Doppelganger (10 page)

“It’s okay,” were his first
words, accompanied by a huge smile of relief. “The vic has just been
identified. Wendy Smithson, she’d been visiting someone in the hospital, and he
got her on her way home.”

“What do we know about her?”

“Nowt really. Just that she was a
local woman who was walking through the hospital grounds when she was
attacked.”

“Weapon?”

“Knife’s not been found.” Stu
shook his head gloomily.

“And the Bible?”

“Found beside her head, not
placed on top of the body like the others were.”

“Do you know what page it was
opened at?” I asked.

“Numbers chapter 25, highlighted
at verse 18. Stuart lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, blowing smoke up into
the sky as he frowned. “So you’ve finished
Hero or Villain?
and
delivered it to Truecrime. How long before it hits the bookstalls?”

“They’re hoping within a couple
of months. By mid January at any rate.”

“And after that you should have
no more trouble with Sean Boyd.”

“Between now and then I do my
best to lie low.”

Stu nodded, changing the subject:
“Listen Jack, there’s summat different about this victim, seems the killer’s
changed his modus operandi. The head hasn’t been mashed like the others,
everything’s neater, somehow, I don’t know, whole thing’s more
professional
somehow. 
They’re talking about it being a copycat killing. I managed to talk to Wendy’s
boyfriend. Wendy had an obsession about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
She was convinced that she had evidence that Prince Charles’s ex-wife had been
murdered. She was talking about producing something that would blow the Royal
Family to kingdom come.”

“As I said, with this one, the
head injuries weren’t so drastic. Death apparently caused by a single blow.”

I inwardly groaned at the thought
of this victim being a conspiracy theorist. Wendy Smithson sounded as if she
was suffering from a mental disorder. Obsessive personalities are often on the
fringes of sanity, especially the type of person who has an unhealthy interest
in famous people, and royalty frequently features in their fantasies. During my
spell as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital I’d met quite a number of them.
Within moments of meeting you their pet subject is aired, whether it’s how
they’re related to the royal family or, more often, that there’s an
international conspiracy to kill them, and everyone they meet is a potential
assassin. Once I remember, a man in my ward took a dislike to one of the nurses
and wouldn’t let him near him because he was convinced the man was in the pay
of the Soviet security services and was intent on administering radioactive
plutonium.

“What are you two doing here?”
Millicent Veitch appeared, alone, having just lifted the yellow taped barrier
to the crime scene to pass through. Beyond the yellow tape a tent had been
erected above what was presumably where the body had been found.

“Just taking a look around,
love,” Stu said.

“You’d better make yourselves
scarce, before DCI Fulford catches you.”

“What’s he going to do? Smack our
bottoms?” Stuart sneered.

“You’ll be escorted off the
premises.”

“Premises? What premises? This is
the grounds of a public hospital, not a nuclear weapons silo.”

“All the same you should leave.” 
Millie’s mouth turned down at the corners as she hunched her thin shoulders
against the wind.

“Millie, can I ask you summat?”
Stu said.

“If you must.”

“Have you ever thought of taking
a day off from being an arsehole?”

“What a way you have with words,
Mr Billingham. No wonder you’re still a hack writer on a provincial rag.”

“As opposed to a hacked-off
feminist who’s become a provincial hag.”

Millie’s face darkened with a
full flush of colour. “This is a murder scene. Not the best place to have a
shouting match, but I wouldn’t expect an oaf like you to behave with suitable
decorum. I can get someone to have you removed from here.”

“Fuck off, Millie. This is
hospital grounds, a public place. You’ve got jurisdiction behind them yellow
lines, nowhere else.”

“Look, Millie,” I butted in,
stepping between them. “Stuart didn’t mean to be offensive, okay?”

“Yes I fucking well did!”

“Shut up, Stu, just cool it,
can’t you?” I turned back to Millicent. “Look, give us a break. We’re just
tired and stressed, yeah? I’m sure you are too. We all want to find the Bible
Killer, so why don’t we just try to help each other out? Stuart’s on the local
paper, your press office needs his cooperation when you put out public appeals,
you know that as well as I do. For heaven’s sake, why do we have to be
enemies?”

