Doppelganger (19 page)

I’m, so, so sorry to drop this
on you Jack. I pray that it’s not too late for you somehow to work things out.

God bless you, whatever
happens.

I just sat there for a long time,
staring at the photo of Megan Foster, aged 19.

There was no mistaking the
resemblance to Lucy. As Douglas said, certainly she could be Megan’s
doppelganger. But the foreshortened third finger? And the
third
coincidence:
that Megan Foster, aka her new identity, had enrolled on a carpentry course
after her release?

All the things that had happened
recently concertinaed together in my mind. Falling in love with Lucy, yet
knowing there was something not quite right about her. Her phobias, her
obsessions, her weird behaviour, then discovering the possibility that she
might be one and the same as Megan Foster, apparently reformed child killer.
All those weeks of going to great lengths to find out the truth, and
discovering that it was all a wicked crazy coincidence, reinforced by Lisa
Chilcott’s death, that I now knew was an irrelevance.

And now.

And now!

Outside the insistent drumming of
rain against the glass was as relentless as ever. Time stood still, and I
drifted into a trance, unable to think or apply logic or reason. How could it
be? I’d been to Lucy’s home town, we’d actually talked to her teacher, who
remembered her as a student. Everything fitted.

And now this.

I must have been sitting staring
out and seeing nothing for a couple of hours, maybe more. I watched as the sky
grew blacker. Impenetrable death-like blackness everywhere. Miserable
unrelieved noir, apart from some lights in the distance, way out across the
valley, and one yellow blinking beacon that twinkled alone, halfway up the
mountain. Suddenly that single light disappeared. That single lonely light’s
extinguishment symbolised my tentative happiness that had now been so rudely
snatched away.

 I couldn’t be bothered to get up
and switch the light on. Alone in the pitch darkness, I was wondering what the
hell I was going to do. Lucy was still upstairs. I couldn’t face her.

Much later, or so it seemed, for
I had no idea of time that night, I heard the door open, and her footsteps
coming closer.

For a second I didn’t care that
the woman I was in love with had been a killer when she was a child. After all,
the psychiatric hospital had released her, hadn’t they? They thought she was
cured, if ‘cured’ was the right word for no longer wanting to kill another
human being. I wanted to go on loving her. I ached to go on living with the
dream of being with her forever. That’s what I wanted and the fantasy would
not,
could not
, stop.

And yet.

Why hadn’t she just told me
the truth all along?

And there was something awful
about that slavish love that consumed me so completely that it made me feel ill.
Something utterly wicked and depraved in my nature that on some primitive level
I was responding to? If she’d been honest with me, if she’d told me everything,
then maybe I could have forgiven her.

“Jack?” she called from the door
as she came closer. “Jack? Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

Her footsteps again behind me.
The light was switched on. Suddenly the bright halogen spotlights in the
ceiling blazed into life casting a pall of whiteness everywhere, like some
ghastly shroud. I saw Lucy, but she wasn’t the Lucy I knew and had loved. She
was a monster now, every nuance of expression in her face, every line in her
forehead that I’d loved was like a brand mark of evil. I couldn’t bear to look
at her.

Lucy came and sat beside me.
Touched my elbow. I flinched, moving away.

I forced myself to turn to look
at her.

“Jack?” She put her hand out
again, almost touching my arm, then pulling back. “Jack? What is it?”

Wordlessly, I passed across
Douglas’s note, then the photo.

She sat reading it for a long
time. I dared to breath. I managed, somehow, to go on living, to go on
existing.

After a long time, she dropped
the letter. Her eyes filled with tears and she sobbed, just once. When she
resumed crying it was as if her heart was being torn from her body. She gasped
and sobbed and wailed for a long time and I just sat there, staring out across
the valley, wishing I was dead. I really did wonder what oblivion or heaven, or
hell might be like. Just anything to escape this unspeakable nightmare that was
more than I could bear to face.

I just sat there, longing to put
my arms around her to comfort her, but somehow unable to bring myself to touch
her.

Then the lights went out.

“The generator is supposed to cut
in automatically,” I said, fighting to make my voice sound normal. “That’s what
Ann told me.”

