Doppelganger

by Geoffrey West

  * * * *

  Getting back to the Manor was ten times worse than leaving it. At one point I lost my footing, tripping on some unseen object. Then I felt myself slipping, sucked down and down. I was lost and panicking, with nothing beneath my feet, sinking fast until I was up to my neck. I kicked and fought to swim sideways, then, thankfully, one foot found purchase, and then I managed to climb onto solid ground, and force my way forwards. The ground was apparently solid beneath my feet now, and it wasn’t until I was a few yards away that I realised I must have fallen down a manhole leading to the main drains – the surge of the water beneath would have lifted the cover, leaving the hatch open so that I’d been sucked down into the sewer, which was now at one with the floodwater. If I hadn’t managed to fight my way out of the swirling vortex of water...

  Then I saw the Manor in the distance – probably no more than fifty yards but in the failing light and poor visibility it looked much, much further. I fought on, desperate to reach it, absurdly still clutching the bundle of candles against my chest.

  By the time I made it up the front steps I was panting with the effort, and desperately tired. Lucy met me at the door, pulling me into the hallway, and I almost collapsed in front of her. Her face was pale.

  “Oh Jack, thank God you’re back. I was so worried.”

  She looked drained, and I could see she was shivering.

  “Are you worse?” I asked her.

  She nodded, staggering slightly and resting against the wall. “I’ve been sick a couple of times. Think it must be the flu come back. I can’t stop shivering and now I’ve got a raging temperature. You shouldn’t have gone. I told you I didn’t want to be on my own.” She swayed slightly. “And I bet sodding Ken Gifford and his wife are more prepared for this than we are, aren’t they?”

  I nodded. The sodding Ken Gifford annoyed me. He was a nice old man who’d showed me nothing but kindness. “They even gave me some candles in case the generator doesn’t start.”

  She wasn’t listening to me. “Sometimes you’re so damned stubborn Jack, why can’t you take notice of me? I hate that about you, I really hate it. You should have put me first. I’m ill, and you left me on my own.”

  “For God’s sake, you’re not a child.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that!” She was on the verge of tears. “I’ve been here on my own worrying and worrying about you and scared to death that you were going to be drowned. And that’s all the thanks I get!”

  A wave of exhaustion washed over me.

  “Come on upstairs.” I tried to ignore my own tiredness as I put my arm around her waist and helped her upstairs to our bedroom, not caring about the wet footmarks on the stair carpet.

  “Sorry Jack, I shouldn’t be snapping at you. I just feel so ghastly. Truth is I can hardly walk,” she confessed, collapsing onto the bed. “Think I’ll just close my eyes for five minutes. Try and get some rest.”

  “Can I get you some aspirin or ibuprofen?”

  “I couldn’t keep anything down just now. But can you cover me with some blankets please, love? I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean it, I was just so scared and lonely...”

  “I know, I know, forget it.”

  I was much more tired than I realised, my near drowning had shaken me much more than I realised. When I got back downstairs I managed to raise enough energy to strip off my clothes and dry myself, changed into a clean dry shirt, socks, jeans and pullover, and warmed myself up in front of the Aga in the kitchen. It was gas fired, more convenient to operate than the solid fuel variety and, once the oven was on and the door wide open, warmer than any heater I’ve ever come across before or since. At least it looked as if, so far, the mains gas supplies were unaffected.

  Half an hour later I’d eaten a bowl of soup with some of the French loaf Lucy had bought from the village, and drunk two huge mugs of hot coffee, with plenty of sugar. My teeth had finally stopped chattering, and the breakfast room, where I was sitting at the scrubbed pine table, had a large picture window that looked out across the valley and the hillside opposite, and as far as you could see there was a lake of water, and it was still raining – oddly enough the panorama of the few twinkling lights of the mountain glittering against the water was almost beautiful. I felt contented and relieved, irritated for having made the journey, which turned out to be unnecessary, but relieved it was over. Gazing out at the landscape it was like being on an island in the sea, totally cut off from everything.

