Doppelganger

by Geoffrey West

  The weird feeling that I’d met her before wouldn’t go away. I racked my brains. But the memory was as elusive and enigmatic as a lost dream.

  The shuddering lift had almost rattled down to the ground floor. “Wait a minute,” she said slowly, her eyes narrowing. “Jack Lockwood the True Crime writer. Already in the lift when the only ward above us is Edith Grendel. Please tell me it’s a coincidence that we just happen to have a patient there who’s been the victim of an attack? The Bible Killer’s latest?”

  “I came to see how she was.”

  “Priceless!” she stepped backwards, glaring at me. “Couldn’t you have had the decency to wait until the killer’s been caught before you push in and ask questions?”

  “Look I’m not–”

  “Don’t you think that poor girl’s had a bad enough experience already, without a self-seeking opportunist like you upsetting her?”

  “Listen–”

  “I’m sorry, but this is so wrong. They surely didn’t let you talk to her?”

  “She can’t talk to anyone.”

  “Good! My God, I thought journalists were the lowest of the low, but you make the gutter press seem like saints! Did you know that girl nearly died?”

  The lift had already stopped and the doors were open.

  “Have you any idea–”

  As I brushed past her I accidentally knocked her arm, so that she dropped some of the files onto the floor, and, in scrambling to retrieve them, dropped the rest, so that their contents were spread across the lift floor in a tidal wave of paper. I stepped over her kneeling figure as she scrabbled around trying to gather things together.

  * * * *

  When I got home I found it hard to sleep. Lucy Green’s accusation of my being a self-seeking opportunist had upset me more than I realised. It wasn’t what she said, so much as the distaste in her eyes as she looked at me. In fact it was much more than that, it was something I couldn’t explain, a bizarre affinity I’d felt for her from the moment I’d set eyes on her face. An affinity that she obviously didn’t share, and the knowledge upset me deeply.

  Lucy Green. Lucy. Again and again I concentrated on her face, but try as I might I couldn’t remember her features in detail. I remembered soulful dark eyes, dark hair, a turned-up nose. More than anything, for a reason I couldn’t explain, I longed to see her again.

  All my life I’d heard those stories of seeing someone across a crowded room, an instant recognition, true love at first sight, and I’d dismissed it as nonsense. It had never happened to me before, not with the various girlfriends I’ve had, or even with my ex wife. The feeling was like a tidal wave, and all the more disquieting because I couldn’t rationalise it. I simply longed to see her again, and the longing was delicious, exciting, yet somehow toe-curlingly terrifying.

  Then my thoughts ran back to the fact that earlier in the evening I’d had more email threats and phone messages from Sean Boyd. The biography I was writing about Boyd, a well known London ‘face’ in criminal circles, was causing me serious problems. Hero or Villain? honestly seemed to me to be a fairly non-controversial summary of the man’s childhood and career so far. Even if I was to have been stupid enough to allege his guilt in specific criminal activities, he ought surely to realise that Truecrime Publications would never print anything he could sue us for. In fact, it was going to be a fairly innocuous book, because of the wretched legal restrictions, something that would almost paint him in a Robin Hood light, so why on earth was he was so determined to prevent publication?

  It was easy to get my agent’s contact details from my website, but not my personal numbers. Yet, somehow, Boyd had got hold of my private mobile number and personal email, and was constantly sending threatening texts and emails, warning me off writing the book. I’d discussed things with the police, who’d admitted there was nothing they could do about it. “Until,” the officer had cheerfully said, “they actually attack you.”

  There was no alternative but to carry on and try to forget about it. And, of course, keep my wits about me.

  * * * *

  I woke up in the early hours, sweating with terror. It was the nightmare I hadn’t had for years now, that I’d hoped had gone forever. The one that always left me trembling for the several still-terrifying moments after I sprang awake.

  It’s always daytime. The sun is shining in a beautiful clear blue sky. Suddenly someone much taller than me stops and looks down, blocking out the sunlight. I look up at them but I can’t clearly see their face, just a dark shadow where it should be. And then I feel pressure on my neck. The blind panic that follows is the worst part. The time when I can’t breathe, when I’m fighting for breath and everything begins to go dark...

  I hadn’t had that dream since long before my experience with Van Meer, the man who’d tortured and nearly killed me, or my terrifying stay in St Michael’s. I had no idea where it came from, could barely remember when I’d first had it. All I could remember was the flavour of the fear. And I hated it.

  As I lay there, my heartbeat gradually easing back to normality, I tried to think back to how long ago it was since I’d had that wretched dream. I couldn’t remember, but it had first happened in my early childhood, and come back periodically ever since, usually once every few years. Obviously the shock of finding poor Caroline on top of everything that had happened in the past few days had had an adverse effect on my subconscious, giving rise to that terrible, terrible dream that I’d hoped was buried once and for all. The funny thing about the dream is that, as a rule I’ve always found that with even the worst nightmare, there’s always one tiny corner of my mind that stays apart, allowing me to know, deep down, that it isn’t really happening, that it is only a dream. But with this particular night adventure I could never do that. Every time, it’s as real as if I’m wide awake, and doubly terrifying. I’m powerless, I’m dying, and there’s nothing in the world I can do to fight back.

