The House: The brilliantly tense and terrifying thriller with a shocking twist - whose story do you believe?

by Simon Lelic

  Syd is visibly shocked. I catch the bulge that gets snagged in her throat. ‘You didn’t tell me that,’ she says, her voice a frightened whisper.

  I could explain, I suppose. Reassure her that until now I wasn’t one hundred per cent certain. But to be honest I’m not feeling much of a need to explain anything right now, not when Syd is so obviously holding back, too. The more I think about it, the more unfair of her it seems. Because it’s like the inspector said: I’m the one who’s lost his job, who’s borne the brunt of whatever game Syd’s father is playing. Who’s sitting here waiting to be accused of murder, basically. What gives Syd the right to keep things from me when it’s my arse at the moment that’s on the line?

  ‘You …’ Syd recovers herself quickly, addresses Inspector Leigh. ‘You could talk to the family Jack helped. Sabeen. Amira. They saw him too. Right, Jack?’ There’s a question mark in her voice when she says my name that has nothing to do with what she’s asked me.

  ‘They saw someone,’ I agree, not quite meeting her eye. Because that’s another thing. Amira. Syd’s still not apologized properly for accusing me of being unfaithful. I’m not even sure she’s fully convinced yet that there was genuinely nothing going on. That would explain that comment she made about our relationship, for example. I mean, maybe she did only say it for effect, but a little show of solidarity wouldn’t go amiss, even if it’s just a hand beneath the table on my knee.

  ‘Unfortunately we don’t know where Sabeen and her family are,’ says Inspector Leigh. ‘They’ve disappeared.’ She catches the concern in my expression when I raise my head. ‘Under their own steam,’ she reassures me. ‘The Home Office would like to speak to them as much as we would.’

  I feel myself relax slightly into my chair. That’s something at least. As much as it pains me to have lost so many of my friends, at least they haven’t been deported. And the likelihood is they’ll be better off without me.

  ‘My father then,’ Syd says. ‘You know where he is. Why not question him at least rather than wasting more time interrogating us?’

  ‘You’re the ones who came to me, Ms Baker. This conversation is taking place at your request.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Syd snaps. ‘Precisely! And yet the fact that we came to you willingly clearly counts for nothing. Talk to my father. Question him. Ask him what he was doing on the night of the murder.’

  Inspector Leigh watches Syd patiently, then drops the bombshell we should have seen coming.

  ‘We already have,’ she says.

  Which stuns Syd momentarily into silence. We share a look, the awkwardness that has been growing between us temporarily forgotten. But it’s like I say: Inspector Leigh has had our manuscript for almost twenty-four hours. If she’s already looked into my story about Sabeen, it stands to reason she would also have followed up on our claims about Syd’s father.

  ‘And?’ I say.

  Inspector Leigh sighs with what I read as genuine irritation. Because she believes our story and is as frustrated as we are? Or because she’s angry that we’re continuing to waste so much of her time? ‘And he reacted exactly the way you would expect him to,’ she says. ‘With surprise, initially. Indignation.’ Syd’s boiling to interrupt and the inspector holds her off with an upraised finger. ‘And he has an alibi. For the night of Sean Payne’s murder.’

  Syd is rigid in her seat. ‘Let me guess. My mother.’

  The inspector offers part of a nod. ‘She says your father was with her the whole night through. She says she hasn’t been sleeping well recently – something about the pain in her hip – and that she can’t have closed her eyes that night for more than half an hour. She says your father was asleep beside her the entire time.’

  Which is not dissimilar to my alibi, it strikes me. It’s better, in a way. More convincing. My story, such as it is, is that I was in bed with Syd and at no point during the night did she hear me leave.

  ‘Of course she’s going to say that!’ Syd bursts. ‘She’s terrified of him. She’ll do whatever he asks her to. Like tell him how to find me in the first place, for example!’

  Inspector Leigh looks back at her like maybe that’s so, but it doesn’t change the fact there’s nothing she can do. This is over, her expression says. This interview, the investigation. It’s over.

  ‘You think Jack did this,’ Syd says, her voice quieter now but sounding no more controlled. ‘You haven’t said it yet, you haven’t fucking dared, but you do, it’s obvious you do.’

