Doppelganger

by Geoffrey West

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the real Megan Foster is dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Wait there.”

  She left me and went upstairs, and I caressed the dog’s lovely mane and looked around the tiny living room, wishing I’d never come. It felt as if the walls were crushing me, a claustrophobic reaction to Susan Elkins’s obvious dislike of me. Susan returned with a file that she opened and then she passed across a photocopy of a newspaper article. “You can keep that,” she muttered quietly. “It’s a copy of the original.”

  Child murderer’s life ends in a drunken car crash, was the headline. The story went on to describe a car accident in which a single female occupant of an MGB sports car had lost her life. There was a small inset picture of a woman’s face at the bottom of the main shot of a written-off car, its front buckled and twisted beyond recognition. The article said that the dead woman car driver had been Lisa Chilcott, but that had not been the name she’d been born with. A ‘friend’ had informed the newspaper that dead Lisa was none other than the child murderer Megan Foster, who’d been given a new identity on her release from gaol, 14 years previously. Living with her secret had apparently presaged Lisa’s dependence on alcohol, and a habit for prescription drugs and, later, an addiction to heroin and cocaine. There were two head shots side by side: one captioned as the raddled face of Lisa Chilcott, the other that of child-killer Megan Foster. They were similar, though hardly identical. The article ascribed the changes in Megan’s face, to ‘years of hard living and substance abuse, plus thousands of pounds worth of face-changing plastic surgery’. Police had concluded that Lisa had driven the powerful sports car head-on into a brick wall, at speed, whilst under the influence of drink and drugs.

  “This happened in a town just outside Oxford in 2009, last year, ironically just a week after Lucy left,” Susan said. “The main media didn’t pick up on it, I don’t know why. But nobody contradicted this claim that Lisa Chilcott was Megan Foster. Chilcott had turned up in the area on her own a few weeks before – no one knew if she had any friends or relatives. No one came to the funeral.”

  Relief flooded through me. I was beginning to grasp the hope that it could be true. But caution made me argue:

  “It’s a cliché about not believing what you read, but a story like this could easily be a rookie reporter chancing his arm. Sloppy reporting, admittedly, but there’s more of it than you’d realise goes on. The bottom line is litigation, which is remote in this case. Even if a relative did dispute it the paper could print an apology, even pay them off. Doesn’t look as if poor Lisa had any relatives to fight her corner anyway, so there’d be no one to sue.”

  “Don’t you want to believe Lucy is who she says she is?” Susan snapped. “I thought you were in love with her.”

  “I want it to be true more than anything else in the world. But it needs more than a cheapskate article like this to convince me.”

  She shrugged, making it clear that I was no longer welcome. “You’re in love with her,” she sneered. “So maybe you need to hear another little fact about your beloved. Do you really want to know why we lost touch? I was in love with her. Really in love with her, unquestioningly in love with her, not like you. Because I believed it when she told me she wasn’t Megan Foster. I believed her the first time she told me, I didn’t need any convincing of it. And even if she had been Megan Foster, and told me she’d regretted what she did, I would still have loved her...” A tear formed at the corner of her eye. Her voice was raw and choked.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t need your sympathy.”

  “I’m really sorry to have upset you–”

  “I thought that maybe we might have a future together. I really did. Nothing too obvious – nothing upfront and straightforward. I envisaged us sharing this house, living together as friends, and no one knowing, or really even suspecting the truth. Growing into old ladies together, and being closer than friends, but to the outside world, just two old spinsters who happened to like to knit and share the shopping and cooking and gardening. But it turned out that my fantasy was all in my mind. Lucy didn’t get it. She had absolutely no idea how I felt. She kept saying how much she liked me, but that she could never, ever think of me in that way. Honestly it was like a cliché, the way she reacted, as if I’d scalded her with boiling water. That was why she never got in touch after she left. She was embarrassed. But I wasn’t embarrassed. I loved her. I still love her. But she never got in touch with me again. So how can I ever contact her now? So you don’t have to worry about me letting you down – I won’t be telling her you came to see me.”

