Doppelganger

by Geoffrey West

  “The police know about you. My friend has told them about what we’ve found out.”

  “And tell me Jack, just what have you found out? That I happen to be Robert Althouse, who just happened to be a school friend of the child murderer Megan Foster? That’s all you’ve found out. Once I realised Megan had seen my face, I got rid of the scalps I was keeping to remind me of my murders. It was sad but necessary. The police have got absolutely nothing at all on me, and they never will have, because I’m clever, I’ve been careful, and, as I told you before, I’m lucky.”

  Strangely I felt more angry than afraid. Angry at my utter impotence.

  I managed to raise my head enough to see that we’d arrived at my house. I remembered that I hadn’t been here since the threat from Sean Boyd’s killers, that now seemed like a lifetime ago. Dr Lamelle parked in the front drive, beside the overgrown hedge that I’d never got around to trimming. He had my keys in his hand, looked around outside, before marching to the garage door, finding the right key and opening it up.

  He drove us into the room at the side of the Gatehouse, that I’ve adapted as a garage, then pulled on the handbrake and killed the engine. And got out of the car, presumably to close the garage door from the inside, returning to lean over the front seat to talk to me. He switched on the car’s overhead light. His large eyes in the dimness of the car’s interior seemed to dominate everything.

  “Good. I see there’s a door leading into your house. I simply have to kill you, untie your hands and feet, arrange things properly, then go into your house, and get away through the back door, down your garden and keep to the back roads. It’s almost dark, no one’s likely to remember my face, and it’s only an hour’s jog back to my house. When I get home I just have to destroy all my clothes. I take it you noticed I’m wearing surgical gloves – hence no fingerprints on the steering wheel.”

  And then Dr Lamelle was leaning across the front seat, holding the gun steadily in his hand, the ugly black hole in its barrel hovering about a foot from my face.

  All of a sudden I was back to my old nightmare. Edward Van Meer’s mad eyes staring at me as he forced the pistol between my lips, pulled back the hammer and squeezed the trigger. The hell as I heard the click against the chamber. I began to tremble uncontrollably, just as I’d trembled then. Because this time there was no element of chance. This shot was for real.

  “Right then Jack. Funnily enough you seem like a really nice guy, bit of an innocent abroad, but that’s part of your charm. I actually like you. So sorry to cut short our friendship, but as they say c’est la vie.”

  Van Meer’s face was there, superimposed over Lamelle’s, the same madness, the same joy in his eyes at my terror. As I fought and struggled to try and free myself I felt my bladder empty, was aware of the clammy cold sweat drenching my face as the ropes bit hard into my flesh and my mouth formed a silent scream.

  He pulled the hammer back, its click hysterically loud in the confined space.

  I closed my eyes. Would there be a final surge of pain? Or nothing but oblivion?

  Chapter 17

  HEAVEN CAN WAIT

  There was neither.

  I actually heard the tremendous cannon-like explosion. It was so loud that I was practically deafened, the ringing in my ears as if my eardrum had burst.

  And yet, it made no sense.

  I could hear!

  And then, for some incredible reason, I found I could open my eyes.

  I could see!

  Why wasn’t I dead?

  Was this some trick of the mind, some weird time lapse, where half my head had been blown away and any second all brain activity would cease?

  It didn’t happen.

  The car’s interior was a fog of cordite fumes, and the ringing in my ears had deafened me to any other noise.

  The stench of gunpowder was overpowering. As the smoke began to clear I could see Lamelle’s face, eyes wide with shock, blinking, desperately trying to comprehend what had happened. Stock-still in front of my face I could see the bloody stump of his attenuated hand, just one finger dangling at an angle, surrounded by a wet sponge of redness, with spurting gouts of blood erupting at heartbeat speed. The blood was soaking my face and hair, dripping down onto the carpet. I managed to twist my head enough to see what was left of the smoking pistol on the floor, its mangled twisted barrel torn in half. Three of Lamelle’s bloody latex-covered fingers were still partially clasped around the pistol’s handle.

