Doppelganger

by Geoffrey West

  “Listen,” I said, coming closer to him. “I can make an informed guess as to who you work for and why you’re here. Please can I ask you something? Something very important to me?”

  He nodded, replacing his glasses and looking like a benign owl.

  “Yesterday, after Lucy had told me her true identity, she said something else. She told me that she’s been locked up for the murder, but that it was a miscarriage of justice. That she never killed Aiden Caulfield, someone else did it. Do you think that’s a possibility?”

  My owlish friend sighed in exasperation. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we’ve heard all this many times before. I can see why she would have tried to persuade you that’s the case, that it’s all some grand miscarriage of justice. But,” he shrugged, “I’m afraid there is simply no question of doubting the facts.”

  “I only found out the truth for certain yesterday. I confronted her with it and she tried to kill herself. That’s why she’s in hospital.”

  He frowned. “Then I’m sorry. I really am. However, people in Lucy’s position are often under an intolerable amount of stress. Sometimes it just gets too much.”

  “And do you think she could still be dangerous?”

  He shook his head, his mouth set in a firm hard line. “Listen to me, Mr Lockwood. I’ve been Lucy’s handler for three years now, and I’ve got to know her pretty well. If it’s any consolation, I honestly think she’s a decent person. Nothing underhand, nothing unwholesome about her, like there is about some of our clients. Furthermore I can promise you that if we had any concerns whatsoever that she might do something similar again, the terms of her release under license would be instantly revoked. That’s why we’ve kept a careful watch on her, discreetly of course. She did something when she was a child. Something truly terrible, most might say unforgivable. But nothing can undo it, and if you can find it in your heart to forgive her... After all we all do things we regret in life. We all deserve a second chance.”

  “Aiden Caulfield had no second chance.”

  “True.” He looked around and turned towards the door. “No, he didn’t.” He stepped away. “Well I’m glad to say all’s well. I’ll leave you in peace.”

  “Wait, please,” I asked him, grabbing his arm. “You’ve known her quite some time, longer than I have. Why do you think she’s so scared all the time? The triple locks on the door, the fear that she’s going to be attacked, the idea that she’ll die before her thirty eighth birthday? What is it she’s scared of?”

  The man shrugged. “I’m no psychiatrist, Mr Lockwood, just a junior civil servant, doing my job as conscientiously as I can.” He looked at me and smiled. “But at the end of the day it is just a job. For you, of course, if you and Lucy are – or were – an item, you obviously want answers. And I can’t give them. I’m truly very sorry.” He gently disengaged himself from me and walked away. He paused at the door, then turned back. “Mr Lockwood, may I ask you something? Something that is really none of my business?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you going to end your relationship with her?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  He nodded seriously. “Well whatever you do, I honestly wish you the very best of luck. Both of you.”

  * * * *

  I badly needed to talk to Stuart. My best friend had the knack of clear thinking, something that I definitely lacked at the moment.

  Stu’s flat was as untidy as ever. Socks and dirty shirts were strewn across the living room floor, while the sounds of Primal Scream bounced around the walls.

  “Sit down mate, you look like shit.”

  He turned off the music, and chucked a few items out of the way to clear the sofa, before sitting down opposite me on the dark brown carpet.

  I told him everything that had happened, and he nodded slowly. He told me that the Bible Killer had struck again. This time it was a housewife out in Kiveton Park in South Anston, on the south eastern edge of the city in the early morning.

  A surge of relief washed over me. It proved that, at least, the worst of my fears: that Lucy might have been the Bible Killer, was unfounded.

  “You know it’s a right funny thing,” Stu said, tilting the bottle of Becks into his mouth and wiping the foam from his mouth with his wrist. “What was the name of the boy Lucy says was responsible for killing Aiden Caulfield?”

  “Robert, Robert Althouse.”

  “Althouse. And what town was the school in?”

  “Nottingham.”

