51

It is a few days later when a man emerges, in the early summer sunshine in the car park of her restaurant.

It is her father’s best friend, Paul, the man she met nearly six weeks ago in his house, when she was right at the beginning of this mess.

‘He sent you,’ she says to him now as she walks to her car. She ought to be frightened, but isn’t. It is hard to be frightened when faced with a benign relic from her past, as familiar as a duvet cover not seen since the 1980s.

‘Yes,’ Paul says. He spreads his arms wide. They’re tanned, the hairs on them still dark. He removes his sunglasses and looks at her properly. His eyes are a vibrant blue in the sunlight.

‘Why?’

‘To protest his innocence,’ he says. ‘That’s all he ever wants to do.’

Izzy looks down at her shoes, knots forming in her stomach. ‘Don’t you think twice about this stuff? Being sent to defend a murderer to me?’

‘No.’

‘I’m his daughter,’ she says, looking up at him. ‘But I want to move on. I’ve lived with it for so long.’

She doesn’t tell him of the threats she’s been receiving. She doesn’t tell him of the fear she has felt every night for weeks as she locks up the restaurant, as she walks alone to the bank, as she locks her car on their drive. She doesn’t tell him that, for the first time in her life, she just can’t take the risk. That, even if he is innocent, it almost doesn’t matter to her because she never wants to feel as threatened and pursued and confused as she has for the past six weeks. She doesn’t bother to say any of it. She shouldn’t need to.

‘Okay. I just need to tell you one thing,’ he says. ‘Then I’ll leave.’

‘Why would you do him a favour?’

‘Because of Megan,’ he says. Paul’s daughter, born much later than Izzy. She can only be twenty or so now. Izzy hardly remembers her. Little details spring to mind: a brown-haired tomboy. She wore trainers with bright blue laces.

‘Right,’ she says faintly in the car park.

A cloud of mosquitoes blooms, just to the left of Paul, gathering and then dispersing in the evening air, coming from nowhere, disappearing to nothing.

‘I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about our chat. And all the things that made me think your dad was innocent. I remembered another thing.’

Izzy shrugs, saying nothing.

‘He called me when he was first arrested,’ Paul says. ‘So he got allocated the duty solicitor. He was naive, I guess. They let him have his call and … it was me.’

‘Right,’ she says.

Paul pauses, straightens his shoulders, then breathes in and out. ‘I remember his exact words. I always have. I never told you, because they’re not evidence. He always said to just leave it – to leave you in peace. But they are … something.’

‘To leave me in peace?’ Izzy says quietly.

‘Yes, he never wanted me to contact you. I think he thought you had been through enough, I suppose. That you should be left alone until … he always said to me that he would speak to you when he was out.’

They are like the two contrasting sides of a coin. Tails: the father with the previous conviction, who planned to murder her mother and who covered it up. And heads: the father whose best friend unequivocally believes in him, whose parents stand by him, who waited for the best, most opportune moment to attempt to reconcile with his daughter, who did it gently, compassionately, slowly. They are night and day, these two men.

‘What did he tell you on the call?’

‘I’m getting to it.’

A greenfly lands on her arm and she brushes it away irritably.

Paul crosses his legs at the ankles and reaches a hand out to steady himself on the roof of his red car. The sun is heating the back of Izzy’s neck. She will get burned if she’s not careful. Her mother used to wear factor 50 year-round, and still went pink in the sun.

‘I guess I always believed him because none of the things they were saying were a surprise to me.’

‘What things?’

‘The conviction … the text messages. The temper he sometimes had.’

‘No?’

‘No. I have known him since we were eighteen. He’s always been the same. Reliably wild.’ Paul smiles a nostalgic, private smile. ‘He was the liability on nights out, you know? Always ended up in a shopping trolley. Would threaten to lamp someone at the bar for rudeness.’

‘But then he killed someone.’

Paul inclines his head, like, you might think so.

‘He wasn’t a stranger to lying, too,’ he says. ‘To suit himself. He’d tell me he’d sold paintings for more than he had. Ego, I guess.’

‘So he’s violent and a liar.’

‘No, he’s mildly temperamental. And he’s never lied about anything big. He’s not immoral. He’s just human. And those human traits loom large when you’re accused. I see those pieces of evidence for what they are: props to the prosecution’s case. They weren’t the substance of their case. And we all have something, if brought out in court, that would make us look guilty.’

‘Do we?’

‘I know I do.’ Paul shrugs.

It’s a strange gesture, here in the car park, as they discuss her mother’s murder. Izzy thinks of Nick. What if he were found murdered? He’d been looking into the police file for her. They’d been rowing. What if he’d been killed with a knife that looked like it had come from her kitchen – the bread knife that’s been missing for several years? It could happen. And she would look guilty.

She finds her mind wants her to keep opening this door, to keep probing, so she does. What if she had been accused of something years ago, when the restaurant was first reopened? There’d been that waitress she had to sack, that awful, awkward exchange – ‘I’m just not that happy with your work’ – oh, but what if that waitress had been found somewhere? Would Izzy have been questioned? Definitely.

‘He said she’d been strangled, you know, at the scene. Before he saw her.’

‘Who says?’

‘A cop.’

Paul almost laughs. ‘Why don’t you ask Gabriel?’

She is tired of debating this. Tired of taking the same set of facts and looking at them from this angle and that. Tired of trying to make them fit one version or another. The truth is messy, her father said, and he’s right about that.

‘What did he say in his phone call to you? From the police station?’ Izzy asks again.

‘He said, “Paul. Izzy’s going to think it was me.”’

Izzy says nothing.

‘That was his big fear, his only fear, that you were young and impressionable and that you’d think it was him. He didn’t care about the rest. The conviction. The jail time. It’s only ever been about you.’

Paul is looking at her intently.

She says nothing in reply.

Izzy is serving a customer – late for their eight o’clock reservation – and taking a pashmina and hanging it up when he arrives. A man in his early twenties in a green T-shirt.

‘The safe?’ he says.

‘The safe?’

‘I’m here to unlock the safe,’ he says in a bored tone. ‘You booked me for tonight.’

‘Oh … it’s fine,’ she says, moving away from the bar with him. She appraises him – maybe he’s in his teens, actually – and he stares back at her, unblinking.

‘You paid online. Where is it?’ he says.

Izzy apologizes to the woman she was serving. ‘Downstairs in the basement,’ she says. ‘Behind the wine rack. Door’s over there.’ It is easier to let him do it. ‘Sorry,’ she says, turning back to the woman. ‘This way.’ She shows her to a table, her mind reeling.

Once they’re seated, she heads to the basement. She had better supervise him.

She can’t see what the man in the green T-shirt is doing with his lock pick. He hasn’t checked that she owns the restaurant, or asked her why she needs it doing. It’s not exactly above board, she guesses.

It takes him less than five minutes. Izzy stands awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs, her hands across her body in the cool, musty air; a nice respite from the summer heat.

‘All done,’ the man says neutrally to her.

He leaves up the stairs, not seeming to want her to see him out. She moves towards the safe, repeating his words inside her head and trying to gauge his tone. What’s he found?

She reaches for the little green door that her mother touched a hundred times, and opens it.

And there it is.

The evidence she has been waiting for.