The New Neighbors

by Simon Lelic

“My name is Mr. Marsh, and the man you appear to be interrogating is my client. Jack, on your feet, lad. Let’s go.”

  “Your client?” The inspector turns toward me. “But I thought Mr. Dalton was your solicitor. That’s what your parents said.”

  “He was going to be,” I tell her. “But I changed my mind. Mr. Marsh here has been representing me from the beginning.” Carefully—apologetically—I tuck my chair beneath the table.

  “Jack? What’s going on here? Your father, he was adamant you . . .”

  Slowly the inspector begins to smile. She drops her weight onto the edge of the table.

  “You already knew,” she says, “didn’t you? You worked it out. Everything I’ve just been explaining.”

  I know better than to answer. Besides, I’m not sure what I would say. Did I know? Not where this was heading, the lengths to which Syd would go. If I had, I would have put a stop to it. Somehow. There’s no way I would have let her risk what she did.

  But it’s true I knew more than I’ve been pretending. Or maybe that’s too strong a word. I suspected, rather. I’ve had a lot of time to think these past ten days, a lot of time to reflect on how I got to the position I was in. Even so, it was only on that night when I was in my prison cell, the day before I was due to meet the man my parents had decided should represent me, that I began to realize what it was that I’d missed.

  Faith, Mr. Dalton talked about—and there I was, ready to put my faith in him in a way I’d never fully offered it to Syd. I should have known that if I was in here there’d be a good reason. I should have realized Syd would have had a plan to get me out. Because it was like Inspector Leigh said. It was all there in Syd’s statement. I always assumed Syd was writing for the same person I was—for Inspector Leigh, ironically, or someone like her—but so much of what Syd wrote was really addressed to me. She couldn’t tell me what she’d done, but she was at least able to explain why. And trust me, she told me, so many times I lost count. Believe in me, she said, the way I always believed in you. It took me a while to finally hear her, but I did, in the end. I do.

  “Jack? You understand this makes you an accessory, don’t you? If—when—Syd gets caught for what she’s done, you’ll end up in the dock right beside her.”

  My solicitor puts a hand on my shoulder. “Ignore her, Jack. You don’t have to answer.”

  I look at Inspector Leigh, and I realize he’s right. I don’t have to answer, because I can see exactly what she’s thinking. I can read her, finally, the way she was always able to read me. Syd isn’t going to be arrested for this. Not now, not in the future. This, talking to me, just so long as Syd and I remain strong, it’s as close as Inspector Leigh will ever get.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  SYDNEY

  IT’S LATE DECEMBER. Christmas, almost. A time for family, so they say. I can’t decide whether that’s appropriate or ironic. Maybe it’s neither. It feels meaningful but maybe that’s just in my head. Like family itself. The concept. Maybe that doesn’t have any real meaning either and is instead as open to interpretation as we allow it to be. There’s so much in life that is, it strikes me. What’s right, for example. What’s wrong. And what’s normal—that’s what I’ve been puzzling over most of late. Are things back to normal? What does normal, for me, even look like?

  What I think—what I’ve decided—is that it looks like us. That’s my baseline, the foundation on which everything else is built. Me and Jack. Side by side. Together. So long as we’re OK it doesn’t matter what’s happening all around us.

  It’s not been easy. For Jack in particular, none of this has been in the slightest bit easy. He says he understands why I did what I did and I hope and pray that he genuinely does. Sean Payne . . . I honestly never meant for it to happen. And everything that followed afterward—between me and Jack, between me and my father, between Jack and the police—only did because I was so desperate to find us a way out.

  I was standing in the kitchen when I heard the noise. It was late, around one in the morning, and Jack was fast asleep upstairs. I had barely closed my eyes since the day my father had revealed himself in my mother’s hallway. Even lying in bed made me feel vulnerable, so I’d taken to pacing the house downstairs. I had no purpose. I was thinking, I suppose, but thinking implies concentrating on a particular subject when my mind was a mess of whirling thoughts. I was afraid but I was also angry. Furious that I felt so utterly exposed. I thought I’d found the perfect place to hide and yet all at once the monster I’d been fleeing had come from nowhere and torn my refuge down. And there was nothing I could do. I knew what the police would have said if I’d gone to them. Their reaction when we took them our statement proves they would have acted only when it was already too late. And of course there was Elsie. There was no solution I could think of for me and Jack that wouldn’t also have meant abandoning her.

