Doppelganger (28 page)

*
* * *

A few days later I woke up in the
middle of the night, unable to sleep. Wandered around the house, made myself a
cup of coffee and found
Shocking Killers
, and again leafed through the
chapter on Megan Foster. Poor Megan. Poor Lucy. A life completely wrecked, a
personality so disjointed and uptight that she’d always found it hard to think
well of other people. Maybe I shouldn't blame her for being so selfish and
having such a low opinion of humanity, and for jeering at my innate sense of
hope and trust in others. If I’d had her experiences: disbelieved by teachers,
doctors, lawyers and police, living in a psychiatric detention unit, mixing
with people who actually were killers and knowing that she was different, maybe
I wouldn’t have liked or trusted other people either. Experiences like that had
obviously damaged her. Those experiences had made her capable of the kind of savagery
that I just couldn’t believe anyone was capable of.

Opening the curtains I looked out
at the dawn, pinkness shooting through the clouds, the skyline of Canterbury
spreading out in the distance, the distant spires of the Cathedral. I opened
the window, leaving it yawning wide, breathing in the fresh air. After this
entire unholy catalogue of murder and misery, things had finally drawn to a
close, and I’d been lucky, more lucky than I could possibly have expected. I’d
written
Hero or Villain?
against the odds, avoided being executed by
several contract killers, and my true-crime writing future looked assured.

But was I happy?

What do you think?

In the ensuing weeks, life for me
was looking good in some ways.
Hero or Villain?
was due to go on sale
soon and was likely to do well, thanks to the publicity surrounding the death
of both Boyd brothers – Dave had expired after a couple of weeks in hospital –
and
The Bible Killer
was completed and coming out in around ten weeks.

Even if I hadn’t been legally
obliged to keep Lucy’s name out of my account of
The Bible Killer
book I
wouldn’t have blown her cover. I obviously had to leave out any mention of
Roger Lamelle’s involvement in Aiden Caulfield’s killing, because it was
completely impossible to prove.

And in case you’re wondering, no,
Lucy Green wasn’t her real name, and neither was Megan Foster. I could hardly
tell you what either of those were without compromising her privacy today,
could I? Lucy Green is as good a name as any, and, now she's dead, her
anonymity can be preserved. There weren’t many people at Lucy’s funeral. Just
me, Stu, Susan from Cambridge, Marion Tucker and a few of her other friends
from the dolls’ house world, Alan from the bookshop and Peter Cholmondley, the
‘spook’ character, Lucy’s ‘handler’ who worked for the government department,
whom I’d met at her flat that day. There were also a few of the nurses she’d
worked with at the hospital.

How or why it happened, I don’t
know. But a local journalist somehow got wind of Lucy’s true identity and an
article appeared in a national newspaper, comparing a photograph of Lucy with
that of Megan Foster, and questioning the gaps in Lucy’s past. Technically it
was illegal to print such things but they’d been clever, couching it in vague
terms, never actually mentioning Lucy by name, but giving hints that
a young
woman who worked as a self employed craftsperson, making furniture for dolls’
houses, bears a marked resemblance to the child-killer Megan Foster, who was
released and given a new identity...

And then the real Lucy Green, now
living in Australia, was approached, and she made a statement through her
lawyers that the person who had been calling herself Lucy Green, who had died
recently in Canterbury, was no relation to her, and that legal proceedings
under the vague heading of ‘attempted impersonation’ would have been taken
against the person who was claiming to be herself, namely the Lucy Green, born
in Chorton Hardy, Hertfordshire in 1972, if Lucy had still been alive. But, in
the event nothing could be done. The publicity surrounding the ‘real’ Lucy’s
legal initiative meant that the alter ego of Megan Foster was well and truly
blown, something that, had she lived, Lucy would have found an intolerable
burden.

But now she was dead it didn’t
really matter. In fact none of it really mattered.

Except, by the weirdest chance,
another witness to the 30-year-old murder of Aiden Caulfield broke his silence,
thanks to the publicity surrounding the real Lucy Green’s announcement and the
newspaper articles. A boy at the school, who’d been in the playground at the
time it had happened, had finally come forward and made a statement to the
police. All those years ago, Sam Dimitri had seen Robert Althouse playing with
Aiden, and had noticed that just after Robert had left the other boy, Aiden had
seemed slack and lifeless. The next moment, Megan had come across Aiden and put
her hands around his throat.

Why hadn’t Sam Dimitri come
forward at the time? He was afraid of the teachers, he said, he was afraid of
telling anyone, especially as Robert Althouse was a bully, who had threatened
him only that day. Ever afterwards he’d felt a terrible guilt, especially when
he read anything about the case, but he just hadn’t got the courage to do the
right thing, so long after the event. He’d recently become a born-again
Christian, and his faith had given him the courage to come forward. But Sam’s
testimony didn’t carry that much weight, not enough to reopen the case to clear
Megan’s memory.

