The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  Izzy searches for David Smiths that evening. Maybe if she finds him, she can see if there really was an alibi in 1999 … to see if she made a mistake.

  She’s been trying to do thirty per night: always the same message. Sorry to bother you … My name is Izzy English … Did you used to live at 18 Rainsdown Lane?

  So far, only three out of sixty have responded, all saying no.

  Next, she looks at a month of bank statements. She’s doing one month per night. When she can. It’s the best way to approach it: logically. Methodically. Tonight is June 1999, five months before her mother’s murder. She scans it, digesting the business’s financial position. Poor profits. Getting better towards the end of the month, as the weather warmed up, she guesses. It shows nothing. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for. She’s just … looking. For anything that might leap out at her. Next, she’ll look through the few possessions of her mother’s and father’s that she inherited.

  Before she leaves, though, she opens an unmarked lever arch file. It contains plastic wallets. She opens the first one and a set of receipts falls out. Fuel. A blender purchased in 1999. The paper has started to age, and flakes in her fingers. She turns it over.

  And there it is. Her father’s handwriting.

  Sorry about the glass! Xx

  That’s all it says. Izzy stares at it. Sorry about the glass. Could it be? The thrown glass he referred to? But he threw it, and not her mother?

  She’ll confront Gabe. See what he says. She puts the note in her handbag, ready.

  Nick and Izzy are in bed, later, when they hear Thea’s window shut.

  ‘Like clockwork,’ Izzy comments, to stop herself from telling Nick where she’s been.

  ‘Clockwork?’ he says.

  He has brought his laptop home, and is still typing away, working into the evening as he often does. He should use a screen guard, but says it hurts his eyes. She leans over. G. Michaels visited the premises on the following dates and times, Nick has written.

  ‘Thea shuts that window every single night about eleven,’ Izzy explains. ‘She airs the bedroom in the day.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just observe her,’ Izzy says, but she blushes.

  I observe her because I want to be part of a family, she thinks. Because I want to experience what her children do: being parented when I myself am an adult.

  ‘You should come work with me,’ he says, pulling her towards him. ‘You’re good at pattern spotting.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says. She leans her head back down on his black T-shirt which smells of their washing powder. If only he knew that just hours before, she was alone with Gabe, at the seafront, in the dark. She shifts closer and closer to Nick’s warm body, flinging a leg over his, too, trying to forget the way Gabriel had looked at her.

  ‘What’s G. Michaels suspected of?’ Izzy says, tapping the screen lightly.

  ‘Human trafficking,’ Nick says. ‘Owns a load of nail bars. We think he’s moving women through them.’

  ‘Like slaves?’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway. Look,’ he says quietly. He shuts the laptop.

  ‘What?’

  He pulls her nearer to him. His laptop falls off his lap, tipping on to its side on the bed. ‘I ordered your father’s file,’ he says, very close to her ear.

  Goosebumps appear on Izzy’s shoulders. ‘Did you?’ she says. She can’t believe it. Rule-abiding Nick.

  ‘I thought about the risks,’ he says, as if reading her mind. ‘But I thought this –’ he gestures to her, ‘is more important. There’s more at stake.’

  She nods. That’s how he’s rationalized it. Still within his tight parameters. Still hyper-logical. She thinks of Pip, for the second time that day, his toes in the ocean. No plans for the next day.

  ‘It’ll take a couple of weeks,’ Nick adds.

  ‘Will anybody know?’

  ‘No. They put an alert on big files. Celebrity files. Huge murders. Myra Hindley, you know. Not … not him.’

  ‘Would you get in trouble if they did know?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Protecting you is more important.’

  Everybody must do it. Everybody must look people up. Nick certainly isn’t stupid. He will have analysed the risk fully.

  Izzy catches a glimpse of the moon outside, and decides what to wish for. That this all turns out well. That nobody loses anything. That they emerge unscathed.

  He begins kissing her ear. She surrenders to it. For the next half an hour, she is not Izzy English whose father murdered her mother. She is Izzy Gainsborough. Nick’s wife.