  The noise, when it came, was like a hand upon my shoulder. I was standing with the lights off beside the sink, and until that point it had been so quiet both in the house and in the darkness outside that I felt like I was the only person in the entire neighborhood who wasn’t in bed. But the sound proved otherwise. It was a careless sound—the knock of a gate?—followed by what I was convinced was the slip of footsteps in our back garden. I tensed and stared out into the night. Was it him? My father. Was he here, now?

  My first thought was to wake Jack. But as the silence spread I began to question what I’d heard, and Jack, I knew, was exhausted. When I’d risen after lying for an hour close beside him he’d been fast asleep—one hour into the maybe three- or four-hour stretch he’d been managing to get each night. If I woke him it might be for no good reason and anyway what was stopping me from checking out the noise on my own? I was Sydney Baker, not Maggie Robinson, not a little girl who flinches at things that go bump in the night. I was bigger than that, better than that, and if there was someone out there—if it was my father out there—I would show him . . . just as I would prove it to myself.

  I checked the silence and again heard nothing, so I started toward the back door. I slid the key into the lock, turned it and gently levered down the handle. Here I paused—and as an afterthought reached for one of the knives in the knife block. Just in case, I told myself. Even if it was my father out there, I had no intention of actually using it. It would be like a ward. Something to scare him with for a change.

  I opened the door swiftly, as though I was ripping off a plaster, but the back garden was empty. The parts I could see, at least. I checked around me, above me, even behind me, even though I was still standing in the doorway, and then padded toward the end of the yard—the only place within the boundary of our plot that my father, or anyone, might have been hiding. But before I got there I heard another noise. It had come from the alleyway, I realized—and if anything it had sounded puzzlingly like a moan.

  I checked the shadows in our garden nevertheless, then crept toward our back gate. The latch was old and the gate was loose, which explained how it might have knocked against the fence post. But the night air was thick, languid, with not the slightest breeze to disturb it, meaning that if the gate had moved something must have knocked it.

  I opened the gate, peered through the gap and tentatively stepped into the alleyway. And that’s when I saw him. Not my father. Elsie’s.

  He was slumped against one of the panels of our garden fence. He’d fallen, I judged from the way he was sprawled, which was presumably what had caused our gate to shift. As for the sound I’d thought I’d heard of someone moving, presumably that was Sean Payne trying—and failing—to stagger to his feet.

  My first reaction, I remember clearly, was disgust. Even from several feet away I could tell he was drunk. His eyes were closed but there was a smile on his lips and quietly, beneath his breath, he seemed to be . . . singing? Trying to, anyway. It was like . . . I don’t know. Like Jack said before. Like he’d been out celebrating. Like it was
just another Friday night for him and his daughter wasn’t lying alone in a hospital bed. Like he hadn’t been the one to put her there.

  I drifted toward him, not really thinking, and barely registering I was still carrying the knife. Even over the smell of the rubbish in the nearby bins, I could detect the alcohol fumes venting on Sean Payne’s breath. Except it was around this point I noticed that the noise he’d been making had stopped, and I wondered whether he was actually breathing anymore at all. Maybe he’d hit his head when he’d fallen. Maybe he’d had a heart attack or something and that moaning I’d heard, rather than singing, was a last, pitiful plea for help.

  Against my better instincts I bent toward him—and that’s when his eyes flicked open. I recoiled, might have stumbled, but from out of nowhere his hand closed around my leg. You, he said—or at least I think he did. The more I try to recall what really happened the more I wonder whether I just imagined it, just as it’s possible I imagined the hatred in his eyes. I panicked, I know that. I thought . . . I don’t know. That he’d tricked me, that he wanted to hurt me, to pay me back for having taken away his daughter. And it was in my desperation to get away, to free myself from his grip, that the knife somehow found its way home.

