52

She picks up the bundle of notes and fingers their papery outsides. They have Edward Elgar on them, the font curly. Old twenties. Unusable now, she guesses.

There are four bundles, clipped neatly together, held firm. She flicks through them, not moving the clips. It must be ten thousand, fifteen, twenty, she guesses. Hidden for all these years in that tiny safe that, she is sure, only her mother knew about. And maybe Tony. Did he know about this cash, sitting there? It’s clearly her mother’s: it’s old money. But why was he trying to move the wine rack?

She focuses instead on the banknotes.

It is evidence. Finally. Not historic previous convictions or an unsupported alibi, but real, tangible evidence. And it is evidence that something else was happening. Something not in keeping with the narrative of the prosecution – or, she supposes, of the defence.

It is new.

She sits there, cross-legged on the bottom step in the basement, and wonders who to tell. Who to trust.

She breathes deeply, her nose in the notes and, amongst the dust and the old papery smell, she thinks she can smell her mother’s perfume.

Izzy decides to tell nobody. She will keep it to herself: she knows she can trust herself.

She avoids Nick, coming home late, going to bed even later. She tells him she’s swamped with annual accounts.

He knows it’s not her year-end, but he doesn’t say anything. She guesses he thinks she’s going through a kind of grief, a second mourning period, and leaves her be. She hears the clink of his knife against their cheese plate in the bedroom, which makes her eyes mist over.

In the restaurant the next day, during the lunchtime service, she takes a blank piece of paper out of her printer and makes notes of what her mother could have been doing.

Money, she writes along the top, then underlines it in red.

Sex.

Fraud.

Selling things.

Favours.

Blackmail.

The list goes on and on. The sordid words run unchecked from her ballpoint pen.

Prostitution.

Assassinations.

They seem to get worse the more she writes, as though she is descending steps into the underworld itself.

She sits back in her chair and stares at the depraved piece of paper, thinking.

If there was money, her mother can’t have been acting alone. Either she was giving somebody the money, or she was receiving it. Basic economics. Supply and demand.

She thinks of the list of names again.

Suddenly, she knows what she is going to do. She almost doesn’t care about the repercussions. All roads have led her here: her father getting in touch, their shared memories, Nick agreeing to get the file for her, the lock picker. And now here she is. Alone, still not knowing whether her father is guilty or not, or who killed her mother. Not knowing what happened on the night of Hallowe’en almost twenty years ago which has come to define her entire life. Only knowing one thing: that she is going to put the name of every single person who came into contact with her mother into Nick’s Police National Computer over the next few days, when she can. That surely one of them will have done something with their money.

Something naive.

Something foolish.

Something suspicious.

Something illegal.

She drives to the coast. She needs to be alone for this. Away from Nick. Away from the restaurant. Away from anybody who can overhear her or judge her as she takes the plunge. What she is doing is either clever or foolish, but she wants no witnesses: she needs to feel as though she is at the end of the world.

She parks at the Devil’s Chimney car park. The steps are carved into the rock, narrow and dark, and it suits her mood. She wants to bury herself in the forest, in the path carved through the cliff. As she descends the stairs, she thinks about all of her messages to all of the David Smiths in London. They would be able to corroborate her father’s innocence, but that isn’t what she’s doing any more, not really, not with this. It isn’t about whether or not her father did it. It’s about what happened. The messy truth of it.

The stairs are covered with ivy, waving in the breeze, so green it shivers, moving like it’s alive. When she’s right in the middle of the forest, completely on her own, she retrieves her deleted messages, and calls her father.

He answers immediately, jumpily, in that animalistic, startled way of his, his brain always scanning the horizon for hazards.

‘Hi, hi,’ he says. ‘Hi.’

‘I got into the safe,’ she says.

Izzy takes a deep breath. She counted the money last night, when everybody had gone. She doesn’t know where to keep it, so she’s separated the bundles and put one into each of her locked desk drawers.

‘And?’

‘And there was eighteen thousand pounds in there.’

‘Shit,’ her father says, not questioning her silence, her estrangement from him, her doubts. ‘Shit.’

‘Look, were you involved in something with her?’

‘No.’

‘I need you to tell me the truth.’

‘No.’

‘Right, then. Well, then the money was hers. Hers alone. And I guess … I guess it is a clue.’

Izzy sits down on a moss-covered rock and feels the heat of her phone against her ear, like another person really is here with her. She breathes in the cow parsley wafting around her, the verdant, sensual summer. The sun is warm on her skin in dappled parts, but the rest of her is cool in the shadows. It’s finally set to rain tomorrow, ending several weeks of drought. A storm and flash floods, they’re saying.

She hears her father blow air into his cheeks, then expel it slowly.

‘So she was buying or selling something,’ he says.

She closes her eyes against it: like father, like daughter. The same thought processes. The same phrases. Oh, please let this be something. Please let him be innocent.

‘I think I’m going to try and look up some of the men on Nick’s computer.’

‘I think that’s a good idea,’ he says. ‘Money changes hands. Someone else was involved.’

‘I will,’ she says.

‘Look, I’ll come over. We can go through everything. You can explain properly. Show me the cash. I think we should look at the bank statements again. I … I have a theory.’

Izzy hesitates for just a second before she agrees. He hasn’t harmed her yet.