Doppelganger (7 page)

I gulped. “It’s rubbish.”

“Maybe. I try and be rational
about it, but there’s nothing I can do. I feel as if I’m kind of
marked out
or something. As if there’s nothing I can do to stop the inevitable.”

“It won’t happen,” I choked out.
“I
won’t let it happen
!”

She smiled and shrugged. “Forget
about it. I do whenever I can. As you say, it’s stupid and irrational and when
I’m forty I’ll look back and laugh. Forget I said anything.” She stopped
talking, staring out at the strip of window, and I noticed that the chink of
sky had a streak of pink across it. “What are you afraid of, Jack?” she broke
the silence at last.

“Dying alone.”

“Really?”

“Ever since Van Meer – I told
you, the man who held me hostage. For most of those three days I was certain I
was going to die. Everyone says that in a situation like that you just accept
the inevitable. Maybe that does happen in, perhaps, a natural disaster, just
before the end. Say if you’re in a plane that’s going to crash. But it wasn’t
like that for me. Every time he put the gun in my mouth I thought that was it,
and every time the fear was just as fresh as it had been the times before. And
Van Meer knew that. He was enjoying it.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died. He came after me,
nearly killed me for a second time,” I stopped talking, hating to dredge up the
awful memories. “But someone saved my life.”

“Who?”

“It’s a long story.” I thought of
the catalogue of trouble I’d only just managed to survive. “I’ll tell you one
day. The point is before meeting Edward Van Meer I never believed that there
was such a thing as pure evil.”

“Could you
ever
forgive
him? Say if you knew it wasn’t his fault – that some kind of mental illness
made him do it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if I was a
better person I could.” I paused to think. “But no. I don’t think I could.”

“So do you believe in
forgiveness?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Do you really believe in, I
don’t know, some kind of ultimate forgiveness? I mean like God’s forgiveness,
that sort of ultimate redemption? I don’t mean for something ordinary. I mean
forgiveness for doing something
awful
, something more awful and horrid
than you can possibly imagine. I’d like to believe what the Bible says, that
whatever terrible things you’ve done, as long as you’re truly, truly sorry,
then He can forgive you, even if no one else ever can.”

I nodded. What she’d said was
depressing me more than I could say. And I was so tired that sleep was
threatening to drag me down.

“So do you?” she repeated,
turning towards me, eyes wide and imploring.

“What?”

“Do you believe in forgiveness,
for
absolutely anything
? I mean, supposing, hypothetically, you found
out I’d done something really bad, do you think you could ever forgive me for
it?”

“Of course I could.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” I grinned, trying to
puncture the tension. “What have you done then? Not declared all your earnings
to the Inland Revenue?”

She didn’t answer, just closed
her eyes and fell asleep. I lay there listening to her breathing.

I’d heard about the instant kind
of love, the look-across-a-crowded-room variety, but I’d never believed in it
before. The peculiar feeling I’d experienced when I first met Lucy, the
absolute
certainty
that I already knew her somehow, seemed like a kind of omen, as
if it was a foreshadow, fate that we would meet, and be together. I know it
sounds crazy, but that’s how it seemed at the time. I looked at her face and I
saw everything I could ever want in my life. Which made no sense at all.
Judging her dispassionately she was no great beauty, she wasn’t even particularly
attractive, but somehow, to me, she was both of those things and many more
besides.

And yet I had this underlying
feeling that something wasn’t right. A niggling fear that I tried to repress.

One thing I recollect about that
night was a tiny memory that I’d normally not have thought about, in fact I
only remembered it much later. As I fell asleep beside her after that first
dawn together, my arm around her waist, watching her chest rise and fall,
listening to the slight rasp of her breathing and studying the faint white down
on the side of her cheek, just below the hairline, I wondered if it could be
real, if all this was actually happening to me, or if it was a dream. Next time
I opened my eyes bright daylight was filtering through the crack in the curtains,
illuminating the top of her dressing table: several glass bottles, a small
mirror, and various cosmetics. Standing a little apart from the rest was a
perfume bottle, labelled
Heaven’s Dust
.