  Lamelle had raised his attenuated partial hand, was moving in the seat, reaching across with his other hand to open the door, blood still fountaining from the gaping wound. He lurched forwards out of sight.

  I thought I heard banging on the garage door.

  The nightmare went on. The smell wasn’t just gunpowder now. There was the hot acrid stench of burning. Flames and burning. Searing heat. I was struggling to tear myself free, but the ropes were tighter than ever. I was being swallowed up in an incredible wave of heat.

  And then I lost consciousness.

  * * * *

  “Help! Help me!

  “It’s okay, you’re all right.”

  It was Caroline’s voice, but that was surely impossible. How could it be Caroline? When I was alone in a car with a killer, about to be shot in the head?

  “Jack, darling, you’re safe in hospital, you’re okay...”

  Caroline’s voice.

  But it couldn’t be real. I was about to die.

  In my half awake, mad first moments of awareness, I thought Van Meer was there in front of me, forcing the gun into my mouth, laughing as he pulled the trigger. But no, it wasn’t Van Meer. It was Roger Lamelle, the man who’d abducted me in Wales. I was tied down to the back seat of the car, struggling and fighting to be free. I suddenly realised that it was Caroline I was fighting with, straining against her arms that were trying to hold me down, remembering the smell and the heat of the fire and the choking cordite fumes.

  A nurse arrived and, together, Caroline and the nurse managed to wake me up properly and calm me down. I sat up in bed, unable to believe what was happening.

  “Everything's okay.” Caroline said when the nurse had gone, cradling my head in her arms and stroking my face, drying my tears. “You’re not badly hurt, but you’ve got bad burns and you’ve been unconscious for a few hours, that’s all, nothing serious. You’ll be out of hospital as soon as you’re better.”

  “How come you’re here?”

  “You were babbling incoherently when they brought you in, and you kept calling out my name. The police traced me and told me where you were, so I dropped everything and came.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nobody knows. One of the people who lives on the Allington Estate, behind the Gatehouse where you live, a woman called Jocelyn Allardice, was walking her dog past your house when she heard an explosion, and saw smoke – she thought there must have been some kind of electrical accident that had caused a fire. Luckily the garage door wasn’t fully closed, so she pulled it open, rushed in and found you inside the car. The car’s carpet was ablaze, your hair and eyebrows were partly burnt off, you were stunned and tied down onto the back seat. Another few seconds and the fire might have got out of hand. What on earth happened to you, Jack?”

  “It’s quite a story.” Nothing seemed to make sense, and when I heard the nurse referring to Caroline as ‘your girlfriend’, I felt a surge of pride. Caroline said that the police urgently needed to talk to me, and we asked a nurse to fetch them. Detective Sergeant Farley, a young eager-looking plainclothes officer with steel-framed spectacles and curly hair arrived with a uniformed PC, and Farley sat down in the other chair by my bed.

  I asked them to contact the hospital in Brecon to alert them to the danger to Lucy Green, in the forlorn hope that Lamelle’s execution attempt might have failed. After a long wait he returned, saying that Lucy was okay, due to the fact that a particularly observant nurse had noticed that her drug-delivery drip had been tampered with
. The nurse had immediately changed the preparation, then reported the matter which was, at this moment, being investigated.

  “Well now Mr Lockwood, what happened?” Farley asked.

  “You’re asking me? It was a miracle. A man shot me in the head. Yet I’m not dead.”

  “Leaning across from the front seat?”

  I nodded.

  “We thought that must have been the scenario. From our preliminary examinations of the car, it looks as if the gun exploded when it was fired.”

  “Exploded?”

  He nodded. “Happens very occasionally, for instance when the wrong ammunition is used, the weapon is old or badly maintained, or it’s been adapted in some way. The bullet and expanding explosive gasses have to exit out of the barrel. If, for whatever reason, they can’t, the weapon is blown apart, usually along with the hand of the user.” He coughed to clear his throat. “Now, if you could tell us who was responsible, sir?”

