Doppelganger (14 page)

“You’re right,” I answered. “I’ve
gone over and over it in my mind. And the answer is, I simply don’t know. I’m
confused and scared. No I’m not scared. I’m bloody well terrified of what I
don’t know. I met Lucy and I got to know her. But I found out that maybe she
wasn’t the person she told me she was. If she could keep a secret like that...
I mean if she could keep such a terrible secret from me, I don’t know her at
all, do I? After all, anyone can sympathise with a person who commits an
accidental murder: for instance because of a fight that gets out of hand. But
it’s the way Megan Foster killed Aiden Caulfield. The monstrous way she
coldheartedly killed a younger child for no reason.”

“Quite.” She sniffed. “So you
see, Megan Foster didn’t just take the life of Aiden Caulfield and destroy that
of his parents. In a way Megan destroyed Lucy’s life too.”

“Of course.”

“You think you’re in love with
her.” She said it as a statement.

“Yes I was. I am.”

“
Are you?
”

My words sounded lame,
ridiculously inadequate.

“Yes.”

“
Are you really?
” Her lip
curled with derision. “I don’t believe you even know her. If you did you
couldn’t conceive that she could be a despicable monster like that...”

“You’re right, Susan. I don’t
know her well. But I want to believe you’re right more than anything on earth.
Why else do you think I’m digging into her past like this? I’m hoping against
hope that she really is Lucy Green.”

“And have you asked her?”

I hung my head. “No.”

“You haven’t even got the courage
to ask her straight out, have you? And you call that love!”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have
come.” I gave Bruno a final stroke on the head, felt the lustre of his warm
springy dark coat between my fingers. “I’ll leave you in peace.”

“Wait a minute,” she said,
“Look.” She sighed wearily. “Maybe it’s I who should apologise. Who am I to
judge you? Discovering something like this is likely to knock anyone for six. I
should know. When she first told me about it, even I had my doubts. At least
you deserve to know the truth. Listen Jack, I can promise you, here and now,
that Lucy Green is not Megan Foster. I really can promise you that. Yes, she
has the
same
cleft in her chin, the
same
expression, the
same
look in her eyes. But she’s Megan Foster’s doppelganger. It’s a ghastly,
terrible coincidence. I know that’s the truth.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the real Megan Foster is
dead.”

“Dead?”

“Wait there.”

She left me and went upstairs,
and I caressed the dog’s lovely mane and looked around the tiny living room,
wishing I’d never come. It felt as if the walls were crushing me, a
claustrophobic reaction to Susan Elkins’s obvious dislike of me. Susan returned
with a file that she opened and then she passed across a photocopy of a
newspaper article. “You can keep that,” she muttered quietly. “It’s a copy of
the original.”

Child murderer’s life ends in
a drunken car crash
, was the headline. The story went on to describe a car
accident in which a single female occupant of an MGB sports car had lost her
life. There was a small inset picture of a woman’s face at the bottom of the
main shot of a written-off car, its front buckled and twisted beyond
recognition. The article said that the dead woman car driver had been Lisa
Chilcott, but that had not been the name she’d been born with. A ‘friend’ had
informed the newspaper that dead Lisa was none other than the child murderer
Megan Foster, who’d been given a new identity on her release from gaol, 14
years previously. Living with her secret had apparently presaged Lisa’s
dependence on alcohol, and a habit for prescription drugs and, later, an
addiction to heroin and cocaine. There were two head shots side by side: one
captioned as the raddled face of Lisa Chilcott, the other that of child-killer
Megan Foster. They were similar, though hardly identical. The article ascribed
the changes in Megan’s face, to ‘years of hard living and substance abuse, plus
thousands of pounds worth of face-changing plastic surgery’. Police had
concluded that Lisa had driven the powerful sports car head-on into a brick
wall, at speed, whilst under the influence of drink and drugs.

“This happened in a town just
outside Oxford in 2009, last year, ironically just a week after Lucy left,”
Susan said. “The main media didn’t pick up on it, I don’t know why. But nobody
contradicted this claim that Lisa Chilcott was Megan Foster. Chilcott had
turned up in the area on her own a few weeks before – no one knew if she had
any friends or relatives. No one came to the funeral.”

