The New Neighbors

by Simon Lelic

  It was my mother who hauled me to my feet. The memory of her, of the time I’d let her in the house. My forearm swept the table as I stood and my sister’s treasures clattered to the floor.

  “Syd?” Jack’s voice, more distant than his proximity to me made possible. “Syd, wait. Are you OK? Where are you going?”

  I stumbled past him, into the hallway. I climbed the stairs, tripped, scrambled higher. I was dimly aware of Jack’s presence close behind me, but my focus was on what lay ahead. On those pictures. Winters’s pictures. All, that is, except one.

  I spotted her instantly. This time, for the first time, she shone out. My arm, though, felt heavy—clumsy with adrenaline—and I knocked several frames to the floor as I reached forward. With the picture in my hand I scrabbled at the backing, then I turned and collided with Jack. He stepped aside or I pushed him, I can’t remember. I was aiming for the newel post, the picture now tight in my grip. I swung it, glass first. It shattered immediately but I swung it again. A third time, a fourth. When I flipped it over I was already bleeding but all I cared about was freeing the photograph from its frame. My grip was slick, sticky, and the glass chewed hungrily at my fingers. I was numb to it, though. All at once, in a way I hadn’t experienced since my childhood, I was numb.

  —

  COMING HOME. IN films, in poetry, in cheesy Christmas songs, it’s become a concept so laden with sentiment it’s almost impossible now to view it as something bad. Yet home, for me, is like a darkened corner. A foul place, somewhere sullied, which for most of my life I’ve been focused on trying to escape. I thought our new house would become my home. But as things turned out it never had a chance. Perhaps nowhere does. Perhaps the place you call home is something, once it’s been chosen for you, you don’t ever get to alter.

  The journey took less than two hours but somehow, simultaneously, it took both more and less than that. A blink in one sense. In another, a lifetime. As I sat rocking to the movements of the empty train, I clutched the photograph from the landing in my shredded fingertips. The picture itself—that little girl’s face—was obscured by blood but on the back the writing I’d discovered was still visible. Just a date, a name. The same name I’d found written on the lid of that shoebox. This time, though, I recognized the handwriting, just as my mother had recognized the picture itself. She would have taken it, after all, and the annotation was hers as well. She made a note on all the photographs of me and Jessica that she took. I could see myself watching her doing it.

  It was typical of my mother that she’d failed to move away. Typical of her weakness. Of her cowardice. After my father went to prison, she’d had a chance to build her life anew but after the house had been repossessed she’d settled for renting a flat on the edge of the same neighborhood. The very edge. The grubby fringe. Not really the same neighborhood at all, in fact, but it was like the way she still dressed, the time she continued to spend applying makeup. If she walked the same streets, shopped at the same shops, she could fool herself that life was a continuum, that the mistakes she’d made—and what mistakes she’d made! What a howler, above all, marrying my father—weren’t forks in the road but bumps, potholes, little things she could glide over as she continued on her journey. It was another act of denial, for all the good it did her. Because although I didn’t understand everything yet, that much was clear: it was the things my mother had clung to—her habitat, her routines—that in the end had given us both away.

  As I walked I felt the anger in me beginning to build. When I’d stepped off that train I’d expected it to melt away, to turn into something like fear. But I barely noticed the landmarks that in my mind had become so loathsome to me, didn’t even flinch when I caught sight of our old house from across the street. When I reached the block containing my mother’s flat I used the tradesmen’s bell to let myself inside. I took the stairs, two at a time, and once I’d located the door I was looking for I beat at it with the fleshy part of my fist.

  “How could you?”

  My mother’s startled eyes peering through the gap. She had the chain in place, otherwise I would have forced my way inside.

  “Do you even know what you’ve done?”

  I glared at her and hit the door again, with both hands this time, both palms, so that even though the chain held firm, my mother’s instinct was to recoil.

  “Sydney, please,” she hissed. “You shouldn’t be here. You—”

  “Open the door! Open the fucking door or I swear to God I’ll break it down!”

  I hit the door again and didn’t turn when I heard another door opening just behind me.

