Doppelganger

by Geoffrey West

  “He was an animal.”

  “Stabbing a man whose already on the floor that many times sounds like a frenzied attack to me. Frankly Dr Lockwood, it sounds like the act of someone who’s completely out of control, someone who has lost his reason. And you do have a history of psychiatric illness, do ye not?”

  “Can these questions wait?” David, sitting beside me, said. “My client needs to rest.”

  “Aye. But this is not over. I’ve not finished with you, boy!”

  “Nor I with you, Chief Inspector. I flushed out your killer, when you were too blinkered to carry out a proper investigation.”

  “And aren’t you the clever man?”

  “It’s certainly something you’ll never be accused of. Your investigation has been a pathetic fiasco. You should be ashamed.”

  Fulford glared at me with hatred. Then I saw the fear behind his eyes, the anticipation he obviously felt for his failure, his awareness of how utterly ineptly he’d handled the case from start to finish, having his own BIA feed information to the killer. In that moment I felt truly sorry for him: I could see he was a broken man.

  “I’m sorry, Chief Inspector. I’m truly sorry for what I said. I know you did your best.”

  “Keep your sympathy, Dr Lockwood,” he spluttered.

  I knew he would always hate me.

  He stood up abruptly and left the room. In one second I saw, or I thought I saw, the tremble of his lower lip, a precursor to an emotional breakdown. A man like Fulford couldn’t possibly sob in front of anyone else, least of all me, the man who’d unwittingly exposed his abject failure and ineptitude. He was going to have to live with the knowledge that because of his incompetence, several woman had died unnecessarily.

  Weariness overtook me, and I felt my eyelids closing. The aches and pains of all my trials and tribulations of the past few days culminated in a surge of searing agony as I pulled myself to my feet.

  * * * *

  One day you’ve got it all, the next you’re fucked.

  That’s life. Or C’est la Vie, as the late Dr Roger Lamelle would have said.

  I thought back to a few weeks ago, when I’d first fallen in love with Lucy. And my memories of the short time we’d had together. Nothing was going to take those memories away. But every time I thought of her now I couldn’t get the image of her repeatedly stabbing Lamelle out of my mind, no matter how hard I tried, and the image of her savagery repelled me. Maybe time would take care of it, lessen the horror of those dreadful images, make me remember the good things about her. Her laugh, her sense of humour, her feistiness, her sheer intelligence and stimulating conversation. And the magic that had happened between us whenever we were together.

  The memory of the first time I fell in love with her. Yes, that was still there, that was still intact, a memory I could grab and hold onto in the long, cold lonely nights ahead.

  And Caroline?

  Caroline Lawrence is a sweet kind-natured girl, who had risked her life for me. But if the resurgence of my feelings for Lucy taught me anything it showed me that with Caroline there was just no spark, or rather the spark wasn’t strong enough for me to want to make a commitment, and it wouldn’t be fair to lead her to believe I ever could. The previous evening I had let her down gently, explaining that I needed time alone to sort out my feelings. I don’t know if she understood, but if she didn’t understand then, I knew she would in time.

  * * * *

  A few days later I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep. Wandered around the house, made myself a cup of coffee and found Shocking Killers, and again leafed through the chapter on Megan Foster. Poor Megan. Poor Lucy. A life completely wrecked, a personality so disjointed and uptight that she’d always found it hard to think well of other people. Maybe I shouldn't blame her for being so selfish and having such a low opinion of humanity, and for jeering at my innate sense of hope and trust in others. If I’d had her experiences: disbelieved by teachers, doctors, lawyers and police, living in a psychiatric detention unit, mixing with people who actually were killers and knowing that she was different, maybe I wouldn’t have liked or trusted other people either. Experiences like that had obviously damaged her. Those experiences had made her capable of the kind of savagery that I just couldn’t believe anyone was capable of.

  Opening the curtains I looked out at the dawn, pinkness shooting through the clouds, the skyline of Canterbury spreading out in the distance, the distant spires of the Cathedral. I opened the window, leaving it yawning wide, breathing in the fresh air. After this entire unholy catalogue of murder and misery, things had finally drawn to a close, and I’d been lucky, more lucky than I could possibly have expected. I’d written Hero or Villain? against the odds, avoided being executed by several contract killers, and my true-crime writing future looked assured.

