Doppelganger (13 page)

Then, with a sickening jolt, I
remembered the perfume on her dressing table.
Heaven’s Dust
.

The same type of perfume that
Caroline remembered in the seconds before she’d been attacked from behind.

That’s when I remembered Lucy’s
words: “Do you believe in forgiveness?”

I was still in love with Lucy,
nothing could change that. Yet I was in love with the Lucy I knew. Was I still
in love with her if it turned out that she was someone else entirely?

Suddenly, I heard a blast of
gunfire.

Plaster dust filled the air as a
series of holes appeared in the wall to my left. I dived to the ground. There
were footsteps on the gravel outside. What had been a window was now just a
gaping jagged hole. I heard the familiar screech-click-clack of a pump-action
shotgun ratcheting another shell into its breach.

Heartbeat cranked up high, I
crawled across the room. My pistol was still in the car.

Another gunshot. The clock on my
mantelpiece exploded. I heard an abrupt crash, then the squeak of breaking
timber. My front door had been broken open. I could hear footsteps.

The kitchen door was several
yards away from the window. Inside a porch.

One decision. And it had to be
the right one.

I leapt up and vaulted through
the broken window. Fell onto the gravel, face down. Scrambled to my feet and
ran. A sharp pain tore at my shoulder. I recollected the sudden sensation of
pressure in my arm as blood spattered onto my hand and I realised that a jagged
edge of glass must have ripped through my flesh.

Movement from the porch. Another
shotgun blast.

But I was running. Running
towards my car.

I made it, leaping into the
driver’s seat and firing the engine. Smashed a chunk out of the wall as I tore
the wheel in a turn. Skidding on the gravel, I slalomed out of my gate, hearing
the slamming doors of another vehicle behind me.

Driving fast along the road
through Mulligan’s Wood. Speeding under the overhanging branches. Headlights in
the mirror, getting closer. The main road.

They were getting closer.

I slammed on the brakes suddenly.
Unable to stop in time, they crashed into my boot. The judder and wrench threw
me forward, jerking the seatbelt tight until I snapped it open and squirmed
around in my seat. In those seconds I managed to reach under the dashboard,
tear the Glock free from its securing duct tape and ratcheted a shell into the
breech. I fired three times through the rear window.

Then I accelerated away.

The other car didn’t follow me.

*
* * *

Jack, why haven’t you phoned?
Where are you? What’s happening?

The texts springing onto my phone
were getting on my nerves, so much so that I switched it off, as I drove out of
the city along the A20, leading towards the M20. I phoned a windscreen repair company,
and they repaired my car’s rear window at a service station forecourt, so that
now there would be no visible evidence that I’d been involved in an incident
where a firearm had been discharged. 

Last night’s nearly successful
attempt on my life by Sean Boyd’s men had convinced me that I couldn’t risk
going back to my house. I had to go into hiding. Somehow they knew I was still
writing
Hero or Villain?
How did they know?  Was there an informant at
the publishers?

But, separately, the other events
of yesterday were still fresh in my mind, and I was still trying to rationalise
what was happening regarding Lucy. Since I couldn’t risk going back home, my
plan was to try to find out exactly what Lucy had been doing for the past few
years, so as to satisfy myself, once and for all, she was not the killer, Megan
Foster.

Megan Mary Foster. Lucy Green.
Where they one and the same?

Of course I was still in love
with her, nothing could alter that. On the face of it I couldn’t believe that
there was any possibility that she could be the same person as Megan Foster.
Yet a tiny voice in my mind couldn’t stop nagging at me, saying, supposing your
worst nightmare is fact: supposing the woman you’re in love with was once a
murderer, could you forget it, and accept that whatever horrendous,
unforgivable things she’d done as a child, she was now a changed person,
someone who’d never do those things again?

Never do those things again?