  “And the last thing Lucy said to you was that there was much more she wanted to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen at the time?”

  “That’s right. And I found this file at her flat.”

  I handed it across and Stuart leafed through the articles slowly, making notes on a pad of paper in front of him.

  Then he switched on his laptop and logged into the site he uses to trace marriage, birth and death certificates. “Right. Robert Althouse was nine in 1982, so he was born in 1973. Ah, here we are, Robert James Althouse. Got the father’s name and the mum’s name.”

  “Where’s all this leading, Stuart?”

  “Don’t know yet. I’m just following a hunch.”

  After an hour he’d discovered that Robert Roger Althouse’s father, Richard, had died in 1985, and his mother had subsequently married a man called William Lamelle a year later.

  William Lamelle.

  I felt the beginnings of excitement as a new idea formed in my mind.

  “So the boy would be twelve in 1985 when his father died, and thirteen when his mother remarried. Reasonable to suppose that the boy had been adopted, and taken the stepfather’s name.”

  “Robert Lamelle,” I said. “My God. Roger Lamelle is the name of the psychiatrist at the hospital. Millicent Veitch’s boss.”

  “And lots of people use their middle first name and drop the first,” Stuart said, warming to his idea. “Just suppose for a minute that Lucy was telling you the truth. She’s spent half a lifetime in institutions, more or less had her life destroyed because of the actions of someone else. What if she was following our mate Dr Lamelle’s career, because she was determined to get even with him for what he did? Supposing she followed him to Hollamby Hospital because she wanted to get revenge somehow.”

  “How she must hate him.”

  “She knew that as a child he’d killed someone, and let her take the blame. She also knew that he’d trained to be a doctor, and a doctor’s career is pretty easy to follow, especially that of a psychiatrist, their career is public knowledge. It wouldn’t take me long to discover just where he’s been practising for the past ten years. I’m just wondering,” Stuart mused, “what if she were determined to prove what he’d done? What if she were threatening the bugger?”

  “No one believed her when she was convicted. Why would anyone believe her now?”

  “And of course she couldn’t openly accuse him of anything without revealing who she was,” Stuart said. “And I’d guess she’s always been doing her utmost to keep that secret. However, she’d hate him. She’d want to damage him as much as she possibly could.”

  “What if,” I said, “she thought he was still killing people? After all, there’s a killer at large in Canterbury right now. And he was a child killer. Perhaps he’s a serial killer, a maniac, someone who kills for no motive, simply for the sake of it.”

  “I’ve often heard it said, that a qualified doctor decides to train to be a psychiatrist because he wants to understand his own mental problems,” Stuart muttered almost to himself.

  “I’ve just thought of something else. Millicent Veitch would probably discuss the case with him, dissect every new finding the police team uncovered. After every killing he’d be one step ahead of the police.”

  For most of the rest of the night we dug around the internet, and in the morning I phoned my detective friend, who hunted databases that we had no access to.

  Dr Roger Lamelle had trained at St George’s, University of Lond
on, acquiring his qualification in general medicine, Bachelor of Medicine, and Bachelor of Surgery (BMBS) in 1995. Two years later he’d finished his foundation training then, in 2003 he got his MRCPsych, his qualification as a psychiatrist.

  By the end of the morning, Stuart had discovered that the locality of Dr Lamelle’s various hospital posts over the past few years mirrored the places where the murders, outlined in Lucy’s old newspaper articles, had taken place. I left it to Stuart to phone his police contact with our new information. There was no way either of us could tackle Lamelle individually, but if the police were prepared to believe our story, they might make the requisite checks. Since it was assumed that the Bible Killer had kept part of the scalp of each of his victims, finding anything of that nature in premises to which the man had access would be tantamount to proof.

