thought she was just so … impressive. She did whatever she liked,’ Izzy says. ‘That’s the biggest thing I’ve learnt from her. Or am trying to,’ she adds, thinking bitterly of the long shifts at the restaurant, the smell of cooking fat in her hair afterwards, the empty feeling of counting down the hours until home time, the days until the weekend, the weeks until holidays. Pointless.

  ‘She had a huge ego,’ Gabe says with a small shrug. ‘I’m sorry to say. I loved her. But it was a failing of hers.’

  ‘Did she?’ Izzy says, but more to herself than Gabe. Maybe she did. Maybe that’s why she ignored some of Izzy’s achievements. Maybe inviting Pip to the restaurant was more an act of showing off than one of solidarity with her daughter.

  She shakes her head. He has distracted her. He did call her mother a drama queen. He did. Two truths can’t co-exist and so instead their colours run together, muddied and confusing. And he has tainted Izzy’s memory of her, too. He didn’t need to say that she’d forgotten Izzy’s driving test. He just didn’t. Her mother is dead, can’t defend herself.

  She tries to think. Maybe she could contact Pip. See what he remembers of her parents’ marriage. If he can verify her version of events. If he remembers these rows that are springing into her mind now, two decades later.

  ‘The bruise looked sore,’ she says.

  ‘Right, anyway. You said she’d been at work,’ Gabe says, his eyes on her.

  ‘Yes. I’m sure she had, because I remember thinking she was always at work. That she couldn’t have an afternoon off even for my driving test.’

  ‘Maybe it was work,’ Gabe says, shaking his head. ‘Maybe it was. I thought she’d been at her mum and dad’s. The mind, hey?’ He glances at her.

  Another inaccuracy. But it was easy to misremember things. Izzy is amazed they can recall any of the details, is thankful for the signposts within her memories: her driving test, her upcoming ballet exam. They help anchor the events.

  A tall, muscular man walks into the café, a woman next to him with angular, tense shoulders. His face changes as he sees them. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he says. He stops walking towards Izzy and Gabe. He’s in a black coat, blue skinny jeans.

  Izzy has no idea who he is.

  ‘Gabriel English, released after murder, and just living his fucking life. Free as a bird,’ the man shouts, spreading his arms wide. ‘Free as a mother fucking bird.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Gabriel says.

  Izzy is surprised by his frightened tone. He seems to fold in on himself, like a snail retreating inside its shell. He bows his head towards the table, his shoulders rounded. She can see the points of his shoulder blades, the bald spot at the back of his head.

  ‘How about we don’t eat our dinner in the presence of a wife-killer?’ the man says.

  Izzy begins to turn away from them, to ignore them completely, but then she looks at Gabe. He’s standing up, reaching for his coat and crossing the café before she can stop him.

  ‘Who were they?’ she asks, once they’re outside.

  ‘Don’t know.’ He looks furtively over her shoulder.

  They begin to walk, unthinkingly, away from the café and down towards the seafront. It’s twilight, the sky still a pale blue, but the air is dark, with hardly any light remaining. The moon is up, full, and Izzy thinks of Pip and what happened between them. The moon is gunmetal grey. It’s mottled, just like the sides of her mother’s copper bathtub. Where did that green soap and those shells go? So much of the aftermath of her mother’s death is a mystery to Izzy. Not only the trial, and the exact presentation of the evidence that Izzy can only vaguely summarize, but the practicalities, too. She guesses the house was sold. Its possessions taken. But where to?

  The beach is dotted with couples and the sand crunches underfoot. Where in the high season the pier is full of sweet stalls, fortune tellers and fairground rides, now it’s empty. Two figures pass under the boardwalk and Izzy instinctively shifts away from them. In the vacuum of tourism, other trades rush in like incoming tides. Nick says he does so many more drugs cases during the winter and spring months. She briefly wonders if Gabe knows any of these people. These dealers, these people Nick watches and who are quietly arrested in the night.

  ‘Who were those people in the café?’ Izzy asks again.

  Her father turns to her in the half-light. He looks better in the dimness. Less ill and thin, even though he’s clearly feeling the cold, even in the heatwave. ‘There are one hundred and fifty thousand people on the island, Iz. Half of them will know what I did. The Isle of Wight hasn’t had many killers.’

  ‘I know,’ she says softly. It’s a fact she’s thought of often. A fact she uses to reassure herself. Statistically, there won’t be another. She’s been safe here on this little island with its small population of people she knows, her father in prison. Nick once said the island was ‘surprisingly seedy at times’, but she ignored it. She never sees that side of it.

  They say nothing, walking on the promenade out towards the sea together. Eventually, she asks him what she’s been wondering. ‘What’s your … your plan? For work, and things?’ she says. Partly out of concern for him but partly so she knows what he’s doing. That he’s busy with something legitimate. Something innocuous. Involved and integrating, she supposes.

  ‘I don’t have a rule book, Iz. And I don’t have a plan, either. That’s up to God.’

  I don’t have a plan. That’s what Pip always said to her. He said at the beach that his main aim was to wake up and enjoy every day. So different to Nick with his rigid views and routines. Where is Pip now? Off travelling, she expects. Living in Singapore or something. Learning to surf in Australia. Making some woman laugh.

  ‘Are you going to get a job?’ she says. She can’t bear the talk of religion. Her funny, easy-going father who once said at a christening, ‘What a load of creepy bollocks.’ Her mother wouldn’t have tolerated it, either. She was far too pragmatic. Her father. Converted to God. To believing. Does he really believe, or is it fantasy? Another story invented to paint him in the best light.

  ‘Trying,’ he says. He stops them, there, before they reach the water’s edge.

  Izzy thinks of conversations she’s had with Nick about his cases. True-crime dramas. Nick’s always taken one angle – no smoke without fire – whether through nature or nurture, she isn’t sure. Izzy’s always been less
cynical. Even more so, now. ‘Well,’ Nick’s always said of perpetrators, of suspects, of protestors of innocence. ‘I wouldn’t want to meet him in an alley at night, would you?’ Izzy’s never known what to say to that. Because it’s true, isn’t it? Once accused, once convicted, they’re tarnished … Would anybody take the risk? Why would anybody employ a convicted criminal, date one, be alone with one? Everybody has principles, until they’re close to home.

  Izzy looks at her father, his face pale in the moonlight. But she is taking the risk. She is alone with him in the sea-scented night-time air.

  ‘How was it – at Mum’s parents?’ Gabe says enquiringly.

  ‘It was fine,’ Izzy lies, images flashing into her mind. The crinkle of the newspaper as her grandparents filled out the crossword together every Sunday in silence. Being told to stop practising her ballet because it would ruin the wooden floors. They were willing to help her out, so long as she slotted neatly into their lives like a handshake.

  She spent her time wondering where the fun and joy of life had gone; spontaneous trips out, and laughter. She couldn’t separate her grief from her new living conditions. Everything had seemed bleak, tasteless, mundane. They had been grieving too, she supposes, looking back. But she couldn’t see that at the time, not when they shouted, not when they silenced her with a judgemental shh.

  ‘You’d better be off. I’m guessing your copper doesn’t know.’ It’s the first time he’s acknowledged Nick’s job.

  ‘He’s an analyst. Not police.’

  ‘All the same,’ says Gabe.

  ‘See you,’ she says to him, not knowing when she will. The lies in his accounts seem to be growing, multiplying like tumours.

  ‘See you soon,’ he says pointedly. He turns away from her and disappears, gradually, up the hill and into the night.

  She wonders where he goes. How he gets around. Who else he sees. Where he sleeps at night. How he sleeps at night.

  By the time she gets home, he has already texted her twice.