  But then after that—that’s when I lost control. I lunged again, and then again and again, until it felt like I would never stop. All the fear I’ve ever experienced, all the rage that for so long had bounced around inside me—it spewed from me in a torrent. At that instant Sean Payne was my father, and I . . . I was Sydney Maggie Jessica Elsie, all the victims I knew come together as one.

  I don’t know how long it went on for. Seconds maybe, though it seemed like longer. Like it’s not a moment now that in my mind will ever stop. I remember collapsing afterward onto the stony floor and I remember forcing myself to look at what I’d done. And I remember too that I felt . . . not glad, exactly. Never that. But I remember it wasn’t what I’d done that I was most alarmed about. What worried me was what it meant.

  The plan, after that, came to me in stages. For some time I just sat there, expecting to be found. But the night remained as empty as it had seemed to me when I’d been standing in the kitchen—how long ago that felt—and though I waited for someone to come, no one did. Which is when it occurred to me that maybe no one would. Gradually my breathing stilled and the adrenaline left my shaking hands. And I noticed the blood. Saw it properly for the first time. It was black in the darkness but wet. Warm, at first, though steadily, against my skin, it turned cold.

  I stripped right there in the alleyway. I felt panic rising within me as I did so and it was only once I’d torn what I’d been wearing from my body that I felt it gradually subside. And then again after that I just stood there, not knowing what was supposed to happen next. I held my clothes before me in a bundle. I had to get rid of them, obviously. My clothes, the knife—I had to get rid of everything.

  I would throw them in the Thames. I would wrap them in a rubbish sack from one of the nearby bins and drop them into the river the next morning. I would shower, clean myself up and act as though none of this had really happened. Except . . . there would be evidence, wouldn’t there? I couldn’t possibly hope to erase it all. And it had happened right outside our house. The police wouldn’t just ignore that, particularly given our history with Elsie’s father. Jack in particular. He’d fought with Sean Payne. Shouted at him, swore he’d kill him in front of everyone in the local pub! The police, if they didn’t blame me, would surely try to pin what had happened on Jack. They’d have to. Wouldn’t they? Unless . . . unless . . .

  It was like a daydream, initially. One of those what ifs that feel as fanciful as the prospect of flying to the moon. But then, as one thought dominoed into another, that daydream turned into something real. Not a what if anymore—a why not? I began to understand how what I’d done could offer a way out, for Elsie, for Jack, for us all.

  I can’t tell you whether I believed it would really work. After . . . what had happened . . . I couldn’t think straight. At least, it didn’t feel like I was making decisions logically but perhaps it was some deeper instinct that took over. I knew my father, at some point, would come after me—and that if I kept the knife I could make it look like he’d used it to attack me. The knife, in turn, would tie him to Sean Payne’s murder. And as for his motive . . . my father had been trying to hurt Jack from the start. Couldn’t this, if I presented it correctly, be seen as another step on that road? Not only did he want Jack blamed, he wanted him out of the way too, because with Jack gone he could finally get to me.

  The hardest part was planting Jack’s driver’s license. Not the physical act itself. The driver’s license was in Jack’s wallet on the kitchen table. Once I’d taken care of the rest of the evidence, I wouldn’t even need to go sneaking around upstairs. No, the difficult part was convincing myself to leave it for the police to find. It felt so wrong. So counterintuitive. I had to remind myself over and over again of the reasoning, just to be sure I wasn’t making a huge mistake. But after a while I felt as certain as I would ever be. The driver’s license would be enough to put Jack in the frame—to make it look like my father had set him up—but it was also tenuous enough in terms of evidence that it would surely never hold up in court. Assuming it ever came to that, and the whole point was it never would. I wouldn’t let it—because if all else failed I would turn myself in. That was the lifeline I clung to: the knowledge that I could act to bring things to a stop.

