The Winning Side

by Lance Parkin

  ‘How could it be?’ the pathologist agreed. ‘Oh wait... there was a watch. A wristwatch.’

  Lechasseur asked if they could see it and the pathologist left the room. They were bent over the body before the door was closed behind him.

  ‘She’s my twin,’ Emily told him. She seemed remarkably unaffected by seeing, to all intents and purposes, her own body. If she was uncomfortable at Lechasseur seeing her... it... naked, she didn’t register that, either.

  ‘She has the same length hair.’ Lechasseur observed. Emily’s hair was slightly longer than the fashion this year.

  ‘We need something more than that. Look here. The same mole.’ A tiny mole on both their necks. ‘Do twins have exactly the same moles?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lechasseur admitted. He was getting a little uncomfortable.

  ‘I don’t have those bruises on my neck and shoulder.’

  ‘Your neck hasn’t been broken. That was how she died. That’s why it’s bruised.’

  ‘You can tell that by looking at her?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘The bruise on the shoulder.’

  ‘Looks nasty, and older than the ones on the neck. Have you got a bruised shoulder?’

  Emily shook her head. ‘But I don’t think twins have the same moles. Are there any other differences? Her nails are shorter. Oh...’

  ‘What?’

  She held up the body’s hand. A half-inch cut on the tip of the ring finger.

  She held up her own hand. A half-inch cut on the tip of the ring finger.

  ‘We both cut ourselves slicing bread. Same finger.’

  The twin’s wound was slightly more ragged, slightly more puckered. Just like Emily’s would have been, if it had got wet.

  Lechasseur shook his head. ‘It’s a trick.’

  ‘A trick?’

  ‘Someone’s trying to scare you.’

  ‘He’s starting to succeed. And he’s gone to a lot of trouble. This isn’t someone who looks a bit like me – if I had a twin, this body would look more like me than she did. Do you know how they did that?’

  Lechasseur had to concede that he didn’t. He’d heard about criminals substituting one body for another, but it was a crude trick. You got a body the same sort of height and age and colouring. Then you set fire to it, or mutilated it, because it didn’t matter how similar the body looked, it wouldn’t fool even an acquaintance in the cold light of day. The whole idea was that everyone thought it was an accident and stopped asking questions.

  ‘Can’t you see anything?’ Emily asked.

  ‘No. I could see the pathologist. I can see you. I can see you cutting yourself. It wasn’t bread, it was bacon.’

  ‘Hey... yes, you’re right. But you get nothing from this... thing? From her?’

  Lechasseur shook his head.

  ‘If they hadn’t scrubbed the body, then we might have found something.’

  Lechasseur was examining the notes. ‘Hammersmith Bridge. Time of death last night, around midnight. No sign of a struggle.’

  ‘I should make sure I stay away from Hammersmith Bridge last night, and that I don’t wear overalls.’

  ‘You don’t own any –’ She gave him a pointed look. ‘Women do. They used to in the munitions factories. I bet they still do if they work in the docks, or...’

  ‘She wasn’t wearing underwear,’ she reminded him. ‘I... well, I wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t go out.’

  She looked down at the small, naked body, and for the first time she looked upset.

  ‘This isn’t you,’ he assured her.

  ‘It is, Honoré. Look at it. Somehow, it is.’

  It was. And Honoré Lechasseur had to admit it was a much more interesting mystery than what a civil servant was doing that took him away from his wife and to Bloomsbury.

  As far as the police were concerned, there wasn’t anything to investigate. This was nothing but a coincidence, they said. Lechasseur and Emily made their way back to his flat. They’d even let them keep the dead girl’s watch – or, more precisely, they hadn’t noticed when Lechasseur slipped it into his pocket. It was, predictably enough, the exact make that Emily wore, a cheap watch she’d bought in the East End. The dead girl’s had stopped at one – presumably damaged as its owner had been swallowed by the mud and water.

  ‘A man with two watches never knows the correct time,’ Emily said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something I read,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember who said it.’