  It is only when, hours later, Nick is breathing steadily next to her, that she realizes what Gabriel said: There are one hundred and fifty thousand people on the island, Iz. Half of them will know what I did.

  What I did. What I did.

  It was a slip of the tongue, she thinks, as she falls asleep. A mistake.

  16

  Izzy braces herself for visiting her grandmother. Whatever the name of the feeling is that she experiences when she sees Thea, or the Instagram family, her grandmother gives her the exact opposite feeling. Neither feeling has a name.

  The nursing home is not far from Matt Richmond’s office, just a brief detour on her way to see her father’s lawyer. It has red carpets that have faded to a dusty pink. It smells of winter food, even in the relentless spring sun: clammy, cooked potatoes, carrots, meat. The faint odour of urine underpins it all.

  Izzy’s grandmother is sitting in a green chair in her room when Izzy arrives in the doorway. The television is on, and her head is angled towards it, but her eyes aren’t. They’re looking out of the window, not really focused on anything.

  Izzy’s mother’s disappearance has taken up residence in the jumbled mind of her grandmother. It’s centre stage. On good days, she reminisces about her red-headed daughter – ‘Not a single redhead in our family, she came clean out of nowhere’ – and on bad days, conversations consist of a steady stream of words associated with that time. Not the time after her mother was found, but rather those two days when she was missing. It’s the trauma, Izzy guesses. The trauma of not knowing, of imagining everything. It has embedded itself in every part of her grandmother’s brain like rot.

  Got a taxi home to be murdered.

  Phone call after phone call.

  Where’s her passport?

  The woods.

  The woods.

  The woods …

  Her grandmother is in limbo. Suspended in that time, in those two days. Her mother still missing. Still searching.

  ‘Granny,’ Izzy says, stepping into the room.

  A double serving of resentment and guilt joins her in the room. Her grandmother doesn’t acknowledge her. She’s working something around her mouth, though there’s nothing there. It’s a kind of nervous tic. Imagine if Izzy told her she’d seen Gabriel just the previous night. What would her grandmother say?

  ‘I miss Mum today,’ Izzy says, instead.

  Immediately, her grandmother’s eyes swivel towards her. ‘Always,’ she says. It’s as if talking about Alex manages to reach parts of her that normal words can’t.

  ‘I keep thinking back to that time, lately,’ Izzy says, sitting down opposite her grandmother.

  Her grandmother shrugs, a jerking moment. ‘Always,’ she says.

  Izzy nods. It’s almost worse for her grandmother. She can remember it so well. Izzy shouldn’t try to get her to talk about it, to try and elicit information from her. She should leave her in peace. She stares at her grandmother’s hand on the arm of the chair. The skin is almost translucent, stained with age spots. For just a moment, Izzy wishes she was here with a baby. A daughter who’d have fat, plump hands that would be held by those slim, wrinkled hands of her grandmother, crossing the generations.

  She glances outside. Already the grass is taking on a parched, yellow quality. She craves gloom, today. Give her rain and drizzle.

  The winter after her mother was murd
ered was the rainiest on record. The bottoms of Izzy’s jeans were constantly soaking and they hung wet around her ankles. Whenever she remembers that time, she gets phantom cold ankles.

  She had been living with her grandparents for eight weeks, in the bedroom in the loft where the relentless rain against the skylight kept her up. Her father was in custody in Newport.

  They were off one morning to the Shanklin esplanade, to walk along the coast. They were keen, her mother’s parents, on maintaining normality. They talked about it in hushed tones on the landing. The benefits of routine. Fish and oven chips on Friday nights, Sunday roasts. A shared pot of tea after school, even though Izzy hated the tannin taste of their teapot; it tasted like old cupboards and reminded her of caravan holidays. She took it like medicine, the milk jug dribbling on to the floral tea tray. Really, she wanted the things she had always liked. The things she still drinks now. Cheap supermarket lemonade. Banana milkshakes. Instant coffee, weak, with lots of milk and sugar.

