10

The next morning, Izzy is on the BBC news archive website. They began reporting online in 1997, and so what coverage there was of her father’s trial is all there.

Matt Richmond. That was his name. Her father’s solicitor was tall, almost as tall as her father. Bald, with dimples. He’d been in his late twenties at the time, which had privately worried Izzy, but he had an arresting presence. His shaved head and bright blue eyes. She can remember him well. He attended every single day of the trial, even though it was her father’s barrister who was conducting the court proceedings. Matt had been so involved. Passing notes to the barrister. Leaning in close to her father, his head by the dock, listening to instructions as her father gesticulated.

Matt knows more than anybody.

She types his name into Google. Matt Richmond lawyer Isle of Wight.

She slowly dials his number on her phone. 01983 …

‘R and G Solicitors,’ a clipped woman’s voice says.

‘Is Mr Richmond available to speak to?’

The woman pauses, then sighs. Izzy hears clacking – nails typing on a keyboard, maybe.

‘Not today, I’m afraid. He’s in an all-day meeting. Could I arrange a call back?’

‘Could I come to see him?’

‘What is it regarding?’

‘A past case he worked on.’

‘And who are you?’

‘I’m … I’m a witness, and I want to clarify something with him.’

‘Mr Richmond isn’t usually … what is it you want to know? I’ll need to inform you of his hourly rates.’

‘What are they?’

‘Three hundred pounds per hour, plus VAT.’

Izzy swallows. How did her father afford that? ‘He worked on my father’s defence case.’

‘And who is your father?’

Izzy closes her eyes. Is there any way she can’t say? ‘I … I just want to talk about the evidence.’

‘I see,’ the woman says, and Izzy thinks she detects a little sympathy behind her clipped tones. ‘I’m sorry, but Mr Richmond does not routinely discuss cases with witnesses. Especially after the event.’

‘I just wanted to find out something about my father’s defence.’

‘I’m sorry. Have you tried contacting witness support?’

‘I just want to … to talk to the person who defended him.’

The woman pauses. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, Ms …’

‘Gainsborough,’ Izzy says, using her married name. She always does in these circumstances, to avoid the speculation. ‘Please,’ she adds. ‘I wouldn’t usually ring and beg but … please.’

There’s another pause. Five seconds, ten. Typing.

‘Come in next Thursday. Eleven o’clock.’

Izzy skips the lunchtime service. She’ll tell anybody who asks that she had a doctor’s appointment.

Once she’s made the decision to look into her father’s case, the rest comes easily.

The loft hatch sticks as she tries to prod it open. In the end, she gets a chair and balances on it, but she still isn’t tall enough. Eventually, she unearths a pair of pointe shoes that she keeps out for exactly this sort of situation – reaching things on high shelves, changing light bulbs – and puts them on. She rises up through demi-pointe, feeling the muscles of her feet contract. She stands on the ends of her toes in the shoes, the pose as natural and as easy to her as sitting on the sofa, and she is reminded of how strong her arms are, how good her balance is. She is grateful for her body that keeps these skills hidden, waiting patiently like an understudy until she calls upon them. She reaches the hatch easily, pulls the ladder down, takes the shoes off, and ascends the steps. They’re covered with a layer of dust in which her bare feet leave messy impressions.

The attic is stuffy and too hot in the warm spring, the air close, like a sauna or a nightclub. The ancient beams of their cottage run across the roof, covered in cobwebs. Nick lined the boxes up against the far wall. He never said anything about them. He accepted her past in typical Nick style: with a shrug. It was easier not to have the conversation about their contents, so he simply didn’t. No, that’s not fair, she corrects herself: he accepts her for who she is. Doesn’t he? She thinks of the set of his shoulders from the other night. No. He does. He does accept her. He answers all her questions about her father. Nobody else would do that.

She had been at the Isle of Wight festival for the first time, with friends, when they met. She had imagined sunsets and late-night chats around fires. A festival full of crap food. Sausage rolls and Pepsi Max cans and pizzas: heaven. She went to sleep at two o’clock in the morning, spread out in her borrowed single-person tent, listening to the relaxing sound of rain on nylon, and woke up at five with wet feet: the tent had flooded. She unzipped it, and tried to empty some of the puddled water out. A tall, pale, dark-haired man was sitting on the grass outside, nursing a coffee, a cynical expression on his face. The sky was oyster pink behind him.

‘Rained on?’ he asked, gesturing to her tent.

‘Flooded,’ she said irritably.

‘Sleep in mine, if you want. It’s not comfortable, but it is dry.’ He gestured to two tents down. His purple tent was open, and inside she could see an invitingly warm, dry sleeping bag, half unzipped. A proper pillow. A little radio propped against a Tupperware pot. So ordered in the chaos of the festival.

‘Do you really not mind?’

‘Nope,’ he said easily.

She didn’t sleep in her tent for the rest of the festival. Nick was a great host. He brought her a proper coffee every morning, brown cardboard cup, white lid, plenty of packets of sugar. They’d slept side by side, the sleeping bag opened up to cover them like a duvet. His body was warm next to hers. She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at his sleeping profile in the night, and felt that feeling: a significant person has just walked on to the stage of my life. She was fascinated by him. By the way he had not a single contact in his phone because he knew everybody’s phone number by heart – he has a great memory – by the snacks he’d brought – cheese in a cool bag, crackers – and by the way he stood and watched the bands play, not dancing, just nodding along, on the fringes of life somewhat, an observer, just like Izzy.

Within forty-eight hours, she had told him about her father, in the almost total darkness of his tent, their hands entwined, the shipping forecast on low – ‘I like to give my mind something to focus on,’ he’d explained – and he’d shrugged. ‘We all have our crosses to bear,’ he’d said, and she was grateful for that, though she didn’t admit it. She’d told him the way she told everyone else: factually, quickly, and then she’d moved on. He’d told her a few work stories, and that had convinced her: Nick was used to crime and darkness. To him, she was normal. And that was wonderful.

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.