Right now, there was a killer on
the loose, who’d already killed three times. And one of the victims was had
been visiting a patient at the same hospital where Lucy worked. Lucy said she
had been in York at the time, but how did I know that she hadn’t returned last
night and gone back to York this morning?

The truth was, if Lucy was Megan
Foster the child murderer, and she no longer posed a threat to society, as the
psychiatrist had stated, how could I reconcile my feelings for her? They were
tainted irrevocably. It was humiliating to realise that the incredible ‘bond’
I’d felt when I’d first seen her face had nothing to do with an instinctive
attraction as I’d thought at first. The strength of my reaction to seeing her
face was actually down to shock: a terrible reminder of when I’d seen her face
in the book, and looked into the eyes of a monster. Everything about my
relationship with Lucy seemed like a dreadful perversion of love. A sickening
travesty.

Trouble was, she hadn’t invented
a false identity for my benefit, she was living it. Living the life of Lucy
Green, who, I had found out, had undoubtedly been born in Chorton Hardy,
Hertfordshire on the date she’d said. And gone to school in the same area – all
the facts matched up.

So the truth had to be that Lucy
was Megan Foster’s doppelganger, there was simply no other credible explanation.
But if I didn’t examine the one other possibility, I’d never be able to think
straight again, and I would always wonder.

Everything about Lucy was turning
out to be a mystery. Because I was still in love with her, I was terrified.
Hoping against hope there was some kind of reasonable explanation for
everything.

Lucy had told me that she’d been
living in Cambridge up until a few months ago, so I emailed a private detective
agency I occasionally use, who can trawl phone directories and electoral registers
around the country to find addresses to match up to names. They found an
address in Cambridge for a Lucy Green, for this time last year. I hardly knew
what I was expecting to find out, most likely a dead end.

Abelard Terrace was a row of
three-storey terraced white houses on the outskirts of town. As I stood outside
the front door of number 23, and noted the names printed against bells, I
realised that most of these houses had probably been split up into flats for
students. There were six names.

I pressed each in turn. At the
final one, Bernard Talgarth, I was rewarded with a snappy male voice barking
through the intercom. “Yeah?”

“Hi. I’m a very old friend of
Lucy Green, and I’ve only just come back from abroad. I wondered if she still
lived here.”

“Who?”

“Lucy. Lucy Green.”

“Come in, mate. I’ll meet you in
the hallway.”

The buzzer sounded and I pushed
the heavy old door inwards and stepped into a musty hallway that looked as if
it had been painted cream in 1960, and the colour had taken half a century to
fade down to its current morbid yellow. The dirty brown carpet was largely
threadbare and a flight of stairs was directly ahead. There was a rank smell of
rotting cabbage.

An extremely tall twentyish man
with a shock of uncombed dark hair and a white tee shirt emblazoned with the
words F . . K Me! emerged from a door in front of me. He had the fashionable
stubble of not-quite-beard and not-clean shaven that didn’t suit him – in fact
he looked like a tramp. Black whiskers wobbled unhappily above a prominent
Adam’s apple as he talked.

“Lucy Green. Yeah. I think she
was the tenant before me in my flat – I moved in six months ago. Kept getting
her mail delivered here for a long time – still get the odd letter sometimes.”

“You never met her?”

“No, mate.” He thought for a
moment. “Tell you what though, I’ll give you the landlord’s address – he’ll
probably have a forwarding address.”

“Great, thanks.”

As Bernard Talgarth scribbled an
address on a bit of paper for me, he was chattering on all the time. “Mean old
bastard he is. Never fixes things, but if the bloody rent’s a day late he’s on
it faster than a cat on a bloody rat, know what I mean?”

“I’ve met the type.”

“As a for instance, our bloody
drains need fixing, but will he get a plumber? Will he fuck! Stench down in the
basement where the washing machine is, getting worse and worse. Sewage, bloody
raw sewage, I reckon, leaking out I shouldn’t wonder – it’s a blimmin’ health
hazard!”