The police returned my car in the
early spring, and I stood on my front drive, examining what was left of it,
reflecting that it was inside this car that I’d almost lost my life.

I got into the front seat,
remembering the last time I’d been inside it, and Roger Lamelle had been the
driver. The carpets had been removed, and the metal of the car’s floor seemed
sharp, hard and cold, as if it was a witness to the suffering I’d experienced.

Idly I wondered what I’d left in
the car, that I might as well clear out: I’d already decided to sell it, as I
couldn’t bear to keep it after what had happened. I opened the central store
hatch between the front seats and found a Mars-bar wrapper and a couple of old
petrol receipts. And a small black rectangle of plastic. What was it? I
couldn’t remember.

I took out the small item and
realised it was one of several digital recorders I’d bought a while ago through
the internet and never got around to using. The controls on this one were too
tiny for my taste. I held it up to the light. What was VAR, I wondered? Of
course: Voice Activated Recording, where you switch it on, then activate the
VAR and it only starts recording when someone speaks. I had a vague memory of
fiddling with it when I bought it, just before driving down to Wales to visit
Lucy in hospital. I’d put it in this hatch when an important phone call came
through, then forgotten all about it.

I pressed Playback. Suddenly
Roger Lamelle’s voice erupted, large as life, as if he was sitting there. I
must have left the VAR on when I’d last put it away, and not turned off the
‘hold’ slider. I listened in growing excitement. Roger Lamelle’s confession to
Aiden Caulfield’s murder was here, on a digital recording. I didn’t know if it
carried weight legally, but surely his voice could be recognised, and I could
also swear an affidavit that Lamelle had spoken those words.

Would it be legal? Surely a voice
expert, and people who knew Lamelle well could be summoned to testify whether
they thought it was a fake recording?

I phoned David, my solicitor, and
outlined the situation to him, and he said that at the very least it would
count as new evidence that the authorities would have to consider, and he
reckoned that any good lawyer might be able to push for the case to be
reopened.

During the following month police
issued a statement to the effect that they were reopening the case of the
murder of Aiden Caulfield, and would expedite matters as quickly as possible.
In the light of new evidence, the statement said, there was a strong
possibility that there had been a miscarriage of justice. A few weeks later,
Megan’s conviction had been officially quashed, and the child killer of Aiden
Caulfield in 1981 was declared to be Dr Roger Lamelle, otherwise known as the
‘Bible Killer of Canterbury’.

On a broader front the
ramifications were ominous: if they’d caught Roger Lamelle as a child and he’d
had the same treatment that Lucy had received, he wouldn’t have been able to go
on to kill so many innocent people later in life. Just like so many huge
mistakes, there’d been massive damage and suffering to many, many different
people, but ultimately most of those who had responsibility for the bungled
case had acted as they saw fit, and had simply got it wrong: no one was really
to blame, it was just a combination of blunders and unfortunate circumstances.

Roger Lamelle’s past was being
painstakingly analysed, and the unexplained killings in Nottingham and
Huddersfield were being reinvestigated, and there was every likelihood that Lamelle
would be posthumously convicted of those crimes as well. Rather like the 2012
Jimmy Savile investigations into sexual misconduct at the BBC, the
ramifications were manifold and would take a long time to become clear.

On another front there was a surprising
development. Wendy Smithson, the woman who was obsessed with the death of
Diana, Princess of Wales, who’d been the fourth ‘Bible Killer’ victim,
apparently was not. For all that day, and the previous and following days,
Lamelle had been attending a conference of psychiatrists in Leipzig, and
there’d been a thousand witnesses to his presence there on all three days. It
was incontrovertibly the case that Lamelle could not possibly have been able to
kill Ms Smithson.

So who
had
killed her? The
police left the case open, but were working on the assumption that it was a
copycat killing, the kind of thing that definitely had happened in the past in
serial killer scenarios. The fact was that there were certain things about
Wendy’s killing that were different from the others, those differences being
various things that the police had deliberately kept secret from the public,
certainly indicated the actions of a copycat killer who was ignorant of the
true facts about the previous murders. But the conspiracy theorists had a field
day, wondering at the coincidence that it happened on the very eve of the day
Wendy threatened to disclose evidence that, she claimed,
categorically
proved that Princess Diana was murdered by the security
services
.
I’m saying nothing on the subject, except to state the fact that the evidence
that Wendy claimed was in a certain locked drawer in her desk was not
forthcoming, despite an exhaustive search by the police. I leave you to draw
your own conclusions. Personally I keep an open mind. Copycat killers do exist,
there’s no doubt of that.