  She began to cry quietly, the tears rolling down her cheeks, as she sobbed.

  “Please, can you see yourself out?”

  As I walked out of the room, I saw Bruno pad across and lay his head across her knees.

  * * * *

  Lisa Chilcott almost clinched it. Lisa Chilcott and the Lucy Green birth certificate that was obviously impossible to forge. Almost, but not quite. There was only one way to try and get at the truth. I stayed the night at a motel and travelled the next day.

  Bargery Down, a few miles outside Oxford, was a small town by English standards, but the town hall and newly built estate of town houses made it memorable. The Bargery Advertiser was an ordinary local paper which, I would guess, would have to pack its pages with news of village fetes, local characters who’d made good, the ‘sin bin’ – the crime pages that every local paper trawls the dregs for – and the front page would normally be concerned with protests over a proposed road bypass, or a new superstore coming to town. The Lisa Chilcott story would be quite a sensation for The Bargery Advertiser, likely to be jaw-dropping, front-page stuff.

  I found the Advertiser’s offices easily enough, tucked in between the Queens Arms pub and a tacky mini supermarket. In the Advertiser’s office I asked the young woman at the desk nearest the door if I could talk to the editor and she indicated a seat and said she’d fetch him, adding: “He’ll be down in a tick, he’s in a meeting just now, but he won’t be long, honest.”

  Tyler McKay came out to talk to me ten minutes later, a mountain of a man with damp sweat marks under the arms of his smart striped shirt, and magnificent eyebrows in a broad forehead. He sprawled in the chair opposite me, after asking the man at the next desk to, “Get us a couple of coffees, would you please, Mike.”

  He read the article I passed across, frowning as he sipped his coffee from a chipped mug. “That’s Tony Price’s by-line,” he observed.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Does he still work here?”

  “Retired soon after this and he died a month ago I’m afraid. A nice guy. We were good friends.”

  “Was he an experienced journalist?” I asked. I’d spun Tyler McKay the story that I was doing background information for a new book I was writing which examined the lives and crimes of killers who’ve committed suicide.

  “Meaning, could he have known that Lisa Chilcott had no living relatives who could speak up for her, so he could dream up a nonsense story about her, to sell papers?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I admit you’re right. If it were anyone else I could believe they might have pushed this little tale without doing the right checks.” Tyler McKay tapped a pencil against the desk, systematically knocking its pointed end against the timber, as if he was stabbing someone. “But not Tony Price. He was a class act, the kind of journalist that’s dying out now. He checked everything. He had integrity. Before he filed any copy it had to be rock-solid, copper bottomed.”

  “Do you know who his source was?”

  “No. But because he was straight there were plenty of people around here who trusted him, and they’d talk to him. I’m not gonna lie and say it’s 100 per cent certain that Lisa Chilcott was Megan Foster, we’re never going to know for sure. But as you can see from the photos there’s a fair old physical resemblance, the differences being what you’d expect by time and tr
oubles, and there were rumours that Megan Foster had plastic surgery, as insurance against her identity being blown. But trust me mate, if Tony wasn’t totally convinced that Lisa was Megan Foster, he’d never have written that story. And the editor in those days, Edward Pierce, he trusted him too.”

  “Thanks.” I stood up to leave and shook his hand. “You’ve been a tremendous help.”

  “Hold on a minute, I’ll get someone to trawl through our archives – see if there are any other stories along the same lines, and make you copies. Can’t imagine what it must be like to write an entire book – for years now, the longest copy I’ve ever done is about 6,000 words, and even then I flag towards the end. How did you get into that True Crime market?”

  We chatted for a while, and I gave him my contact details and shortly the woman who’d greeted me on my arrival arrived and gave me a file with a couple of photocopied cuttings in it.