  ‘I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t think I was a suspect,’ Lechasseur noted.

  Emily had been nervous all the way home. She had one hand pulled up at the collar of her coat. They’d quickly run through the likely explanations, principally because there weren’t that many likely explanations. The best they’d come up with was what the police said: it was all a coincidence.

  ‘If there weren’t coincidences, there wouldn’t be a word for it,’ Lechasseur had said. Hardly profound, and he could tell Emily wasn’t buying.

  So, exhausting the rational explanations, they’d tried some of the irrational ones. A few weeks after Emily had been found wandering on that bombsite, Emily told Lechasseur, a man had come to her flat to talk about putting her in a book about the unusual. Boys raised by wolves, incredible feats of luck (both good and bad), twins brought up in different parts of the world who meet up and discover they’ve led parallel lives. The writer had hoped that Emily’s story would be a good example, one his publishers liked because it was topical.

  ‘He believed in ghosts and spirits,’ she told Lechasseur. ‘And he mentioned the idea of a doppelgänger.’

  Lechasseur shrugged.

  ‘A double,’ she explained. ‘A supernatural, exact double. And if you see it, it means you’re going to die.’

  She was so matter-of-fact about it. This evening had disconcerted her – hell, why wouldn’t it have done? But she was trying to think about it, to come up with a solution.

  ‘Whoever that body was, it wasn’t supernatural.’

  They’d reached his flat, and Lechasseur hesitated, feeling slightly awkward as usual. Emily smiled at him gently. ‘It’s okay, Honoré, I know this is your space, and I’m grateful –’

  At that moment, car doors slammed closed across the road, and two men started coming purposefully towards them. Plain clothes police. If they’d been uniformed, it would hardly have been more obvious.

  ‘Honoré Lechasseur?’

  ‘Yeah. Hi. I was just with you. It was all a mistake – this is Miss Blandish, and as you can see, she’s –’

  The nearest grabbed him, the other hit him in the stomach.

  Lechasseur tried struggling, but the guy holding him was too strong.

  Another punch.

  ‘Stop that!’ Emily cried, trying to prise the guy’s arms from around her friend.

  The guy let go of Lechasseur and rounded on her. Emily held up her hands, tried to protect herself, but he just brought a heavy blow down on her shoulder, knocked her over.

  Lechasseur turned, and would have got a good swing on the guy, if it wasn’t for his associate. The other man punched Lechasseur in the back, right in the kidneys. Lechasseur tried to stay upright, but ended up on his knees, not conscious of anything but the pain. He ought to be used to pain by now, but...

  ‘Stay away from Simon Brown,’ the man who’d hit Emily said.

  Then the two of them went back to their car, got in and drove off.

  Lechasseur found Emily was offering a hand to him, trying to help him up.

  ‘Do you know –’ she began.

  ‘Never seen them before.’

  Had they been following him this afternoon, when he’d been following Brown? Lechasseur knew Brown hadn’t seen him. But had someone else? Could those two men have been righ
t behind him on the Tube, at the antiques shop?

  Emily winced.

  ‘You okay?’ Lechasseur asked.

  ‘Well,’ Emily replied quietly, ‘at least we know how the body in the morgue got the bruise on her shoulder.’

  2

  Emily cooked herself breakfast, using the last of the eggs, which annoyed Lechasseur more than he knew it should have done.

  It was good to see her alive. But across London she was lying on a slab. What would they do with the body? A full post mortem, a brief time for some relative to come forward, then a burial, he assumed. Should Lechasseur go? Would they even be informed when it was taking place?

  The bruise on Emily’s shoulder had developed during the night, and was the same shape as the one on the corpse, she had told him.

  He couldn’t help but think that the body was Emily. Somehow she had both died and not died. Impossible, of course, but so much of Lechasseur’s life in the last few weeks had been impossible. Was there some way in which events could branch off in two directions? Life was a series of choices, some conscious decisions, some accidents. Everyone understood that, at some level. If you flipped a coin, it could come up heads or tails. He knew so little about Emily, but what he knew was that time flowed differently around her. He couldn’t explain it any better than that.

