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 murdered 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.