  But still, I couldn’t be certain. Once I was back in the car I emailed the tracing agency I use, asking them to search for a birth entry for England and Wales for Lisa Alexandra Chilcott, reckoning on the dates 1970 - 75 to be enough of a time scale to search. My contact there, Paul Dangerfield, emailed a few minutes later, to give me the list of Lisa Alexandra Chilcotts. There were four of them. Then I asked him to do searches for each of them. All were currently living in the country, using credit cards, with a National Insurance number, all the usual traces that show up in a credit reference. The death date I’d given them and the death certificate they’d found for Lisa didn’t appear to match details for any of them. So there was no record of a birth for Lisa in the UK for the whole of that period. Then I asked him to look for an address just prior to the date she’d died, and also a death certificate. I thanked Paul and drove back to Canterbury.

  Of the birth records for the four Lisa Alexandra Chilcotts in England or Wales during the parameter of dates that were possible, all were currently alive. A trusted informer had told a reputable, presumably an honourable, journalist that he or she had been informed that Lisa Alexandra Chilcott was the identity given to the child killer Megan Foster. And having to live with the knowledge that you’d killed a child was the kind of thing that might drive anyone to drink and drugs, and, ultimately, to a lonely suicide.

  On the journey I felt a wave of sheer relief wash over me. I pulled into a lay-by and texted Lucy, saying I’d been out of contact with everyone for the past few days because I’d been in Wales and for some reason the signal was weak in the valley – some technical glitch, and I’d been so immersed with work I’d done nothing else.

  It was wonderful when she rang me back almost immediately. We talked for almost an hour.

  So that was it. According to the amazing irony that often happens in life, it was purely thanks to Susan Elkins, a woman who evidently disliked me, that my nightmare was over.

  I should have done the logical thing – simply driven down to Wales, to Godfrey’s mansion in the valley, where it would be safe to make a start on the Bible Killer book. If I had done that, things wouldn’t have turned out so catastrophically.

  But I didn’t.

  On impulse I phoned Lucy again and arranged to meet her in York on Friday. I longed to tell her everything I’d done, all that I’d found out about her, but I just couldn’t do it. How could I tell her that I’d suspected her of being the monster who’d murdered a child? What Susan Elkins had said was true: if I really loved her, I should have immediately confronted her with my doubts, and asked her the truth. And then, if it turned out that she actually had been Megan Foster, I would have been able to forgive her. The best thing to do was to forget all my doubts, all the ridiculous ideas I’d had and behave as if nothing had happened.

  Worst of all, the discovery of her similarity to Megan Foster had irrevocably and subtly altered my feelings for her, albeit that she was undoubtedly nothing to do with Foster. Innocent as Lucy was, I knew deep inside that my feelings for her had changed. Why? Goodness knows.

  Perhaps it was a combination of factors. The fact that my initial attraction had partly been based on my romantic feelings of déjà vu, that I now knew were completely unfounded, in fact based on something monstrous. And Susan’s assertion that if I had really loved Lucy, then I would have been willing to forgive anything she’d done when she was a child, however diabolical. Or maybe the rose-tinted-spectacles days of my love affair with her were over.

  The stress of the last few days of working on Hero or Villain?, the attempt on my life, and my agonising about Lucy and driving around the country investigating her past had taken its toll. As I drove towards London I decided that I was sick and tired of living in fear of my life. I wanted to see Canterbury again, maybe have a few jars with Stuart. Canterbury was a big town. How could Sean Boyd, my would-be assassin, possibly know where I would be?

  Why would he want to run the risk of murdering me, when he must realise that publication of Hero or Villain? was a done deal by now, whether I was alive or dead?

  Anyway I decided to take a chance, and turn south onto the M40 instead of north: in the direction of Canterbury instead of back to Wales, and Llantrissant Manor.

  So that evening I met Stuart in a pub in Canterbury town centre and had a few drinks with him. I told Stuart all about what had happened, and he was as pleased as I was when I told him that my doubts about Lucy were unfounded.

