21

‘I had forgotten how much you had started to row,’ she says nervously now to Gabe.

He produces a pack of cards and starts shuffling them aimlessly. ‘We played so many card games inside,’ he says, nodding to them. ‘Great way to pass the time.’

‘You preferred to play sport at home. Tennis. Badminton.’

‘I know. I have come around to the sedentary life,’ he says. He starts dealing. ‘Here, I’ll teach you.’

‘I had thought you were happy,’ Izzy says, steadfastly leading him to what she wants to discuss.

‘We were.’

‘But these rows, they’re making me remember all sorts of stuff … I wish they weren’t.’

He shrugs at that, saying nothing. He has dealt them two cards each. ‘Pontoon?’ he says. They only ever played cards on holiday. The tap, tap, tap of rain on French campsites as they played on the wooden decking, sheltered under the porch.

He doesn’t mention the rows with her mother again, and she doesn’t press. But, as she’s leaving, she produces the receipt, scrunched up in her handbag. ‘I found this,’ she says. ‘I was thinking about what you said, that Mum threw a glass at you … about her temper.’

Gabe takes the receipt, turning it over in his hands. He studies the handwriting, then looks back up at her. ‘Yes, she wrote me this,’ he says softly.

Izzy swallows. Her mother’s and father’s handwriting was similar, but not quite the same, and this is his. He’s lying to her.

She leaves quickly, looking over her shoulder as she does so. She’s a fool. She won’t be a fool again. She won’t. She’ll go home and ignore him, from now on.

As she stops in traffic, she sees two men standing in the doorway of a shut-up tourist shop, yet to open for the season. They’re performing a transaction of some kind, money in exchange for a small parcel, and Izzy looks away, away from the seedy underbelly of the island that Nick so often refers to.

And then she thinks again of the receipt, her father’s lies about the handwriting. She thinks, too, of the wardrobe he claimed her mother bought. But another memory pops into her mind. Him lifting it over the threshold of the house on a borrowed trolley. No. Can that be true? She can picture it perfectly, the curled ornate edges, the wrought-iron handles. She is sure he was wheeling it in, ready to present it to her mother.

And her mother had said ‘no, don’t’ on the phone to her father. It was missing from Gabe’s account, but Izzy was sure she had heard it. She remembers so clearly because she had a witness. They had exchanged a glance. He was somebody she trusted, somebody she had loved very much, who was with her, alone, for the very first time, who heard it too. He was someone who later stopped loving her.

What’s the truth? The discrepancies between her and Gabe’s accounts and memories of the events leading up to her mother’s death are growing in small but significant ways, like the beginnings of a fault line in the earth itself. His incorrect recall about who had painted the restaurant cellar. The way his arguments with her mother are tweaked in his favour. It might be misremembering, but it serves Gabe. It always advantages him. It’s hard not to be suspicious.

She will go home and, soon, she will read about it, she decides. Properly. Swallow the nausea and read the full accounts of his trial online. The evidence. It is not only that she wants to exonerate him, it is that she wants to free herself of that past.

Of his temper, and what might live within her.

Izzy opens her laptop first thing the next day, as soon as Nick has left for work. He had kissed her goodbye, an unusually full, warm kiss that reminded her of the weekend they met, all that time spent in his tent, laughing at this clever, steady man who’d suddenly become the centre of her life.

She forgets the kiss as she opens Facebook. Somebody has given Alexandra’s a five-star review. Despite its morbid roots … the review begins, and she clicks off it. She sets her coffee down on the kitchen table.

Gabriel is easy to find on the internet. The Post ran a full feature in 1999 – GABRIEL ENGLISH: ARTIST AND KILLER. And she’s read The Island Echo’s story before – RESTAURANT OWNER WIFE MURDERED BY HUSBAND, SURVIVING DAUGHTER TO TESTIFY. Today, she wants something more. She is looking for something outside of herself and her memories. Her own recollections are tangled and incoherent, muddied by the lens through which she views them. She is a melting pot of childhood memories, her grandparents’ views, press headlines next to normal family photographs deemed sinister with hindsight … She cannot remember what is real.

