Doppelganger (15 page)

But I didn’t.

On impulse I phoned Lucy again
and arranged to meet her in York on Friday. I longed to tell her everything I’d
done, all that I’d found out about her, but I just couldn’t do it. How could I
tell her that I’d suspected her of being the monster who’d murdered a child?
What Susan Elkins had said was true: if I really loved her, I should have immediately
confronted her with my doubts, and asked her the truth. And then, if it turned
out that she actually had been Megan Foster, I would have been able to forgive
her. The best thing to do was to forget all my doubts, all the ridiculous ideas
I’d had and behave as if nothing had happened.

Worst of all, the discovery of
her similarity to Megan Foster had irrevocably and subtly altered my feelings
for her, albeit that she was undoubtedly nothing to do with Foster. Innocent as
Lucy was, I knew deep inside that my feelings for her had changed. Why?
Goodness knows.

Perhaps it was a combination of
factors. The fact that my initial attraction had partly been based on my
romantic feelings of déjà vu, that I now knew were completely unfounded, in
fact based on something monstrous. And Susan’s assertion that if I had really
loved Lucy, then I would have been willing to forgive anything she’d done when
she was a child, however diabolical. Or maybe the rose-tinted-spectacles days
of my love affair with her were over.

The stress of the last few days
of working on
Hero or Villain?
, the attempt on my life, and my agonising
about Lucy and driving around the country investigating her past had taken its
toll. As I drove towards London I decided that I was sick and tired of living
in fear of my life. I wanted to see Canterbury again, maybe have a few jars
with Stuart. Canterbury was a big town. How could Sean Boyd, my would-be
assassin, possibly know where I would be?

Why would he want to run the risk
of murdering me, when he must realise that publication of
Hero or Villain?
was a done deal by now, whether I was alive or dead?

Anyway I decided to take a
chance, and turn south onto the M40 instead of north: in the direction of
Canterbury instead of back to Wales, and Llantrissant Manor.

So that evening I met Stuart in a
pub in Canterbury town centre and had a few drinks with him. I told Stuart all
about what had happened, and he was as pleased as I was when I told him that my
doubts about Lucy were unfounded.

“Look at it this way,” he pointed
out. “Obviously, the only way that Megan Foster, after being given a new
identity, could adopt a real identity – I don’t just mean a birth certificate,
but a driving licence and passport – belonging to someone else, would be if
that person died and the death was somehow kept secret. But when you think of
the further possibilities – friends, family, work colleagues of the dead
person, doing that is nigh on impossible. She’d at the very least be listed as
a missing person, and if your girlfriend had applied for a passport or driving
licence in that person’s name, that fact would be highlighted. Even allowing
for all them checks, she couldn’t get documents without a photo that was authorised
by someone like her doctor or teacher, a reputable citizen who’d go on record
saying she was who she said she was. Stealing a dead person’s identity might
have been possible once, but nowadays, no chance.”

“You’re right.”

“And what were you basing it on
anyway? An old photograph. People have doppelgangers. Aye it’s rare, sure it
is, but it happens. I’ve heard there are plenty of actors and musicians making
a right good living by impersonating their doppelganger. While not many Elvis
impersonators will have The King’s exact looks, there’ll probably be one or two
who come pretty close. They say Saddam Hussein and Field Marshall  Montgomery,
the hero of World War Two, both of them had doubles, who’d stand in for them
for security reasons.  And as for all that bollocks you reckoned you felt about
having a romantic premonition because you thought you already knew her face,
it’s a right good thing you’ve come to your senses. You’ve met a lass you
really like, she happens to look like someone else and that’s the end of it.
Enjoy yourself. Enjoy being with Lucy and forget all this bloody twaddle.”

Stuart was right of course.
However, there were other things that were strange about Lucy. There were all
her hang-ups – the fears about her personal safety, the flick knife and mace
she carried about with her everywhere, and her morbid fear that she’d die
before her thirty-eighth birthday. But if she was neurotic, what on earth did
it signify? What did it matter? Stuart was right. It was time to forget all
about it and accept things as they were.

As I was leaving, my mobile rang
and it was Ann. I told her how I was about to start the
Bible Killer
book,
that I was in Canterbury outside the Dog and Duck pub and I planned to stay at
the Carlton Hotel, get a good night’s sleep and drive back to Wales in the
morning. It was gone 11pm, and I felt shattered, keen to get my head down. The
combination of tiredness and alcohol was a pleasant feeling of relief from my
recent days of unrelieved lonely boredom in Wales, or the nonstop tension of
evading my would-be killers. My car was safely tucked into the Carlton’s car
park, and I’d bought a bottle of red wine that I was planning to drink when I
was alone in my room, the best aid to sleep I’ve ever known; sleep might help
me put some kind of perspective on my morbid feelings that my relationship with
Lucy was doomed. That my feelings for her had changed, and somehow they
wouldn’t come back. Maybe I’d phone her up and talk to her again.