  What the hell, Syd? I feel like blurting – as though she’s the one, by giving voice to it, who’s making it real.

  ‘So why haven’t you arrested him?’ she blusters on. ‘If you’re so certain, why don’t you go ahead and lock him up?’

  I’m staring at Syd in outright panic now, powerless as she pokes the tiger that’s got us trapped inside its cage. At the same time, though, I can’t help wondering how the inspector will react. Because what Syd’s saying has occurred to me as well. Of course it has. All this time that’s passed since the murder, all these days the police have spent watching. I’ve been hoping it’s a question of evidence, that they need more than they can find. Hoping, but not quite believing.

  Inspector Leigh smiles her little smile. She’s still for a moment, then makes a start on tidying up her things. ‘May I keep this?’ she asks, splaying her hand on the top sheet of our manuscript.

  Syd’s expression is one part disbelief, two parts disgust. Her chair screams as she slides it backwards from the table. ‘Knock yourself out,’ she says, and when she stands her chair clatters to the floor. She moves past it towards the doorway, clearly expecting me to follow.

  When I linger the inspector stops what she’s doing and turns to face me. Syd is stranded by the door.

  ‘Can I give you some advice, Jack?’ says Inspector Leigh. Ms Baker for Syd, I notice, Jack for me, as though we’re old friends. Tactics again and yet I find myself being drawn in. Please. Yes. Advice. Anything.

  ‘Use what time you have to find yourself a good solicitor,’ she says, and then she too is heading for the door.

  Sydney

  Jack barely speaks on our way back to the house. We get a cab and his knee jiggles throughout the twenty-minute journey. He makes little snapping noises with his teeth, too, a habit he has when he’s tense that I’m not sure he’s aware of when he’s doing it. I offer him a stick of gum from my bag but he shakes his head and goes back to staring out of the window.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ he says as we pull up and he thrusts a twenty at the cabbie through the slot in the partition. He’s out before the driver can give him change but a twenty is way too much so I sit and wait for our six pounds fifty.

  When I get inside Jack is drawing curtains.

  ‘Jack?’

  We’re in the living room and he moves past me to close the curtain on the other side.

  ‘It’s broad daylight, Jack. What are you doing?’

  He ignores me and moves off into the hall. The second curtain he’s pulled has snagged and out of habit I jiggle it straight. When I catch up with him he’s closing the blinds in the kitchen. He pauses first though, peers towards Elsie’s house through the slats, then straightens and twists the blind shut.

  ‘Jack, please. You’re scaring me.’

  He stops then and looks at me, darkly. He’s about to say something – something I get the impression he thinks he might regret – but whatever he’s on the brink of voicing he pulls himself back.

  ‘I’m thinking about what the inspector said,’ he tells me. ‘That’s all.’

  His eyes dart around the room. There’s another window near the table. It only overlooks the side return but Jack moves across to close the blind there anyway.

  ‘Which part of what she said?’

  Again, it’s like Jack has to compose himself before he’ll even speak to me.

  ‘About how we need more evidence.’

  He goes back to the window by the sink and prises the slats apart so he c
an see out again across the garden.

  ‘But … what’s that got to do with closing all the blinds?’

  A sigh this time: irritated, impatient – as though it’s obvious. ‘Your father’s been watching us. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I agree, tentatively.

  ‘So what I’m wondering about is where from.’ Once again he peers out across the garden. ‘Like from a car parked on the street? From the alleyway? But if that was the case, how come neither of us noticed him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean … maybe we did. Maybe we just didn’t realize it was him.’

  Jack frowns at that. ‘But you would have realized. Wouldn’t you? If you’d seen him.’

  I don’t like this. The way Jack’s talking to me. The way he’s looking at me. ‘Not necessarily,’ I reply. ‘Why would either of us, unless we were watching out for him?’ I suppress a shudder. It’s dark with the blinds closed and I turn to switch on the light. Jack gives a start, seems about to snap at me. But then he’s moving again, dragging a chair from beneath the kitchen table towards the middle of the room.

  ‘Jack? What are you doing now?’