  That’s when I remembered the parcel that Ken Gifford had given me.

  I tipped out the sodden contents of the carrier bag onto the table and dried the candles with a towel. The parcel was soaked through, but after I’d opened up the package, the book inside was miraculously dry, just the paper cover slightly damp and wrinkled at the edges. From it arose that damp cardboard smell that took me back to my schooldays. All along one edge, the pages were damp and wrinkled where the water had crept inside.

  With a surge of anger I recognised Douglas Hosegood’s wretched Shocking Killers, the book that had caused me so much misery.

  Who the hell had sent me this?

  Then I thought back to Douglas’s frantic phone call on my answerphone, a couple of nights before he’d died. He’d said he’d send something very urgent for me, and obviously Ann had given him this address, and I’d left just after it had arrived and the postman had delivered it to Ken to give to me, and he’d forgotten until now. Just as I’d completely forgotten about it myself.

  All past history now, I was relieved to think. I planned to destroy my own copy of the damned book as soon as I could, because of the misery it had caused me.

  I had the almost uncontrollable urge to tear this copy to pieces and chuck it out of the window so that it submerged beneath the floodwater for ever.

  But I didn’t.

  I opened the front cover. Inside was a note written in Douglas’s handwriting. The edges were damp and wrinkling, but the body of text was readable, even though in one spot the ink had smudged across the page:

  Jack, believe me I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, but you have to know. If you turn to chapter three you’ll see that your Lucy, the girl whose picture you showed me, bears a marked resemblance to the photo of Megan Foster as a child; I believe that’s where you got your ‘déjà vu’ idea of having met her before somewhere. Of course a child’s resemblance to an adult means nothing, apart from the fact that a cleft in the chin like that is obviously extremely rare; and the face of a child is different to that of an adult. But when I was writing the book I was given a photo of Megan aged 19 by a family friend, but it was illegal for me to reproduce it in the book, as it might have compromised her new identity. I’m enclosing that photo. I’m sorry Jack, but I think you’ll agree that she does bear an uncanny likeness to the photo of Lucy that you showed me.

  Heart beating frantically, I lifted the page to see a picture that was almost identical to that of my Lucy staring back at me. Hair differently styled, fewer lines across her forehead. But essentially the same face. I lifted it up, cast it to one side and went on reading:

  Of course there are doppelgangers. People born so alike that you cannot tell their faces apart. I’d hoped this was the case with Lucy. I even wondered about the possibility that Megan Foster might have an identical twin sister – stranger things have happened.

  However, you told me that your Lucy had the third finger of her left hand shorter than the rest, because of an accident she had as a child. Megan Foster had that selfsame mutilation. This fact was kept from the general public for obvious reasons, and I only learnt about it during lengthy discussions with her relatives when I was researching the book. Jack, you’ve got to agree, one coincidence is fair enough. But, I’m sorry, two coincidences like that just can’t happen. I checked and double checked. Your Lucy and Megan Foster would now be exactly the same age. Not only that but tonight I phoned a contact who used to work in the Home Office. Obviously he couldn’t tell me any details, he wasn’
t supposed to say anything at all, but since he was no longer employed by the Service he was able to inform me, very reluctantly when I pressed him, that Megan Foster, under her new identity, did go to college and studied carpentry after her release. Apparently her status is a grey area: although she’s no longer considered a danger to the public, apparently she’s still obliged to report to someone in the Home Office whenever she moves or takes a new job, and the local police are kept informed, on a need-to-know basis, of course – meaning perhaps only one very senior officer in her new locality is informed of her presence, and this is regarded, naturally, as top-secret information. My contact could not tell me where she was living at present, and obviously couldn’t tell me her new name. However, when I asked if she might be living in Canterbury he didn’t demur.

  But I think we both know the truth.

  How much do you really know about Lucy? What has she told you about her past?

  Jack, you don’t know how hard and how dreadful it is to write this letter to you. You know that all I’ve ever wanted was your happiness. Maybe Lucy has told you about her secret identity, maybe you’ve been able to forgive her for what she’s done, in which case ignore this. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances that I don’t know about. And the justice system isn’t foolproof, as we both know.