The same extremely rare brand of
perfume that Caroline Lawrence was certain she’d inhaled on the night she’d
nearly died.

*
* * *

Lucy left for York the following
morning, and on Wednesday evening, after a gruelling day when I’d been talking
to the parents of Bible Killer victim Angela McCree about their daughter, a
strange thing had happened, and oddly enough it upset me far more than it
should have done. Douglas Hosegood’s 1983 book
Shocking Killers
, that
I’d shown to Lucy a few days previously, had disappeared. I wanted to refer to
it because there were some sections in it that I often found useful to refer to
whenever I was planning out a new book.

It was crazy. Ridiculous. I’d had
it in my hands just a few days ago, it had never left my home, yet now it was
nowhere to be found. I phoned Lucy and she was relaxed about it all, saying
that it would turn up somewhere. But where could it have gone? Douglas had
given it to me, and signed the copy, and it meant the world to me. How on earth
could it have just vanished into thin air? Even though getting another copy
wasn’t the same as having the one that Douglas had signed it was better than
nothing, so I opened up my internet connection on the laptop and looked on
Amazon to see if I could get another one, but it had long gone out of print,
and nothing was available. That’s when I had the idea of mentioning it to
Archie, Lucy’s downstairs neighbour and owner of
Mad about the Book
. “No
problem Jack,” Archie assured me the following morning. “Leave it with me. With
all my contacts in the trade I’m sure I can lay my hands on a copy.”

*
* * *

I returned to my cottage after
driving back from York – my first visit to Lucy. As I drove through the
woodland road to my house, I reflected that it hadn’t altogether been a
success. For the first time I began to have doubts that we could have a
successful relationship. Lucy was somehow all or nothing: either full-on charm,
or so quiet she almost seemed depressed. Her mood swings weren’t easy to get
used to; perhaps because I’m pretty easygoing myself, I stay pretty much on an
even keel, and trying to understand people’s moods and making allowances for them
was new to me. We argued from time to time, and she became fiercely angry,
saying vicious cutting remarks rather than screaming her head off. And those
cruel remarks were far more hurtful than any off-the-cuff insult. For instance
we both loved architecture: I was keen on buildings from a practical,
builder’s, point of view, since I’ve learnt brickwork, plastering, plumbing and
other building trades, whereas Lucy’s interest was in the finer, more cerebral,
aspects of design.  When I mentioned that I loved Rennie Mackintosh’s work, she
announced without thinking, that
Mackintosh
produced rubbish for the
masses
, and went on to vilify the Scottish furniture designer whom I’ve
always admired. It wasn’t the things she said, so much as the way she said
them, as if to deliberately wound, to hurt.  

But I was in the early stages of
falling in love, ready to forgive her faults, and try and make things work
between us. Staying for a couple of nights in her cramped flat above the little
dolls’ house shop didn’t help. There was simply not enough room for two people,
and I found her obsessive tidiness irritating, as if she couldn’t bear to leave
anything out on a surface, it always had to be tidied away. I just couldn’t
spread out and relax. The shop seemed oddly fussy, a weird emporium of crazy
pretend houses, everything in miniature, everything in obsessively neat order,
making me feel as if I was a clumsy giant in some bizarre Lilliputian world of
make-believe, where the tiny dolls and their dinky houses were real and I was
the outsider. I saw Lucy gazing at the minuscule features in the rooms, her
mind totally locked into the astonishing pretend world, as if she was in a
trance, shutting me out of her thoughts as surely as if she was in another
room.

Dolls’ house enthusiasts seemed
weird and slightly sick people to me. The tiny dolls were specially made to
scale, to match the different sizes of the houses, the ones for the American
market normally different dimensions to those for Europe.  Lucy would pick them
up and place them in position. A bowler-hatted father with a moustache, a blond
haired Barbie lookalike, even tiny doll children. I found everything about the
shop claustrophobic, even the customers seemed odd, fussy, strange-looking
women mostly, whose eyes lit up as they wallowed in the miniature things,
crouching down or kneeling to get up close, as if they longed to shrink down
and join the dolls. There was one German woman with a hair lip and a rasping
voice, who caressed the dolls as if they were her babies. She made my flesh
creep.

