And finally, as ever, thanks go to David. I write about love, really, in all its forms, but for you it is the purest.
1
It was a wicked and depraved act, Izzy is thinking as she closes her curtains. That’s what the judge said. She remembers his exact words from seventeen years ago. It was a wicked and depraved act. You wanted Alexandra Harrison to die, and you made sure that she did. Her father was standing in the dock, staring impassively at the judge, his gaze not faltering, his body completely still. He wouldn’t even look across at her. Not as the guilty verdict was read out. Not as he was sentenced to life in prison. And not as he was taken away, either.
It’s been an unusually cold spring. There was snow last weekend, at Easter. She bought Nick an Easter egg from Sainsbury’s and by the time she had brought it in from the car it had a light dusting on the top of its box. It has felt unnatural, somehow, to see the April flowers trying to push up through frosts and snow. She has tried to air the bedroom this evening, but it’s still too cold, and her hands chill as she draws the curtains.
Downstairs, she can hear Nick gathering up their mugs. He always does it right before bed. Always has, for their entire fourteen-year relationship.
Next he will methodically swill them, then up-end them in the dishwasher. She listens for it, an ear cocked. The tap. The chink of the china. The noise of the dishwasher drawer on the runners.
A tree seems to shift in the darkness outside their bedroom window. Izzy is used to the palm trees, but Nick couldn’t believe it when he first moved across. ‘It’s not that south,’ he kept saying. Izzy had shrugged. The Isle of Wight was special; everybody knew that. It was new to Nick, but she’d grown up here.
‘It’s tomorrow,’ she says to Nick, still standing by the window, when he arrives upstairs. She likes to confront things in this way, head on, though it embarrasses Nick. Gentle, dithering Nick, her cousin Chris once called him.
‘I know,’ he says, his tone tentative. Neither of them has mentioned it this evening until now. What is there to say? Besides, Nick will only list each eventuality, and what they should do about it. Izzy would rather see what happens. In some ways, the worst has already happened.
‘I can’t believe he’s out tomorrow,’ she says anyway, unable to stop herself. She lets the curtain fall. She wonders again what her father will do – where he’ll go – but she stops the thought before it can really begin.
Nick is looking at her from across the bedroom. She had always said she wanted a bedroom like a hotel room and, after a weekend away for her thirtieth, four years ago, she arrived home to a different bedroom, as though she had walked into the wrong house. A high bed with a dark suede headboard, six duck-feather pillows piled up. Aubergine-coloured walls, a deep carpet. Everything. He’d done it all for her. He’d bought copper lamps from HomeSense and scented pillow spray and a leather ottoman that he placed at the bottom of the bed.
She looks back at her husband. He is tall and pale, with dark hair and freckles. She thinks she sees pity cross his features as he hesitates, but she isn’t sure in the dim lamplight. He doesn’t reassure her. Doesn’t ask her how she’s feeling. She no longer expects him to, not after so many years. It is enough that he comes and stands next to her and pulls the curtain properly shut. He’s been at work, at the police station, and smells of stale coffee and biscuits.
‘You’ll tell me, if you hear anything,’ she says to him. They ought to be practical, at least, and Nick will hear before she does. If her father does anything. If he causes any … trouble.
‘Yes,’ he replies softly, still looking at her. ‘And you me.’
She squeezes past him to go downstairs. She could step into his arms. They would tighten around her, and keep her safe, but she won’t let them, not right now. She might never leave his arms, and life goes on. It must go on.
She unlocks the front door and drags the bin across the back alleyway. It’s Sunday, bin night. They live on the end of a set of four houses, isolated in Luccomb, only three miles from where Izzy grew up. The row of seventeenth-century cottages are set back from the road, and share a cobbled access way. Bin night went from friendly nods to protracted chats to something more formal, for Izzy’s neighbours. A way to welcome the week, William said, when he rang her doorbell to ask her to join their barbecue one night. Nick was working, and she went alone. She met Thea and her dog Daniel, and now they speak every day.
She hears them now as she reaches her bin. They’re laughing about something, a burst of noise in the quiet night. She nods to them as she wheels it past. They’re in scarves, hats and gloves, exasperated with the cold spring, but outside anyway.
‘Happy Sunday,’ Thea says to her. Her cheeks are red with the cold, grey-streaked hair poking out from underneath a hat.
‘And you,’ Izzy says with a smile.
‘Did you decide on the paint?’
‘No – I’ve narrowed it to four,’ Izzy answers. Last weekend they’d spread out ten Farrow & Ball samples on her kitchen table. ‘Pavilion Grey will be too dark in here,’ Thea had said, and Izzy had instantly discarded it.
She can’t stay and speak, not this week. Not today. She’ll only tell Thea everything. She continues to wheel the bin by the group quietly and leaves it at the end of the path with theirs. She pauses again, in the chilly night, listening to them.
‘June – June, she’ll be home,’ Thea is saying. ‘She’s going to some Californian festival over Easter instead of revising.’
Imagine, just imagine. Izzy closes her eyes just briefly and stands shivering in the cold. It was warm, the April her father was convicted. ‘It’s a sweat box already,’ she heard one of the prison van drivers say outside the courtroom as they led him away wearing a suit and handcuffs. She didn’t try to speak to him.
When Izzy walks back to her house, Thea has turned to their other neighbour, William. He is holding a cup of tea and the vapour steams up his glasses as he sips. ‘Anyway, she’s graduating in three months and – not a clue,’ Thea is saying.
William nods, his mouth turning down. ‘Neil’s the same.’
‘So she’ll be back here, I expect, at least for a few years.’ Thea’s smiling, her eyes crinkling, looking upwards at the sky as she thinks of her daughter coming home. ‘I never knew what I wanted to do, either,’ she adds. ‘We can work it out. And in the meantime, she’s the best company. We’re both stupid at going to bed. We stay up together, buying rubbish on the internet.’
Izzy averts her eyes as she walks past. When she reaches the back door, her hand lingers on the doorknob. She takes a deep breath, and allows herself to imagine her own mother. Murdered by her father, when Izzy was just seventeen.
After a few seconds, she goes inside. She locks the door, then checks it, just to be sure.
THE BEGINNING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Published in Penguin Books 2018
Copyright © Gillian McAllister, 2018
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Cover images: © Getty Images and © Arcangel Images
ISBN: 978-1-405-93467-1
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No Further Questions Page 31