She is looking for the daily coverage of the trial. All of the evidence, all of the conjecture, all of the arguments. The professionals’ views, that is what she wants. Not opinions. But facts. If she reads enough of them, perhaps she can begin to form her own opinion, like taking a handful of different ingredients and making a cake. She can’t believe she is here, that she actively wants to read about the things she has avoided for so long.

She types Gabriel English into the British Newspaper Archive. It is somehow removed from her father’s name, in the way a celebrity’s may be. Gabriel English is a notorious killer, the subject of tabloid spreads and true-crime documentaries. But her father – her living, breathing, soft-bodied father – is somebody who used to like to lick his finger and pick up the tiny splinters of crisps left at the bottom of the bag, somebody who believed in fresh air and long runs, somebody who took seriously the thoughts running through Izzy’s mind, and listened to them.

She scrolls down to 1999 in the local press section. The stories begin there, running into 2000, a new one at least every week until the trial was over, then her father’s appeal failed and the press moved on. She looks at the most recent articles.

Notorious wife-killer Gabriel English’s daughter reopens restaurant in mother’s name.

Alexandra’s opening – Izzy English – her mother’s image.

Izzy remembers the night she opened the restaurant. She was just twenty-one. The money had come from her grandparents, though everybody had assumed otherwise. When you are beset by tragedy, everybody assumes that at least you get a pot of money. Life insurance payouts. Compensation. But she didn’t: there was nothing.

She had wanted to open the restaurant without ceremony. Switch the lights on and open the doors one night and see who came by. But her business head had taken over: she needed the press on side. And, of course, they came because of who she was. She avoided the questions, the awkward enquiries, but later that night, when she’d had a couple of flutes of what everybody thought was champagne but was actually Lambrini, somebody referenced her history. She was standing near to the bar, taking it all in, when a man with a DSLR camera slung around his neck came up to her and said, very simply, ‘What is it like?’ His eyes were round and staring as she met them and she saw in them not a journalistic curiosity but a human one. She was other. She didn’t answer him, just picked up her glass and moved along the bar, but she hadn’t forgotten the question. She could never answer it. It would take all year.

After everybody had left, she ran her palm along the bar. She knew she didn’t feel how she ought to. There wasn’t pride, or accomplishment, or even happiness, really. Instead, she felt the familiar feeling of displacement. I’m not supposed to be here. Her mother dead, her father incarcerated, and running a restaurant by herself. It’s not where she wanted to be. And so, for two minutes, she let herself transform. The bar became a barre. She assembled her feet into first position and did a few experimental pliés. But she couldn’t continue. She was choked up. Her body was stiff, her memories brittle. She couldn’t access her self: her old self. The one who had danced so freely. Before.

She scrolls now to the articles written during her father’s trial.

Missing Alexandra English’s body found – husband arrested at scene.

Alexandra English: cause of death confirmed.

Alexandra English made phone call plea moments before death.

Izzy feels sick, and clicks off the browser and back to Facebook. It blinks with a new message. Alice Reid has written back.

Hi Izzy, and thanks for writing to me.

I do remember you and your father but I’m afraid I can only remember what I said at the trial. I dropped your mother off at about quarter to midnight. She paid me in cash, got out of the taxi, and in the rear-view mirror I saw her enter the house.

I hope this helps you, Izzy, to perhaps get some peace. I’d rather move on, myself, and enjoy life. And so I’d ask that you don’t write again.

Izzy reads her words over and over. In the rear-view mirror I saw her enter the house. As she had told the court, she guesses. But could she be sure? In Izzy’s and Gabe’s recollections there are inconsistencies. Things presumed. How many taxi journeys did Alice make every day? Did she always see her clients enter their destination, or did she just presume – imagine it, construct it around what she expected? What if Izzy went there? Parked up outside? Saw what a taxi driver could see?

‘She didn’t know,’ her grandmother had said at home one night during the trial, to her grandfather, while Izzy sat on the spot on the landing where the pipes crossed and warmed the carpet. ‘She didn’t know she was going home to be murdered.’