I found the landlord’s address
with the help of my Satnav and knocked on the door of a bungalow in another
part of Cambridge. The door opened.

Mr Gribbins was short and
elderly, with a fringe of white hair around his bald dome. He didn’t invite me
in.

“Lucy? Yes I remember her. Did a
runner, didn’t she?”

“A runner?”

“Sometimes happens. Mind, I was
surprised, she seemed a nice girl, but you just never know with people do you?
Just shipped out without letting me know. I kept her month’s deposit, so no
harm done. But all she had to do was tell me, and she could have had her money,
couldn’t she?”

“She just left without warning?
No forwarding address?”

“Just said so, didn’t I?”

Gribbins looked as if he was
anxious for me to leave.

“Can I just make sure we’re
talking about the same woman,” I said, showing him a picture on my phone I’d
taken of Lucy recently.

He peered down at it, and I had a
close up of the nest of hairs in his ears.

“I think that’s her. Although
when she looked at the flat and moved in later she was with her friend, Susan
Elkins, and I’m afraid I can’t be certain which is which. That’s either Susan
or Lucy – one or other of them.”

“Susan Elkins?”

“Yeah, yeah, her mate, Susan. She
helped her move into the place, they seemed very close, I almost wondered if
they were sharing for a bit, though there’s not a lot of space. I don’t ask
questions. If they want to share and halve the expenses, who am I to complain?”

“Thanks for your help.”

“Hope you find her.”

Back in the car I wondered at
this latest turn of events. Thoughts were skittering to and fro, but I couldn’t
make sense of them. Then something the unshaven guy had said came back to me.
“Smell in the basement. Won’t fix the drains...”

And Gribbins couldn’t be sure
whether the image of Lucy was her at all, or if it was her friend, Susan
Elkins. I had to check it out. Returning to 23 Abeline Road, luck was with me.
The door happened to be unfastened, so I walked into the hall, and went
alongside the stairs to the far end where there was a door marked Utility Room.

Once past the entrance, a flight
of steps leading downwards was directly in front of me. I switched on the light
and went down, closing the door behind me, eager not to be disturbed.

And I could smell what the lodger
had been talking about. A rank sickly-sweet aroma that made me feel sick. At
the bottom of the stairs straight ahead and to the left was a large washing
machine and separate spin dryer. Beyond them was a small area covered with
flagstones. I moved closer. One of the flagstones looked as if it didn’t match
the rest. The smell was stronger over here.

I found a large rusty screwdriver
leaning up against the wall. I knelt down and used it to prise up one edge of
the paving stone until I could lift it up and out of the way. There was soil
underneath, but it didn't have the dry compacted appearance of soil that’s been
undisturbed for years.

There was the sound of footsteps
above my head, and, for a few moments, I wondered how I’d explain what I was
doing here if anyone came down. But my luck held. No one came through the door.

Prodding carefully, I dug up some
soil, removing it with a cupped hand and depositing it on the floor. As I dug
the smell seemed to be getting stronger. Then the blade of the screwdriver hit
something hard. My heart thudding fast, I pushed soil out of the way and saw
something that was a different colour. Something hard.

A piece of yellowing bone.

Moving backwards I couldn’t stop
myself vomiting.

Was this the body of the real
Lucy Green, hastily buried by my girlfriend before she’d left the flat for
good?  Had the woman I was in love with killed Lucy Green, and somehow taken
her identity?

Going back to see the landlord,
Mr Gribbins, was the only option I had.

Half an hour later, he’d arrived
back in convoy with me, driving his own battered Nissan. My explanation must
have seemed crazy to him, but when I’d mentioned that I thought I’d found a
body, he’d insisted on coming to look before calling the police. Clearly he
thought I was a madman, but felt he couldn’t take the chance of ignoring me,
because I’d told him that if he refused to investigate I’d call the police
myself.