  Rubbing my eyes, I wondered whether to get up and walk around, or just lie back and hope for a sweeter dream to cleanse away my terror. Eventually I lay back and drifted off again, thankful to enjoy oblivion for several more hours. I overslept, so that it wasn’t until 10.30 in the morning that I heard the crash from downstairs. At first I thought it was a dream.

  But the sound of tinkling glass and the thudding footsteps on the stairs were real.

  I leapt out of bed, in time to see the door slam back and bounce against the wall, and a tall figure wearing a Coco the Clown mask. There were others behind him, moving fast, filling the room. Before I’d worked out what to do, two of them were holding my arms, pulling me up against the wall, while the others were systematically beating my body with baseball bats. As I stopped struggling, they slackened their hold, allowing me to slide to my knees. Then they really went to town.

  I had a close-up views of heavy boots against my face, hard steel-capped toes, smashing into my chest and arms and legs. It went on for what seemed like hours, but was in reality probably more like minutes.

  When they’d finished I was cowered on the floor, my hands up to protect my face. Between my fingers I had a surreal image of Donald Duck’s face floating down to my level.

  “Listen, mate,” he rasped. “This is your one and only warning. You stop writing Sean Boyd’s biography or we’ll come back and bury you. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise. It’ll be quick and clean. And you won’t know where or when.”

  As he said it, one of the others handed him what looked like a plumber’s blowlamp.

  There was a pop as the blue flame sprung alive, then the roar of the burning gas.

  Chapter 2

  HATE WITHOUT A HANDBRAKE

  My legs were bare. There was no pain at first as the blue flame licked across the flesh of my ankles, but then there was a searing agony, which surpassed the aches and stabbing pains in the rest of my body. That’s the point when I must have blacked out.

  How long I lay there I have no idea. The next thing I knew was a woman’s fa
ce above me, pulses of searing pain that were almost unbearable, a smell of scorched flesh and the coppery taste of blood in my mouth.

  “Lie still. I’m calling an ambulance.”

  I thought I heard her voice saying it, but it could equally have been God or an angel. I was right out of it, fading in and out of consciousness.

  I woke up again in the ambulance, to a view of a crisp white cuff and a lily-white hand touching the plastic mask attached to my face. And pink-painted fingernails.

  Then, to my amazement, the face that I hadn’t been able to forget was close to mine.

  “You’re okay. We’re going to hospital.”

  It was Lucy Green, the girl I’d met in the lift yesterday. The girl I was obsessed with. The woman whose face I couldn’t get out of my mind. The woman who hated me.

  What was she doing at my house?

  I closed my eyes, felt the effect of the drugs carry me into oblivion.

  * * * *

  Much later, when I was sitting up in a hospital bed, she explained what had happened.

  “I came to see you to apologise,” she began. “When I spoke to the sister on Edith Grendel, she explained that the policewoman had told me why you’d come. I had no right to talk to you like that, or to leap to ridiculous conclusions. I suppose it’s the stress of being a single woman, living alone in this town, that’s got me so uptight. The killer’s got us all looking over our shoulders, panicking at the thought of being his next victim. The policewoman said it was thanks to you that Caroline Lawrence is alive. And that you’d only come to find out how she was.”

  “How did you know where I live?” I asked

  “I’ve got a friend in the hospital IT department. You were admitted last year for a hernia operation, and your address was in the system.”

  “You broke the law.”

  She smiled. “Lucky for you I did.”

  “If you hadn’t come I might have bled to death in here on my own.”

  “The front door was wide open – it looked as if you’d had a burglary, so I just walked in. I could tell something was wrong. Sorry about your house, or cottage or whatever you call it.

  “It’s kind of an almost-house. It was once the gatehouse to a large mansion, and I converted it into a home.”

  “Well I’m afraid they’ve made a bit of a mess.”

  I stayed in hospital overnight, and in the morning my new friend came to see me, just after the police had interviewed me. They didn’t hold out much hope of catching my attackers, and I didn’t imagine they’d make too many efforts to try.

  She insisted on driving me home.

  Lucy was wearing a tight-fitting bright red coat, its brass buttons fastened up to the neck against the cold wind. Her hands were slim fingered, the nails trimmed square but the same pink I remembered seeing at close quarters when I woke up in the ambulance. She drove fast and decisively, frowning in concentration as she stared at the road ahead.

  “How’s Caroline Lawrence?” I asked her.

  “Recovering well, apparently. The police have talked to her. I haven’t been around her ward to see her, but I gather she’s being discharged soon. Someone told me she wants to see you, they say, to thank you for what you did.”

  “For nearly killing her?”

  “For saving her life. Make no mistake, someone was after her, and might have caught her. It was a clear country road at night. She knows you could hardly have been able to stop in time.”

  “Small consolation for killing someone.”

  “Of course. It would have been an awful thing to live with.”

  “It is.”

