Doppelganger (12 page)

I turned back to the page and
looked again.

I felt the prickle of hair
standing up at the back of my neck. And a chill cold freezing feeling in the
pit of my stomach.

It was a black-and-white photo of
a little girl. I gulped and stared, mesmerised. It was a child’s face, the face
of a little girl of around eight years old. Yet her eyes, her nose, the set of
her mouth and the strange cleft in her chin were unmistakable. God it couldn’t
be!

The image in front of me was the
absolute image of my Lucy. The same face as Lucy’s only as she must have looked
as a child.

Terrified now, I found the
magnifying glass I kept in a drawer and scanned the picture, searching
frantically for differences.

Try as I might, there was just
something in her expression, as well as her facial features, that seemed to me
unmistakeable. Yet the picture was old, lacking definition. What a crazy
coincidence.

Who was she? I turned back to the
beginning of the chapter.

The photo was that of Megan
Foster, taken when she was nine years old.

The child in the picture, who
looked exactly like a younger version of the woman I was in love with, had been
convicted of strangling a younger child in 1981.

I closed my eyes, then opened
them again.

Terror was making my heart beat
so fast it felt as if it was going to burst out of my chest.

It couldn’t be.

It couldn’t be!

Then with frightening clarity I
somehow knew that this had to be where I’d seen her face before. All those
romantic fantasies I’d luxuriated in, about having known her face before I’d
met her, how it was a portent that we were meant to be together, a sort of déjà
vu that I had wallowed in. Was this the real explanation? That because of the
horrendousness of her crime, the face of this child murderer had lodged
somewhere deep in my subconscious and Lucy’s image had triggered the memory?

And Douglas. I remember that when
I’d shown him the picture of her, he, too, said he’d felt as if he’d seen her
somewhere before.

No.

It couldn’t possibly be. Lucy was
a normal, lovely person. This face in front of me, although it looked like a
miniature version of Lucy, couldn’t possibly be her. They say that everyone has
a double, don’t they? There’s a German word
doppelganger
, that even
describes it.

Of course, that was it. That had
to be it. My heartbeat eased. I tried to think rationally. However similar the
face of the child and the woman might be, there couldn’t possibly be a
connection. Why should there be one?

My Lucy was Lucy Green, a girl
who’d grown up in the village of Chorton Hardy, near St Albans in
Hertfordshire, whose parents had both died years ago. She’d left home when she
went to university, left her course and retrained as a woodworker, then as a
master carpenter. She’d lived first in Edinburgh, then Cambridge, and now she
was living in Canterbury. It was all eminently verifiable.

But a small voice at the back of
my mind that I didn’t want to hear, kept saying, yes, all those things are true
for Lucy Green. But Megan Foster had killed a child. And for all the world my
Lucy and Megan Foster looked like one and the same person. Cleft in the chin.
Soulful dark eyes. The way she had of staring at you as if she was looking deep
into your soul...

I dismissed the idea. And yet,
the other part of my rational mind reminded me that I knew next to nothing
about the woman I was in love with. Whenever I’d asked about her past life
she’d talked about her upbringing in Hertfordshire, but she’d soon shied away
from the subject, not wanting to dwell on the past. She’d told me that she had
no other living relatives.

I had to know the truth, and I
had to find out right now, beyond any doubt. What on earth had happened to
Megan Foster since 1981, when the picture I was staring at had been taken?
Surely she’d have been locked up for years and years, perhaps was behind bars
somewhere right now, and I could relax, knowing that my Lucy’s only crime was
unwittingly being Megan Foster’s doppelganger.

My fingers were trembling, but I
managed to switch on the computer, and type the name into Google, pressing
return and hoping against hope there’d be nothing. After a second the screen
came alive. Megan Foster, a child behaviour therapist in Northampton. The Megan
Foster fracture clinic in Barnsley. Megan Foster the novelist. Three Megan
Fosters, and not one of them was the diabolical monster I’d been reading about.
And then halfway down the second page I found the entry I didn’t want to find.
The date was 1992, and it was a snippet from
The Times
newspaper. I
clicked on the link, praying there was some mistake.