In the back of my mind was a
scenario whereby Megan Foster, officially given another name, was released, yet
still had the uncontrollable urge to kill. She had bided her time, until
eventually she killed again. The flat where she’d been living until recently
had a body buried in the basement. Was it the body of the real Lucy Green, and
Megan Foster had stolen her identity? Or was it that of Susan Elkins, Lucy’s
friend, whom the landlord had mentioned?

Gribbins unlocked the door and
led the way into the hall, sweeping forwards down the stairs to the cellar in
front of me.

I led him across to the patch of
disturbed earth underneath the missing paving slab. Oblivious to the smell, he
bent down and prodded the soil. 

“Can you smell it?” I asked him
when we were beside the bare earth where the paving slab had been.

“I can smell something,” he
answered. “But what it is, I wouldn’t like to say.”

“There!” I pointed to the bone
that he’d disturbed with the screwdriver.

“This?”

To my horror he prodded some
more, removing more soil with his hands. After several minutes of him prodding
and removing soil there were no others. The single bone I’d found turned out to
be only one, about three inches long. 

He picked it up in his fingers
and held it for me to see.

“Looks more like the bone from a
leg of lamb to me,” he said grimly. “Does that look human to you?”

“No. No it doesn’t. I’m sorry.”

“I should bloody well think you
are.”

Without another word, Gribbins
stood up and indicated that I should leave the cellar.

Outside on the pavement he glared
at me just before getting into his ancient car.

“Listen,” he muttered angrily. “I
don’t know who you are, or what right you think you had to enter my property.
For all I know you’re an escaped lunatic or someone high on drugs who’s got
nothing better to do than make up damn silly stories. But if any of my lodgers
tell me you’ve been seen around here again, I’m calling the police, right?”

“Sure.”

He drove away. My phone beeped
again, and sure enough there was yet another text from Lucy.

I turned it off.

*
* * *

Susan Elkins.

The name of Lucy’s friend was all
I had left to go on. She was obviously someone Lucy had been close to, for
she’d helped her move into Gribbins’s flat. But how should I handle the
situation? All I could hope was that if I could find Susan, I could try pumping
her for information. With any luck she might be the chatty type, who’d
volunteer some facts.

After spending the night in a
hotel, I’d got up around midday, and connected my laptop to the hotel’s WiFi
system. Then I emailed the name Susan Elkins to my detective friend, gave her
the approximate age, the same as Lucy, and asked them to search the area around
Cambridge. They came back with one likely possibility. Susan Jane Elkins, who
had an address in the north of the city.

I’d parked in one of the big car
parks near the centre of town, and it made more sense to walk to Latimer Road
than take the car – parking seemed particularly difficult. 32 was a neat semi
with a small red Fiat Uno parked in the front drive. I’d waited until it was
6.30 in the evening, reasoning that it was the most likely time to find her in,
assuming she had a job.

A woman in her thirties answered
the door. She was tall and thin, in a loose-fitting green pullover and black
trousers. Small gold earrings argued with the auburn hair that brushed her
shoulders, and she used a wary, guarded expression for the unexpected caller,
and I could hardly blame her. I started with my line of being Peter Thomson, an
old friend of Lucy’s who’d been abroad and was trying to trace the woman whom
he’d lost touch with.

“Lucy?” She blinked. “Goodness. I
haven’t heard from Lucy for ages.”

“Were you close friends?”

“Yes. Yes, we were.”

She hesitated on the doorstep, as
if she was itching to close the door in my face but was too polite to do so. I
noticed a tiny mole on her chin, a dark brown speck against the smooth pale
skin.

“I knew she spent some time in
Cambridge, and I asked at the flat address she’d given me, but they said she’d
moved on.”

“Yes. Yes, she did.”

“Do you know where?”

She regarded me warily. “Sorry,
what was your name again? And just how do you come to know Lucy?”

My heart was sinking. I was
gambling on the hope that she’d be unable to tell me how to contact Lucy, but
would talk about how they’d known each other, and chatter away about the
circumstances of their relationship. But far from being the chattering type,
she looked about as bubbly and forthcoming as a traffic warden.

