the Third Twin (1996)

by Ken Follett

  “I told you we should have made her vanish.”

  Jim was at his most offensive when under pressure. After a sleepless night Berrington had no patience. “If you say ‘I told you so’ I’ll blow your goddamn head off, I swear to God.”

  “All right, all right!”

  “Does Preston know?”

  “Yes. He says we’re finished, but he always says that.”

  “This time he could be right.”

  Jim’s voice took on its parade-ground tone. “You may be ready to wimp out, Berry, but I’m not,” he grated. “All we have to do is keep the lid on this until the press conference tomorrow. If we can manage that, the takeover will go through.”

  “But what happens after that?”

  “After that we’ll have a hundred and eighty million dollars, and that buys a lot of silence.”

  Berrington wanted to believe him. “You’re such a smart-ass, what do you think we should do next?”

  “We have to find out how much they know. No one is sure whether Steven Logan had a copy of the list of names and addresses in his pocket when he got away. The woman lieutenant in the data center swears he did not, but her word isn’t enough for me. Now, the addresses he has are twenty-two years old. But here’s my question. With just the names, can Jeannie Ferrami track them down?”

  “The answer is yes,” Berrington said. “We’re experts at that in the psychology department. We have to do it all the time, track down identical twins. If she got that list last night she could have found some of them by now.”

  “I was afraid of that. Is there any way we can check?”

  “I guess I could call them and find out if they’ve heard from her.”

  “You’d have to be discreet.”

  “You aggravate me, Jim. Sometimes you act like you’re the only guy in America with half a fucking brain. Of course I’ll be discreet. I’ll get back to you.” He hung up with a bang.

  The names of the clones and their phone numbers, written in a simple code, were in his Wizard. He took it out of his desk drawer and turned it on.

  He had kept track of them over the years. He felt more paternal toward them than either Preston or Jim. In the early days he had written occasional letters from the Aventine Clinic, asking for information under the pretext of follow-up studies on the hormone treatment. Later, when that became implausible, he had employed a variety of subterfuges, such as pretending to be a real estate broker and calling to ask if the family was thinking of selling the house, or whether the parents were interested in buying a book that listed scholarships available to the children of former military personnel. He had watched with ever-increasing dismay as most of them progressed from bright but disobedient children to fearless delinquent teenagers to brilliant, unstable adults. They were the unlucky by-products of a historic experiment. He had never regretted the experiment, but he felt guilty about the boys. He had cried when Per Ericson killed himself doing somersaults on a ski slope in Vail.

  He looked at the list while he dreamed up a pretext for calling today. Then he picked up the phone and dialed Murray Claud’s father. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. Eventually Berrington figured this was the day he went to visit his son in jail.

  He called George Dassault next. This time he was luckier. The phone was answered by a familiar young voice. “Yeah, who’s this?”

  Berrington said: “This is Bell Telephone, sir, and we’re checking up on fraudulent phone calls. Have you received any odd or unusual calls in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Nope, can’t say I have. But I’ve been out of town since Friday, so I wasn’t here to answer the phone anyway.”

  “Thank you for cooperating with our survey, sir. Good-bye.”

  Jeannie might have George’s name, but she had not reached him. That was inconclusive.

  Berrington tried Hank King in Boston next. “Yeah, who’s this?”

  It was astonishing, Berrington reflected, that they all answered the phone in the same charmless way. There could not be a gene for phone manners. But twins research was full of such phenomena. “This is AT and T,” Berrington said. “We’re doing a survey of fraudulent phone use and we’d like to know whether you have received any strange or suspicious calls in the last twenty-four hours.”

  Hank’s voice was slurred. “Jeez, I’ve been partying so hard I wouldn’t remember.” Berrington rolled up his eyes. It was Hank’s birthday yesterday, of course. He was sure to be drunk or drugged or both. “No, wait a minute! There was something. I remember. It was the middle of the fucking night. She said she was with the Boston police.”