  I’m, so, so sorry to drop this on you Jack. I pray that it’s not too late for you somehow to work things out.

  God bless you, whatever happens.

  I just sat there for a long time, staring at the photo of Megan Foster, aged 19.

  There was no mistaking the resemblance to Lucy. As Douglas said, certainly she could be Megan’s doppelganger. But the foreshortened third finger? And the third coincidence: that Megan Foster, aka her new identity, had enrolled on a carpentry course after her release?

  All the things that had happened recently concertinaed together in my mind. Falling in love with Lucy, yet knowing there was something not quite right about her. Her phobias, her obsessions, her weird behaviour, then discovering the possibility that she might be one and the same as Megan Foster, apparently reformed child killer. All those weeks of going to great lengths to find out the truth, and discovering that it was all a wicked crazy coincidence, reinforced by Lisa Chilcott’s death, that I now knew was an irrelevance.

  And now.

  And now!

  Outside the insistent drumming of rain against the glass was as relentless as ever. Time stood still, and I drifted into a trance, unable to think or apply logic or reason. How could it be? I’d been to Lucy’s home town, we’d actually talked to her teacher, who remembered her as a student. Everything fitted.

  And now this.

  I must have been sitting staring out and seeing nothing for a couple of hours, maybe more. I watched as the sky grew blacker. Impenetrable death-like blackness everywhere. Miserable unrelieved noir, apart from some lights in the distance, way out across the valley, and one yellow blinking beacon that twinkled alone, halfway up the mountain. Suddenly that single light disappeared. That single lonely light’s extinguishment symbolised my tentative happiness that had now been so rudely snatched away.

  I couldn’t be bothered to get up and switch the light on. Alone in the pitch darkness, I was wondering what the hell I was going to do. Lucy was still upstairs. I couldn’t face her.

  Much later, or so it seemed, for I had no idea of time that night, I heard the door open, and her footsteps coming closer.

  For a second I didn’t care that the woman I was in love with had been a killer when she was a child. After all, the psychiatric hospital had released her, hadn’t they? They thought she was cured, if ‘cured’ was the right word for no longer wanting to kill another human being. I wanted to go on loving her. I ached to go on living with the dream of being with her forever. That’s what I wanted and the fantasy would not, could not, stop.

  And yet.

  Why hadn’t she just told me the truth all along?

  And there was something awful about that slavish love that consumed me so completely that it made me feel ill. Something utterly wicked and depraved in my nature that on some primitive level I was responding to? If she’d been honest with me, if she’d told me everything, then maybe I could have forgiven her.

  “Jack?” she called from the door as she came closer. “Jack? Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

  Her footsteps again behind me. The light was switched on. Suddenly the bright halogen spotlights in the ceiling blazed into life casting a pall of whiteness everywhere, like some ghastly shroud. I saw Lucy, but she wasn’t the Lucy I knew and had loved. She was a monster now, every nuance of expression in her face, every line in her forehead that I’d loved was like a brand mark of evil. I couldn’t bear to look at her.

  Lucy came and sat beside me. Touched my elbow. I flinched, moving away.

  I forced myself to turn to look at her.

  “Jack?” She put her hand out again, almost touching my arm, then pulling back. “Jack? What is it?”

  Wordlessly, I passed across Douglas’s note, then the photo.

  She sat reading it for a long time. I dared to breath. I managed, somehow, to go on living, to go on existing.

  After a long time, she dropped the letter. Her eyes filled with tears and she sobbed, just once. When she resumed crying it was as if her heart was being torn from her body. She gasped and sobbed and wailed for a long time and I just sat there, staring out across the valley, wishing I was dead. I really did wonder what oblivion or heaven, or hell might be like. Just anything to escape this unspeakable nightmare that was more than I could bear to face.

  I just sat there, longing to put my arms around her to comfort her, but somehow unable to bring myself to touch her.

