53

‘Where are the statements?’ he says. He’s standing in her kitchen, holding a cup of tea – the most middle class of drinks – and the bundle of likely illegal cash. He’s flicking through it.

‘In my loft.’

‘I like small spaces. Used to them.’ He passes her the cash.

He climbs the ladder quickly, arriving next to her in the hot loft. She retracts the stairs up with them, even though Nick isn’t due back for hours. The hatch closes, and she clicks the light on, and here they are, in the tiny, hot loft, alone, together.

‘There,’ she says, taking the lid off one of the box files and passing it to him. ‘Accounts and wages.’

‘What’s that one?’ he says, pointing to the second box.

‘Property stuff – the lease. Insurance documents.’

Her father leans back on his hands. His upper lip is sweating.

‘You know, sometimes I forget you’re no longer this scrawny seventeen-year-old ballerina with a boyfriend with a daft name. The Izzy of then.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ she says, thinking of the Gabe of then, too, and all that they have lost.

‘You’re all grown now, and so smart.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You never finished telling me what happened with him. Pip?’ There’s a question in her father’s voice.

‘He fucking ghosted me,’ she says bitterly.

‘Ghosted?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘You need a twenty-first-century translator,’ she says.

‘Be mine,’ he says. He always was so charming.

‘He blanked me. Three days after Mum died. Later, his dad, Steve, emailed me. A fucking email. Said it was too much for him, with his brother dying and then my mum. That he was depressed.’

Izzy winces as she recalls seeing them in the petrol station. She wishes she hadn’t messaged them. The scorned ex, from years ago, getting in touch even with his father. She blushes as she thinks of it.

‘People,’ her father says.

‘Yeah. But then two weeks later, my first time venturing back into town after everything, I saw him. He was fine. Out drinking. As soon as he saw me, he turned his whole body away from me.’ Izzy could still cry when she thinks of it, even now, almost twenty years on; a fact which embarrasses her.

‘Well, depression’s invisible, you know.’

‘I know. But even so.’

‘Yes. Owed you a text at the very least.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve lost track of the number of people who “ghosted” me, if it helps.’

‘I bet,’ she says with a bitter smile.

‘Are you ready to discuss it yet?’

‘What?’ She shifts, uncomfortable on the hard floor, and her father passes her his Matalan coat. She lifts herself and sits on it. It’s warm from his body heat.

‘The strangulation. Your mum’s and Babs’s. I can explain them.’

‘Try, then.’ She looks at the money, a tangible little pile of purple notes that anchor her to something else. To his innocence, she supposes. To an alternative explanation. To the messy truth.

‘I did put my hands around Babs’s throat. I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d do what a jury would do – conflate the two. That I had done such a thing so foolishly, once, would mean I would do it again. That I … that I liked strangling people, I suppose.’

‘You lied to me, and you excluded it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it fair to exclude things from trials?’

‘It is if you think they’ll lead to a miscarriage of justice. I wasn’t trying to kill Babs. But it was a … loss of control.’

‘A loss of control.’

‘I was angry with her. She’d cheated on me, and I had just found out. I didn’t tell you because I knew how it would look … It was wrong, obviously. I stopped almost immediately. Tony is prickly about it because he thought he ought to have stopped it. He heard one of our bad rows, before that one, and warned me.’

‘I would never do something like that. I would never do that to Nick.’

‘No. But … I don’t know. Some of us do. And we’re not monsters. Just human. Fucking fools. Young foolish men.’

She says nothing to that, not agreeing, not disagreeing, wondering if he is deluded. But one thing is for sure: he wants to find out. That is what he wants. And that is what she wants, too.

‘And the confession … They insist on calling it that,’ he says. ‘Let me tell you how it really was.’