  He climbs up on to the chair and angles his head beneath the smoke alarm. He fiddles for a minute before he answers. ‘You can get cameras these days. Can’t you? Tiny ones that go basically anywhere.’

  Cameras. I hadn’t thought of that. But it sounds too crazy, like something out of a John le Carré novel.

  Jack’s struggling to remove the cover. It comes off eventually with a crack that suggests it’s unlikely to go back on. I peer up, in spite of myself, but the only component I can tell apart from any other is the battery.

  ‘Jack, I don’t think –’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That. There.’

  I can’t tell what it is he’s pointing at. ‘I don’t know. It just looks like …’

  All of a sudden he’s got both hands around the casing and he’s pulling, trying to wrench the entire unit from the ceiling. If it comes away abruptly, or the chair slips from under him, he’s going to fall and hit his head. ‘Jesus, Jack. Be careful.’ Ordinarily I would move across to hold his hips but I’m not sure how he’d react right now to me touching him.

  He’s grunting, tutting. ‘Pass me the screwdriver, would you?’

  I scan the empty space around me. ‘What screwdriver?’

  ‘In the drawer over there. The bottom one.’

  It takes me a moment to find it. When I do I’m reluctant to pass it to him but he wiggles his hand impatiently and I give in.

  Half the ceiling comes down when finally Jack prises the smoke alarm free. OK so maybe not half the ceiling but some of the plasterwork anyway and I’m coughing and blinking against the dust. ‘Jack …’

  ‘Look.’

  I try but I can’t see anything. I cough and fan my hand to clear the cloud of plaster.

  ‘Look here. What’s that?’

  I peer up to where his fingertip is pointing. ‘It’s just … a wire.’

  Jack lifts the casing right up close to his eyes. He rips out the offending article and studies it. ‘Yeah,’ he agrees, thwarted, and finally climbs down from the chair. The front of his T-shirt is dusted white. He starts looking around the room again, the gutted smoke alarm dangling in his grip. He tosses it on to the kitchen table.

  ‘What’s that up there? In the corner?’ He uses the screwdriver to direct my gaze and once again I look as a reflex. He’s pointing at the burglar-alarm sensor, I think. The alarm itself was broken when we moved in and the sensor is covered in dust. Clearly no one’s touched the thing in years.

  ‘Jack, stop. Please.’

  He turns and looks at me sharply. ‘What?’ he says. ‘Why?’

  ‘I just think … I think you’re wasting your time. That’s all.’

  ‘He had a key, Syd. He was in the house. It stands to reason he might have put up some kind of camera or something somewhere. Or a microphone maybe.’ The mention of a microphone gets him looking in different directions, at crannies in the kitchen he hasn’t so far considered. ‘I mean, maybe that’s how he found out all the things he did,’ he goes on, talking as much to himself now. ‘It would have been easier than following us around. He could simply have been listening in. Watching us.’ He looks again at that dusty alarm sensor. ‘Who’s to say he isn’t watching us right now?’

  I shiver, shake it off.

  ‘I still think you’re wasting your time.’

  Jack rounds on me. ‘Wasting my time?’ He laughs and for the first time ever it’s a sound that frightens me. ‘I tell you what was a waste of my time. Writing that fucking manuscript, that’s what.’

  He’s waiting for me to say I told you so, I know he is. He wants me to, so he can launch into me the way he’s obviously longing to. I don’t, though. I wouldn’t anyway because I don’t agree, regardless of what I might have said when Jack first suggested it. I still think it will help, in the end.

  ‘You saw her reaction, you were there,’ Jack goes on, turning his frustration on Inspector Leigh now. ‘Fucking elaborate,’ he mimics. ‘Fucking unique. Fucking smug fucking bitch.’

  This isn’t Jack. Hearing him swear like this, sounding so vicious. This: it’s like listening to me.

  I want to reassure him but I don’t know how. And he senses that, I think. I felt it when we were talking to the policewoman: the distance that’s opening up between us. And I know it’s my fault. I know it’s inevitable, necessary even – but it breaks my heart even so.

  I roll my lips and look down at the floor. Jack sets off towards the alarm sensor, dragging the chair with him as he goes.

