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 and 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.

‘The actor,’ Gabe says immediately, with all of the recall of somebody who lives life entirely in the past. ‘When, did you say?’

‘September the sixth, 1999.’

‘Two months before.’

‘Yes. Any idea why?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Anyway, that’s all I found.’

‘Good sleuthing,’ Gabe says. ‘What’s next?’

‘I want to speak to the taxi driver,’ Izzy says. ‘The last person to see Mum alive.’ The words she doesn’t say hang in the air between them: except you, perhaps.

He says nothing, thinking. ‘Alice Reid,’ he says finally. ‘It was Alice Reid.’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘You going to speak to her?’

‘Maybe,’ she says.

‘Are you looking into it? You know, I can think of nobody better than you – to investigate it.’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, remembering her grandparents talking about Alice’s evidence, and the nail it placed in her father’s coffin. And thinking of the box of evidence now in her possession, of the bank statements in the loft. ‘Maybe,’ she says again, more slowly this time, wondering if she’s really going to do this.

‘You’ve no idea,’ he says, ‘how pleased I am that you trust me enough to look into it … that you’re giving me the benefit of the doubt.’

Izzy says nothing to that. What can she say? Sometimes she thinks he’s delusional, manipulative. The police, the State, the CPS used all of their available resources to investigate her mother’s murder. What does he think – that she’ll find something they missed?

Her father tells her he has to go for another interview and she says goodbye while negotiating a roundabout. She doesn’t reach to hang up, and he hasn’t, either. She can still hear him, or somebody, rustling around a room. She hears the crinkle of a carrier bag, maybe, and she hopes he isn’t taking that to a job interview. She hears footsteps and the thump of shoes being moved on to the floor. And then she hears her father’s voice. Speaking. Without knowing she is listening.