25

‘So you wouldn’t have even picked up her call,’ Gabe says softly.

‘No. That’s what I said, in court.’

‘The papers went to town on that phone call.’

Izzy waves a hand, faking indifference. ‘They like all that stuff. That what could have been stuff.’ She used exactly the same phrase when she told Nick about it. It’s what she says.

‘How often do you think about the call?’

‘Hardly ever,’ she says.

‘Really,’ Gabe says, but it’s not a question: his tone is musing.

Izzy thinks back to that newspaper article: Alexandra English made phone call plea moments before death.

That call. That midnight call, five minutes before she died. Izzy had been in Pip’s bed, oblivious. Had she called as she was being attacked, or beforehand – for a chat, to impart some information? They would never know. All they knew is that she pressed ‘dial’ but that the call was cut off before it could connect.

Izzy sometimes relives the last few moments with Pip, those last few moments before the lights were turned out on her life forever. Their ankles were entwined, afterwards, but nothing else. Their torsos were separate, propped up on his blue pillows, facing each other. It smelt different in Pip’s bed to her own: different washing powder. She loved everything about his annex. His guitar standing steady in the corner. The way they slept on the ground floor, close to the earth, and could hear the rain running down the windows. How surprisingly neat he was: a folded throw at the end of his futon, a little drawer cleared out for her things. It was like their own little flat. Their own world. She felt like she was on holiday. And more than that: she felt like life would follow a different path with him. That the barriers of the island would come down, and she’d be set free.

‘And what were you doing at midnight?’ the prosecution lawyer said to her.

She swallowed, wishing she didn’t have to answer, at just seventeen. ‘I was … with … my boyfriend, I didn’t hear my phone,’ Izzy said. Pip was looking at her in bed at midnight, she guessed. He was always looking at her.

‘And did you have a missed call?’

‘No.’

If a stranger attacked Izzy, who would she call? She sits back in the chair in the evening sunlight: Nick. It would always be Nick, no matter what.

But that night, her mother hadn’t called her husband Gabe. It seemed, to Izzy, to be one of the most damning pieces of evidence against him, though the lawyers brushed it away. They had been rowing a lot, her father’s defence lawyer had said easily, one hand in his pocket. Why would you call someone you’ve rowed with – especially if, perhaps, it’s not immediately obvious you’re in danger?

Her mother chose not to call her father that night. Why? Because her father was standing over her, holding the object he eventually murdered her with?

Or maybe just because her mother had chosen to call Izzy for some reason; last number redialled, or for no reason. They’d never know. Sometimes, on days like this, when she is thinking about it too much, or late at night when her guard is down, the night seeming endless and dark, she thinks she might be able to stretch out, far into the past, and find their phones, those almost-connecting phones, and finally answer.

‘It’s a shame it didn’t ring,’ Izzy says now.

‘A shame.’

She shrugs, irritable, wanting him to stop looking at her. All she can see are the headlines. What if she had been looking at her phone? What if she’d called her mother?

Gabe is watching her closely. She tries to blink away the tears, but she doesn’t quite manage it.

‘It’s okay to be sad about it,’ he says softly.

‘She reached out to me,’ Izzy says, her eyes filling again. She finds a tissue and wipes them. ‘I don’t know if she thought of me as she was dying.’ It’s absurd that she is confiding in him, but she can’t help it. He’s her dad.

‘I knew I’d get you talking,’ Gabe says. ‘Close quarters.’ He gestures to the kitchen.

‘Hmm?’

‘All the other prisoners used to confess to me,’ he says. ‘They’d tell me all sorts. Murders and robberies and money laundering. And then I’d blackmail them with their secrets for extra chocolate.’ He lets a laugh out.

‘You didn’t,’ she says.

‘I did. I did.’ He doesn’t look as though he’s just told her something unsavoury, something inhumane, and Izzy is relieved when he changes the subject. ‘What happened with Pip?’ Gabe says now, knowing when to push, and when to change the subject.

‘It wasn’t very nice.’

‘You always seemed so good together. Quite adult.’

‘I guess so,’ she says, not wanting to get into that, too. ‘But I met Nick, anyway …’

‘What’s he like, this husband of yours?’

‘He’s …’ Izzy thinks. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to describe him as he is. Safe. Steady. Good at facts and figures and at sorting things with a level head. Likes routines. Why? She probes around inside her mind and finds the answer: because she knows Gabe would be surprised to discover she had ended up with such a man. ‘He’s very funny,’ she says, which is the last thing Nick is.

‘Oh, good,’ Gabe says, his face stretching into a smile that makes him look too thin. ‘Funny people take the edge off life. My last cellmate was funny. Nice guy, Keith.’

