Doppelganger

by Geoffrey West

  Once past the entrance, a flight of steps leading downwards was directly in front of me. I switched on the light and went down, closing the door behind me, eager not to be disturbed.

  And I could smell what the lodger had been talking about. A rank sickly-sweet aroma that made me feel sick. At the bottom of the stairs straight ahead and to the left was a large washing machine and separate spin dryer. Beyond them was a small area covered with flagstones. I moved closer. One of the flagstones looked as if it didn’t match the rest. The smell was stronger over here.

  I found a large rusty screwdriver leaning up against the wall. I knelt down and used it to prise up one edge of the paving stone until I could lift it up and out of the way. There was soil underneath, but it didn't have the dry compacted appearance of soil that’s been undisturbed for years.

  There was the sound of footsteps above my head, and, for a few moments, I wondered how I’d explain what I was doing here if anyone came down. But my luck held. No one came through the door.

  Prodding carefully, I dug up some soil, removing it with a cupped hand and depositing it on the floor. As I dug the smell seemed to be getting stronger. Then the blade of the screwdriver hit something hard. My heart thudding fast, I pushed soil out of the way and saw something that was a different colour. Something hard.

  A piece of yellowing bone.

  Moving backwards I couldn’t stop myself vomiting.

  Chapter 8

  FRIENDS WITHOUT BENEFITS

  Was this the body of the real Lucy Green, hastily buried by my girlfriend before she’d left the flat for good? Had the woman I was in love with killed Lucy Green, and somehow taken her identity?

  Going back to see the landlord, Mr Gribbins, was the only option I had.

  Half an hour later, he’d arrived back in convoy with me, driving his own battered Nissan. My explanation must have seemed crazy to him, but when I’d mentioned that I thought I’d found a body, he’d insisted on coming to look before calling the police. Clearly he thought I was a madman, but felt he couldn’t take the chance of ignoring me, because I’d told him that if he refused to investigate I’d call the police myself.

  In the back of my mind was a scenario whereby Megan Foster, officially given another name, was released, yet still had the uncontrollable urge to kill. She had bided her time, until eventually she killed again. The flat where she’d been living until recently had a body buried in the basement. Was it the body of the real Lucy Green, and Megan Foster had stolen her identity? Or was it that of Susan Elkins, Lucy’s friend, whom the landlord had mentioned?

  Gribbins unlocked the door and led the way into the hall, sweeping forwards down the stairs to the cellar in front of me.

  I led him across to the patch of disturbed earth underneath the missing paving slab. Oblivious to the smell, he bent down and prodded the soil.

  “Can you smell it?” I asked him when we were beside the bare earth where the paving slab had been.

  “I can smell something,” he answered. “But what it is, I wouldn’t like to say.”

  “There!” I pointed to the bone that he’d disturbed with the screwdriver.

  “This?”

  To my horror he prodded some more, removing more soil with his hands. After several minutes of him prodding and removing soil there were no others. The single bone I’d found turned out to be only one, about three inches long.

  He picked it up in his fingers and held it for me to see.

  “Looks more like the bone from a leg of lamb to me,” he said grimly. “Does that look human to you?”

  “No. No it doesn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “I should bloody well think you are.”

  Without another word, Gribbins stood up and indicated that I should leave the cellar.

  Outside on the pavement he glared at me just before getting into his ancient car.

  “Listen,” he muttered angrily. “I don’t know who you are, or what right you think you had to enter my property. For all I know you’re an escaped lunatic or someone high on drugs who’s got nothing better to do than make up damn silly stories. But if any of my lodgers tell me you’ve been seen around here again, I’m calling the police, right?”

  “Sure.”

  He drove away. My phone beeped again, and sure enough there was yet another text from Lucy.

  I turned it off.

  * * * *

  Susan Elkins.