On the following morning, Monday,
I realised that making some attempt to contact the police investigation team in
the Incident Room at Cowley Road station, was something I’d been putting off
ever since my talk with Ann, my editor at Truecrime, but now I realised I
couldn’t put it off any longer. Obviously no one was going to let me into the
actual room or see any of the evidence, but I had a few friends amongst the
Canterbury police, and, with any luck if I hung around outside the station I
might catch sight of someone I knew, and I could ask a few subtle questions.

The police station was of tired
red bricks, a ‘30s building on the outskirts of town. It was one of those
‘arsehole’ stations (police slang) for a place where nobody wants to work.
Cowley Road station was sandwiched between two big council housing estates
where the most usual crimes were drug related, and domestic violence was a
routine event.

But I discovered that the
Incident Room wasn’t in the station building at all, but in a large mobile
caravan in the car park belonging to the Cowley Industrial Estate, across the
road. The part of the car park where the large caravan was parked was in the
far corner, clear of other vehicles, and an empty crisp packet and a page from
a newspaper were wafted along by the breeze as I waited around and wondered
what to do.

Then I had my first bit of luck
of the day. Dave Parsons, a PC I’d been friendly with some years ago, came out
of the caravan and hailed me.

“Hello Jack, what are you doing
here?”

“Hoping for a bit of news. I’m
writing a book about the Bible Killer, and I want to get something hot from
your team.”

“You cheeky fucker!”

“I love you too, Dave!”

“You got some balls, I give you
that. You know DCI Fulford’s leading the investigation?”

“Is he?” I pictured the Scottish
character who’d interviewed me after I’d run down Caroline Lawrence. “I met him
the other day.”

“Then you know what a bastard he
is.”

“Who else is on your team?”

“The BIA is Millie Vee – ever
come across her?”

“I worked with her a while ago.”
I groaned inwardly.

“Fulford’s wetting himself with
excitement to have got Millie. She’s on loan from the hospital psychiatric
wing, s’posed to be highly academic, wrote a brilliant paper for her doctorate.
Her boss is that psychiatrist who’s often on TV, Roger Lamelle, written loads
of books, always being interviewed. Fulford reckons our Millie is the dog’s
bollocks, she’ll crack the whole thing for us.”

“Umph.” I glowered.

“I take it you’re not a fan of
Millicent Veitch?”

“Do you like her?”

Dave shrugged. “How can you like
a person who looks at you as if you were the shit on her shoe unless you’re a
rank above Sergeant?”

“She hasn’t changed then.” I
nodded.

“And there’s something loathsome
about a workaholic, too, don’t you reckon? One o’ them types that’s always on
the phone, jabbering away, or burrowing through papers, and she’d rather shave
her arse in public than crack a smile. But Fulford can’t get enough of her, and
she’s got plenty of time for him too.”

“Can you tell me anything about
the case, Dave? Off the record?”

“’Course I can’t, you mad prick!
Talk to the Press Office.”

“I don’t want squeaky-clean press
releases Dave. I want more than that: details, facts, names, gossip.”

“Well you can whistle for them,
mate, I’m not risking losing my pension.”

“So what are you doing here?”

The woman’s voice from behind
made me turn suddenly, and Dave stepped smartly away and vanished from view.

Millicent Veitch had an excellent
psychology degree and a PhD, and was making a name for herself as a BIA, and
had had some speculator successes with a police force in Lancashire. Millicent
was very short, with jet black short hair and self consciously casual clothing:
jeans and a sweatshirt, bangle bracelet dangling from her wrist. I’ve come to
the conclusion that she might once have had an attractive face, but that years
of frowning had etched the lines of gloom around her mouth. And sometimes, very
occasionally when the light’s just so, I’m sure I can see a faint line of
moustache on her upper lip.