  I told them everything, apart from my visit to Dave Boyd and his poisoned chalice of the gift of the gun. They went away, then an hour later, Farley came back to tell me that Lamelle hadn’t shown up for work at the hospital, nor was he at his flat. Stuart had told them the previous day of our suspicions, and they were already looking into our theory, that Lamelle was the Bible Killer, but getting a warrant to search his house hadn’t so far been possible up until now. They had no actual evidence against him apart from my testimony of his admissions in the car. However, at some of the murder scenes there were good traces of DNA not belonging to the victim – presumably semen or sweat samples of the killer. With the amount of blood in my car, getting the doctor’s DNA profile was just a matter of time, and if it matched any that was that left at the scenes of the killings, there would be enough concrete evidence to go to trial.

  “Tell me if I imagined it, but I thought I saw his fingers on the floor, near the gun. I thought I was hallucinating. Or dead.”

  He smiled grimly. “Dr Lamelle’s fingers are in a hospital deep-freeze now, but so far no one’s come to claim them. According to our expert I’ve just spoken to it appears that the gun had been a deactivated piece: the barrel was blocked with a plug of metal so as to make it useless as an offensive weapon. An extremely powerful magnum cartridge was fired, so it was effectively a mini bomb, and it destroyed most of the firer’s hand. The flash of the explosion burnt your face and set fire to the carpet. Which raises a number of questions. Why would your erstwhile killer use such a gun? As he was loading it, he’d surely have noticed the blockage in the barrel.”

  Now I realised why Dave Boyd had given me the pistol, and the reason why he’d loaded it with the unsuitably high-powered magnum shells himself. What a relief it was that I’d been careful to painstakingly wipe it free of my fingerprints, after every time I touched it without gloves, to cover any such eventuality. Dave Boyd would have gambled on the fact that I’d never think to look down the barrel to check it was clear, or view it unobstructed, for instance when the cylinder was swung aside, during loading. Obviously both Boyd brothers wanted me to die, so that their secret died with me. This had been Dave’s way of ensuring that any assassination attempts I tried to resist would succeed.

  There was no sign of Lamelle, despite a nationwide search, and all ports and airports had been alerted. “How on earth could he get away?” I asked Farley. “He’d have been covered in blood. Without urgent medical assistance he’d surely bleed to death.”

  He shrugged. “And my guess is that’s probably what happened. He’d obviously need urgent medical assistance if he was to survive, and all the hospitals in the country have been alerted to inform us of anyone needing treatment for that kind of hand injury. It’s not exactly a common occurrence. The doctors tell me that he couldn’t have travelled far in that condition without at least some kind of treatment.”

  “He’s a doctor. He knows what to do.”

  “He might be able to stem the bleeding to some extent, but he can hardly attend to ruptured blood vessels with only one hand. No sir, he can’t get far without help. Judging by the blood on the floor of your car, he was losing it at a fast rate. Unless he had a car nearby he’d have to have gone on foot. He’d be very weak, in shock. He’d probably lose consciousness and collapse and die shortly afterwards. Don’t worry, Mr Lockwood. I’m sure that everything’s going to be all right. Dr Lamelle is no longer a threat to you or anyone else.”

  Caroline had gone home and came back again at around 11am. She’d brought all the morning papers for me. She told me to look at the article on page four of the Daily Mail:

  Gunfight marks the end of Boyd brothers’ reign of terror.