  ‘How did you know?’

  We’re on the landing. There are still ghosts of those pictures that until last week we’d left hanging on the wall, little blanks of wallpaper a slightly deeper shade of cerise than the space around them. I’m sitting on the floor, the balustrade needling my back. The discomfort is like a penance and I don’t shift. Jack’s slumped forward on the dining chair, heedless of the plaster dust that coats it now as well as him. There’s a hole above him where he’s ripped out the last of our smoke alarms and a pair of wires that until recently were hidden beneath the light fitting. There’s no evidence anywhere of any cameras.

  ‘How did you know?’ he says again. ‘How could you be so sure we wouldn’t find anything?’

  I’ve been thinking about how to answer this question, obviously.

  ‘Because it’s not the type of thing my father would do,’ I say. ‘He’d view it as … cheating, somehow.’

  ‘Cheating?’ Jack looks at me in disgust. As though they’re my rules.

  I nod, shrug. I’ve been following Jack around like a gormless puppy, watching him drag that chair from room to room and jab holes in all our fixtures and fittings. I thought that was painful to watch but this, the way he is now, it’s worse. He’d clearly managed to convince himself he was on to something – one shattered smoke alarm away from finding the evidence the inspector said we needed. But now he’s floundering, I guess. Desperate. Which, given the circumstances, is hardly surprising. I’d be floundering if I was in his position too. I’m floundering in mine.

  ‘So bribing an estate agent with a wedge of cash is OK,’ Jack is saying, ‘but installing a camera that costs – what? A hundred quid? – isn’t allowed?’

  I sigh. Not at Jack. At the ridiculous logic of it. ‘Bribing Evan was all right because it’s …’ I hesitate to use the word, use it anyway. ‘Clever,’ I say. ‘It’s sly, part of setting his trap. But cameras …’ I shrug again. ‘Cameras are easy. Cheap. And I’m not talking about how much they cost.’

  Jack sits straighter and some plaster dust sprinkles from his shoulders.

  ‘What about that photo he took of me and Amira?’ he says. ‘I mean, he must have hired someone to follow me. Don’t you think? Ali said they saw someone but we don’t know for sure they saw your father. So wouldn’t hiring a private detec
tive or whatever count as cheating, too?’

  ‘Probably,’ I say.

  Jack frowns like I’m the one not playing fairly. ‘Meaning what? That you don’t think he did hire anyone? That he followed me and took that photograph himself?’

  ‘If he could have he would have, yes. My father was never exactly one to delegate. He always did like to get his hands dirty.’ I shiver again. It’s not the temperature. What I mean is, if it were hotter, I’d still be shaking. ‘Besides,’ I go on, ‘it’s like with the cameras: hiring someone would have meant leaving a trail and he’s smart enough not to do that.’

  Jack’s angry again because that’s another path to securing evidence gone. And I think that, in spite of everything, he’s still struggling to comprehend it: the effort to which my father would have had to go.

  ‘What about hacking my email?’ he says, after a pause. ‘Could he have done that, maybe somehow left a trace? I mean, it’s possible that’s how he found out about Sabeen. Except …’ His shoulders drop and he’s slumping once again in his chair. ‘We never communicated by email,’ he says. ‘It was always by phone or by text.’ He ponders for a moment, then drops his gaze. ‘I suppose he could have checked my phone if he saw it lying around when he was in the house. Like, on my bedside table.’

  He looks towards our bedroom and this time Jack is the one to shiver. It’s catching, like yawns.

  I get up then. I start to head back downstairs, to get on with … what? With waiting, I guess. Which makes me wonder whether Jack didn’t have the right idea after all. Punching holes in all the plasterwork with a blunt screwdriver. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t productive. But at least it was something.

  ‘Shit,’ Jack spits suddenly from behind me. As I turn he tosses the screwdriver and it gouges out another small piece of wall. ‘We can’t just bloody sit here, Syd. We can’t just sit back and let him win!’

  It’s an echo of what the inspector said. This is how he wins. I want to offer Jack some reassurance but there’s not a thing I can say. If there was I would have said it already.