  “She?” That could have been Jeannie, Berrington thought with a premonition of bad news.

  “Yeah, it was a woman.”

  “Did she give her name? That would enable us to check her bona fides.”

  “Sure she did, but I can’t remember. Sarah or Carol or Margaret or—Susan, that was it, Detective Susan Farber.”

  That settled it. Susan Farber was the author of Identical Twins Reared Apart, the only book on the subject. Jeannie had used the first name that came into her head. That meant she had the list of clones. Berrington was appalled. Grimly, he pressed on with his questions. “What did she say, sir?”

  “She asked my date and place of birth.”

  That would establish that she was talking to the right Henry King.

  “I thought it was, like, a little weird,” Hank went on. “Was it some kind of scam?”

  Berrington invented something on the spur of the moment. “She was prospecting for leads for an insurance company.

  It’s illegal, but they do it. AT and T is sorry you were bothered, Mr. King, and we thank you for cooperating with our investigation.”

  “Sure.”

  Berrington hung up, feeling completely desolate. Jeannie had the names. It was only a matter of time before she tracked them all down.

  Berrington was in the deepest trouble of his life.

  54

  MISH DELAWARE REFUSED POINT-BLANK TO DRIVE TO Philadelphia and interview Harvey Jones. “We did that yesterday, honey,” she said when Jeannie finally got her on the phone at seven-thirty A.M. ‘Today’s my granddaughter’s first birthday. I have a life, you know?”

  “But you know I’m right!” Jeannie protested. “I was right about Wayne Stattner—he was a double for Steve.”

  “Except for his hair. And he had an alibi.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to call the Philadelphia police and talk to someone on the Sex Crimes Unit there and ask them to go see him. I’ll fax them the E-FIT picture. They’ll check whether Harvey Jones resembles the picture and ask him if he can account for his movements last Sunday afternoon. If the answers are ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ we got a suspect.”

  Jeannie banged the phone down in a fury. After all she had been through! After she had stayed up all night tracking down the clones!

  She sure as hell was not going to sit around waiting for the police to do something. She decided she would go to Philadelphia and check Harvey out. She would not accost him or even speak to him. But she could park outside his home and see if he came out. Failing that, she could speak to his neighbors and show them the picture of Steve that Charles had given her. One way or another she would establish that he was Steve’s double.

  She got to Philadelphia around ten-thirty. In University City there were smartly dressed black families congregating outside the gospel churches and idle teenagers smoking on the stoops of the aging houses, but the students were still in bed, their presence betrayed only by rusty Toyotas and sagging Chevrolets with bumper stickers hailing college sports teams and local radio stations.

  Harvey Jones’s building was a huge, ramshackle Victorian house divided into apartments. Jeannie found a parking slot across the street and watched the front door for a while.

  At eleven o’clock she went in.

  The building was hanging on grimly to the vestiges of respectability.
A threadbare runner climbed the stairs wearily, and there were dusty plastic flowers in cheap vases on the window ledges. Neat paper notices, written in the cursive hand of an elderly woman, asked tenants to shut their doors quietly, put out their garbage in securely closed plastic sacks, and not let children play in the hallways.

  He lives here, Jeannie thought, and her skin crawled. I wonder if he’s here now.

  Harvey’s address was 5B, which had to be the top floor. She knocked on the first door on the ground floor. A bleary-eyed man with long hair and a tangled beard came to the door barefoot. She showed him the photo. He shook his head and slammed the door. She remembered the resident in Lisa’s building who had said to her, “Where do you think you are, lady—Hicksville, USA? I don’t even know what my neighbor looks like.”

  She clenched her teeth and walked up four flights to the top of the house. There was a card in a little metal frame attached to the door of 5B, saying simply “Jones.” The door had no other features.

  Jeannie stood outside, listening. All she could hear was the frightened beating of her heart. No sound came from inside. He probably was not there.