  Her grandfather was hunched over the steering wheel. He had on glasses which darkened as the sun came out. She couldn’t see his eyes behind them. She lived with them now, had lived with them for months, and it struck her, in the back of the Lada Samara car, that she had no idea what he had done for a living. Who was this man in the driver’s seat?

  ‘About the trial,’ he said. ‘Will you testify?’

  ‘Yes,’ Izzy said. ‘They’ll want me to, won’t they?’

  ‘I think it would be helpful,’ he said, his brown eyes briefly meeting hers in the mirror. ‘Especially if you can recall any instances of … temper. That sort of thing.’ He indicated left, and that was the only sound in the car.

  ‘Right,’ Izzy said.

  She had been talking about giving evidence for the defence. To give him a fair trial.

  That was how it had been, she recalls, as she stands to leave her grandmother’s care home, after staying a cursory half-hour. They never argued that her father was guilty. It simply was so, just like the nuts and bolts of their weekly routines. Sponge pudding followed roast beef. Your father murdered your mother.

  17

  At 10.45 a.m., Izzy is parked in her father’s defence solicitor’s car park. It’s a run-down building, a sixties office block that reminds her of school, and she watches a flock of seagulls circle the flat roof, eventually landing in a neat row on a telecoms mast. She waits patiently outside, the car in neutral, the air con on. She has always been good at waiting. She is logical, persistent. She will experiment with different opening hours at the restaurant, different dishes, different special offers. And then she will watch and wait, seeing which works.

  A receptionist tells her to sit on the sofa and wait. Izzy’s in summer wear, a skirt, and her thighs stick to the leather. She wonders what she will ask Matt, but he arrives in the foyer before she has really begun to gather her thoughts.

  He must now be in his mid-forties, but has hardly aged in that time. He is still tall, athletic. Tanned. More expensive looking, somehow, than before. A well-cut suit. A nice watch.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Gainsborough,’ he’s saying, as he strides into the room. ‘I know you’re booked in as a new enquiry but I don’t know –’ He stops talking. He stares at her, standing still. A loaded pause, like the cock of a gun, and then she speaks.

  ‘English,’ Izzy says. ‘Isabelle English.’

  She watches him work it out, his lawyer brain turning the cogs. He leads her wordlessly into a meeting room which smells of stale coffee and the fetid aroma flowers take on when they’re past their best.

  He says nothing as she sits down, but his expression is kind. He crosses his legs at the thighs, a strangely female and agile mannerism, and jiggles his foot as it dangles in the air. He has on black shiny shoes and pale blue socks.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asks.

  ‘I wonder if there is any way,’ Izzy says, knotting her hands together, ‘that you can discuss my father’s case with me. Gabriel English.’

  ‘I know who your father is …’ Matt says softly. ‘You look just like her.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss his case. I’m sorry, if I had known who you were …’

  Izzy feels disappointment drop in her chest. Of course not. Confidentiality, integrity, privacy. Her father’s right to tell his lawyer his most well-kept secrets.

  ‘Not even now he’s been convicted and he’s out?’ she tries.

  ‘Client confidentiality lasts for life,’ Matt says. He offers her a kind of smiling apology. ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘I just … I’m pretty confused by some things.’

  ‘I know. I remember every aspect of your father’s case. I worked with him for several months. And then I kept tabs on every subsequent development.’

  ‘Did you –’ Izzy stops herself.

  But Matt already knows what she has asked. ‘I don’t think he should have been convicted,’ he says carefully. ‘I worked very hard to ensure he wasn’t. I hardly slept, during those early months of 2000. I had a newborn. It was one of the very hardest cases of my career. Of my life.’

  ‘If he had told you anything …’ Izzy says.

  Matt says nothing, his cool lawyer’s gaze appraising her. He is keeping his powder dry, saying nothing. Waiting.

  ‘… could you tell me?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘If he had told you he was guilty.’

  Matt makes a sudden movement, scooting his chair backwards slightly, raising his palms to her. ‘A common misconception,’ he says. He leans back towards her, elbows resting on his knees. ‘If a client confesses their guilt to me, I would have to stop defending them if they intended to lie in court. All lawyers would.’