Relief flooded through me. I was
beginning to grasp the hope that it could be true. But caution made me argue:

“It’s a cliché about not
believing what you read, but a story like this could easily be a rookie
reporter chancing his arm. Sloppy reporting, admittedly, but there’s more of it
than you’d realise goes on. The bottom line is litigation, which is remote in
this case. Even if a relative did dispute it the paper could print an apology,
even pay them off. Doesn’t look as if poor Lisa had any relatives to fight her
corner anyway, so there’d be no one to sue.”

“Don’t you want to believe Lucy
is who she says she is?” Susan snapped. “I thought you were in love with her.”

“I want it to be true more than
anything else in the world. But it needs more than a cheapskate article like
this to convince me.”

She shrugged, making it clear
that I was no longer welcome. “You’re in love with her,” she sneered. “So maybe
you need to hear another little fact about your beloved. Do you really want to
know why we lost touch? I was in love with her.
Really
in love with her,
unquestioningly
in love with her, not like you. Because I believed it
when she told me she wasn’t Megan Foster. I believed her the first time she
told me, I didn’t need any convincing of it. And even if she had been Megan
Foster, and told me she’d regretted what she did, I would still have loved
her...” A tear formed at the corner of her eye. Her voice was raw and choked.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need your sympathy.”

“I’m really sorry to have upset
you–”

“I thought that maybe we might
have a future together. I really did. Nothing too obvious – nothing upfront and
straightforward. I envisaged us sharing this house, living together as friends,
and no one knowing, or really even suspecting the truth. Growing into old
ladies together, and being closer than friends, but to the outside world, just
two old spinsters who happened to like to knit and share the shopping and
cooking and gardening. But it turned out that my fantasy was all in my mind.
Lucy didn’t get it. She had absolutely no idea how I felt. She kept saying how
much she liked me, but that she could never, ever think of me in that way.
Honestly it was like a cliché, the way she reacted, as if I’d scalded her with
boiling water. That was why she never got in touch after she left. She was
embarrassed. But I wasn’t embarrassed. I loved her. I still love her. But she
never got in touch with me again. So how can I ever contact her now? So you
don’t have to worry about me letting you down – I won’t be telling her you came
to see me.”

She began to cry quietly, the
tears rolling down her cheeks, as she sobbed.

“Please, can you see yourself
out?”

As I walked out of the room, I
saw Bruno pad across and lay his head across her knees.

*
* * *

Lisa Chilcott almost clinched it.
Lisa Chilcott and the Lucy Green birth certificate that was obviously impossible
to forge. Almost, but not quite. There was only one way to try and get at the
truth. I stayed the night at a motel and travelled the next day.

Bargery Down, a few miles outside
Oxford, was a small town by English standards, but the town hall and newly
built estate of town houses made it memorable.
The Bargery Advertiser
was an ordinary local paper which, I would guess, would have to pack its pages
with news of village fetes, local characters who’d made good, the ‘sin bin’ –
the crime pages that every local paper trawls the dregs for – and the front
page would normally be concerned with protests over a proposed road bypass, or
a new superstore coming to town. The Lisa Chilcott story would be quite a
sensation for
The Bargery Advertiser
, likely to be jaw-dropping,
front-page stuff.

I found the Advertiser’s offices
easily enough, tucked in between the Queens Arms pub and a tacky mini
supermarket. In the Advertiser’s office I asked the young woman at the desk
nearest the door if I could talk to the editor and she indicated a seat and
said she’d fetch him, adding: “He’ll be down in a tick, he’s in a meeting just
now, but he won’t be long, honest.”

Tyler McKay came out to talk to
me ten minutes later, a mountain of a man with damp sweat marks under the arms
of his smart striped shirt, and magnificent eyebrows in a broad forehead. He
sprawled in the chair opposite me, after asking the man at the next desk to,
“Get us a couple of coffees, would you please, Mike.”

He read the article I passed
across, frowning as he sipped his coffee from a chipped mug. “That’s Tony
Price’s by-line,” he observed.

