The Other Side of Night Read online

  Advance Praise for THE OTHER SIDE OF NIGHT

  “Emotional, heartwarming, and thought provoking, The Other Side of Night is one of those rare books that you’ll still be thinking about long after the last page.”

  —Jenny Blackhurst, internationally bestselling author of How I Lost You

  “The Other Side of Night is a mesmerizing tale of love, loss, and the human condition, certain to transport readers while simultaneously transforming their imaginations. It will captivate and challenge perception while raising the question, what is reality versus grand illusion? It’s guaranteed to be among the classics you’ll read time and time again.”

  —Eric P. Bishop, author of The Body Man

  “Hold on to your sanity. This psychological thriller will keep you wondering which strange details are real and which emerge from the minds of the characters. The lonely boy, the disgraced police officer, the bizarre scientist—each has a dark secret, and a dark problem to solve. The Other Side of Night is imaginative and thought-provoking, fiction at its best.”

  —W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear, New York Times bestselling authors of Dissolution and Fourth Quadrant

  “In this inventive and intriguing novel, Hamdy mixes in just the right amount of mystery, uncertainty, and relational tension and brings them all simmering to delicious effect. Stunningly good writing. Don’t let this one slip you by.”

  —Steven James, bestselling author of Every Wicked Man

  “The Other Side of Night is a mind-bending mystery that, by the time it reaches its extraordinary end, leaves no twist unexplained, no thread untied. An utterly satisfying read.”

  —Ryan Gattis, author of The System

  “The Other Side of Night is a beautiful love story within a crime mystery within a love story, each embedded within its proper place.”

  —Dean Buonomano, author of Brain Bugs

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  For Elliot, who inspired this book with a simple question

  PREFACE

  What would you sacrifice for love?

  As I look back on my life, I’m haunted by the question. Perhaps what troubles me most is that I never got to choose. The pain I suffer, the loss I feel, the regret that clouds every single day—I never chose my sacrifice. Someone made the choice for me.

  Would I have taken a different path?

  I don’t know, but the opportunity would have been nice. Instead, like a character in a story, my fate was decided by someone else.

  My son.

  I think about Elliot every day. Sometimes in anger, often with remorse, mostly in pity, but always with love. You can draw your own conclusions about the morality of his actions. To this day, my own mind is not at peace with what happened.

  Is regret real?

  We feel it, but it doesn’t exist anywhere. I can’t point to it, any more than I can relive the events that caused it. But does that mean it isn’t real? I devoted many of my years to science, and after decades spent pondering the intersection between perception and reality, I’ve come to the conclusion that regret and all the other emotions we feel so deeply are just as real as the clothes we wear or the air we breathe. I’ve dissected my life, studied the great thinkers of every age, and considered all the theories of reality I could find, and I’ve come to accept one inescapable truth:

  Life is memory.

  Everything we experience of the world exists only in our minds or the minds of those around us. The past is generally accepted as memory, so must we accept the present and future as fictions of our mind. Moments we perceive as now have already passed, and the future is the imagined memory of things to come. We commonly think of time moving forward, but there are some who believe we’re traveling backward, that the past lies ahead of us and the future behind. In many ways, this view of the cosmos makes sense. We can see the past but are blind to the future. Are moments gone any more real than those yet to be had? We are equipped to experience the now, to take in sights and sounds, tastes, smells, to touch and be touched, to feel pain, heartbreak, anguish, and yet as we move from one moment to the next, each instant fades and the new now becomes more real than anything we remember, but it too is memory the instant we experience it.

  What was, what is, and what will be—I now understand these things exist only in our minds, but that doesn’t make them any less real, any less inevitable. We are bound by the chains of causation that allow time to hold back chaos, and each link is essential to ensure we never escape our destiny. Every moment of suffering, every stab of pain, every shed tear, is simply the price of order. We each long to be exempt from such tight bonds, to have one link unfastened to undo a moment, to alter the chain that constrains us, but such dreams are futile. We are stuck, bound to stories that have already been written. We just haven’t lived them yet, and when we have, it’s too late for them to be changed.

  The story that follows has been decades in the making. I’ve pieced together court reports, electronic records, newspaper articles, video recordings, letters—everything I could to make my account as close to the truth as possible. I’ve relied greatly on the words of the woman who destroyed my son’s life and then redeemed it: Harriet Kealty.

  Harri strikes me as a lonely figure. Perhaps that’s what law enforcement does to a person. Maybe daily exposure to the violent, dishonest, and downright murderous makes trust a luxury? Perhaps that’s why police officers travel in packs and end up socializing together.