  “Look at it this way,” he pointed out. “Obviously, the only way that Megan Foster, after being given a new identity, could adopt a real identity – I don’t just mean a birth certificate, but a driving licence and passport – belonging to someone else, would be if that person died and the death was somehow kept secret. But when you think of the further possibilities – friends, family, work colleagues of the dead person, doing that is nigh on impossible. She’d at the very least be listed as a missing person, and if your girlfriend had applied for a passport or driving licence in that person’s name, that fact would be highlighted. Even allowing for all them checks, she couldn’t get documents without a photo that was authorised by someone like her doctor or teacher, a reputable citizen who’d go on record saying she was who she said she was. Stealing a dead person’s identity might have been possible once, but nowadays, no chance.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And what were you basing it on anyway? An old photograph. People have doppelgangers. Aye it’s rare, sure it is, but it happens. I’ve heard there are plenty of actors and musicians making a right good living by impersonating their doppelganger. While not many Elvis impersonators will have The King’s exact looks, there’ll probably be one or two who come pretty close. They say Saddam Hussein and Field Marshall Montgomery, the hero of World War Two, both of them had doubles, who’d stand in for them for security reasons. And as for all that bollocks you reckoned you felt about having a romantic premonition because you thought you already knew her face, it’s a right good thing you’ve come to your senses. You’ve met a lass you really like, she happens to look like someone else and that’s the end of it. Enjoy yourself. Enjoy being with Lucy and forget all this bloody twaddle.”

  Stuart was right of course. However, there were other things that were strange about Lucy. There were all her hang-ups – the fears about her personal safety, the flick knife and mace she carried about with her everywhere, and her morbid fear that she’d die before her thirty-eighth birthday. But if she was neurotic, what on earth did it signify? What did it matter? Stuart was right. It was time to forget all about it and accept things as they were.

  As I was leaving, my mobile rang and it was Ann. I told her how I was about to start the Bible Killer book, that I was in Canterbury outside the Dog and Duck pub and I planned to stay at the Carlton Hotel, get a good night’s sleep and drive back to Wales in the morning. It was gone 11pm, and I felt shattered, keen to get my head down. The combination of tiredness and alcohol was a pleasant feeling of relief from my recent days of unrelieved lonely boredom in Wales, or the nonstop tension of evading my would-be killers
. My car was safely tucked into the Carlton’s car park, and I’d bought a bottle of red wine that I was planning to drink when I was alone in my room, the best aid to sleep I’ve ever known; sleep might help me put some kind of perspective on my morbid feelings that my relationship with Lucy was doomed. That my feelings for her had changed, and somehow they wouldn’t come back. Maybe I’d phone her up and talk to her again.

  Habit over the last few weeks had made me wear my Kevlar vest and carry my gun with me all the time whenever I was going anywhere alone, especially at night. Just in case. After the last attempt on my life I couldn’t take any chances. The previous attempted assassination hadn’t made any sense. After all, I reasoned, Sean Boyd was no moron. He’d probably have realised by now that whatever he did to me the publication of Hero or Villain? was going ahead regardless, so there was nothing to be gained by killing me. And if I was murdered after the police were aware of his threats against me, he’d be the prime suspect. He hadn’t become a successful crime boss and stayed out of prison this long by taking unnecessary chances. He’d pushed things far enough, and every indication was that he’d realise the book was going ahead anyway, with or without me, so he may just as well cut his losses.

  Lost in thought as I walked, I didn’t hear anything strange. I didn’t see anything. Until, on the periphery of my consciousness, I was aware of a very faint plopping sound. Just as the shop window beside me erupted into a million fragments. There was a sharp sting in my cheek as a shard of glass sliced the flesh.

  Then the bottle I’d been holding exploded, leaving me holding the remains of the neck. I dropped it and ran, simultaneously feeling a sharp thudding pain in my back: the vest had stopped a bullet, but the impact had knocked the wind out of me.

  Chapter 9

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

  For the first seconds I was on autopilot, wheeling and swivelling, jumping and ducking, ignoring the pain in my chest. Since it hadn’t pierced the Kevlar, that meant it was a small calibre handgun, not a high-powered shell.