Just as there’s absolutely no
doubt that powerful people in the establishment can, quite literally, commit
murder and they’re above the law – some of them actually make the laws of the
land.

*
* * *

At first the police had
threatened to charge me with various things, but in the end nothing substantial
would stick. Taking the blame for Lucy’s frenzied attack on Lamelle wasn’t an
issue: the Crown Prosecution Service decided that it wasn’t in the public
interest to bring a case of unlawful killing against me, when Lamelle had
threatened to kill me and had already killed Lucy.

In the ensuing months I’d been
busy on other projects. A police force in Scotland had approached me to act as
BIA on a murder case, and, although it was pretty well cut and dried, and
sorted out in a few weeks, I felt as if I’d garnered some kind of professional
credibility as a BIA, which meant my future was that much more secure as a True
Crime writer: the effect was symbiotic – people are always going to want to
read true crime books that are written by someone with actual experience in the
field. And the more notoriety I garnered as an author, the more in demand I was
likely to be by the police.

It was a couple of months since I’d
spoken to anyone at Truecrime Publications Ltd. I’d phoned Ann shortly before
finalising
The Bible Killer
manuscript, remembering how the last time
I’d seen her in the flesh, she’d almost stabbed her husband to death.

We met at her office in London, and
discussed all that had happened. She was excited that I’d be able to wind up
The
Bible
Killer
book with such a dramatic ending. “A real exclusive,”
she said.

“How’s your divorce going?” I
asked.

Ann blushed and looked down at
the desk. “Well, the thing is, Harry and I have decided to give it another go.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Harry
had used surveillance gadgets to eavesdrop on her phone calls to me and used
the information to inform Sean Boyd of my whereabouts, so as to set me up to be
killed. In order to escape from Sean Boyd’s men, Ann had stabbed Harry almost
to death to help me escape...

But Ann went on, blithely unaware
of my feelings. “The thing is, I know what Harry did was disgusting and
deplorable. But, when you think about it, he did it because he was jealous,
because he thought you and I were having an affair. He really cared, he was
really
jealous enough
to go to those lengths... Which means he really,
really cared about me. And he was so sweet after what happened, he absolutely
refused to press charges after I stabbed him.”

I nodded in the habitual near
darkness of Ann’s office.

“Harry’s got a lot of problems.
The detestable way he behaved, well, it’s not as cut-and-dried as it seems.
He’s a borderline alcoholic, and he’s even got a drug habit, and that’s my
fault because we were always rowing. He’d borrowed a lot of money and couldn’t
pay it back, and Sean Boyd was offering payment for what he was doing. Harry’s
really not such a bad person as you think...”

I said nothing.

“Anyway. The house is worth so
much, and, well, neither of us can afford to buy the other one out, and neither
Harry nor I want to move out anyway. So we’ve decided to try and make a go of
it. Harry’s going into a clinic to get clean and we’ll take it from there. One
step at a time.”

I felt almost sorry for her. And
disgusted.

“I know you’ll think I’m wrong.
But, you don’t know Harry. He’s got his faults, but, well, haven’t we all?”

“Sure, of course. I don’t know
him.”

“Now everything’s over and
settled, he really feels bad about what happened. He actually said he would
like to meet you and apologise, man to man. But I suppose that asking too
much?”

“Yes, that’s asking too much.”

I’d always thought of Ann as a
friend, but in the Truecrime office in that dark chilly spring early evening, I
knew she was no friend to me, she was just a hard, cold-hearted acquaintance
who didn’t give a damn if I lived or died. I needed her support in my career,
but I didn’t need her company, nor did I want it.

I felt tired, bitter and jaded.
Although I’d successfully written another two books that looked as if they
might sell well, I reflected that I had found what I thought was the love of my
life, and lost her. Even now, I still look at the picture I took with my phone
of Lucy when we’d gone to Chorton Hardy on that perfect day. That day that I’d
been so much in love that I thought it could never change. Maybe we should be
able to preserve those happy days, somehow, so we can bring them out and
remember them when times are hard, to remind ourselves that we are capable of
having happy, decent lives. Several times I went to the beautiful peaceful
haven of Canterbury Cathedral and lit another candle for Megan, standing to the
side of the main area, near the entrance to the cloisters and saying a silent
prayer. It always seems to help somehow, and I like to think that if there is
such a thing as life after death, maybe I’m helping Megan in some way. The
flickering candle, amongst all the others, is a pathetic excuse for a living
breathing person, but it’s a token of life, and whenever that flame flickers I
feel that something of her lives on. Once, when I was standing there minding my
own business, I looked out across the pews in St Augustine’s Chapel and
recognised the familiar hair and spectacles of DCI Fulford, kneeling there with
his eyes closed in silent prayer. I couldn’t begin to imagine how he must have
been suffering.