  “What’s going on out here?” came an old woman’s voice.

  “Let me in, Mother,” I said without looking round.

  “Sydney, please . . .” she replied, her eyes darting between mine and her busybody neighbor’s.

  “Open. The fucking. Door.”

  I heard tutting from across my shoulder as my mother retreated inside. As soon as the chain was off I shoved my way into my mother’s hall. She spread her arms wide and continued to try to barricade my path.

  “Listen to me, Sydney. Please. You need to leave. You need to go.” Even though the door to the flat was closed now, she didn’t raise her voice above a whisper.

  “What did I say to you?” I said, ignoring her. “What was the single thing I asked?” It didn’t escape me that I was the one speaking like a parent. My mother, before me, was cringing like a frightened child.

  “I’m sorry,” she said—pleaded, even—and I could tell she was just about to cry. “But Sydney, please. Let’s . . . let’s go outside. OK? Let’s talk about this outside.”

  “I’m not going fucking anywhere until you give me an explanation!”

  Which is when it struck me that she already had. That day she’d come to see me. I’m not strong enough, she’d said. I’ve just never, ever been strong enough. And what else, really, was there to add?

  My mother shriveled on her side of the hallway. Her resistance had crumbled, against my onslaught, to her tears. But that wasn’t all. She appeared to be waiting for something, resigned to it. As though my onslaught, her tears, weren’t the only things she’d been trying to hold off.

  I glared at her, still furious, but all of a sudden that fury felt closer to fear. It was the way I’d expected to feel when I’d stepped off that train.

  “Mum?”

  The voice I heard was no longer my own. Or it was, just not Sydney Baker’s. It belonged to the old me. To the girl I thought I’d left behind. I’d always worried whether the woman I’d become was just a front—whether, rather than armor, Sydney Baker was in reality nothing more than a brittle shell. And there, standing in my mother’s dismal hallway, I realized I was at last about to find out.

  “Oh, Mum. What have you done?”

  I found myself backing away toward the apartment’s front door. My mother was watching me pityingly.

  “He’s here, isn’t he? He’s actually here.”

  I smelled him then, even before I heard him. The scent—the stink—was of nothing, individually, that would have been unpleasant, and maybe it carried on a memory rather than physically through the air. But I smelled his aftershave, something like oranges. The coffee he drank. The gunk he slathered in his hair. Collectively it was worse than sewage and I might have gagged had a figure not at that point stepped into the hall. Like he was home. Like he’d never been away.

  He smiled at me. The man who’d taunted me, tricked me, beaten me, broken me. He was here, now, right in front of me, smiling.

  And then he spoke.

  “Hello, Maggie,” my father said.

  PART

  TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  JACK

  “AND THAT’S WHEN we started writing.”

  “When?”

  “After Syd saw her father. After, three days la
ter, they found Sean Payne in the alleyway behind our house.”

  Inspector Leigh raises her head. “His body, you mean,” she says. “After they found Sean Payne’s body. With a total of seventeen stab wounds in his neck, chest and stomach.”

  She’s studying me, and I do my best not to look away. I feel guilty, of course I do, but wouldn’t anyone? Seventeen stab wounds. It’s just . . . it’s brutal. There’s no other word to describe it. And I can tell she’s thrown the fact at us deliberately. She hasn’t mentioned it before. No one has, not even the papers.

  Seventeen.

  I look at Syd and I can see she’s thinking about the same thing I am. The morning the body was discovered we were looking out of our spare-bedroom window, and even through all the police officers we could see it. The blood. Sean Payne’s blood. It was everywhere. Syd, for one, almost vomited. It’s linked to her sister, I guess, this thing she has about death, but the sight of all that blood is ultimately what got her to agree to my suggestion that we start writing things down. For her it was never about trying to understand, not the way it was for me, because Syd was clear about what was happening from the start. She recognized that this was something her father had been building up to, and she realized what Sean Payne’s murder, for us, really meant. But all that blood . . . it made her recognize how important it was that we get our story straight. That we get it on record, in preparation for the point we’re at now.