  The name of Lucy’s friend was all I had left to go on. She was obviously someone Lucy had been close to, for she’d helped her move into Gribbins’s flat. But how should I handle the situation? All I could hope was that if I could find Susan, I could try pumping her for information. With any luck she might be the chatty type, who’d volunteer some facts.

  After spending the night in a hotel, I’d got up around midday, and connected my laptop to the hotel’s WiFi system. Then I emailed the name Susan Elkins to my detective friend, gave her the approximate age, the same as Lucy, and asked them to search the area around Cambridge. They came back with one likely possibility. Susan Jane Elkins, who had an address in the north of the city.

  I’d parked in one of the big car parks near the centre of town, and it made more sense to walk to Latimer Road than take the car – parking seemed particularly difficult. 32 was a neat semi with a small red Fiat Uno parked in the front drive. I’d waited until it was 6.30 in the evening, reasoning that it was the most likely time to find her in, assuming she had a job.

  A woman in her thirties answered the door. She was tall and thin, in a loose-fitting green pullover and black trousers. Small gold earrings argued with the auburn hair that brushed her shoulders, and she used a wary, guarded expression for the unexpected caller, and I could hardly blame her. I started with my line of being Peter Thomson, an old friend of Lucy’s who’d been abroad and was trying to trace the woman whom he’d lost touch with.

  “Lucy?” She blinked. “Goodness. I haven’t heard from Lucy for ages.”

  “Were you close friends?”

  “Yes. Yes, we were.”

  She hesitated on the doorstep, as if she was itching to close the door in my face but was too polite to do so. I noticed a tiny mole on her chin, a dark brown speck against the smooth pale skin.

  “I knew she spent some time in Cambridge, and I asked at the flat address she’d given me, but they said she’d moved on.”

  “Yes. Yes, she did.”

  “Do you know where?”

  She regarded me warily. “Sorry, what was your name again? And just how do you come to know Lucy?”

  My heart was sinking. I was gambling on the hope that she’d be unable to tell me how to contact Lucy, but would talk about how they’d known each other, and chatter away about the circumstances of their relationship. But far from being the chattering type, she looked about as bubbly and forthcoming as a traffic warden.

  “I might be able to help you, Mr Thomson.” She frowned. “But you can hardly expect me just to give you her details.”

  “No, of course not.” My friendly smile failed to melt that stony glare.

  “She never mentioned your name.” She looked me up and down, then, surprisingly, stepped backwards, her frosty manner warming marginally. “Would you like to come inside?”

  “I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

  “No, no it’s no problem, come on in, Peter. You did say Peter, didn’t you?” She shut the front door behind me and I followed her down the narrow hall into a living room. A large German Shepherd dog padded up to me and inspected me carefully. Then sat back and wagged its tail.

  Susan Elkins smiled at last. “You’ve passed the Bruno test. If he hadn’t liked you I’d have asked you to leave – normally I wouldn’t let a stranger into my home.”

  “Dogs seem to sense that I like them.”

  I made a fuss of Bruno, and soon he was sitting cheerfully beside me on the sofa. It was a comfortable room, thick-pile grey carpet and a three-piece suite and a grandfather clock in the corner, its pendu
lum swinging slowly to and fro. The wallpaper had a floral pattern and there were china figurines on the mantelpiece above the electric ‘burning’ logs in the fake grate. There were framed prints on the wall, scenes of Victorian towns in lamplight, and a Lowry, the stick figures like ants below the tall factory chimney. It was a cosy room, dominated by a pleasant doggy aroma.

  Susan settled into the armchair opposite, black-trousered knees held close together. She leaned forward in the chair, peering at me anxiously, clearly ill at ease.

  “So did you work with Lucy?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And are you still in touch with her?”

  “Lucy moved away some time ago.”

  “So you don’t know where she is now?”

  She looked thoughtful. “Well, yes I do as it happens. I’m sorry but, as I said, I don’t know who you are, so I really can’t just hand over her address. Give me your contact details and I’ll forward them on to her if you like.”