  “You mean it’s happened to you before?”

  “Yes, a long time ago.” I thought of Martin Gallica, the man I’d accidentally run down and killed when he’d dashed out into the road under the influence of cocaine and alcohol. How I still remembered his face staring at me through the windscreen in the seconds before he died. I stifled the memory.

  “Hope you don’t mind, but I’d rather not talk about it,” I said.

  “Sure. We’ve all got memories we lock away. And I’m sorry for being such a bitch the other day, the ridiculous misunderstanding that was all my fault. I really am sorry about all that’s happened.”

  “Well I met you. Something good came out of it.”

  “Good? After the way I behaved I wouldn’t have blamed you for never wanting to speak to me again.”

  We drove up Hedgers Lane, the narrow road leading to the Gatehouse, which once marked the entrance to the Adelaide Manor, long since demolished to make way for an estate of luxury flats. She pulled up behind my car in the front yard. “Will you come in for a minute?” I said.

  “Sure you don’t want to be left alone to crash out?”

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t sleep at the moment. My mind’s buzzing, and everything hurts too much.”

  “It’s none of my business, but you told me that these characters who beat you senseless want you to stop writing some gangster’s memoirs.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that if you don’t, they’re going to kill you.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “So you’re abandoning it?”

  “I made an agreement, signed a contract. The book’s almost finished. All I can do now is try and get my publisher to accelerate production as fast as they can. Once it’s in the shops the threat’s over.”

  She stared at me aghast. “You mean you’re going to defy them?

  I nodded, the movement making me wince with pain. “Next time I’ll be more prepared.”

  * * * *

  It turned out that Lucy had only lived in Canterbury since May. We were sitting in my living room, Lucy on the battered old sofa, while I was in my favourite old armchair.

  “So you’re a nurse at the hospital?”I asked.

  “Oh no. I just volunteer there one day a week. I’m actually a miniaturist.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I make dolls’ houses, as well as furniture for dolls’ houses.”

  “Somebody buys furniture for dolls’ houses?”

  She nodded seriously. “There’s a big market – particularly in the States. I charge a lot for my pieces, but I have to – people don’t realise how long they take to make, how much patience you need.”

  “And skill, I should think.”

  “It certainly takes patience.”

  “So where were you before you came here?”

  “Cambridge. But a friend here told me she was going to Australia for a couple of years but didn’t want to sell her flat and workshop. She lets me have it at a very reasonable rent.”

  I knew the town pretty well, though my undergraduate days had been spent at New College, Oxford. “Do you like Canterbury?”I asked eventually.

  “Yes and no. I love the Kent countryside, and of course the Cathedral. If I get upset, I only have to go there, sit for a while and I feel this overwhelming sense of peace. That’s what is so awful about the Bible Killer making references to Thomas Becket, Canterbury’s martyr, and his associations with the Cathedral. The idea that somebody so twisted and evil could refer to a saint, to actually try to copy the way Thomas was brutalised after his death.”

  “Yes. But apart from that, you still like the town?”

  “It’s okay. But I haven’t really settled here yet. It’s hard to get to know people.”

  “No boyfriend?”

  She shook her head. “Actually there was a guy at Cambridge who I thought was the one. But, well, we had our differences. That was one reason for wanting a complete fresh start up here. Since I came I’ve been working non-stop. Stuck in my workshop most of the time. Volunteering at the hospital is the only time I get out and meet people. As well as trying to be useful, I thought it might be a way to make friends, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Everyone has their own life. They’re all busy. Nurses aren’t all the welcoming kind-hearted angels you see on the TV soaps. I’m not into partying and dri
nking, which seem to be the main preoccupations of the younger ones, and the older people have their own families, they don’t want to be bothered with me.”

  She frowned as she stared at me. “Can I ask you something personal?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How can you bear to work with the kind of people you write about? Vicious gangsters. Killers. Corrupt policemen.”

  “I’d like to be winning the Pulitzer Prize for literature, but it’s not going to happen. This genre is what I do best, it’s what I know about. I’m also a Behavioural Investigative Adviser, that’s what used to be called a criminal profiler, though I only get jobs now and again. As for the people I deal with, I don’t have that much to do with them – usually just dig around for the facts and deal with them in my own way. Interview people for a short period – victims mostly, perfectly nice people as a rule.”

  “Such as Sean Michael Boyd?”

  “He’s an exception. I’ve had situations like the Boyd problem before. You just have to keep things in perspective.”

  Her mouth twisted in distaste. “But writing about criminals and murderers. It must be horrid.”

  I loved the way she said ‘horrid’. Such a quaint, almost antique word that I hadn’t heard in years.

  “My theory is that people are fascinated by evil,” I explained. “Perhaps because it’s so rare. I think what appeals to the readers is the loss of control. Maybe we’re all fascinated about doing something violent to some hate figure, but of course we never do it. Civilisation, a sense of right and wrong, a conscience, whatever you care to call it, stops us breaking the rules. But a sociopath, or sometimes even an autistic person, has no conception of conscience. It’s hate without a handbrake.”