  She was thirty-one or thirty-two when she first met my son. She’d been born and raised in London and spent her childhood living in a four-bedroom terraced house near Battersea Park. Harri was twenty when her mum died, and her father retired to Melbourne shortly after she joined the police force. He died a few years later. There were a couple of cousins, one on the Isle of Wight, the other in Toronto, and a brace of school friends who met her once a year for drinks, but beyond that, Harri was a loner. She didn’t keep a conventional diary, but every few days she would send herself a chatty email chronicling recent events. She kept the emails in a folder called “Journal,” and as far as I can tell she never shared them with anyone. The emails read like round robins, and the fact she felt too isolated to share her news with anyone but herself fills me with sadness. I consider myself a voyeur trawling through her private recollections, but given her role in Elliot’s life this book wouldn’t have been possible without the intrusion. If I’ve wronged her, I hope she will forgive me.

  I’ve been in two minds about sharing the trove that has enabled me to tell this story. They always say a magician should never reveal their secrets, and I think the same is true of authors. If I hadn’t revealed my access to Harri’s emails, court records, and other histories, you might have thought me more imaginative, or a better storyteller, but I feel it is important you know I’m honest. I’ve traded mystery for accuracy. However much this diminishes your perception of me as a storyteller, you know that all I’m doing is coloring between the lines of reality.

  Of all the books I’ve written, this is the most difficult. Not a page passes that I don’t think of my son, alone, described by the social workers who came to assess him as “troubled,” “withdrawn,” and “suspicious.” I long to reach out to my boy and hug him. I want to hold Elliot and make the pain go away. I want to tell him ho
w sorry I am for abandoning him, to tell him how much I love him.

  But I can’t.

  And that eats at me.

  I’m hollow.

  I miss him so much.

  But he’s gone.

  Or rather, it’s me.

  I’ve gone.

  I left him.

  I left him alone in that house.

  I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t. I can’t come to terms with what I’ve done. That’s part of the reason I’m writing this book: to try to make sense of it all. I’ve spent years telling stories, but this was the only one that really mattered, and I’ve never had the courage to tell it publicly because it’s too raw. It still causes great pain, and all my failings as a father are laid bare. I want to hug my boy. I want to make him feel better, but I can’t. And that’s on me.

  Me, and no one else.

  I return to the house every year. I make a summer trip when the Peak District is at its most beautiful. I travel the familiar track to the cottage we once called home and wander through the untouched memorial to a happy life. I don’t think anyone lived here after Elliot left, and the place is damp and imbued with a stillness of abandonment that crushes me every time I cross the threshold. The doors are bowed and flaking, the windows long broken, the frames woodwormed and splintered.

  The roof has been pockmarked by the relentless march of time, and here and there the cracked slate floor is contoured by the residue of water puddles. I’m not sure how much longer the old place will withstand the elements, but where others might see a ruin, memory takes me beyond the decay and fills my eyes with glistening images of a husband and wife, happy together. Their joy at a child. The bubbling sounds of family life.

  Years ago, I found an aluminium box concealed in the cubby behind the loose brick beside the fireplace in the sitting room. A trove left by Elliot, who was always obsessed with secrets. I remember showing him the cubby in happier times, before our lives were blighted by misery. I still recall how his eyes lit up when I said it would be a good place to hide pirate treasure or the clandestine messages of a spy. He always had such a wonderful imagination.

  I can’t remember what prompted me to look behind the loose brick all those years later. A desire to make physical contact with that moment, perhaps? To be linked to my son, no matter how tenuously? To relive a memory? My reward was a connection more real and haunting than I could have ever imagined.

  I found letters Elliot had written to me.

  I remember standing in the ruined room, hearing no sound, sensing nothing, as though time itself had stopped. I devoured them, pausing only to compose myself when some handwritten phrase broke me. Some of the letters are so raw I have only been able to read them once. Others I revisit often. This is one of my favorites, for reasons I hope will become clear.

  Dear Dad,

  Do you remember when you showed me this little pirate’s hollow? You told me Jack Sparrow might hide treasure there. Or Alex Rider some top secret plans. I remember that day. I hope you do too. I pray you find these. I like to think of you standing by the fireplace reading my words. These scrawled symbols on the page link our minds. It doesn’t matter how many years have passed; the moment of your reading will be tied to the moment of my writing and through these words we can be together again. They tell part of my story, but you’ll have to dig deeper if you want the whole truth.

  You didn’t deserve what happened. None of us did. But fate conspired against us and I was forced to make a choice. Although I sometimes wonder whether I ever really chose. When I look back on what happened, it always seems my path was chosen for me. Perhaps you’ll be able to find sense where I have not?

  I have two regrets. The first is that we can’t be together. It causes me pain every single day, but without that pain, well, you know the alternative. You lived it. For a few agonizing weeks, you saw what life would have been like. My other regret is Sabih Khan. His face haunts my dreams and helps me accept my punishment.