  She rapped on the door of 5A. A moment later the door opened and an elderly white man came out. He was wearing a chalk-stripe suit that had once been dashing, and his hair was so ginger that it had to be dyed. He seemed friendly. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi. Is your neighbor home?”

  “No.”

  Jeannie was relieved and disappointed at the same time. She took out the photo of Steve that Charles had given her. “Does he look like this?”

  The neighbor took the photo from her and squinted at it. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  I was right! Vindicated again! My computer search engine works.

  “Gorgeous, ain’t he?”

  The neighbor was gay, Jeannie guessed. An elegant old gay man. She smiled. “I think so too. Any idea where he might be this morning?”

  “He goes away most Sundays. Leaves around ten, comes back after supper.”

  “Did he go away last Sunday?”

  “Yes, young lady, I believe he did.”

  He’s the right one, he has to be.

  “Do you know where he goes?”

  “No.”

  I do, though. He goes to Baltimore.

  The man went on: “He doesn’t talk much. In fact, he doesn’t talk at all. You a detective?”

  “No, although I feel like one.”

  “What’s he done?”

  Jeannie hesitated, then thought, Why not tell the truth? “I think he’s a rapist,” she said.

  The man was not surprised. “I could believe that. He’s peculiar. I’ve seen girls leave here sobbing. Twice, that’s happened.”

  “I wish I could look inside.” She might find something that would link him with the rape.

  He gave her a sly look. “I have a key.”

  “You do?”

  “The previous occupant gave it to me. We were friendly. I never returned it after he left. And this guy didn’t change the locks when he moved in. Figures he’s too big and strong to be robbed, I guess.”

  “Would you let me in?”

  He hesitated. “I’m curious to look inside myself. But what if he comes back while we’re in there? He’s kind of large—I’d hate to have him mad at me.”

  The thought scared Jeannie, too, but her curiosity was even stronger. “I’ll take the risk if you will,” she said.

  “Wait there. I’ll be right back.”

  What would she find inside? A temple of sadism like Wayne Stattner’s home? A gruesome slum full of half-finished takeaway meals and dirty laundry? The excessive neatness of an obsessional personality?

  The neighbor reappeared. “I’m Maldwyn, by the way.”

  “I’m Jeannie.”

  “My real name is Bert, actually, but that’s so unglamorous, don’t you think? I’ve always called myself Maldwyn.” He turned a key in the door of 5B and went in.

  Jeannie followed.

  It was a typical student apartment, a bed-sitting room with a kitchen nook and a small bathroom. It was furnished with an assortment of junk: a pine dresser, a painted table, three mismatched chairs, a sagging sofa and a big old TV set. It had not been cleaned for a while, and the bed was unmade. It was disappointingly typical.

  Jeannie closed the apartment door behind her.

  Maldwyn said: “Don’t touch anything, just look—I don’t want him to suspect I came in here.”

  Jeannie asked herself what she expected to find. A plan of the gymnasium building, the pool machine room marked “Rape her here”? He had not taken Lisa’s underwear as a grotesque souvenir. Perhaps he had stalked her and photographed her for weeks before he had pounced. He might have a little collection of pilfered items: a lipstick, a restaurant check, the discarded wrapping from a candy bar, junk mail with her address on it.

  As she looked around, she began to see Harvey’s personality in the details. On one wall was a centerfold, torn from a men’s magazine, showing a naked woman with shaved pubic hair and a ring through the flesh of her labia. It made Jeannie shudder.

  She inspected the bookcase. She saw the Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred Days of Sodom and a series of X-rated videotapes with titles like Pain and Extreme. There were also some textbooks on economics and business; Harvey seemed to be doing an MBA.

  “Can I look at his clothes?” she said. She did not want to offend Maldwyn.

  “Sure, why not?”