RELEASE OF CHILD KILLER, MEGAN
FOSTER

Questions were asked today in
the House of Commons as to the decision by the Home Secretary to release the
child murderer Megan Foster, eleven years after she was first detained at Her
Majesty’s Pleasure. The Home Secretary stated that psychiatric assessments from
prominent experts showed that during her incarceration she had changed and now
no longer posed a threat to society. The Mental Health Tribunal, led by Sir
Rodney Harington QC, concluded that Megan Foster should be released and given a
new identity and monitored by the social services and other government
agencies, allowing her out, effectively on probation, for the rest of her life.
Accordingly she was given a new identity and released on August 31, 1992. Her
mother, her only living relative, said that Megan, now 19, would probably
settle down to life abroad, most likely somewhere within the EEC. Sir Rodney
stated that he had no hesitation in following the four leading consultant
psychiatrists’ opinions that Ms Foster could effectively wipe the slate clean
and was young enough to begin her life afresh. For obvious reasons her new
identity is to be kept top secret forever.

To be kept top secret forever.

1992. Eighteen years ago. Making
her exactly the same age as my Lucy: thirty-seven. And allowing plenty of time
for her to go to university, train for a career, live in different places,
establish a history.
To be another person entirely
.

My mind was racing with thoughts
so terrifying I couldn’t allow them to form. There had to be some other
explanation. What was I basing all this on, anyway?

A photograph.

Nothing more substantial than an
old grainy photograph.

And yet, now the thought had
entered my mind, it wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard I tried to get rid of
it. How much did I know about Lucy, anyway? If you didn’t want to compete in
the jobs market, and were likely to have difficulties giving references from
previous employers, and to be asked awkward questions about your past, being
self employed was the most logical kind of employment to have. And making
dolls’ houses and furniture for dolls’ houses was the kind of job requiring
patience and skill, work that you necessarily had to do alone.

And a lawyer had once explained
to me a quirk of the judicial system, whereby you could murder someone, get
sentenced to 16 years imprisonment, serve half of it, and be released. Yet if
you pleaded diminished responsibility, and spent time in a secure hospital for
a murder done because a psychiatric illness caused you to act as you did, you
were effectively never actually free, but always subject to scrutiny from the
authorities, in fact on probation for the rest of your life.

I made some coffee, gritted my
teeth and settled down to read the account of the case outlined in the book:

Extract from
True Crimes of
the 20th Century
, by Douglas Hosegood:

Megan Foster – THE CHILD
KILLER WITH A CLEFT IN HER CHIN

Megan Foster came from a
normal, middle-class home, and the Fosters, by all accounts, kept themselves to
themselves and were well liked. No one could have envisaged that Megan would
turn out to be what all of us secretly can’t bear to think of: a child who has
no innocence, who is truly evil, who is, in fact, a monster.

On 23 September 1981,
8-year-old Megan was playing with other children in the yard of her school,
whose name and whereabouts cannot be disclosed for fear of compromising her
anonymity, now that she has a new identity. Suddenly one of her playmates
started screaming, having discovered the body of Aiden Caulfield, five years
old, an angelic little blond-haired boy who was particularly small for his age.
Aiden was lying on his back against the wall, immobile, and despite the efforts
of the teacher who’d been summoned, he was obviously dead, apparently
suffocated or strangled.

It was a mystery. No one had
seen what had happened. The school was immediately closed, the children were
sent home, and the police questioned everyone who was in the vicinity. First of
all it was assumed that an adult had somehow gained entry to the school grounds
and attacked the child, but no one had seen any adults who weren’t accounted
for.

That’s when some of the adults
who had anything to do with Megan thought she was acting strangely. Although
she was clearly upset about Aiden’s death, Megan refused to even talk about it
to anyone, not her teacher and not her friends, apart from her initial token
denials.

When she was taken in for
questioning, with all the paraphernalia of social workers, her mother, doctors
and other medical professionals attending, she denied having been responsible.
However, eyewitness accounts afterwards confirmed that she’d been playing
‘strangling games’ with children in the playground for several weeks. Two
witnesses finally admitted seeing Megan with her hands around Aiden’s throat
shortly before he’d been found dead. Her teachers reported that she was known
to be a ‘skilful liar’, and, despite her pleas of innocence, the court case
concluded that she was guilty.