  She’d just appeared one day on a bombsite. Heads. But had she appeared somewhere else, too? Tails. It would explain the identical bodies. Perhaps there was some explanation for the bruises – some arcane link between the two bodies. Prick one, does the other not bleed? Except that the other Emily had been murdered – if you hit her, and ‘his’ Emily got the bruise, then why wouldn’t her neck break when her twin’s did? The prospect that there was some sort of time delay, that Emily’s neck would just snap in a day or two worried him... but as Emily herself had said, if that was the case, they couldn’t do anything.

  Lechasseur couldn’t help thinking about Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Future. Finding the body was a sign, a warning. They were meant to do something differently, or Emily would die. He’d tried explaining this to Emily, who had never read the story or even heard of Charles Dickens. When Lechasseur admitted that he had no idea how Emily was meant to mend her ways to prevent her fate, it joined the pile of useless theories they’d amassed.

  Was there a connection between Emily’s ‘death’ and the business with Brown? There was no logical reason to link the two, but Lechasseur couldn’t help but try to join the dots. The men who’d given Emily the bruise knew about Simon Brown. Tenuous, but a link.

  Lechasseur’s first choice of the day was whether or not to carry on following Brown around. The case had always been of minimal interest to him, he didn’t fancy the idea of being beaten up again. He was seriously considering just letting it drop.

  It was Emily who came up with a solution – the men had warned him to stay away from Simon Brown. He could pursue the case without pursuing the man. Around ten o’clock, he headed back to Bloomsbury, and the flat above the antiques shop.

  Four doorbells, one for each of the flats. Not all of them had names next to them. Lechasseur made a guess which was the one for the first floor. Brown had pressed either the second or third. Lechasseur decided on the second.

  The latch clicked. There was no way anyone could have made it downstairs in that time – and he’d have heard them, he was sure – so the door had been opened for him. Very trusting.

  Lechasseur stepped into a hallway that managed to exude class and a degree of wealth while also being almost bare. The carpet was thick, and Lechasseur found himself wiping his feet automatically on the tough doormat before he stepped all the way inside. He made his way up a flight of stairs, his footsteps muffled by the carpet. The door on the first floor was already an inch open. He entered a room full of dark furniture, lined with bookcases.

  They were history books, mainly. There were Russian history books (including books with authors with names like Zamiatin), books about trade unions, as well as poetry. There was a small pile of faded newspapers on a side table.

  The woman registered no surprise to see him. Lechasseur doubted she would say the same about himself. She was standing in the middle of the room. She was tall, thin, wearing a silk dressing gown that was purple, but had probably faded from a vivid red. She had brown waist-length hair, heavily streaked with grey, but, looking at her, she probably wasn’t forty yet. She had a glass of whisky in her hand.

  ‘And you are?’ she asked, with one of those impossibly English accents.

  Her fingernails were covered in a thick, impeccable varnish that matched the colour of her gown. Lechasseur couldn’t be certain, but suspected that the gown and the nail varnish was all she was wearing.

  ‘Honoré Lechasseur.’

  ‘An American.’ It couldn’t possibly qualify as a question.

  ‘And your name, ma’am?’

  She smiled. ‘Amanda. And you’re too late; he’s already come and gone.’ She looked at him as she poured a generous measure into one of the three glasses that were out. ‘Drink?’

  It was ten in the morning, Lechasseur reminded himself. He wondered if ‘Amanda’ knew what time it was.

  ‘A little early?’ she asked, taking a seat. As she sat, the gown parted, revealing a long, very white, leg. She covered it over almost immediately.

  Lechasseur hesitated.