  She opened his drawers and closets. Harvey’s clothes were like Steve’s, somewhat conservative for his age: chinos and polo shirts, tweed sport coats and button-downs, oxford shoes and loafers. The refrigerator was empty but for two six-packs of beer and a bottle of milk: Harvey ate out. Under the bed was a sports bag containing a squash racket and a dirty towel.

  Jeannie was disappointed. This was where the monster lived, but it was not a palace of perversion, just a grubby room with some nasty pornography in it.

  “I’m done,” she said to Maldwyn. “I’m not sure what I was looking for, but it’s not here.”

  Then she saw it.

  Hanging on a hook behind the apartment door was a red baseball cap.

  Jeannie’s spirits soared. I was right, and I found the bastard, and here’s the proof! She looked closer. The word SECURITY was printed on the front in white letters. She could not resist the temptation to do a triumphant war dance around Harvey Jones’s apartment.

  “Found something, huh?”

  “The creep was wearing that hat when he raped my friend. Let’s get out of here.”

  They left the apartment, closing the door. Jeannie shook hands with Maldwyn. “I can’t thank you enough. This is really important.”

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

  “Go back to Baltimore and call the police,” she said.

  Driving home on 1-95, she thought about Harvey Jones. Why did he go to Baltimore on Sundays? To see a girlfriend? Perhaps, but the likeliest explanation was that his parents lived there. A lot of students took their laundry home on weekends. He was probably in the city now, eating his mother’s pot roast or watching a football game on TV with his father. Would he assault another girl on his way home?

  How many Jones families were there in Baltimore: a thousand? She knew one of them, of course: her former boss, Professor Berrington Jones—

  Oh, my God. Jones.

  She was so shocked she had to pull over on the interstate.

  Harvey Jones could be Berrington’s son.

  She suddenly remembered the little gesture Harvey had made, in the coffee shop in Philadelphia where she had met him. He had smoothed his eyebrows with the tip of his index finger. It had bothered her at the time, because she knew she had seen it before. She could not recall who else did it, and she had thought vaguely that it must have been Steve or Dennis, for the clones did have identical gestures. But now she remembered. It was Berrington. Berrington smoothed his eyebrows with the tip of his index finge
r. There was something about the action that irritated Jeannie, something annoyingly smug or perhaps vain. This was not a gesture that all the clones had in common, like closing the door with their heel when they came into a room. Harvey had learned it from his father, as an expression of self-satisfaction.

  Harvey was probably at Berrington’s house right now.

  55

  PRESTON BARCK AND JIM PROUST ARRIVED AT BERRINGTON’S house around midday and sat in the den drinking beer. None of them had slept much, and they looked and felt wasted. Marianne, the housekeeper, was preparing Sunday lunch, and the fragrant smell of her cooking wafted in from the kitchen, but nothing could raise the spirits of the three partners.

  “Jeannie has talked to Hank King, and to Per Ericson’s mother,” Berrington said despondently. “I wasn’t able to check any others, but she’ll track them all down before long.”

  Jim said: “Let’s be realistic: exactly what can she do by this time tomorrow?”

  Preston Barck was suicidal. “I’ll tell you what I’d do in her place,” he said. “I’d want to make a highly public demonstration of what I’d found, so if I could get hold of two or three of the boys I’d take them to New York and go on Good Morning America. Television loves twins.”

  “God forbid,” Berrington said.

  A car drew up outside. Jim looked out of the window and said: “Rusty old Datsun.”

  Preston said: “I’m beginning to like Jim’s original idea. Make them all vanish.”

  “I won’t have any killing!” Berrington shouted.

  “Don’t yell, Berry,” Jim said with surprising mildness. ‘To tell you the truth, I guess I was bragging a bit when I talked about making people vanish. Maybe there was a time when I had the power to order people killed, but I really don’t anymore. I’ve asked some favors of old friends in the last few days; and although they’ve come through, I’ve realized there are limits.”

  Berrington thought, Thank God for that.