47

Izzy’s eyes feel black the next morning. Her father has texted her – of course he has – but she has ignored it. Nick hasn’t gone to work. It must be serious, she thinks, as she opens the door to the back garden from their kitchen.

She will have to tell him about the newspaper article and the text. She knows she will. It’s just a matter of when. She wants to drip-feed it, as though she can control his judgement that way. He was sympathetic, last night, but he also abhors people who make silly mistakes.

She stands outside and looks at the sky. The exact same blue as yesterday, when her father had cried by the side of the road. She thinks of his tears, of his reliance on her, of his fake, gilded memories, fabricated over eighteen years. Perhaps he believes them himself, like a truly insane person. He’s lived with his lies for so long he has become them.

Nick comes up behind her. His hair is messy, his belt undone. She loves all of his guises. When his hair is neat and his ears look bigger and his face leaner. And now, when his hair is messy and he looks like a hipster. That’s what Izzy likes most about the terrain of a long relationship; all the forms she sees her husband take.

‘Look,’ she says. She clears her throat self-consciously. ‘The other day I received a newspaper article. I don’t know … I didn’t tell you … it was about Dad. And there’s been a text.’

‘What was it?’ Nick says, releasing her.

She misses the warmth of his body, feeling suddenly cold in the sun.

‘It was about the crime, and stuff.’

‘Right.’

‘But where my mum’s name was written had been crossed out – and mine was written, instead,’ she says softly.

Nick says nothing. The only way she can tell he has heard is because his nostrils flare, his upper body tenses, as if ready to fight.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Can I see them? What did the text say?’

‘Yes.’

She goes inside and fetches her phone and the newspaper cutting from her handbag.

‘I see,’ he says, when she passes them to him. He looks directly at her, the weak sunlight lightening his dark eyes to a lion-like gold. ‘Did you tell Gabriel about these?’

She drops her head. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes,’ she whispers. ‘That’s why he suggested being alone more … because somebody knew. Somebody knew we were trying to solve it.’

Nick closes his eyes. ‘Izzy,’ he says softly.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’

‘Okay,’ he says, exhaling.

‘You think he’s sent them.’

He pauses, looking thoughtfully up into the sun. Running that mind of his over the facts. ‘Two things spring to mind.’

‘What?’

Nick’s eyelids flutter. ‘Somebody who knows he’s guilty could be warning you.’

‘But … who?’ Izzy says, her mind racing.

‘Often an inmate.’

‘Oh.’

‘Someone who spent so many years with him … they sometimes write to family members. Or get someone on the outside to write, to warn them.’

‘But they wouldn’t know he’d seen me.’

‘Unless he told them.’

‘Oh. What’s the other explanation?’

‘Well, sometimes people with form like Gabriel … well, they might play games.’

‘What games?’

‘Cat and mouse,’ Nick says quietly.

She turns to him. His slender hand is raised to his forehead, shielding the sun from his eyes. ‘It’s, you know. Pretty typical.’

‘Of what?’

He looks directly at her now, removing his hand and placing it back on his hip. ‘Abuse.’

He says it factually, which she’s grateful for, though she allows her mind, for just a moment, to imagine another Izzy, here with him. Izzy who complains about her parents interfering in her life. Who is utterly different to this Izzy. Never needy, never shameful, never jealous. The Izzy to whom this didn’t happen.

‘He wouldn’t do that,’ she says.

They’d ridden everywhere on their bikes the summer before her mother had died. Izzy’s ballet teacher had suggested some extra cardio, and Gabe had obliged. He’d bought her a bike he’d seen advertised for sale in the paper, from a blue-green shed a few streets down from them. He should have been working, she thinks now, looking back, but she didn’t care then. Not at all. They had cycled to the coast. Her thighs had burned, but they had reached the clifftop. They could see Portsmouth in the distance. It had been worth it, especially when they had cycled down again. They hadn’t gone fast. Her father had led her down a slow, winding path, past a patch of bluebells so vivid they seemed to move and shimmer. The sun on her bare arms. The wind in her lungs. Her hair trailing out behind her. She had felt as happy as it was possible to feel, as though a fizzing tablet of pleasure had been dropped down her throat and into her stomach.

She blinks, looking up at Nick now. She can’t explain that, especially not to him.

‘He wouldn’t do that,’ she says again, but she knows her argument makes no sense, is illogical. He would murder, but he wouldn’t threaten her. Sure, Nick would say.

Abuse, she tells herself. Violence. Violence against women: against vulnerable women. Killings, strangulations, disappearances, lies, mind games. That is who her father is.

‘Are you going to tell work?’ she says.

He looks at her, brows lowered, his mouth forming a thoughtful pout. ‘Maybe,’ he says easily, but doesn’t elaborate.

She wonders what would happen if the police needed to look into her father. His licence conditions. His past. They would get the file, surely. They would see it had been retrieved.

‘I’ll sort it,’ Nick says, catching her worried expression.

‘But won’t th –’

‘Leave it with me. I can speak to his probation officer.’

‘Okay,’ she whispers.

‘Then if he’s done anything … he’ll be back to prison for life. Proper.’

She thinks of her father’s eight cans of beans. Single key to his single room. His single pink bed. Of their shared memories, their shared grief. The way they understood each other. She is abandoning him to the abyss; to loneliness, forever.

No. Stop it. He is a murderer. He is sending things to her house, designed to scare her. This sympathy, it is misguided: a poison.