Habit over the last few weeks had
made me wear my Kevlar vest and carry my gun with me all the time whenever I
was going anywhere alone, especially at night. Just in case. After the last
attempt on my life I couldn’t take any chances. The previous attempted
assassination hadn’t made any sense. After all, I reasoned, Sean Boyd was no
moron. He’d probably have realised by now that whatever he did to me the
publication of
Hero or Villain?
was going ahead regardless, so there was
nothing to be gained by killing me. And if I was murdered after the police were
aware of his threats against me, he’d be the prime suspect. He hadn’t become a
successful crime boss and stayed out of prison this long by taking unnecessary
chances. He’d pushed things far enough, and every indication was that he’d
realise the book was going ahead anyway, with or without me, so he may just as
well cut his losses.

Lost in thought as I walked, I
didn’t hear anything strange. I didn’t see anything. Until, on the periphery of
my consciousness, I was aware of a very faint
plopping
sound. Just as
the shop window beside me erupted into a million fragments. There was a sharp
sting in my cheek as a shard of glass sliced the flesh.

Then the bottle I’d been holding
exploded, leaving me holding the remains of the neck. I dropped it and ran,
simultaneously feeling a sharp thudding pain in my back: the vest had stopped a
bullet, but the impact had knocked the wind out of me.

For the first seconds I was on
autopilot, wheeling and swivelling, jumping and ducking, ignoring the pain in
my chest. Since it hadn’t pierced the Kevlar, that meant it was a small calibre
handgun, not a high-powered shell.

There were pounding footsteps
behind me. One gunman. Possibly two.

 
Plop
- Fragments of brick
were flying from the wall into my eyes, blinding me. Skidding and backing to
the wall. Staggering, weaving sideways, almost falling. Crashing into the
brickwork. Making it around another corner, and racing to the end just as the
plop
came again. I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my left arm. Caught a glimpse of a
splash of dark liquid on my hand.

I don’t know how long I was
running for, or how many roads I ducked into. But always the footsteps were
behind me. Always he followed. And always there was the
plop
, sometimes
two
plops
in succession.

Suddenly I saw an arched opening
in the wall to my right, and leapt into the space. It was an entrance way into
a building. Ahead was a closed door, to the left a brick wall. So I hurled
myself to the right, into some inviting darkness. Then I was falling, falling a
long way down, tumbling and crashing, head and arms and legs smashing against
concrete or stone. Until I was in a heap at the bottom. Head twisted sideways,
legs and arms at all angles. It was pitch dark. I could feel water soaking into
my trousers from the puddle where I was sprawled. There was pain in my back and
arms.

Up above I caught the dim view of
the yellow cone of a torch beam, slicing the blackness. I stayed motionless for
a few moments then, carefully, eased my hand around to my back to pull the
Glock out from my waistband, flick off the safety catch and rack the action
backwards and forwards. Blood had covered my left hand, seeping from the wound
to my arm. Sweat was running into my eyes, making it hard to strain upwards
into the black void. The cone of blackness was muzzy and blurred, a hazy vision
of hell.

The torch beam hit the wall above
my head. Span jerkily to and fro for second. Flickered. And then the
flashlight’s circular blaze was down, down, finally boring directly in my eyes,
blinding me. For a moment I thought I saw the figure up above: a dark
silhouette, raising his pistol once more.

I lifted my gun, gripped it
two-handed.

And fired.

The explosion burst and crashed, filling
the narrow stairwell like cannon fire. I went on shooting, again and again,
firing at random, shifting marginally each time, aiming blind. I went on until
as I squeezed the trigger all I heard was a click. My ears were buzzing, my
head pounding from the deafening explosions in the confined space. For a moment
I lay there, scared that the terrible blinding pain in my ears meant ruptured
eardrums. All around me were the clouds of cordite, the overpowering stench of
gunpowder.

