33

PROSECUTOR: Who had the key to that location?

GABRIEL ENGLISH: Me.

PROSECUTOR: How many keys were there?

GABRIEL ENGLISH: Just mine. One.

PROSECUTOR: One?

GABRIEL ENGLISH: Yes.

PROSECUTOR: Had you checked it when your wife had been missing for two days?

GABRIEL ENGLISH: No.

PROSECUTOR: So you had a sheltered place where somebody could be.

GABRIEL ENGLISH: Yes.

PROSECUTOR: And you decided not to check it at all during the time your wife was missing until the police prompted you to do so on the second day?

GABRIEL ENGLISH: No. Because I … I knew she wouldn’t be there. She never went there. I was looking. I was looking for her.

Wednesday 3 November 1999: two days after Alex’s murder

Gabe

They – this is how I had come to think of them, the police – were checking my shipping container in the morning, and so I accompanied them with the key. We walked. It was less than ten minutes from home, you probably remember.

My relationship with them had become strained, like a couple not yet ready to admit it was heading for divorce. Still sharing a bed, still watching television. Uneasy silences and small talk while each assessed the other.

What do I remember about that morning? I remember the way the light hit the pale sides of the container, that honeyed autumnal light even at nine o’clock in the morning. And I remember the way I felt, the way I’d felt for days, like I was full of anxious poison.

They let me unlock the two doors at the back. The sun blinded me as I did so, and I fumbled with the key. Earlier, they had asked me who else had access to the container, and I’d told them nobody. Not even the man I rented it off. He had given me the only set; he’d joked he was ‘a good sport that way’.

The container opened up like a pair of French doors, two together. It smelt of art. That’s the only way I can describe my container. Art, and home.

Do you know how much your mother hated that container? Even before we were in debt, she hated it. Treated it like a competitor, a rival. When I packed up my art bag to go there in the evenings (I was always transporting oils around, because I was never not painting) she’d raise her eyebrows, but say nothing.

But sometimes she liked it. When it suited her, I guess. If I left my container late, she liked me to give her lifts home from the restaurant. So much so that I’d started surprising her. Turning up when she didn’t expect it. She would always be delighted. She’d turn the heat up, take her shoes off, curl her legs up on the passenger seat – no seat belt – and doze. She said it was the only time of day when she wasn’t in charge.

The two police officers – one short, one taller and thickset – stood like sentries as I opened the doors. The container was undisturbed since the last time I had been there. An easel to the left housing a half-finished painting which their eyes roved over. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smells from before. The sweet, Play-Doh smell. That’s the oils themselves, Iz. Then the mellow, doughy smell of the linseed oil I used to mix them with, the paint becoming gluey, forming stiff peaks like your mother’s meringues. And then the acerbic cut of the turpentine I used to wash the brushes with. A kind of citrus mouthwash, that’s how it smelt. All together they were … they were me.

‘This the extent of it?’ one of them said to me as he walked towards the back of the container.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just a little spot to paint and store my things.’

They poked around for a while, lifting things up, removing them.

It was right before we left that I realized it was missing. My hand was on the double doors. I blinked. Looked, then looked again. Where the fuck was it? It must have been at home. It must have been at home.

I didn’t say anything. I was too scared to, Izzy. They were already questioning me closely. That would make it all so much worse.

Later, I told the court I hadn’t noticed. But I had. That’s the truth. It wouldn’t have saved her, anyway, if I had spoken up.

She was already dead.

Izzy

Her father left with them, to go and look in his art shipping container. There was something off about his body language. She knew him well, and she knew what his hunched shoulders meant, what his stiff walk signified, as they left the driveway and turned on to the street.

She knew he didn’t want them to be looking there.

She stared at them as they disappeared from view, her hand against the cool windowpane. He hadn’t glanced back at her, not once.

Pip rang her after that.

‘Any sign?’ he said immediately, his voice soft and comforting down the telephone to her, like being pulled out of a stormy sea and deposited on warm sand.

She removed her palm from the glass and it left a misty mark that slowly faded, leaving just the grainy film of her fingerprints.

‘No,’ she said sadly.

They didn’t find her mother’s body that morning, but they did find one of the clues that would lead them to her killer.

Or rather, they should have. The clue was, as is often the case, in the absence of something. Something that should have been there, but wasn’t. Something belonging to her father, kept in a place only he had access to.