  But was I happy?

  What do you think?

  Chapter 21

  WHO KILLED AIDEN CAULFIELD?

  In the ensuing weeks, life for me was looking good in some ways. Hero or Villain? was due to go on sale soon and was likely to do well, thanks to the publicity surrounding the death of both Boyd brothers – Dave had expired after a couple of weeks in hospital – and The Bible Killer was completed and coming out in around ten weeks.

  Even if I hadn’t been legally obliged to keep Lucy’s name out of my account of The Bible Killer book I wouldn’t have blown her cover. I obviously had to leave out any mention of Roger Lamelle’s involvement in Aiden Caulfield’s killing, because it was completely impossible to prove.

  And in case you’re wondering, no, Lucy Green wasn’t her real name, and neither was Megan Foster. I could hardly tell you what either of those were without compromising her privacy today, could I? Lucy Green is as good a name as any, and, now she's dead, her anonymity can be preserved. There weren’t many people at Lucy’s funeral. Just me, Stu, Susan from Cambridge, Marion Tucker and a few of her other friends from the dolls’ house world, Alan from the bookshop and Peter Cholmondley, the ‘spook’ character, Lucy’s ‘handler’ who worked for the government department, whom I’d met at her flat that day. There were also a few of the nurses she’d worked with at the hospital.

  How or why it happened, I don’t know. But a local journalist somehow got wind of Lucy’s true identity and an article appeared in a national newspaper, comparing a photograph of Lucy with that of Megan Foster, and questioning the gaps in Lucy’s past. Technically it was illegal to print such things but they’d been clever, couching it in vague terms, never actually mentioning Lucy by name, but giving hints that a young woman who worked as a self employed craftsperson, making furniture for dolls’ houses, bears a marked resemblance to the child-killer Megan Foster, who was released and given a new identity...

  And then the real Lucy Green, now living in Australia, was approached, and she made a statement through her lawyers that the person who had been calling herself Lucy Green, who had died recently in Canterbury, was no relation to her, and that legal proceedings under the vague heading of ‘attempted impersonation’ would have been taken against the person who was claiming to be herself, namely the Lucy Green, born in Chorton Hardy, Hertfordshire in 1972, if Lucy had still been alive. But, in the event nothing could be done. The publicity surrounding the ‘real’ Lucy’s legal initiative meant that the alter ego of Megan Foster was well and truly blown, something that, had she lived, Lucy would have found an intolerable burden.

  But now she was dead it didn’t really matter. In fact none of it really mattered.

  Except, by the weirdest chance, another witness to the 30-year-old murder of Aiden Caulfield broke his silence, thanks to the publicity surrounding the real Lucy Green’s announcement and the newspaper articles. A boy at the school, who’d been in the playground at the time it had happened, had finally come forward and made a statement to the police. All those years ago, Sam Dimitri had seen Robert Althouse playing with Aiden, and had noticed that just after Robert had left the other boy, Aiden had seemed s
lack and lifeless. The next moment, Megan had come across Aiden and put her hands around his throat.

  Why hadn’t Sam Dimitri come forward at the time? He was afraid of the teachers, he said, he was afraid of telling anyone, especially as Robert Althouse was a bully, who had threatened him only that day. Ever afterwards he’d felt a terrible guilt, especially when he read anything about the case, but he just hadn’t got the courage to do the right thing, so long after the event. He’d recently become a born-again Christian, and his faith had given him the courage to come forward. But Sam’s testimony didn’t carry that much weight, not enough to reopen the case to clear Megan’s memory.

  The police returned my car in the early spring, and I stood on my front drive, examining what was left of it, reflecting that it was inside this car that I’d almost lost my life.

  I got into the front seat, remembering the last time I’d been inside it, and Roger Lamelle had been the driver. The carpets had been removed, and the metal of the car’s floor seemed sharp, hard and cold, as if it was a witness to the suffering I’d experienced.

  Idly I wondered what I’d left in the car, that I might as well clear out: I’d already decided to sell it, as I couldn’t bear to keep it after what had happened. I opened the central store hatch between the front seats and found a Mars-bar wrapper and a couple of old petrol receipts. And a small black rectangle of plastic. What was it? I couldn’t remember.