And up above, the yawning maw of
blackness was just the same. Until the cone of light dropped. There was the
clumping, sliding, thumping sound of something soft and heavy falling. Finally
the clatter-click-snap of a metal object bouncing and rattling down the stairs
to land on the step just above me. There in front of my eyes was what looked
like a slim stylish Beretta, its long black cylindrical silencer almost kissing
my nose. The harsh stench of burnt cordite was everywhere, choking me. Ignoring
the agony in my back and legs I managed to stand. I tucked the gun back into my
waistband, then felt gingerly along with my right hand along the wall’s hard
brickwork. I pulled myself up the steps, one at a time. At the top the gunman’s
body was no more than impressions: mop of dark curly hair, a black leather
jacket, hand flung outwards, the fingers curled skywards, like an upturned
crab. A growing pool of liquid was seeping from under the mass of clothes and
limbs. Avoiding stepping in the blood, I managed to get to the top, where the streetlight
beckoned me on through the dim archway into the night. I peered out. No one was
around.

For seconds there was silence.
Then I heard distant voices. A shout of laughter away to the left. The rumble
of a passing car. The crash of a bottle being thrown against tarmac. The
splinter as it smashed.

I waited a beat, then looked
around before walking back the way I’d come.

Pulling up my jacket collar so as
to hide my face from any CCTV cameras in the main road, I made it to the car in
time to hear the sirens in the distance – obviously people had heard the
gunshots and reported them. No one saw me. I made it back to the Carlton Hotel,
where luckily no one was manning the reception desk, and I got up to the first
floor without anyone seeing me. I soaked and scrubbed my hands and wrists in
the shower, using a brush until the skin was tingling and raw, then rammed all
the clothes and the shoes I’d been wearing into a bin bag. Dressing as quickly
as I could I, listened for the sirens of police cars but, so far, there was
nothing. Blood kept splashing onto the back of my hand from the flesh wound in
my forearm, but that was a detail that could wait.

I took the stairs down to the
underground car park and drove, well within the speed limit, towards the south
of the city. A few miles out of town I saw an overflowing skip outside a house,
and parked nearby, got out of the car and thrust the bin bag full of my clothes
and shoes into it, pulling a couple of bricks out of the builder’s rubble it at
the same time. Then got back into the car and drove on.

Soon I found the bridge over the
River Ouse that I remembered, parking in some shadows nearby. I’d already put
the gun, along with my salvaged pair of bricks, into another black bag and tied
the top with string. Walking to the middle of the bridge, to where the river
looked deepest, I looked around to make sure I wasn’t being watched, then lifted
and dropped the black plastic bag, relieved to see it sink below the surface of
the water.

When I got back into the car I
made straight back towards the M1 to the north, towards York and my meeting
with Lucy.

*
* * *

This was it. I’d tried to kid
myself before but it was too late for that.

Sean Boyd’s contract killers had
failed twice. By good fortune I’d managed to escape the first and the second
attempts on my life, but next time I wasn’t likely to be so lucky.

Hero or Villain?
had been
delivered to Truecrime, and now, counting the time for the designers and
printers, I reckoned it could be in the shops in six weeks or so, at most three
months. During that time anything could happen, and chances were that it would.
Even after it was published I might still be a marked man forever. Did I have
any right to involve Lucy in this kind of danger? If she was going to be seeing
much of me, she would be as much at risk as I was.

As I pulled into the big car park
beside the York Castle Museum and found a space, I wondered at the kaleidoscope
of changing emotions that had engulfed me in the past couple of weeks. Falling
for Lucy was obviously the most momentous, but facing the awful possibility
that she might be child-killer Megan Foster was far, far worse. It would take
time to forget the whole sorry mess. Maybe meeting her again would rekindle my
feelings for her. I walked along Tower Street, then Clifford Street and then
into Coppergate, going to a cafe near the Jorvik Centre, where I sat down and
waited for her to arrive.

When you’re in love, do you
remember there’s always that odd moment just before the person you’re in love
with appears, when you can’t quite remember their face? It’s just a hazy,
dream-like memory, and every time you see them anew it’s like a wonderland of
discovery. That’s what it was like that day, to see her arrive: to see the way
her hair fell, the set of her mouth, the surprising toothiness of her smile,
the hesitancy in her eyes before the smile arrived. Then she was coming towards
me. A long black coat over a red top and short black skirt. Fashionable
knee-high black leather boots, creamy fur lining oozing around the edge beside
her black woollen tights below her knee. I stood up and took her in my arms as
she arrived.

How could I ever have doubted
her?

Then she was chattering away,
telling me about the shop, the customers, the American tourists who spent so
much money, the new friends she’d made. I hardly took it in, just marvelled at
her eyes and her mouth and her lovely voice, and wondered how I could ever have
doubted that she wasn’t the marvellous beautiful, kind woman that I knew her to
be, who could never harm a fly.