  I hope you don’t miss me as much as I miss you. There’s no need for sadness. We were blessed to have had more years together than we were due. It was an honor to call you Father, but you know you were more than that to me, you were also a friend. The best I ever had. If you find yourself mourning me, take comfort in the knowledge that one day I will find happiness. Please don’t be sad for me. I have as much as anyone could hope for, even if it’s not everything.

  With all my love,

  Elliot

  Those of you familiar with my work might be surprised by this tale, but before I became an author, I had another life. Writing is a metaphor for my journey. I came to it unwittingly, unwillingly, and am captive to it.

  Don’t pity me. Like my son, I’ve suffered more than most and been trapped in ways few could understand, but I have almost everything I’ve ever wanted. There is just one thing missing, and it’s the thing I miss the most.

  I’ve tried to tell this story once or twice before, but even my closest friends don’t believe it. Their sidelong glances of skepticism grind away at me, and I’ve always lost heart before reaching the end. So I’m publishing it as a book, perhaps my last, and my readers can make of it what they will.

  This is my son’s story. I have no doubt it will be sold as fiction, but rest assured every word that follows is true.

  David Asha

  PART ONE The Child

  Extract from the court report of R v. Elmys

  Roger Sumption QC for the Crown Prosecution Service

  Ms. Hardcastle, you run Sunshine Start, is that correct?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  Yes.

  Roger Sumption QC

  Could you describe what you do?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  We provide temporary care for children until they can be placed with a foster family or adopted.

  Roger Sumption QC

  Can you explain how you first encountered the defendant?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  Mr. Elmys was going to adopt Elliot Asha. Well, he did, but when I first met him, he was still going through the legal formalities.

  Roger Sumption QC

  I believe you told the police there was something odd about Mr. Elmys’s behavior on the day he came to collect Elliot.

  Elaine Hardcastle

  Yes.

  Roger Sumption QC

  Can you elaborate? Tell us about it for the benefit of the jury.

  Elaine Hardcastle

  It was last August. I remember because we were planning our annual sunshine holiday. It’s a little treat we give the children at the end of every summer, sort of to make up for them not going away like they might if they were with family. I was sad Elliot was leaving us and missing it but pleased he had a new home. Well, an old home.

  Roger Sumption QC

  Can you explain?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  David and Elizabeth Asha had made Mr. Elmys trustee of their estate and Elliot’s guardian. Elliot was going back to the family home to live with Mr. Elmys.

  Roger Sumption QC

  And how did he seem to you that day?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  Elliot? He was sad. At least to begin with.

  Roger Sumption QC

  And Mr. Elmys?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  I, well, we met in my office. I like to give new guardians the opportunity to ask questions while I’m doing final checks.

  Roger Sumption QC

  Did Mr. Elmys ask any questions?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  No. He just watched me going over the paperwork. He seemed distracted.

  Grace Oyewole QC for the defendant

  My Lord, as someone might be if they were suddenly responsible for a child.

  Justice Thomas

  Indeed.

  Elaine Hardcastle

  That’s true. A lot of people who adopt struggle with the responsibility. But this was different. Am I, I mean, I hope it’s not untoward or anything, but Mr. Elmys s
eemed troubled.

  Grace Oyewole QC for the defendant

  My Lord.

  Justice Thomas

  Please keep to your recollection of events, Mrs. Hardcastle. You’re not qualified to give opinions on Mr. Elmys’s frame of mind.

  Roger Sumption QC

  What happened then?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  I asked Mr. Elmys to stay in the welcome room. It’s a play space we use to acclimatize children to their new families. I left him there and went to fetch Elliot, who was with Stephanie Cliffe, one of our counselors. She was observing him interact with other children. Or rather not interact. His parents’ deaths had hit him hard. Is it okay to say that? I mean, it’s my opinion, but it’s based on decades of working with children.

  He was sitting apart, like he did every day, staring out of the window at the old oak tree that grows just beside the residential wing. Whenever I’d ask him what he was doing, why he was daydreaming rather than playing, he’d say he was counting souls. Each leaf was a person. One day they’d start to fall, and by winter they’d all be gone. I thought it was a very strange way for a ten-year-old child to look at the world.

  Anyway, I found him by the window, and Steph and I took him to the welcome room. It was very distressing.

  Roger Sumption QC

  Why?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  He was crying. Fighting with us both. We don’t use physical restraint at Sunshine, but this was as close as I’d ever come to having to do so.

  Roger Sumption QC

  Would you say he was afraid of Mr. Elmys?

  Grace Oyewole QC

  I hesitate to rise, but my learned friend knows the rules. Can I ask that he stick to them so that I do not have to address my Lord further?

  Roger Sumption QC

  Then I will ask a different question. Did you get Elliot to the welcome room?

  Elaine Hardcastle

  Yes.

  Roger Sumption QC