  * * * *

  The following day, after a few hours of near-dead sleep on Stu’s filthy sofa, I’d reached the conclusion that there was only one way that I was ever going to get clear of Sean Boyd’s clutches. I had to take the initiative. I had to defy Sean, the older Boyd brother, call his bluff by doing the very thing he was determined to stop me doing. I had to tell his brother Dave the truth about what had happened to his daughter. Of course, he wouldn’t believe anything I said, so the challenge was to find a way of convincing him. Apart from as a means of saving my own skin, the man had a right to know the truth. Even if I did convince him that his brother had impregnated his daughter, there was no guarantee that Dave Boyd might spare my life either – he would also want the story suppressed. However, stirring up fraternal rivalry looked to be about my only hope of survival.

  Stuart’s research last night – I’d been too worn out to think when he’d begun surfing the internet – had indicated that during 2002, Dave Boyd’s wife and children had been living in Hackney, East London, at 158 Morningside Mansions, in the Dalston Manor Road. They didn’t live there any more – on Dave’s release from prison the family moved to a much more salubrious house in Chelmsford, Essex, somewhere ‘far away from the unhappy memories’, as Dave’s wife, Marion, had said. Last night, in the island of clarity between sleep and wakefulness, I’d tried to work out what to do, how, if it was possible, I could find a way to substantiate Ann’s assertion, made by long-dead Lenny Scott, that Sean Boyd had sexually molested and impregnated his own twelve-year-old niece Amanda. Ironically it was the first I’d ever heard of the possibility, yet Boyd had been so convinced that I knew some vague rumour concerning the child’s death that he was intent on killing me to shut me up. Now, to save my own life, I was going to do my utmost to tell Dave Boyd what he had a right to know anyway.

  Hackney appeared to be a nothing but a morbid traffic jam beside a stream of fast-food restaurants, boarded up shops and graffiti-covered hoardings over partially demolished buildings. Dalston Manor Road started with a whimpering snarl near an underground station, and Morningside Mansions was a vast high-rise monstrosity that by rights should have been razed to the ground. I managed to find a parking space at a meter a few roads away and pushed in coins to pay for an hour. The walk back to Morningside Mansions was an exercise in misery. A gang of noisy youths on the corner of the road milled about, throwing a tennis ball to each other and swearing colourfully, the disagreeable scent of powerful ‘skunk’ marijuana roasting the air as their spliffs rocked up and down between their lips.

  Riding up to the tenth floor in the urine-smelling lift took five minutes, and I avoided eye contact with the truculent black boy wearing a huge orange puffa jacket, his wrists covered in flashy metallic bangles and golden rings on every finger, cool shades shielding his eyes.

  And it was a waste of time. The door to number 158 was answered by a blank-eyed mountain-sized man wearing nothing but a stretched-to-the-limit vest and stained underpants, who continually scratched his crotch, and belched in my face twice. No, he hadn’t known the former tenants of the council flat, no he didn’t know the neighbours, and no, he had no idea who Dave Boyd or his family was, nor did he care. It was just as useless when I knocked on the neighbours’ doors: none of them even bothered to answer; either that or they weren’t in.

  Back in the car I phoned Stuart, and asked if he could go online to find me a list of crematoriums and cemeteries for the Dalston area. He gave me six, and I went to each of them in turn, hoping that Dave and Marianne Boyd had held the interment of their daughter locally.

  I struck lucky at the second of the crematoriums, Higston Wood, and found the pathetic slab of coppery metal in the ground inscribed: Amanda Boyd, 1990 – 2002, Let the innocent come unto me saith the Lord. There were flowers laid across it, not fresh, but only about a week old. That was good: it meant that someone visited the grave regularly.

  It was a large sprawling place of sharp modern brick walls, a chapel whose colourful brickwork and jazzy stained-glass windows made it look more like a fast food restaurant, and an awkward terrace where a swarm of unhappy, overdressed people were pacing around piles of floral tributes and wishing they were somewhere else. The horrible barbecue smell of burnt meat was in the air, making me feel sick. I watched another gaggle of folk in dark clothes emerge from the chapel behind the white-vestmented clergyman, who was wiping his nose with a screwed up paper handkerchief.