  Detective Inspector Karen Leigh links her hands together and lets them rest on the stack of pages in front of her.

  “Why?”

  Syd and I exchange another glance.

  “Excuse me?” Syd says.

  “Your father’s been on parole for barely six months,” says Inspector Leigh. “He’s only just begun to rebuild his life. And yet on a whim he takes it upon himself to murder a complete stranger. To butcher him, in fact.” She pauses, just long enough to check my reaction. “That’s your theory if I’m not mistaken. So what I’m asking you, Ms. Baker, is why?”

  There is a flash in Syd’s eyes that anyone who knows her would recognize as a warning sign. “Didn’t you read it?”

  I shift slightly in my seat. We’re in an interview room, bare apart from the gray plastic furniture. There’s just the three of us: Inspector Leigh on one side of the table, Syd next to me on the other.

  The inspector’s hands are still resting on the printout. She doesn’t bother to move them when she glances down. “I read it, Ms. Baker. Twice after you brought it to me yesterday. Once again just this morning.”

  “So what the fuck kind of question is that?”

  “Syd . . .”

  “No, I’m sorry, Jack, I’m serious. ‘Why?’” she mocks. “I thought you were a fucking detective. So fucking detect, why don’t you.”

  “Syd, please!”

  Inspector Leigh, to be fair, doesn’t even flinch. She just tips her head slightly, as though re-evaluating whatever judgment of Syd she first made.

  “It’s a game,” Syd says, exasperated. “OK? Payback, revenge, whatever you want to call it, but mainly, for my father, it’s a game. ‘Rebuild his life,’” she quotes, shaking her head. “This is his life. This . . . toying with people. It’s what my father lives for.”

  There’s a silence then, before Syd adds, “Oh, and for the record, my father never so much as chose what suit to wear on a given morning based on a whim.”

  Inspector Leigh smiles at that, the same little half smile she wore practically the whole of the last time I saw her. So far it’s not been much in evidence. Somehow her demeanor this time is different, as though she can tell the role she played with me isn’t going to cut it in front of Syd. She’s as good at reading people, I think, as I gave her credit for. It strikes me I should probably be reassured by that, but instead it only makes me more worried.

  “So in this game,” the inspector says, with a slight emphasis on the final word that conveys her skepticism. “This is how your father wins?” There’s a barely perceptible nod in my direction then, the first time Inspector Leigh has even tacitly admitted that I’m a suspect. Not just a suspect. The suspect. In a murder case where the victim was stabbed seventeen times. It’s not like it comes as a surprise—why else, otherwise, would we even be here?—but still that little nod hits me like a fist.

  “Honestly?” Syd answers. “I don’t know what my father counts as winning.”

  “You think you’re in danger?” the inspector asks her, and I watch Syd closely for her reply.

  “No.” She shifts. “I don’t know.”

  “Of course she’s in danger,” I put in.

  The inspector turns her gaze on me.

  “I mean, it’s obvious she is. Isn’t it?”

  Syd interrupts before the inspector can respond. “Whether I’m in danger or not isn’t the point. This isn’t about what my father might do. It’s about what he’s done already.”

  Inspector Leigh stares for a moment, considering, then looks down again at the manuscript. Six days Syd and I have spent writing it—virtually every spare hour since the night of Sean Payne’s murder. And, OK, so it’s not like I’ve had a job to go to, and Syd’s hardly been prioritizing hers, but even so I’m beginning to wonder whether it was worth the effort. In one sense we’ve achieved what we set out to in that Syd and I are at least now on the same page. But the idea was also to convince other people.

  “It’s elaborate,” says Inspector Leigh, “I’ll give you that. Unique, too. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a . . .” She hesitates here, glances once again in my direction. “. . . of a witness,” she settles on, “presenting a written statement before they’ve actually been asked. Certainly not one of such depth.” She fans the pages.

  “But?” Syd prompts, and the inspector meets her steely eyes.

  “But there are aspects to your story I still find confusing,” she says. “The house, for example. Your father bought it for you, is what you’re saying. But without your knowledge. He . . .”