  I took out the small item and realised it was one of several digital recorders I’d bought a while ago through the internet and never got around to using. The controls on this one were too tiny for my taste. I held it up to the light. What was VAR, I wondered? Of course: Voice Activated Recording, where you switch it on, then activate the VAR and it only starts recording when someone speaks. I had a vague memory of fiddling with it when I bought it, just before driving down to Wales to visit Lucy in hospital. I’d put it in this hatch when an important phone call came through, then forgotten all about it.

  I pressed Playback. Suddenly Roger Lamelle’s voice erupted, large as life, as if he was sitting there. I must have left the VAR on when I’d last put it away, and not turned off the ‘hold’ slider. I listened in growing excitement. Roger Lamelle’s confession to Aiden Caulfield’s murder was here, on a digital recording. I didn’t know if it carried weight legally, but surely his voice could be recognised, and I could also swear an affidavit that Lamelle had spoken those words.

  Would it be legal? Surely a voice expert, and people who knew Lamelle well could be summoned to testify whether they thought it was a fake recording?

  I phoned David, my solicitor, and outlined the situation to him, and he said that at the very least it would count as new evidence that the authorities would have to consider, and he reckoned that any good lawyer might be able to push for the case to be reopened.

  During the following month police issued a statement to the effect that they were reopening the case of the murder of Aiden Caulfield, and would expedite matters as quickly as possible. In the light of new evidence, the statement said, there was a strong possibility that there had been a miscarriage of justice. A few weeks later, Megan’s conviction had been officially quashed, and the child killer of Aiden Caulfield in 1981 was declared to be Dr Roger Lamelle, otherwise known as the ‘Bible Killer of Canterbury’.

  On a broader front the ramifications were ominous: if they’d caught Roger Lamelle as a child and he’d had the same treatment that Lucy had received, he wouldn’t have been able to go on to kill so many innocent people later in life. Just like so many huge mistakes, there’d been massive damage and suffering to many, many different people, but ultimately most of those who had responsibility for the bungled case had acted as they saw fit, and had simply got it wrong: no one was really to blame, it was just a combination of blunders and unfortunate circumstances.

  Roger Lamelle’s past was being painstakingly analysed, and the unexplained killings in Nottingham and Huddersfield were being reinvestigated, and there was every likelihood that Lamelle would be posthumously convicted of those crimes as well. Rather like the 2012 Jimmy Savile investigations into sexual misconduct at the BBC, the ramifications were manifold and would take a long time to become clear.

  On another front there was a surprising development. Wendy Smithson, the woman who was obsessed with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, who’d been the fourth ‘Bible Killer’ victim, apparently was not. For all that day, and the previous and following days, Lamelle had been attending a conference of psychiatrists in Leipzig, and there’d been a thousand witnesses to his presence there on all three days. It was incontrovertibly the case that Lamelle could not possibly have been able to kill Ms Smithson.

  So who had killed her? The police left the case open, but were working on the assumption that it was a copycat killing, the kind of thing that definitely had happened in the past in serial killer scenarios. The fact was that there were certain things about Wendy’s killing that were different from the others, those differences being various things that the police had deliberately kept secret from the public, certainly indicated the actions of a copycat killer who was ignorant of the true facts about the previous murders. But the conspiracy theorists had a field day, wondering at the coincidence that it happened on the very eve of the day Wendy threatened to disclose evidence that, she claimed, categorically proved that Princess Diana was murdered by the security services. I’m saying nothing on the subject, except to state the fact that the evidence that Wendy claimed was in a certain locked drawer in her desk was not forthcoming, despite an exhaustive search by the police. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Personally I keep an open mind. Copycat killers do exist, there’s no doubt of that.

  Just as there’s absolutely no doubt that powerful people in the establishment can, quite literally, commit murder and they’re above the law – some of them actually make the laws of the land.

  * * * *

  At first the police had threatened to charge me with various things, but in the end nothing substantial would stick. Taking the blame for Lucy’s frenzied attack on Lamelle wasn’t an issue: the Crown Prosecution Service decided that it wasn’t in the public interest to bring a case of unlawful killing against me, when Lamelle had threatened to kill me and had already killed Lucy.