The police psychiatrist, who’d
attended the questioning, stated that Megan displayed classic sociopathic
tendencies. She offered no explanation for her actions, and no reason for her
unprovoked attack, continuing to deny that she was guilty, accusing a boy (who
cannot be named) of being the killer, not her. The medical professionals
concluded that the fact that she always denied killing Aiden proved that she
was incapable of facing up to the consequences of her horrendous actions.

The drama of death
.

I thought about it, remembering
the case of Beverley Allard, the nurse who’d killed children in her charge,
allegedly because she enjoyed the feeling of high drama when she summoned
medical assistance, and was delighted to be at the centre of the inevitable
attempted ‘resuscitation’ attempt. ‘Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy’ was the
fancy name for it. But Beverley Allard thoroughly enjoyed the excitement of a
child’s death, she wanted to be at the centre of attempting to save the life,
to be a heroine. Megan Foster had killed another child and then lied about it,
shying away from any responsibility.

And yet. Lucy was working as a
volunteer in a hospital. A place where there were vulnerable people.

I spent the next couple of hours
on a family history website, checking the births for 1973 for Hertfordshire,
and sure enough, discovered that a Lucy Green had been born in the village of
Chorton Hardy to Daniel and Alison Green.

So thank heavens, a Lucy Green
had been borne, and was exactly the same age as my Lucy. And Lucy’s account of
her early life matched that of the birth record I’d just discovered. However
thorough the government body that established false identities might be, I
couldn’t imagine they’d be able to tamper with the official records of births
and deaths. How could they conceivably fabricate parents, christenings, and all
the rest of it? Presumably when a person was issued with a new identity they
had to invent a fictitious early life for the outside world, up to the point
that their change of identity occurred. A fictitious life which could not, of
course, be documented officially in any way whatsoever.

Everything was okay then.

Except there were other
possibilities.

If my Lucy was in fact Megan
Foster, then the real Lucy Green was someone else entirely. Someone else who
had to be somewhere, who presumably would not want her identity copied. Or was
she dead? Assuming Lucy had been Megan Foster, had she somehow discovered that
Lucy Green had died, and applied for documents in her name, just as the killer
in the novel
The Day
of the Jackal
, had done? And why would she
need to bother anyway, when presumably the government had issued her with a
bona fide new identity and all necessary documentation?

But I knew that it was not
possible. Since the time that Frederick Forsyth’s thriller had been written,
the world had moved on. Passport security had improved beyond all recognition,
and the novel itself had highlighted a weakness in the system that had since
been tightened up. With the recent terrorist scares, security had obviously
become much more stringent, even within the last few years. Besides, in these
days of computers it was hardly likely that when you applied for a replacement
passport there wasn’t a simultaneous check made to confirm that no death
certificate had been issued for the same person.

That left only two possibilities.
Firstly that Lucy was indeed Lucy Green, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the
child killer; which, I was gradually coming to realise, was by far the most
likely explanation. Secondly, my Lucy was really the child-killer Megan Foster,
and for reasons of her own had befriended the real Lucy Green, killed her, then
taken her identity. Was it possible? Was it even practical? And why would she
want, or even need to do it? After all, the whole point of being given a new
identity was that there was no need to cover your tracks, you could be
perfectly upfront about everything in your life after the date you were
released from prison.

However, there were other
possible scenarios. What if someone had discovered her true identity, and the only
way to prevent her new persona being compromised was to create another? Could
Lucy Green, if she was indeed another person, have discovered the truth? And,
because Lucy was threatening to expose her, Megan had killed her, hidden the
body somehow, and then managed to take on her identity? She could have killed
the real Lucy Green, then applied for another passport in Lucy’s name, using
her own photograph. Yet I was certain that there was a system whereby someone
in authority who knew you personally had to sign the photo to confirm the
person was indeed the one photographed. But was there some possible way round
the rules? And what about Lucy Green’s relatives and friends? I just didn’t
know the answers.

And then came the worst thought
in the world. The Bible Killer’s first victim had been found shortly after the
date that Lucy had started working at the hospital. And she’d been partially
strangled, just as young Megan’s victim had been.