9

Izzy sits, the phone still held to her ear. She’s stunned. She had forgotten all about that row that she overheard. She’d only remembered her parents kissing in the kitchen, the way they’d still held hands, sometimes. She’d completely forgotten that row that she recalled now because she heard Gabe’s side of it first.

‘I wasn’t jealous,’ Gabe says quickly.

She has to think of him this way: Gabriel, known as Gabe. He isn’t her father. He isn’t Dad to her. Not at the moment. Not yet.

‘You were. Sometimes. You often said Mum was looking at other men.’

‘That was banter,’ he says easily.

‘But I heard Mum say that night that it would be the last time. And then you told her not to talk back to you. I remember it.’

‘Izzy,’ he says. His tone is as sharp as acid. ‘I’d never say those things. She was the loose cannon, not me. In fact, she once wrote me a letter apologizing for throwing a glass at my head.’

Izzy frowns. She hasn’t imagined it. Has she? Now that she’s pointed it out, she’s unsure whether she’s right. She thought she was. But surely he’d know? She was so young.

‘You didn’t row often, though,’ she says. ‘It was just that one time – right?’

‘Things were strained,’ he says down the phone. ‘About the debt. I thought your mother had her head screwed on better than that. But I hadn’t done it before. You’re mistaken when you say she said that.’

Izzy shakes her head. No. They were happy. She’s sure she’s correct about that. Goosebumps break out over her arms. Suddenly, the phone is too warm against her ear. What if she’s wrong? They were fighting. And it escalated.

‘How often were you arguing?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Gabe says. And, again, his tone is off. Like there is a slowly simmering anger building. But surely she’s imagining it?

‘Look. Let’s talk about something else. It’s been so long since I’ve heard from you. I’ve hardly chatted on the phone at all for years, to anyone,’ Gabe says, changing the subject.

‘No prison phone calls?’

‘It was in the main association area, you know? Two phones between seventy-five men. No privacy.’

‘Wow.’

‘I know. Hard to believe somebody isn’t listening now. I haven’t had a proper, normal conversation in years.’

Izzy closes her eyes as she imagines Gabriel in prison. She hasn’t allowed herself to imagine it, not really. But now she can’t help but ask. ‘Did you talk much in prison?’ she says.

He lets a little air out down the phone to her. ‘There wasn’t anybody I wanted to speak to,’ he says.

‘For eighteen years?’

‘Criminals are criminals, Iz.’

‘They are,’ she says softly, thinking about Pip and how it ended. ‘What happened to the debt?’

‘Midland Bank took the proceeds of the house sale. That’s why you didn’t get it. The business loan was secured against the property.’

‘They’re called HSBC,’ Izzy says, without thinking.

‘Who?’

‘Midland Bank. You know?’

‘Oh.’

She blinks. Of course. Of course he doesn’t know. He hasn’t seen a high street for almost twenty years. It’s a wonder he can remember anything at all.

‘Anyway …’

‘Gabe,’ Izzy says, a thought occurring to her. A suspicious thought about one of his memories.

A momentary pause as he digests how she’s referred to him. ‘Yes?’

‘You said it was you who painted Alexandra’s cellar.’

‘In the restaurant?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it was Tony.’

‘Was it? No, it was … I remember …’

‘Tony did it because you were working on something else. I still look at the poor job he did with the cutting in. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t neat.’ She adds another sentence without thinking, ‘I’ll show you.’

Gabe laughs. ‘Isn’t the mind a funny thing? I was a painter-decorator … I must have just … transported the memory from Tony to me.’

Izzy frowns, saying nothing. There is something unconvincing about his tone.

‘The point of all this is that we were rowing. But with reason, Iz. That’s why I’ve told you. Nobody wanted anyone dead. It was just a marriage under strain, I guess. The things your parents don’t tell you.’

‘I see,’ she says. But she doesn’t. Not really. The more they speak, the more she’s remembering. Rows. Cross words. Perhaps he was trying to portray their strained marriage – the mistakes her mother made – to show himself in a good light. But all it’s done is make him look dangerous. Controlling. She’s got to go. She’s got to get off the phone to this man. To this abuser.

‘My lawyers tried so hard to find my alibi, you know?’ he says suddenly. Out of nowhere.

Izzy stops moving, sitting completely still, her back straight, her body cold. ‘And they couldn’t?’ she says.

‘No. No social media then. But, if only they could’ve. None of it would have happened, hey?’ His tone is light. Deliberately so.

She holds the phone closer to her ear while she runs her fingertips over the letter. The kitchen seems to close around her. She shivers amongst the sterile countertops, the pans on the hooks above the table swinging like hanged men.

He remains on the line for a few seconds more, and she thinks of the words the press used to describe him. Monster. Wife-Killer. Sociopath.