  ‘Do I need to remind you that it’s you calling on me?’ she asked. She didn’t seem worried. Was there someone else here, ready for trouble? Lechasseur didn’t think so. Amanda must be lucky enough to live safe from the threat of violence. This was, of course, how most people lived. Lechasseur could just remember what that had been like.

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘I can see you’re not a stupid man, Mr Lechasseur.’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘The first thing you did was look at the titles of the books,’ she told him. ‘You’ve read this?’ She passed him a book as she tidied an envelope away into a drawer.

  Homage to Catalonia.

  ‘No. I served in the War. I don’t like reading about them.’

  ‘You fought in Spain? Is it rude to ask for whom?’

  ‘Ma’am, I meant the last War. I was a GI. I fought in France.’

  ‘You’ve killed people?’

  She didn’t seem too interested in the answer, so Lechasseur shrugged.

  ‘Simon Brown,’ he said, instead of answering her question.

  Amanda cocked her head to one side. ‘What about him?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Presumably you know I do; that wasn’t just a lucky guess.’

  ‘His wife wonders where he’s been spending his evenings.’

  ‘Does she? Why haven’t you told her that he spends them here?’ She sipped at her whisky. ‘I’m surprised they sent an American. I suppose I shouldn’t be.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The government, Mr Lechasseur. The state.’

  ‘I don’t work for the government.’

  She looked over at him.

  ‘I don’t,’ he insisted.

  ‘I have no doubt you’re not on the payroll. But however you define it –’

  Lechasseur cut her off. ‘I don’t work for the government.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me you don’t even follow affairs of state.’

  If he felt like having the conversation, that’s exactly what he’d tell her. He’d lived in London only a few years, he’d not voted in a General Election. He wasn’t sure he was entitled to.

  ‘We are living at a crucial time,’ she continued.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Lechasseur countered.

  ‘Ah – a philosopher.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘But you’re wrong. The dust is still settling from the War. Everything was thrown up into the air, we c
an’t yet be certain where it has landed.’

  Lechasseur glanced over at her. She was fitting a cigarette at the end of an ivory cigarette holder. As she leant over, Lechasseur got confirmation that she was wearing nothing underneath her robe. She retrieved a ha’penny box of safety matches and struck one against the side. It took a moment to get the cigarette lit. A recent habit, then – or at least the holder was a recent affectation. If it had seen much use, it wouldn’t have stayed so white, he reasoned.

  Amanda was facing him again, drawing some smoke in.

  ‘The people you work for – please, don’t give me that look again – they know this. They think that they’ve got the power, but it’s the power that has them. It works to a new and terrible logic, one they don’t understand.’

  ‘Well I sure as hell don’t understand,’ Lechasseur confessed, a little more candidly than he ought to, were he keeping his cards close to his chest.

  ‘The atom bomb,’ Amanda said, as though she’d explained everything in three words. ‘You have heard of the atom bomb?’

  He looked at her. ‘You said yourself I’m not a stupid man.’

  She smiled. ‘There’s a new logic there. A whole new way of fighting a war. Or of not fighting one.’

  ‘It’s just a big bomb, ma’am.’

  ‘One atom bomb can destroy a city. And with that power –’

  ‘Ask the people of Coventry or Dresden, and they’ll remind you we didn’t need atom bombs to do that.’ Lechasseur held up his hand. ‘Look, lady, I work for Simon Brown’s wife. She wants to know if he’s got another woman.’

  She frowned, clearly not believing his story. ‘You’re a... what do you call them? A private eye?’

  ‘No... Well, that is what I’m doing here. But this is a favour for a friend.’

  ‘You’re a friend of Simon’s wife?’

  ‘Er... no. Look... I... are you... ?’

  ‘Of course we are, Mr Lechasseur. I commend you on your resourcefulness. I was led to understand that most detectives snuck around and examined dustbins for discarded receipts and correspondence. You just knocked on my door and asked me. How shall we continue? We’ve been having an affair for two months. He took me to Brighton once, heaven knows why – I think he thought it was the form. I’ve had lovers with more flair, but he makes up for that with –’