Lucy went on crying.

I couldn’t stand doing nothing.
Candles were on the table, where I’d dried them earlier. I picked up the torch,
and got up, found some matches in a drawer, and placed a candle inside my empty
coffee mug and lit it.

“Jack, I wanted to tell you, but
I daren’t,” she said at last.

“You’re cured. Yes. Of course
you’re cured. I know that. Otherwise they’d never have released you.”

“Jack, listen to me. I never
killed Aiden Caulfield.”

I yelled: “For God’s sake,
you
were convicted in a court of law!
” I hadn’t meant to shout, but I couldn’t
help it. The frustration of these past weeks and this ultimate misery had
pushed me past my limits. My knuckles were so clenched they were almost
bursting. “You served ten years in a secure hospital for the criminally insane!”

“I was innocent.
I never
killed Aiden
. I swear it.”

It was hard to speak. My voice
felt cloying, choking, on the edge of tears. “How can I believe a word you say
now? Everything you’ve said to me has been lies.”

“But this is the truth! Listen to
me! I was playing with a boy just before it happened.” She broke out sobbing
again, then managed to gain a modicum of control. “It was a game.
His game
.
The strangling game, we called it. We’d go up to someone, usually a child a few
years younger than us, and put our hands on his or her neck and pretend to
squeeze – to see how long they’d let us do it. It was stupid and ridiculous,
but children do stupid ridiculous things. This boy – Robert Althouse – and I
were playing the strangling game in playtime. He’d been pretending to strangle
Aiden, and I did the same. He’d been with Aiden for quite a time, I saw him
with his hands at his throat, then he moved away, so I went over to look at
Aiden, I put my hands on his throat, just as I’d done to lots of others that
morning, expecting him to shout out and giggle and run away. I didn’t squeeze,
because he was already so still and slack, and just lying there, with a strange
look on his face. Then a teacher walked past and saw Aiden resting there, with
my hands on his throat. I stood up and told the teacher what had happened, but
no one was listening to me, people began shouting and running from everywhere.
I don’t remember very much more, except telling everyone what had happened,
that Robert Althouse was the one who’d strangled him, but they thought I was
lying. They told me I was lying, in front of mum and the social worker,
everyone, and I was so confused, in the end I thought I must have done it.
Somehow I thought that, by mistake, maybe I had squeezed Aiden’s neck, so I admitted
I had been playing the strangling game. But that’s all I admitted to, until
they went on and on at me, confusing me, making me say things I didn’t mean.”

“What about Robert Althouse?”

“Mum told me the police
questioned him, but he never admitted it. None of the other children backed me
up, no one seemed to have seen anything...”

The candle was guttering now,
flickering, casting grotesque shadows on the walls. Lucy’s face looked haggard,
shadows under her nose and chin, dribble at the corners of her mouth, eyes
swollen and bloated with crying. She looked horrifying, scaring, a wraith of
misery, beyond all ordinary control. She began to cry again and went on sobbing
for a long time.

“And what about the real Lucy
Green?” I asked, hardly able to look at her face. “Did you kill her too?”

“
I’m the real Lucy Green!
”
she whispered. “How could it be any other way? Don’t you understand
anything
about what happens to people like me? Lucy Green was the name I was
allocated, the name on my passport that matches my national insurance number –
don’t you realise that only the government and maybe the kind of expert forgers
I wouldn’t know can create documents like that? I was parcelled up as Lucy
Green and sent out into the world, with my contacts at the probation service
and the police and the Home Office keeping in touch with me, wanting to know
what I was doing, where I was living. I really wanted to be a nurse, but they
wouldn’t let me do that, Oh no, ‘Not suitable’ they told me. But they couldn’t
stop me volunteering at the hospital. They tried, but there was no reason for
them to stop me, because I wasn’t allowed to have any contact with the patients
anyway. Strictly clerical duties. The Home Office still treated me like a
criminal, some kind of social experiment, and I could never tell a soul about
it. I had nobody to tell. It was so, so lonely.