‘Yes,’ Izzy says, wanting to change the subject again. ‘But the timings of that night. They said she arrived home at just before twelve … and that she was dead by the early hours.’

‘Yes.’

‘But they don’t know if she was killed in the house.’

‘No. Nobody knows exactly where she died.’

‘And the mobile phone masts –’

‘I know.’

‘Your first call to her pinged the Shanklin mast, not Luccombe.’

‘Yes.’

‘Shanklin is the nearest mast to where she was found.’

‘I know that, Iz. But they were inaccurate then. Not like now. There were fewer masts, so the distances varied … I told you.’

‘But if you never left the house – if you were only just outside it, in the garden – it couldn’t have been you.’

Izzy sits for a moment, thinking of that neighbour. Lost somewhere. An unknowingly important witness. He’d clearly never seen Gabe’s story in a newspaper. Had never realized he held the key.

Or … he had moved days before, just like Izzy thought. He couldn’t corroborate Gabe’s alibi, because it was made up. Gabe’s phone pinged the Shanklin mast because he was murdering her mother right where she was found. She meets her father’s eyes as she thinks it.

‘Did your lawyer ever trace the removal van? When it was returned?’

‘Yes. The first of November.’

Izzy sucks her lip in, thinking. Do you return a removal van the day you finish with it, or a couple of days after – once you’d bought new furniture and transported it home, perhaps? She wasn’t sure.

‘He gave the house keys to the agent on the first. The agent gave evidence.’

But giving the key back doesn’t mean that’s when you moved out, Izzy thinks.

‘Izzy,’ Gabe says suddenly, urgently. ‘Forget about David Smith. You were in the restaurant that night.’

‘Yes. I was.’

‘So?’

‘So what?’ Izzy says, staring at him blankly.

‘Who was there? I want every person.’

Izzy gazes at him as she realizes. ‘I see,’ she says. ‘This is why you’re here. Because I have information.’

‘I want to know who killed my wife,’ he says urgently.

Izzy slides her hands off the table, curling into herself, away from him.

‘And yes – you can help.’

‘But you have to get me on side first.’

‘Are you on side?’ he asks.

‘Not really. I don’t know.’

He turns his hands over in a defeated gesture. ‘You know it’s about more than what information you have for me, Izzy. Obviously.’

‘Is it?’

‘Of course.’ He holds her gaze.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Okay. Chris. Tony. Marcus. Hmm. A couple of other waiters. Was one called Gary?’

‘Okay. That’s four names. Anyone else?’

Izzy thinks back. She can remember looking forward to going to Pip’s, and thinking dreamily of him, but nothing else. The shift has blurred into all of the other waitressing shifts she undertook around that time. There is nothing to distinguish it, so it has faded into oblivion. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know.’

‘Tony also mentioned somebody called Babs,’ Izzy says, watching Gabe’s expression closely.

‘That’s my ex-girlfriend,’ he says dismissively. ‘Were there any other men there?’

‘He seemed to indicate something had happened? With Babs?’ Izzy can feel that she is being led away from explanations, towards what her father wants to talk about, but she’s powerless to stop it. Perhaps that is just his way. The way he is, has always been: dominant and full of energy.

‘He heard us row once. Is all. Took exception to it. Butted in, in the name of chivalry, which was actually just stabbing me in the back.’

‘How?’

‘Oh, said men shouldn’t shout at women.’ Gabe jumps at a sound.

She follows his gaze, and sees Nick’s car pulling up in their driveway. He’s early.

‘You have to go,’ she says to Gabe. ‘My husband’s home – and he doesn’t know.’

Stomach acid sloshes around as she stands and gestures to Gabe. ‘You can cut through the back garden,’ she tells him. He can walk down the shared access and out.

Adrenaline floods her body as she imagines Nick realizing that she’s been seeing her father; that he’s here with her, a convicted killer, invited into their home. She swallows. She stands in the kitchen, looking at Gabriel, and watching her husband in his car.

‘Now,’ she says.

He puts his coat on, even though it is warm outside, and leaves without argument.

‘Ah,’ Nick says as he walks in. ‘I wondered if you’d be home already.’

‘Yes,’ she says, her cheeks burning, thinking of Gabriel, walking down their access way just a few feet from them.

He will have to walk home again. Five miles to her. Five miles back.

It’s only once she is in bed, waiting for sleep to come, that the fear joins her, barely knocking on the door of the silent bedroom before letting itself in. That note. That horrible, horrible, personal note. Who could have sent it?

She tries to forget that the last person to hand-deliver a letter to the restaurant was Gabe himself.