  ‘I’ve been looking at the evidence. There are some things which don’t add up.’

  ‘I know,’ Matt says. ‘He should not have been convicted. Much of the evidence against him was circumstantial.’

  ‘Is that to say you think he’s innocent?’

  Matt holds her gaze, saying nothing. Looking like he wants to say something, but not saying it. ‘What doesn’t add up?’ he asks eventually.

  ‘Why would he have reported her missing? And why would he have put her … where he did?’

  ‘I agree.’ Matt leaves a beat before speaking again. ‘We never found his alibi.’

  ‘No,’ Izzy says. ‘I know.’ She hesitates, then asks, ‘Do you believe them? Your clients who say this?’

  Matt purses his lips, showing her those dimples. ‘Some of them.’

  ‘He tells me they were in debt.’

  Matt looks at her in surprise. ‘Yes. From setting up the restaurant.’

  ‘I’m looking into it. Into the case against him. And what he says.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes. I own Alexandra’s now.’

  ‘Is it the same company?’ he says, unfolding his long legs and recrossing them the other way around.

  ‘Yes. Alexandra’s Restaurant Limited.’

  ‘In that case, I can help you there,’ he says. ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘But …’ she asks the question before she can help herself. ‘Should I be alone with him?’

  Matt says nothing again, staring at her. Eventually, he brings a hand to his chin, raises his eyebrows. If it means something, Izzy isn’t sure what. But he’d tell her, if Gabe was dangerous, wouldn’t he?

  Forty-five minutes later, Izzy is handed a box of paperwork from Matt’s ex-colleague and partner of another law firm who acted for her mother’s company. As the owner, they now belong to Izzy. ‘They might not help at all …’ Matt had said, smiling in his apologetic way, ‘but sometimes it’s nice to feel you’re looking at the primary materials.’

  She places the box on the passenger seat in the car park outside the law firm and starts to sift through it, unable to resist.

  The restaurant’s balance sheets are filed together, in date order, this time. The appointment of her mother as director an
d shareholder. The company accounts. A few pages later, a letter:

  6 September 1999

  Dear Alexandra

  Alexandra’s Limited – Dismissal

  I am pleased to confirm that Daniel Godfrey has now been removed from the payroll.

  Kind regards

  Adams & Co Solicitors

  She fingers the letter. Izzy tries to think. Daniel was a waiter in his late thirties who wanted to be an actor. Her mother had always got on well with him. They’d had a shared joke about how much he hated working lunchtimes, that he got up late. ‘Alright, alright,’ she would sometimes say, ‘you can work the evening.’

  Dismissal, the letter’s subject says. How could this be? And why Daniel? A curly-haired, out-of-work actor. Totally benign, as far as Izzy remembers.

  In all of Izzy’s research into her mother’s running of the business, she had never once let somebody go. Not even the waitress who called in sick thirty-five times in six months. Her mother had paid her sick pay generously, Izzy had noticed the other night while looking at the statements in the loft. Why would she have got rid of Daniel?

  Maybe she was sacking people because of the debt.

  Or maybe she sacked Daniel for some other reason.

  She takes the box home with her. She will look through the rest of it later, out of the heat. It’s the best she’s got. Better than inscrutable Matt, who gave nothing away. At least she can start somewhere now. She can start digging.

  Izzy calls Gabe as she drives to work. Seeing Matt has made her think of alternative explanations. New theories for what might have happened. It’s sanctioned what she wants to do: contact him.

  ‘I’ve seen Matt Richmond today,’ she says when he picks up.

  ‘My lawyer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How is he?’ Gabe says, like they are talking about an old friend.

  ‘Secretive,’ Izzy says, and Gabe laughs so loudly Izzy has to turn the volume down on her hands-free system. He doesn’t seem surprised to hear from her. He seems to take her contact passively, like a stray animal grateful for any scrap at all. ‘Mum sacked Daniel Godfrey in September 1999,’ she says.