  Syd is shaking her head and Inspector Leigh gives her a chance to interject. Obtuse: that’s the inspector’s tactic with Syd. And it’s working. Syd’s riled, which is what Inspector Leigh wants. She likes her interviewees flustered, I’ve come to realize, I suppose because she thinks it’s more likely they’ll reveal something they hadn’t meant to. This business about the house, for example. We’ve been over it. In the manuscript, in our discussions. But the inspector is raising the subject again, because she’s seen that Syd is getting more irritated every time she’s required to repeat herself.

  “He didn’t buy it,” Syd says. “He saw we were interested, then bribed the estate agent to make sure it ended up coming to us. Probably pretended he was just a concerned parent, insisted to Evan that he wasn’t to let on. I bet he even paid extra for a spare set of keys.”

  She says it with conviction, when this is the one part of our story that’s mainly conjecture. It makes sense, though. Evan Cohen was operating from a grimy little office two left turns away from the footfall on the local high street. He had no employees, no new properties up for sale (judging by the cards that were on display in his office window), nor even a proper website. He was the estate agency equivalent of a shyster, who’d probably only got Patrick Winters’s business because Winters had felt sorry for him (and, most likely, because he’d felt more at home in Evan’s offices than he had in the poncey-wine-bar interior of the local Foxtons). On top of which, there was that annotated copy of the Racing Post I noticed when I went to see him, meaning Evan at the very least enjoyed a flutter. A failing business, then, potential gambling debts—it all adds up. And he’s gone. That, for Syd and me, remains the clincher. I went back not long after my first visit—after my conversation with Patrick Winters, in fact—and Evan’s office even then was boarded up. When Syd and I went together the other day, it was in the process of being converted into a coffee shop. Mo
ving premises, my arse. It’s like I said: Syd had him pegged right from the start.

  “He bribed the estate agent,” Inspector Leigh echoes. “Again, I have to ask, why? I mean, effectively he would have been helping you. Right?”

  “He wasn’t helping us,” Syd counters. “He was controlling us. Controlling me, demonstrating to me he still can. For my father, control is all any of it has ever been about.”

  “By ‘any of it,’ you mean . . .”

  “I mean everything! Every single thing he’s ever done to me! Like with the house—it was his way of putting us exactly where he wanted us, somewhere he could get to us anytime he liked.”

  “And the money?”

  “What money?”

  Again the inspector unleashes her little smile. “That’s exactly my point. Your father’s assets were seized when he was convicted. Maybe he put in some extra stints in the prison laundry while he was inside, but what would you estimate your average estate agent goes for these days?”

  “My father wouldn’t have left himself broke,” Syd responds. “Not ever. He was brazen but he wasn’t stupid. Whatever assets you think you seized, there would have been double that amount hidden away under someone else’s mattress. And he’s never been interested in money just for the sake of it. It’s always been about what he can do with it. About who and what money can buy. That’s why he was in prison in the first place—remember?”

  I’ve always been a little vague on how Syd’s father ended up in prison, mainly because Syd has always been fairly vague about it herself. But I’m up to speed now. Syd’s told me about the scams her father used to run, about how he arranged kickbacks for certain prominent members of the local council to facilitate his company’s property deals. And, after that, how he used to blackmail those same council members to get them to pay back what he’d given them, plus interest.

  Inspector Leigh must know about this, too. She makes a face, half doubtful, half impressed that Syd is so convinced by her own story—and so able to come up with the appropriate answers. And the horrible thing is, I can see my own doubts reflected back at me in the inspector’s reactions. The back and forth I’m witnessing now, it’s a reprise of the toing and froing I had at the start of all this with Syd. Because I couldn’t accept it at first either: that everything that had been happening to us was part of one cohesive plan. In my head, when we’d started writing, Elsie’s father was still to blame for the majority of what had happened, and the rest—the shoebox, Syd’s sister’s name, maybe even the house—was down to . . . I didn’t know. Coincidence, I guessed. Happenstance. As for Sean Payne’s murder, I figured he must have had another argument or something in the pub. I mean, the bloke’s a head case. Was a head case. It stands to reason he had other enemies apart from me and Syd.