  “Thanks, that would be great.”

  In fact it would be a disaster. It would be embarrassing and unimaginably awful if Susan contacted Lucy. If that happened, I’d simply have to bluff it out, pretending I knew nothing about it. I wrote down my fictitious name with an equally fictitious phone number and address and handed them across.

  “Canterbury. That’s where you live then?” she asked.

  “Where I’m staying. Temporarily – just while I’m in the country.”

  “And how long are you in the country for?”

  “That’s pretty fluid. Depends on various things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Work, you know.”

  She stared at me. “You never actually told me what your work was.”

  “I’m an engineer.”

  “What kind of engineer?”

  “Civil engineer. You know, bridges, dams, roads, that sort of thing.”

  “And how did you come to know Lucy?”

  “I’ve taken up enough of your time.” I stood up. “Thanks Ms Elkins, I’ll leave you in peace–”

  “Why did you come here, Mr Thomson?”

  “As I said, I was hoping to contact Lucy.”

  “But how did you find out that I knew her?”

  “As I told you, I went to the flat where she used to live. The landlord gave me your name.” I walked to the door. “Well thanks again, and I’ll hope to hear from you.”

  “Look what’s all this about?” she asked, standing too. “Why are you lying? And why are you so keen to get away?”

  “I shouldn’t have come,” I admitted. “I made a mistake.”

  “A mistake?”

  I shook my head. “Look, I shouldn’t have come here,” I repeated. “Forget about it, please, there’s no need for you to contact Lucy. I’ll just go now.”

  “Are you a journalist?”

  I turned at the door. “Why do you say that?”

  She shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first. Though somehow I doubt it. You’re such a lousy liar. Look, Peter or whatever your real name is, at one time Lucy meant a lot to me, that’s why I risked asking you in to try and find out what you wanted with her. Why don’t you tell me what this is all about? If you tell me the real reason you’re here I might be able to help you.”

  I said nothing, just looked at the mole on her chin.

  “She’s not an old friend of yours is she?” Susan persevered.

  I shook my head.

  “According to this address you’ve given me, you’re living in Canterbury yourself, so my guess is you know that Lucy’s also living there. You met her recently. And, let me guess, you’re afraid she isn’t all that she seems.”

  I looked at her, walked back into the room and sat down again. She was no fool. And strangely enough I found her candour endearing. I had nothing to lose by being straight with her.

  So I told her everything. The way I met Lucy, how I’d been attracted to her right from the start. The first days when I thought about her more and more, then falling in love. Finally the horrible nightmare of seeing the childhood photograph of Megan Foster in the book, and realising that was where I’d seen her face before. And my terrible ghastly fear, almost certainty, that Megan Foster and Lucy Green could be one and the same person. And my desperation to try and prove that they were not.

  “Poor Lucy,” she said simply at the end. “Poor, poor Lucy.”

  Then she said nothing for a long time, just stared at the floor.

  “I can understand this must be a shock for you,” I said.

  “And why do you suppose it should be a shock?” she said slowly. “Have you any idea of the misery Lucy had to go through, just because she looked so much like that wretched woman?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m a nurse. Lucy was a volunteer at my hospital, St Genevieve’s, here in Cambridge. One day an older woman, a patient, stared at her and started asking questions. I even remember her name: Alice Walker – one of those straitlaced, grey-haired spinsters, all tight-mouthed and prissy, church going, butter-wouldn’t-melt types who loved to dish the dirt. She came straight out with it, she confronted Lucy, asked her if her name was really Megan Foster. I remember her words as if she was here now: Don’t you dare touch me! You’re that monster who murdered the little kiddy! Lucy denied it of course, and everyone believed her. But after that, nothing was the same again. One of the other nurses had found an old picture of Megan on the internet, and brought it in to work, and was showing it to everyone. Lucy was called into the office. Honestly, if you’d seen her, she was in tears, desperately trying to get someone to believe her. Of course there was no evidence, Lucy even brought in her birth certificate to prove who she was, but not everyone was satisfied – what’s that old saying? Mud sticks, even when it’s perfectly obvious that no one can forge a birth certificate. People treated her warily, friendly on the surface, but with a vague suspicion you couldn’t put your finger on. Then Human Resources said her voluntary duties at the hospital were surplus to requirements. She’d had enough of Cambridge. They drove her away.