  Not since the famous Shootout at Mr Smiths in the 1960s has there been such a violent end to an era of crime rule that had lasted more than 20 years. Last night Sean Boyd, Neil Smith and Roger Tennant were gunned down in a violent attack on the premises of their London club, the Rambling Rose. A number of firearms were discharged and ten other people were injured, amongst them Sean Boyd’s brother Dave. For years the two brothers have operated as rivals, with their own teams and loyalties, but until now any disputes have stopped short of actual confrontation. However, it appears that festering differences came to a head last night. In the 1960s’ ‘Mr Smith’ shootout, the deadly and powerful ‘firm’ run by south London gangsters the Richardson brothers, Charlie and Eddie, was effectively terminated as a force in the underworld, as a result of Richardson henchman Richard Hart and others being killed, and the capture of those left alive or injured. In an even more decisive gun battle at the Rambling Rose, almost fifty years later, many of the leading members of the two rival Boyd ‘firms’ – each run by one of the brothers – are now dead, injured or arrested. Crucially, Sean Boyd is dead, and his brother Dave has been critically injured and is now fighting for his life in hospital. The decimation of both gangs means it is more than likely that rival criminals will take over the Boyd enterprises in south and east London. The Boyd brothers always lacked the strength and success of either the Krays or the Richardsons, because of their regular territorial disputes. This bitter fraternal rivalry appears to have been their final downfall.

  I put the paper aside. What I’d done – informing Dave Boyd that his brother had had sex with his twelve-year-old daughter, made her pregnant, before her apparent suicide, might be construed as immoral, but it had served a useful purpose, so far as I could see. Although other criminal scum would soon fill the vacuum left by their departure, at least with their deaths the world was, for the moment, a much better place.

  “So that’s all your problems solved,” she said.

  “Caroline, thanks for all you’ve done for me. I appreciate you coming here.”

  “Listen, Jack, I want to tell you something.”

  I waited. And as I looked at her I realised that I enjoyed her company much more than I’d realised.

  “The other night at your house. It wasn’t just a spur of the moment thing for me. I really meant what I said.”

  “Caroline, please–”

  “You called for me, not Lucy when you were first brought in.” She stared into my eyes. “That must mean something. Doesn’t it? Or did you really mean to call Lucy?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

  “Okay. Jack, I know you still have feelings for Lucy. But I’m absolutely certain that soon you’ll realise she’s the wrong person for you. I think that your manic roller coaster of emotions over Lucy is something you’ve confused with love. Does she really care about you, Jack? All the time you’ve been together, I’m betting it’s been about her problems, her hang-ups, her fears. Yet you’ve been literally scared of losing your life, and she wasn’t there for you, was she? I would have been. If I’d known someone was gunning for you I’d have dropped whatever I was doing to be with you and to share the danger and to watch your back. I’ll always be there for you, Jack. Always. Just say the word. Phone me, text me anytime. And I’ll come to you. I mean it.”

  She�
�d blushed as she made her speech, and suddenly I had a glimpse of what life could be like with a woman like Caroline. With Lucy it was high octane drama, full-on emotions, an all-or-nothing relationship. Did I really want that for the rest of my life? Was I really in love with her, or was it, as Caroline had said, a whirlwind of emotion that I’d confused with love?

  It hadn’t occurred to me before, but Caroline had been right: all the problems I’d had in the last weeks I’d had to face completely alone, Lucy had been too preoccupied with her own demons to take much interest.

  But more importantly I was remembering what Roger Lamelle had said to me in the car. That rubbish about her following him to Healey’s Woods to watch him attack a woman, rather than to stop him. Unbelievable. It had to be.

  The alternative was unthinkable.

  Anyway, I could relax in the knowledge that one of my major problems was solved. Dave Boyd, who’d repaid my willingness to tell him the truth about his daughter’s life by doing his best to kill me, was close to death, and my enemy Sean’s life was thankfully over. Two evil men culled.

  Roger Lamelle would surely soon be in custody or was already dead. On a personal level, Hero or Villain? would be out in a matter of weeks, in time to capitalise on the massive publicity surrounding Sean Boyd’s death. And as soon as I was able to I could get cracking with the rest of The Bible Killer, and I was now able to include first-hand parts of the text, which would undoubtedly add authenticity.

  I hadn’t been in contact with Lucy since leaving her in hospital, what seemed like days ago now. Yet I remembered I’d promised to go down and fetch her. I phoned her using the hospital phone.