She used to dream of him. He would arrive in her bedroom at her grandparents’ house and kill her. She would wake up, sweat dripping between her breasts, dampening the small of her back, and feel whatever the opposite of relief was. It had been a dream, but it had also happened. Just not to her.

It’s only when Izzy is in the car on her way home from Alexandra’s that she thinks more about his memory of painting the basement. Some of them even believe their own lies, Nick had said. It had been Tony’s work. Her father hadn’t realized she’d known that, but she had. Not to mention the inconsistency between their accounts; the phrase she’s sure she heard her mother say. Was he inventing things, exaggerating the good, playing down the bad? Having painted the cellar for her mother would make him sound … heroic, loving, maybe, he thought. Were all these memories merely stories, inventions? Gabe’s flights of fancy? Or had he really just misremembered?

Izzy drums her fingers on her kitchen table at home, thinking. She has seen Nick think through cases hundreds of times. She’d bought him a shower whiteboard for his birthday, after he’d said he had his best thoughts in the shower. She reads the scrawls he makes on it. Sometimes it’s as specific as someone’s movements to a car garage and back once a week, every Monday at 9.00 p.m. Other times his musings are broader. Talking of opportunity. Motive. Risk/Reward. Alibi.

So what would Nick do?

She stares at the kitchen wall where they have hung a calendar up, finally, five months into the year.

What if she could investigate it herself? To decide whether or not her father’s story of the debt is true, and then maybe – she closes her eyes in hope – to eradicate the doubt?

Say she looked into his case by herself. Into the evidence. She has boxes and boxes of evidence. She doesn’t have to contact him. See him. Be alone with him.

The boxes had passed to Izzy’s grandmother. It was only twelve years ago, when her grandmother moved, and Izzy moved out, that Izzy was finally able to get them. Her grandmother had guarded them, never allowing Izzy access, never discussing with her where they would end up when she moved. ‘For the bin?’ a packer had asked her, pointing to the stack of aged boxes with their mismatched lids. He was wearing light green overalls that looked like scrubs. He had braces, his hair gelled stiff. He couldn’t have been over seventeen. He would have had no idea who Izzy was; who her father was.

‘No, to keep,’ Izzy had said quickly. She couldn’t even explain why she wanted them. Maybe she knew, somehow, that one day she’d end up here.

She’d ask her grandmother, she reasoned. She wasn’t stealing from an old lady: she was just taking what ought to have been hers. ‘Can you do an extra trip?’ she’d said, looking at the packer. He’d shrugged, not caring, and she gave him thirty pounds. That night, the boxes were delivered to the house she was moving into with Chris: every single company document from the time her mother ran the restaurant, all of her parents’ personal files, and every piece of artwork Gabe had ever created.

She did check, later, with her grandmother. She had nodded, her eyes unfocused and glassy in the nursing home she’d moved into. Izzy felt a lurch of guilt. It was strong, but it was outstripped by the urge to keep the boxes of her father’s things. Of the artefacts of her parents’ marriage. And of their life before. A life where the future held sixtieth birthday parties, phone calls returned reluctantly to whichever parent had left her yet another voicemail. Fixed leaks and father-of-the-bride speeches and birthday cards sent lovingly through the post.

It had made sense to move in with Chris when her grandfather died and her grandmother moved into care. Izzy and Chris had found a two-bed they could afford that overlooked both the sea and Alexandra’s in Luccombe.

‘We can even keep an eye on our own workplace,’ Chris had said. He’d been sitting on the sill of the Victorian sash window, his bare feet against the magnolia wall. He pointed. Alexandra’s was just visible, up the hilly street and to the left.

‘How sad,’ Izzy had said in the tone of voice she reserved for talking about Alexandra’s. Perhaps it was contempt. Or maybe just the sardonic way you’d talk about a distant relative you are supposed to love.

‘You’re the boss. Always have to be on duty,’ Chris had said, lifting his arms above his head. He’d said it without judgement or malice. Izzy was his boss, and he her chef, but nobody wanted it to be that way. Chris loved food just as much as her mother had – enthusing about wild garlic and artichokes – and he’d rather run the restaurant. Izzy would … well. Where would she rather be? She gazed at Chris’s legs stretched out in front of him.

‘You’ve got great turn-out,’ she had said, pointing.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Almost flat. You’d have made a good dancer.’

He’d laughed at that. ‘Trust me when I say I wouldn’t.’

Later, they’d ordered their first joint pizza, drunk wine out of mismatched mugs, and Izzy had touched the boxes for the first time, taking them up to their loft while Chris held the ladder, not saying anything.

Later, she moved them to the cottage she’d bought with Nick.

Maybe she could unearth the boxes from the recesses of the cottage’s loft. Start to go through them. Methodically, carefully. Just to be sure. Investigate it herself.

But what else can she do? Is there anyone she could speak to?

She stares at the calendar as she realizes what Nick would do. Of course. Who knows the most about her father’s case?

His lawyer.