“I’d rather have an outright
enemy than be friends with a traitor,” Millie snapped.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I know you hate me, Jack, so
never expect me to trust you. I know you resent me as a BIA, doing the job you
were trained to do, but never managed to get enough experience to be consulted
on important cases. You can’t help being jealous of my success.”

“I’m not jealous, Millie.”

“Oh no? When we worked together
in Birmingham, why were you always hand-in-glove with the guys, leaving me out
in the cold, ganging up against me, making me the butt of your jokes?”

“I didn’t. I had a few laughs
with the other guys, but I promise none of them were at your expense. I
wouldn’t be a bully like that Millie, I swear.”

“Really?” She smiled into my
face. “Well I don’t believe you. But it doesn’t matter. Because now the boot’s
on the other foot. In this investigation it’s me on the inside laughing at you,
who’s on the outside looking in.”

Half an hour later Stuart and I
were in the pub. I was making the most of a dried-up cheese sandwich with a
Guinness, while Stuart had opted for the cold hotpot with a pint of Fosters.

Dave Parsons, the constable I’d
spoken to last time I’d run up against Millicent Veitch, came through the door
in the company of a man of around sixty. PC Randall’s companion was tall and
upright, with a thick grey moustache and neatly combed hair, smart blue blazer
and sober tie, one of those neckpieces that looks as if it denotes an old
school or an army brigade. I summed him up as ex-army. He had a military
bearing: upright stance, shining shoes, clean collar and tie.

Dave saw us from the door, and
made his way across. Stuart knew Dave too, and Dave asked if he could join us
and introduced his friend. The man’s name was Julian Grylls, and, to our
delight, he turned out to be Wendy Smithson’s boyfriend. Dave made his excuses
and left after about ten minutes, pleading an urgent appointment, leaving Stuart
and me in the company of Julian, who seemed glad to meet us, and insisted on
buying us drinks.

“I just never in a million years
thought they’d actually do it,” Julian said, taking a sip of his large whisky.
I noticed that the ends of his moustache were damp with the liquid. Almost as
if he wasn’t thinking, he ruminatively sucked the soggy bristles into his mouth
to glean the liquor.

“Thought
who
would do it?”
Stuart asked.

“Why, the government, MI6, MI5,
or whatever.”

“Why would the government want to
kill Wendy?” I asked.

“Because she had evidence to
prove that Princess Diana was murdered, that the car crash in Paris in 1997 was
actually an assassination.”

I cringed inwardly. From the
moment, thirteen years ago, when Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al
Fayed, son of the Egyptian businessman Mohammad Al Fayed, were killed in a car
crash in the Alma tunnel in Paris, there have been conspiracy theorists. Many
people to this day believe that she was murdered by clandestine government
agencies in order to clear the way for Prince Charles to marry the love of his
life, Camilla Parker Bowles. True to form, the ones who were most vocal about
the conspiracy theory tended to be the rabid believers, often obsessives, anti
royalists, occasionally even morbidly deranged people. From the light of fury
in his eyes as he spoke, I suspected that Julian belonged to the fanatic
brigade.

“The thing is, Wendy had a very
close friend, who had a loose connection with the security services, do you get
me?” Julian looked at each of us in turn. “They have plenty of part-time
operatives, you know. They call them ‘cut offs’ or ‘surrogates’. People who do
their ordinary jobs, but are on the books of MI6, prepared to do the occasional
job for them for ready money as and when. Well this guy, Wendy’s friend, took
copies of some top-secret papers. He refused to tell anyone he’d done it, or
where they were, because he knew that once they were in the public domain they
could be traced back to him, and the chap was understandably afraid of
repercussions. After all, we’re talking about folk who murdered a princess.
Knocking off some ex spook, no one would blink an eye. But last month this guy
died. He knew of Wendy’s determination to prove the truth, and he bequeathed
her those papers.”

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“Gone. Didn’t they tell you?
Wendy was killed in the hospital grounds, but her flat was burgled too. They
left jewellery, and even some money she’d left out but they took all her
papers, amongst which, I can only assume, were these particular incriminating
documents, as well as her computers.”

“Have you checked?”

“Yes.”

“You have a key to Wendy’s home?”