“And then, one day, about a year
after I’d been released and was doing well on the woodwork course, I knew I was
sick of this great blank in my life that I couldn’t tell anyone about. I longed
to have a childhood, an
ordinary childhood
, teenage school years, a mum
and dad and a family life. Something I hadn’t had from the age of nine to
eighteen, and prior to nine, I couldn’t possibly talk about my life to anyone I
met because I was so ashamed. When I was twenty I hit on the idea of finding a
way to have readymade schooldays and an early life. I discovered that there
were ten Lucy Greens who’d been born on my ‘birthday’, which my official papers
stated was the actual day I was born. All but two of the Lucy Greens I found
were still around, large as life, but of the remaining two, one had got married
and moved to Scotland, the other had emigrated to Australia. I chose the Lucy
who’d gone to Australia, because she was out of the picture. I found out
everything I could about her, where she went to school, the fact she was an
only child and her parents were both dead. I went to stay in the village where
she’d lived and memorised everything about it. As I said, she was an only child,
her parents were dead, and she was halfway across the world, so I knew no one
was going to confront me. The only danger was if I ever met someone who’d known
the real Lucy Green, and providing I kept away from the village that wasn’t
likely to happen.”

“I don’t understand,” I said,
remembering that day in the Hertfordshire village where Lucy said she had been
born. “The house where Lucy was born–”

“I found the address from her
birth certificate. I waited and watched for years until it came up for sale,
then I pretended I wanted to buy it and arranged a viewing.”

“But when we went to Lucy’s
school. You spoke to one of your old teachers.”

“And if you only knew how scared
I was. It was a lucky break. Miss Chandler obviously had no idea who I was, so
when I ‘reminded’ her she was polite enough to pretend. You’ll never know what
I went through on that day. I was absolutely terrified.”

“And all for nothing.”

She sighed, and shook her head.
“But at last you know everything, Jack. I swear, from now on, no more secrets.
So you see there were never any forged documents, no murders, no grand scheme
of stealing a living person’s identity, except in the loosest sense. I just
hijacked Lucy Green’s early years, that’s all I did. And no one was the wiser.
It got to the point when I almost believed I was Lucy Green from Hertfordshire.
Susan believed me. “

“Susan convinced me completely.”

“Why couldn’t you just have loved
me, unquestioningly?”

“Like Susan did?”

“Yes, like Susan.”

“Because I’m not a fool.”

“Jack, please, I beg you, give me
another chance! There’s more,
much more
I want to tell you, but I don’t
really know where to start. I tried to trace Robert Althouse after I left the
hospital. It was hopeless for a long time, but I was determined to tackle him
about what had happened, if nothing else to try to find out how he could have
lived with such a secret for so long. I managed to find out where he was
living. So that’s when I–”

“Shut up Lucy! I don’t care.” I
wanted to stand up and scream, to run away from her and never come back. “I’ve
had enough.”

There was silence, followed by
the low grumble from something in another room. Evidently the generator was
starting up. The lights flickered a couple of times, then went out. The noise
stopped.

Beside me I was aware that she
was shivering, shivering so much that her teeth were chattering. She probably
still had a temperature.

“Look at me, Jack,” she said
quietly, and I was aware of her imploring eyes on me.

“
Look at me!
”

“I can’t bear to look at you,” I
muttered quietly. “If you’d told me the truth yourself, maybe things would be
different. But I can’t believe anything you tell me anymore. You’re a murderer.
You’re deranged. You tell me I’m a fool for seeing the best in people. Maybe
that’s true. Maybe I am the biggest fool alive. But you’ve made a fool of me
once too often. This is where it ends.”

Her words were barely a whisper.
“So what are you saying?”

“I can’t go on. This is the end
for us. I never want to see you again. I can’t switch off my feelings for you
just like that, I still love you of course I do, God help me, that’s something
deep inside that I can’t get rid of. But my love has turned to something
wicked, something perverted, something that I loathe myself for feeling.
Everything’s skewed and twisted and a mockery of what’s natural. I feel as if
you’ve twisted my mind into somersaults. I feel as if I wish I was dead. I wish
to God I’d never met you.”