  Then the lights went out.

  “The generator is supposed to cut in automatically,” I said, fighting to make my voice sound normal. “That’s what Ann told me.”

  Lucy went on crying.

  I couldn’t stand doing nothing. Candles were on the table, where I’d dried them earlier. I picked up the torch, and got up, found some matches in a drawer, and placed a candle inside my empty coffee mug and lit it.

  “Jack, I wanted to tell you, but I daren’t,” she said at last.

  “You’re cured. Yes. Of course you’re cured. I know that. Otherwise they’d never have released you.”

  “Jack, listen to me. I never killed Aiden Caulfield.”

  I yelled: “For God’s sake, you were convicted in a court of law!” I hadn’t meant to shout, but I couldn’t help it. The frustration of these past weeks and this ultimate misery had pushed me past my limits. My knuckles were so clenched they were almost bursting. “You served ten years in a secure hospital for the criminally insane!”

  “I was innocent. I never killed Aiden. I swear it.”

  It was hard to speak. My voice felt cloying, choking, on the edge of tears. “How can I believe a word you say now? Everything you’ve said to me has been lies.”

  “But this is the truth! Listen to me! I was playing with a boy just before it happened.” She broke out sobbing again, then managed to gain a modicum of control. “It was a game. His game. The strangling game, we called it. We’d go up to someone, usually a child a few years younger than us, and put our hands on his or her neck and pretend to squeeze – to see how long they’d let us do it. It was stupid and ridiculous, but children do stupid ridiculous things. This boy – Robert Althouse – and I were playing the strangling game in playtime. He’d been pretending to strangle Aiden, and I did the same. He’d been with Aiden for quite a time, I saw him with his hands at his throat, then he moved away, so I went over to look at Aiden, I put my hands on his throat, just as I’d done to lots of others that morning, expecting him to shout out and giggle and run away. I didn’t squeeze, because he was already so still and slack, and just lying there, with a strange look on his face. Then a teacher walked past and saw Aiden resting there, with my hands on his throat. I stood up and told the teacher what had ha
ppened, but no one was listening to me, people began shouting and running from everywhere. I don’t remember very much more, except telling everyone what had happened, that Robert Althouse was the one who’d strangled him, but they thought I was lying. They told me I was lying, in front of mum and the social worker, everyone, and I was so confused, in the end I thought I must have done it. Somehow I thought that, by mistake, maybe I had squeezed Aiden’s neck, so I admitted I had been playing the strangling game. But that’s all I admitted to, until they went on and on at me, confusing me, making me say things I didn’t mean.”

  “What about Robert Althouse?”

  “Mum told me the police questioned him, but he never admitted it. None of the other children backed me up, no one seemed to have seen anything...”

  The candle was guttering now, flickering, casting grotesque shadows on the walls. Lucy’s face looked haggard, shadows under her nose and chin, dribble at the corners of her mouth, eyes swollen and bloated with crying. She looked horrifying, scaring, a wraith of misery, beyond all ordinary control. She began to cry again and went on sobbing for a long time.

  “And what about the real Lucy Green?” I asked, hardly able to look at her face. “Did you kill her too?”

  “I’m the real Lucy Green!” she whispered. “How could it be any other way? Don’t you understand anything about what happens to people like me? Lucy Green was the name I was allocated, the name on my passport that matches my national insurance number – don’t you realise that only the government and maybe the kind of expert forgers I wouldn’t know can create documents like that? I was parcelled up as Lucy Green and sent out into the world, with my contacts at the probation service and the police and the Home Office keeping in touch with me, wanting to know what I was doing, where I was living. I really wanted to be a nurse, but they wouldn’t let me do that, Oh no, ‘Not suitable’ they told me. But they couldn’t stop me volunteering at the hospital. They tried, but there was no reason for them to stop me, because I wasn’t allowed to have any contact with the patients anyway. Strictly clerical duties. The Home Office still treated me like a criminal, some kind of social experiment, and I could never tell a soul about it. I had nobody to tell. It was so, so lonely.