  In the ensuing months I’d been busy on other projects. A police force in Scotland had approached me to act as BIA on a murder case, and, although it was pretty well cut and dried, and sorted out in a few weeks, I felt as if I’d garnered some kind of professional credibility as a BIA, which meant my future was that much more secure as a True Crime writer: the effect was symbiotic – people are always going to want to read true crime books that are written by someone with actual experience in the field. And the more notoriety I garnered as an author, the more in demand I was likely to be by the police.

  It was a couple of months since I’d spoken to anyone at Truecrime Publications Ltd. I’d phoned Ann shortly before finalising The Bible Killer manuscript, remembering how the last time I’d seen her in the flesh, she’d almost stabbed her husband to death.

  We met at her office in London, and discussed all that had happened. She was excited that I’d be able to wind up The Bible Killer book with such a dramatic ending. “A real exclusive,” she said.

  “How’s your divorce going?” I asked.

  Ann blushed and looked down at the desk. “Well, the thing is, Harry and I have decided to give it another go.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Harry had used surveillance gadgets to eavesdrop on her phone calls to me and used the information to inform Sean Boyd of my whereabouts, so as to set me up to be killed. In order to escape from Sean Boyd’s men, Ann had stabbed Harry almost to death to help me escape...

  But Ann went on, blithely unaware of my feelings. “The thing is, I know what Harry did was disgusting and deplorable. But, when you think about it, he did it because he was jealous, because he thought you and I were having an affair. He really cared, he was
really jealous enough to go to those lengths... Which means he really, really cared about me. And he was so sweet after what happened, he absolutely refused to press charges after I stabbed him.”

  I nodded in the habitual near darkness of Ann’s office.

  “Harry’s got a lot of problems. The detestable way he behaved, well, it’s not as cut-and-dried as it seems. He’s a borderline alcoholic, and he’s even got a drug habit, and that’s my fault because we were always rowing. He’d borrowed a lot of money and couldn’t pay it back, and Sean Boyd was offering payment for what he was doing. Harry’s really not such a bad person as you think...”

  I said nothing.

  “Anyway. The house is worth so much, and, well, neither of us can afford to buy the other one out, and neither Harry nor I want to move out anyway. So we’ve decided to try and make a go of it. Harry’s going into a clinic to get clean and we’ll take it from there. One step at a time.”

  I felt almost sorry for her. And disgusted.

  “I know you’ll think I’m wrong. But, you don’t know Harry. He’s got his faults, but, well, haven’t we all?”

  “Sure, of course. I don’t know him.”

  “Now everything’s over and settled, he really feels bad about what happened. He actually said he would like to meet you and apologise, man to man. But I suppose that asking too much?”

  “Yes, that’s asking too much.”

  I’d always thought of Ann as a friend, but in the Truecrime office in that dark chilly spring early evening, I knew she was no friend to me, she was just a hard, cold-hearted acquaintance who didn’t give a damn if I lived or died. I needed her support in my career, but I didn’t need her company, nor did I want it.

  I felt tired, bitter and jaded. Although I’d successfully written another two books that looked as if they might sell well, I reflected that I had found what I thought was the love of my life, and lost her. Even now, I still look at the picture I took with my phone of Lucy when we’d gone to Chorton Hardy on that perfect day. That day that I’d been so much in love that I thought it could never change. Maybe we should be able to preserve those happy days, somehow, so we can bring them out and remember them when times are hard, to remind ourselves that we are capable of having happy, decent lives. Several times I went to the beautiful peaceful haven of Canterbury Cathedral and lit another candle for Megan, standing to the side of the main area, near the entrance to the cloisters and saying a silent prayer. It always seems to help somehow, and I like to think that if there is such a thing as life after death, maybe I’m helping Megan in some way. The flickering candle, amongst all the others, is a pathetic excuse for a living breathing person, but it’s a token of life, and whenever that flame flickers I feel that something of her lives on. Once, when I was standing there minding my own business, I looked out across the pews in St Augustine’s Chapel and recognised the familiar hair and spectacles of DCI Fulford, kneeling there with his eyes closed in silent prayer. I couldn’t begin to imagine how he must have been suffering.