  Long ago I’d discovered that in any large place of employment there are always discontented workers, who spend their days moaning to colleagues and their evenings dreading the next day’s labours. They were usually more adept at avoiding work than doing it, and the telltale signs were obvious when you knew what to look for. Furtive glances at a wristwatch. Anger behind the eyes. Defensive body language and an aura of general hatred of the world.

  Harry Kemp, assistant customer care person, as his name badge described him, glared at me with a blend of apathy and hostility when I said to him, “Can I ask your advice?”

  “Advice?”

  “I need information.”

  “About what?”

  I made sure no one was watching us, then took out a twenty pound note, holding it between my fingers casually, making sure he could see it.

  “Who are you then?” His piggy eyes were fixed on the money.

  “A journalist. See the plaque on the remains of Amanda Boyd just across there?” I pointed with the twenty pound note towards Amanda’s resting place. “Does anyone come to visit it? Lay flowers maybe?”

  “They might do.”

  I held up the twenty between us. Then plucked another twenty from my pocket and added it to the first.

  “Can you give me a description of this person?”

  His eyes gazed greedily at the notes, as if he was mesmerised. “Add another twenty and I can give you a name ’n all.”

  I did so. His hand shot out to take the money, but I withdrew it at the last minute.

  “The name?”

  It was his turn to glance around to make sure we weren’t being watched. “Wanda Pierce. Old black lady, comes here a lot. Sweet old girl really. Does a lot of charity work locally. Someone told me she was into that bereavement counselling lark. Beats me why anyone wants to do that. I mean, what’s the point? Nobody pays you.”

  “Where can I find her?”

  “Wait around and she might even turn up. Hold up, it’s your lucky day – there she is!”

  I gave him the sixty quid and followed the lady who was walking sedately along, carrying a bunch of flowers. Sure enough, she walked back to where Amanda’s grave plaque was, and removed the shrivelled bunch of flowers and replaced them with the new ones. She stood up, head bowed, as if she was praying. I waited until she began to move on before walking up beside her.

  “Excuse me, are you Wanda Pierce?” I asked.

  She turned and gave me a beautiful smile. Her clothes were immaculate, a neat dark trouser suit, clean black pump shoes and spectacles below silky black hair that was too straight to be anything other than a wig.

  “Yes, that’s me.” In contrast to wily Harry, Wanda’s voice was devoid of
double meanings.

  “Do you mind me asking you – were you a friend of Amanda Boyd?”

  “A friend? No not really.”

  “It’s just that I’m writing a book about her family. I know she died in 2002, but I don’t know any details. I’m in touch with the mother, but I didn’t want to ask her something so personal. I don’t want to upset her any more than I have to, you see.”

  “It’s my granddaughter who was her friend,” Wanda explained, “Little Mandy’s best friend, she was, but she’s working in the daytime, so it’s hard for her to get here when the place is open. My Deirdre, she always remembers her. She never really recovered from her death. Poor child. They were both just 12 years old. I ask you, where is the justice in the world?”

  I nodded. “Do you think your granddaughter would mind talking to me?”

  “You’re not going to write a lot of bad things? Scandal and such?”

  “Oh no. Believe me, Mrs Pierce, I want to set the record straight.”

  “You can come to our flat tonight about six if you like,” she invited. “I’ll give you my address.”

  * * * *

  Deirdre Pierce was a very different proposition to her grandmother. At nineteen she was upfront and bouncing with the vitality of youth, had grace and beauty and a ready charm, and she moved swiftly. The flat was small but beautifully decorated: pure white walls and white carpet and large white leather sofa and chairs, with colourful cushions.

  “Do you know why Amanda killed herself?” I asked.

  She nodded grimly. “Her uncle.”

  Thank heavens, I thought. Amanda had told someone.