Another thing I didn’t know about
her was that she smoked. She lit the cigarette, then looked around, wondering
if it was allowed. “Oh, I forgot, it’s a public place, isn’t it?” she said,
stubbing it out in a saucer.

“I didn’t know you smoked.” I
said.

“I’ve been trying to give it up
for years, but last month I decided I was going to give up giving up...”

She chattered on, telling me
about the shop, the interesting craftspeople who supplied them and the friendly
customers she’d met.

“So what have you been doing,
Jack?” She touched my arm, just gently, small dainty fingers clutching my
sleeve, her mouth curving as she spoke, while I longed to kiss her.

Half an hour later we’d already
eaten and were planning what to do for the rest of the day and evening. I told
her about the attempt on my life, leaving out the fact that I’d managed to kill
the gunman. Some things it was better that no one should know about.

“I see,” Lucy nodded. “So that
explains why you said you wanted to come up here, instead of me going back to
Canterbury.”

“When the book’s published the
heat should die down. At least I hope it does.”

“But you
knew
Sean Boyd
was a dangerous crime boss. Why ever did you get yourself into such a mess?”

“If I’d known what was going to
happen, I wouldn’t have taken it on. But it’s too late now.”

“Is it? Are you sure, Jack?
Surely you can get out of it somehow?” She’d blushed a dark red colour
suffusing her cheeks. She was looking down at the table. “I’ve only just found
you. I can’t bear the thought of losing you now.”

I leaned forward and touched her
face, “I love you, you know that, don’t you?”

“And I–” The opening bars of
Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, her mobile phone’s ring, interrupted her words.

“Bugger,” she swore. “I bet it’s
Kirsty – I left her in charge of the shop and she’s hopeless! Can’t make a
decision to save her life. I’d better answer the bloody thing, then I’ll switch
it off.”

I nodded, watching her as she
leaned back in her chair and gave a cheery ‘Hi’. But after the first second,
when I saw her face change, I knew something was wrong. She didn’t speak much,
just listened, the line of her mouth hardening all the time.

Finally, she said “Thanks, yeah,
see you.” And pressed the cut-off button. She lifted her gaze towards me and I
saw the expression in her eyes.

“That was Susan Elkins. A man
called Peter Thomson, who answers your description, has been asking questions
about me.”

Oh Christ, I’d never thought
of it
. Why hadn’t I realised that Susan Elkins might break her word and
tell her about my visit? She’d promised not to contact Lucy and I’d believed
her.

“And don’t lie to me.”

“Let me explain.”

“No!” Lucy was standing,
gathering up her handbag and gloves. “Don’t bother! You could have come to me,
and asked me! Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” panic was
mounting inside, I was terrified of losing her. “I was afraid–”

“Of what? Afraid that I was a
reformed killer? I would have thought that would make me your ideal girlfriend!
You could have written a kiss-and-tell exposé of my life.”

“I was afraid because I didn’t
know who you were.”

“
I fucking told you who I was!
I could have given you my birth certificate, and family photographs since I was
a baby if you’d only bloody well asked! You
bastard
, Jack! – You didn’t
even think enough of me to come and speak to me face-to-face – you had to sneak
around behind my back–”

“It wasn’t like that–”

“Wasn’t it? What was it like
then? Tell me, Jack, because I’d
really like
to know.”

I didn’t answer, just sat there,
watching her, willing her to sit down again.

“Don’t go,” I begged, fear of
losing her welling up inside me as I stood up too. “
Please
Lucy, I was
wrong, I was stupid, I admit it, but please sit down, let me tell you what–”

“I’ve had it all my life,” she
muttered through gritted teeth. “The school playground taunts, the accusatory
stares, the silence in a group of people whenever I go into a room. If you
didn’t think enough of me to come and talk to me about it, then that’s it. I
was an idiot to think you were a man. You’re a gutless louse.”

I made a grab for her hand.

“Don’t go. Lucy we’ve got to talk
about this...”

“There’s nothing to talk about.
Don’t contact me again.” She pulled away, voice trembling, on the verge of
tears. “Just one thing, Jack.”

“What?”

“I hope Sean Boyd kills you next
time.”

And then she was gone.

All that was left on the table
was the box of matches that she’d used to light her cigarette. I picked it up
without thinking and put it in my pocket, in a daze.

*
* * *

I shouldn’t really have driven
back straight away, but after Lucy left me I had vague ideas of getting to the
first motorway service station, checking in to a Travelodge and trying to sleep
for a few hours, because after the long drive up there I was absolutely
exhausted.