  —

  BUT JACK. THERE was so little I could do to reassure him, which is why it’s so important to me that he understands now. And he does, I think. I really think he does. He knows now the full story about what happened between me and my father and he understands how terrified I was when I found out that he’d come back. Above all, he knows that I was only ever trying to protect him. To protect us. That was the other reason for leaving the driver’s license: for my plan to work, I needed Jack out of the way. I needed him safe. Somewhere my father couldn’t get to him, because I knew that if he could he would hurt Jack to hurt me—more so, even, than he had already. So that’s why Jack had to go through what he did. That’s why, when it looked like Inspector Leigh wasn’t going to arrest him, I tried to drive Jack away. I couldn’t confide in him because if he knew what I planned to do he would have stopped me. Or, worse, he would have tried to help me and I could never have allowed him to do that.

  If anything, that’s the part Jack was upset about most of all: that he couldn’t be there for me, as he sees it, when I needed him most. But now . . . it’s strange, the way things have turned out. There’s a closeness between us—a tightness—that somehow surpasses what we had before. And in other ways too, Jack’s about the happiest I’ve ever seen him. I know for a fact he doesn’t miss his job. There was never any real threat of criminal proceedings against him—that was just the police trying to scare him—and now that he’s finally got the time, he’s relishing the opportunity to try writing. He still calls his parents every Sunday but when I hear him on the telephone I get a sense that the dynamic between them has changed, that rather than a child ringing up to seek approval it’s a conversation now between adults. Maybe that’s not quite how Jack’s parents view it yet but given time I don’t doubt they’ll come to see it that way too.

  If Jack worries, I think it’s mainly about other people. There’s Bart, for one, who Jack continues to insist on apologizing to virtually every time they get together. Also, Sabeen and her family. It was Bart, it turned out, who tipped them off, who warned them Jack’s secret had been discovered, the very day Jack found out himself. None of us knows where Ali and the others have ended up but that they’re safe is the only thing that matters. And—to me, at least—that they know that they are because of Jack.

  Which just leaves me, I suppose—because it’s about me I know Jack worries most of all. Sometimes I catch him looking at me, and when I notice he just gives me this little smile—like h
e wants to say something but also like he realizes he doesn’t have to and that for me that smile is enough. He’s concerned, I guess, about my well-being, about how everything that’s happened has affected me. I don’t mean physically. The wound I suffered has left a scar but it’s not like I’m not used to scars. I’ll admit I wasn’t as prepared as I thought I’d be for the pain, nor for the sight of so much of my own blood, and for a time right after it happened I was convinced I’d driven the knife too deep. But I’m fine now. Physically, I’m fine.

  As for the rest of me . . . I guess that’s all fairly fine too. As fine as it ever was. I expect Jack wonders mainly about the guilt I’m experiencing and I admit I worry sometimes about that myself. Because . . . I don’t know. It’s not clear to me how I feel about that side of things either. I know guilt is something I’ve lived with all my life and that I feel less guilty about Elsie’s father than I did—than I do—about what happened to my sister. Plus, there’s Elsie. There’s nothing anyone could say that could convince me she’s not better off now than she was before.

  So I do; I feel fine. Better than fine, if I’m honest, and if ever I feel guilt it’s usually about that. But that’s a long-term thing really, something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to reconcile: my determination on the one hand to be happy and my uncertainty on the other hand about whether I have the right. But I’m working on it. I’m working on a lot of things. My relationship with my mother, for one.

  Even though my mother was more directly involved, she knows less about what happened than Jack does. Jack knows everything; there are no secrets between us anymore. But my mother . . . she knows what she did, obviously—retracting the alibi she’d given my father, letting me in so I could plant what I needed to among his things—but I never fully explained to her what I was planning. She did what she did because I asked her to and because I told her that it was the only way to keep us safe. She’s aware that my father has been charged with murder of course but it’s as though the fact that he’s gone is the only detail she needs to know. It’s just how she is, how she always was: happy to turn a blind eye. I don’t blame her for being like that the way I used to. She has her way of coping, I have mine, and it’s not like I can claim now that hers is any more destructive.