“Yes,” I replied. “Does he still
work here?”

“Retired soon after this and he
died a month ago I’m afraid. A nice guy. We were good friends.”

“Was he an experienced journalist?”
I asked. I’d spun Tyler McKay the story that I was doing background information
for a new book I was writing which examined the lives and crimes of killers
who’ve committed suicide.

“Meaning, could he have known
that Lisa Chilcott had no living relatives who could speak up for her, so he
could dream up a nonsense story about her, to sell papers?”

I nodded.

“Well, I admit you’re right. If
it were anyone else I could believe they might have pushed this little tale
without doing the right checks.” Tyler McKay tapped a pencil against the desk,
systematically knocking its pointed end against the timber, as if he was
stabbing someone. “But not Tony Price. He was a class act, the kind of
journalist that’s dying out now. He checked everything. He had integrity.
Before he filed any copy it had to be rock-solid, copper bottomed.”

“Do you know who his source was?”

“No. But because he was straight
there were plenty of people around here who trusted him, and they’d talk to
him. I’m not gonna lie and say it’s 100 per cent certain that Lisa Chilcott was
Megan Foster, we’re never going to know for sure. But as you can see from the
photos there’s a fair old physical resemblance, the differences being what
you’d expect by time and troubles, and there were rumours that Megan Foster had
plastic surgery, as insurance against her identity being blown. But trust me
mate, if Tony wasn’t totally convinced that Lisa was Megan Foster, he’d never
have written that story. And the editor in those days, Edward Pierce, he trusted
him too.”

“Thanks.” I stood up to leave and
shook his hand. “You’ve been a tremendous help.”

“Hold on a minute, I’ll get
someone to trawl through our archives – see if there are any other stories
along the same lines, and make you copies. Can’t imagine what it must be like
to write an entire book – for years now, the longest copy I’ve ever done is
about 6,000 words, and even then I flag towards the end. How did you get into
that True Crime market?”

We chatted for a while, and I
gave him my contact details and shortly the woman who’d greeted me on my
arrival arrived and gave me a file with a couple of photocopied cuttings in it.

But still, I couldn’t be certain.
Once I was back in the car I emailed the tracing agency I use, asking them to
search for a birth entry for England and Wales for Lisa Alexandra Chilcott,
reckoning on the dates 1970 - 75 to be enough of a time scale to search. My
contact there, Paul Dangerfield, emailed a few minutes later, to give me the
list of Lisa Alexandra Chilcotts. There were four of them. Then I asked him to
do searches for each of them. All were currently living in the country, using
credit cards, with a National Insurance number, all the usual traces that show
up in a credit reference. The death date I’d given them and the death
certificate they’d found for Lisa didn’t appear to match details for any of
them. So there was no record of a birth for Lisa in the UK for the whole of
that period. Then I asked him to look for an address just prior to the date
she’d died, and also a death certificate. I thanked Paul and drove back to
Canterbury.

Of the birth records for the four
Lisa Alexandra Chilcotts in England or Wales during the parameter of dates that
were possible,
all were currently alive
. A trusted informer had told a reputable,
presumably an honourable, journalist that he or she had been informed that Lisa
Alexandra Chilcott was the identity given to the child killer Megan Foster. And
having to live with the knowledge that you’d killed a child was the kind of
thing that might drive anyone to drink and drugs, and, ultimately, to a lonely
suicide.

On the journey I felt a wave of
sheer relief wash over me. I pulled into a lay-by and texted Lucy, saying I’d
been out of contact with everyone for the past few days because I’d been in
Wales and for some reason the signal was weak in the valley – some technical
glitch, and I’d been so immersed with work I’d done nothing else.

It was wonderful when she rang me
back almost immediately. We talked for almost an hour.

So that was it. According to the
amazing irony that often happens in life, it was purely thanks to Susan Elkins,
a woman who evidently disliked me, that my nightmare was over.

I should have done the logical
thing – simply driven down to Wales, to Godfrey’s mansion in the valley, where
it would be safe to make a start on the
Bible Killer
book. If I had done
that, things wouldn’t have turned out so catastrophically.