“I
might
be able to help
you, Mr Thomson.” She frowned. “But you can hardly expect me just to give you
her details.”

“No, of course not.” My friendly
smile failed to melt that stony glare.

“She never mentioned your name.”
She looked me up and down, then, surprisingly, stepped backwards, her frosty
manner warming marginally. “Would you like to come inside?”

“I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

“No, no it’s no problem, come on
in, Peter.  You did say Peter, didn’t you?” She shut the front door behind me
and I followed her down the narrow hall into a living room. A large German
Shepherd dog padded up to me and inspected me carefully. Then sat back and
wagged its tail.

Susan Elkins smiled at last.
“You’ve passed the Bruno test. If he hadn’t liked you I’d have asked you to
leave – normally I wouldn’t let a stranger into my home.”

“Dogs seem to sense that I like
them.”

I made a fuss of Bruno, and soon
he was sitting cheerfully beside me on the sofa. It was a comfortable room,
thick-pile grey carpet and a three-piece suite and a grandfather clock in the
corner, its pendulum swinging slowly to and fro. The wallpaper had a floral
pattern and there were china figurines on the mantelpiece above the electric
‘burning’ logs in the fake grate. There were framed prints on the wall, scenes
of Victorian towns in lamplight, and a Lowry, the stick figures like ants below
the tall factory chimney. It was a cosy room, dominated by a pleasant doggy
aroma.

Susan settled into the armchair
opposite, black-trousered knees held close together. She leaned forward in the
chair, peering at me anxiously, clearly ill at ease.

“So did you work with Lucy?” I
asked.

“Yes.”

“And are you still in touch with
her?”

“Lucy moved away some time ago.”

“So you don’t know where she is
now?”

She looked thoughtful. “Well, yes
I do as it happens. I’m sorry but, as I said, I don’t know who you are, so I
really can’t just hand over her address. Give me your contact details and I’ll
forward them on to her if you like.”

“Thanks, that would be great.”

In fact it would be a disaster.
It would be embarrassing and unimaginably awful if Susan contacted Lucy. If
that happened, I’d simply have to bluff it out, pretending I knew nothing about
it. I wrote down my fictitious name with an equally fictitious phone number and
address and handed them across.

“Canterbury. That’s where you
live then?” she asked.

“Where I’m staying. Temporarily –
just while I’m in the country.”

“And how long are you in the
country for?”

“That’s pretty fluid. Depends on
various things.”

“Such as?”

“Work, you know.”

She stared at me. “You never
actually told me what your work was.”

“I’m an engineer.”

“What kind of engineer?”

“Civil engineer. You know,
bridges, dams, roads, that sort of thing.”

“And how did you come to know
Lucy?”

“I’ve taken up enough of your
time.” I stood up. “Thanks Ms Elkins, I’ll leave you in peace–”

“Why did you come here, Mr
Thomson?”

“As I said, I was hoping to
contact Lucy.”

“But how did you find out that I
knew her?”

“As I told you, I went to the
flat where she used to live. The landlord gave me your name.” I walked to the
door. “Well thanks again, and I’ll hope to hear from you.”

“Look what’s all this about?” she
asked, standing too. “Why are you lying? And why are you so keen to get away?”

“I shouldn’t have come,” I
admitted. “I made a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

I shook my head. “Look, I
shouldn’t have come here,” I repeated. “Forget about it, please, there’s no
need for you to contact Lucy. I’ll just go now.”

“Are you a journalist?”

I turned at the door. “Why do you
say that?”

She shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the
first. Though somehow I doubt it. You’re such a lousy liar. Look, Peter or
whatever your real name is, at one time Lucy meant a lot to me, that’s why I
risked asking you in to try and find out what you wanted with her. Why don’t
you tell me what this is all about? If you tell me the real reason you’re here
I might be able to help you.”