  “That was when she told me all about how Megan Foster had affected her early life. How at secondary school she’d been teased because she looked so much like Foster. Then, because of the embargo on her photograph as an adult being published anywhere, things died down. Until that bloody book your friend wrote came out in the early ‘80s, and the picture of Megan Foster as a child was in the public domain again, and you could see the close resemblance of the woman and the child’s face. That small cleft in her chin was the killer, really. Her life would be fine for years, then one person might mention her similarity to Megan Foster and people would wonder. Think about it. There is absolutely nothing you can do if someone suspects you of being someone else. If you were the spitting image of – I don’t know – Vladimir Putin, or Tony Blair, it wouldn’t matter, it would just be a bit of a laugh, particularly if the other person has an obvious public profile. But take someone not so famous, who was known to have been given another secret identity because they’d done unspeakable things. Poor Lucy would go through it all over again. And this is the worst thing of all. People wouldn’t believe her. There was no way she could prove who she was. People would say that she’d stolen the birth certificate from someone else – that it didn’t prove a thing. Let me ask you something, Jack. Supposing, just supposing that Lucy actually had been Megan Foster. A child murderer. Didn’t you once stop to think that if you really are as deeply in love with her as you tell me you are, that you’d be able to forgive her, even if she was Megan Foster?”

  “You’re right,” I answered. “I’ve gone over and over it in my mind. And the answer is, I simply don’t know. I’m confused and scared. No I’m not scared. I’m bloody well terrified of what I don’t know. I met Lucy and I got to know her. But I found out that maybe she wasn’t the person she told me she was. If she could keep a secret like that... I mean if she could keep such a terrible secret from me, I don’t know her at all, do I? After a
ll, anyone can sympathise with a person who commits an accidental murder: for instance because of a fight that gets out of hand. But it’s the way Megan Foster killed Aiden Caulfield. The monstrous way she coldheartedly killed a younger child for no reason.”

  “Quite.” She sniffed. “So you see, Megan Foster didn’t just take the life of Aiden Caulfield and destroy that of his parents. In a way Megan destroyed Lucy’s life too.”

  “Of course.”

  “You think you’re in love with her.” She said it as a statement.

  “Yes I was. I am.”

  “Are you?”

  My words sounded lame, ridiculously inadequate.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you really?” Her lip curled with derision. “I don’t believe you even know her. If you did you couldn’t conceive that she could be a despicable monster like that...”

  “You’re right, Susan. I don’t know her well. But I want to believe you’re right more than anything on earth. Why else do you think I’m digging into her past like this? I’m hoping against hope that she really is Lucy Green.”

  “And have you asked her?”

  I hung my head. “No.”

  “You haven’t even got the courage to ask her straight out, have you? And you call that love!”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come.” I gave Bruno a final stroke on the head, felt the lustre of his warm springy dark coat between my fingers. “I’ll leave you in peace.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said, “Look.” She sighed wearily. “Maybe it’s I who should apologise. Who am I to judge you? Discovering something like this is likely to knock anyone for six. I should know. When she first told me about it, even I had my doubts. At least you deserve to know the truth. Listen Jack, I can promise you, here and now, that Lucy Green is not Megan Foster. I really can promise you that. Yes, she has the same cleft in her chin, the same expression, the same look in her eyes. But she’s Megan Foster’s doppelganger. It’s a ghastly, terrible coincidence. I know that’s the truth.”