“Yes, we are – I mean we
were
– close friends. She was one of my very closest friends actually. Friend is the
wrong word really, but at my age it’s crazy to be described as a boyfriend, and
we weren’t actually living together and partners in the true sense. But we were
‘together’ in the parlance of today. Wendy was everything to me. That’s why all
this is so hard to take.”

“I never really followed what
happened about the death of Princess Diana, it all passed me by,” Stuart said,
halfway through his second bag of crisps, crunching noisily. “Just got the
headlines. But how could they have faked an accident? Owt could have gone
wrong.”

“MI6 often use motor accidents
for the very reason that they’re one of the most common causes of death,”
Julian went on, warming to his subject. I noticed his nails were bitten down to
the quick. “Listen to these facts: Henri Paul, the driver of the car in which
Princess Diana and Dodi and himself died, had a sample of his blood analysed,
and the news was released that he had 1.75 g of alcohol as well as 12% of
carbon monoxide in blood taken from the femoral vein and 20.7% from the heart –
results which are medically nonsensical. If he’d had that amount of carbon
monoxide in his system he wouldn’t have been able to walk, let alone drive a
car. The blood samples were switched with one of the night’s suicide victims,
who’d asphyxiated himself with car exhaust, and the fools just knew he was
drunk and didn’t realise their mistake. Mercedes Benz, the manufacturers of the
vehicle that crashed, were keen to do their own independent inspection of the
car, to assess its condition and roadworthiness – they are the very best people
to do such a test, and would be eager to exonerate their vehicle from being the
cause. But they weren’t allowed to do so. It has been proved that Henri Paul
was a part time employee of MI6, as well as other national security agencies.
Henri Paul’s bank statements prove that payments were made to him from various
such organisations over a very long period. Henri Paul took a different route
from the one that would normally be taken that night. Against the express
advice of the other security professionals,  and also for no apparent reason,
he didn’t turn from the Place de la Concorde into the Champs Elysees to take
the simplest and shortest route to Dodi’s apartment. Instead he continued
south, took an unplanned and unnecessary turn into the Place de la Concorde,
and from there drove into the Alma Tunnel. A witness to the crash – the first
man on the scene – rang the police, but no one arrived, so he ran on foot to
the nearest police station to report what had happened to summon help, and he
was thrown into jail, and nobody believed his statement: that he’d seen
Princess Diana injured in a car crash. There were reports from some of the
pursuing photographers of a motorbike in front of the doomed car, with a
pillion passenger who shone a fantastically bright light through the windscreen
of the Mercedes. The force of this startlingly powerful light suggests it was
of the type used by the SAS to temporarily blind and disorientate people. Henri
Paul wouldn’t have been able to see anything, or react in any way for about a
minute afterwards.”

“Hold on, hold on Julian,” Stu
said. “There were inquiries afterwards. The French authorities went to great
lengths to prove it was an accident.”

“If they wanted to establish the
true facts, why did they thoroughly disinfect the entire area where the
accident occurred more or less immediately after the crash, before it could be
examined by the specialist crime investigation team? Everyone acknowledges that
a white Fiat Uno had a knock by the Mercedes at the end of the tunnel,
immediately prior to the crash. Why did the police not search for this vehicle,
the driver of which could have given important evidence of what he’d seen? And
why three months afterwards was it generally known that this same white Fiat
car belonged to James Adnanson, also a part-time employee of MI6. And that
months later Adnanson’s Fiat was found in a dense wood in Nantes, burnt out,
its driver James allegedly having committed suicide by pouring petrol over
himself and his car – quite an unlikely method of killing yourself, wouldn’t
you agree? I tell you gentlemen, the list of discrepancies, inconsistencies,
ludicrous apparent mistakes and sheer unlikely happenings just goes on and on.
Consider this: supposing you or I had an ex wife whom we hated, and who was
threatening to tell all kinds of secrets that we would find harmful, and was
someone who hated you and was in a position to do you real harm, is it likely
that she’d wind up conveniently dead in a car accident within a relatively
short space or time? Did you know that while she was married to Charles, Diana
had a close friend who was her Personal Protection Officer, a man called Barry
Mannakee, someone she told all kinds of personal secrets to? It became know
that she’d been indiscreet, telling him things she shouldn’t have. He died
unexpectedly too.”