I said nothing, just looked at
the mole on her chin.

“She’s not an old friend of yours
is she?” Susan persevered.

I shook my head.

“According to this address you’ve
given me, you’re living in Canterbury yourself, so my guess is you know that
Lucy’s also living there. You met her recently. And, let me guess, you’re
afraid she isn’t all that she seems.”

I looked at her, walked back into
the room and sat down again. She was no fool. And strangely enough I found her
candour endearing. I had nothing to lose by being straight with her.

So I told her everything. The way
I met Lucy, how I’d been attracted to her right from the start. The first days
when I thought about her more and more, then falling in love. Finally the
horrible nightmare of seeing the childhood photograph of Megan Foster in the
book, and realising that was where I’d seen her face before. And my terrible
ghastly fear, almost certainty, that Megan Foster and Lucy Green could be one
and the same person. And my desperation to try and prove that they were not.

“Poor Lucy,” she said simply at
the end. “Poor, poor Lucy.”

Then she said nothing for a long
time, just stared at the floor.

“I can understand this must be a
shock for you,” I said.

“And why do you suppose it should
be a shock?” she said slowly. “Have you any idea of the misery Lucy had to go
through, just because she looked so much like that wretched woman?”

I shook my head.

“I’m a nurse. Lucy was a volunteer
at my hospital, St Genevieve’s, here in Cambridge. One day an older woman, a
patient, stared at her and started asking questions. I even remember her name:
Alice Walker – one of those straitlaced, grey-haired spinsters, all
tight-mouthed and prissy, church going, butter-wouldn’t-melt types who loved to
dish the dirt. She came straight out with it, she confronted Lucy, asked her if
her name was really Megan Foster. I remember her words as if she was here now:
Don’t you dare touch me! You’re that monster who murdered the little kiddy!
Lucy denied it of course, and everyone believed her. But after that, nothing
was the same again. One of the other nurses had found an old picture of Megan
on the internet, and brought it in to work, and was showing it to everyone.
Lucy was called into the office. Honestly, if you’d seen her, she was in tears,
desperately trying to get someone to believe her. Of course there was no
evidence, Lucy even brought in her birth certificate to prove who she was, but
not everyone was satisfied – what’s that old saying? Mud sticks, even when it’s
perfectly obvious that no one can forge a birth certificate. People treated her
warily, friendly on the surface, but with a vague suspicion you couldn’t put
your finger on. Then Human Resources said her voluntary duties at the hospital
were surplus to requirements. She’d had enough of Cambridge. They drove her
away.

“That was when she told me all
about how Megan Foster had affected her early life. How at secondary school
she’d been teased because she looked so much like Foster. Then, because of the
embargo on her photograph as an adult being published anywhere, things died
down. Until that bloody book your friend wrote came out in the early ‘80s, and
the picture of Megan Foster as a child was in the public domain again, and you
could see the close resemblance of the woman and the child’s face. That small
cleft in her chin was the killer, really. Her life would be fine for years,
then one person might mention her similarity to Megan Foster and people would
wonder. Think about it. There is absolutely nothing you can do if someone
suspects you of being someone else. If you were the spitting image of – I don’t
know – Vladimir Putin, or Tony Blair, it wouldn’t matter, it would just be a
bit of a laugh, particularly if the other person has an obvious public profile.
But take someone not so famous, who was known to have been given another secret
identity because they’d done unspeakable things. Poor Lucy would go through it
all over again. And this is the worst thing of all. People
wouldn’t believe
her
. There was no way she could prove who she was. People would say that
she’d stolen the birth certificate from someone else – that it didn’t prove a
thing. Let me ask you something, Jack. Supposing, just supposing that Lucy
actually had been Megan Foster. A
child murderer
. Didn’t you once stop
to think that if you really are as deeply in love with her as you tell me you
are, that you’d be able to forgive her, even if she was Megan Foster?”