Doppelganger (4 page)

Rubbing my eyes, I wondered
whether to get up and walk around, or just lie back and hope for a sweeter
dream to cleanse away my terror. Eventually I lay back and drifted off again,
thankful to enjoy oblivion for several more hours. I overslept, so that it
wasn’t until 10.30 in the morning that I heard the crash from downstairs. At
first I thought it was a dream.

But the sound of tinkling glass
and the thudding footsteps on the stairs were real.

I leapt out of bed, in time to
see the door slam back and bounce against the wall, and a tall figure wearing a
Coco the Clown mask. There were others behind him, moving fast, filling the
room. Before I’d worked out what to do, two of them were holding my arms,
pulling me up against the wall, while the others were systematically beating my
body with baseball bats. As I stopped struggling, they slackened their hold,
allowing me to slide to my knees. Then they really went to town.

I had a close-up views of heavy
boots against my face, hard steel-capped toes, smashing into my chest and arms
and legs. It went on for what seemed like hours, but was in reality probably
more like minutes.

When they’d finished I was
cowered on the floor, my hands up to protect my face. Between my fingers I had
a surreal image of Donald Duck’s face floating down to my level.

“Listen, mate,” he rasped. “This
is your one and only warning. You stop writing Sean Boyd’s biography or we’ll
come back and bury you. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise. It’ll be quick and
clean. And you won’t know where or when.”

As he said it, one of the others
handed him what looked like a plumber’s blowlamp.

There was a pop as the blue flame
sprung alive, then the roar of the burning gas.

My legs were bare. There was no
pain at first as the blue flame licked across the flesh of my ankles, but then
there was a searing agony, which surpassed the aches and stabbing pains in the
rest of my body. That’s the point when I must have blacked out.

How long I lay there I have no
idea. The next thing I knew was a woman’s face above me, pulses of searing pain
that were almost unbearable, a smell of scorched flesh and the coppery taste of
blood in my mouth.

“Lie still. I’m calling an
ambulance.”

I thought I heard her voice
saying it, but it could equally have been God or an angel. I was right out of
it, fading in and out of consciousness.

I woke up again in the ambulance,
to a view of a crisp white cuff and a lily-white hand touching the plastic mask
attached to my face. And pink-painted fingernails.

Then, to my amazement, the face
that I hadn’t been able to forget was close to mine.

“You’re okay. We’re going to
hospital.”

It was Lucy Green, the girl I’d
met in the lift yesterday. The girl I was obsessed with. The woman whose face I
couldn’t get out of my mind. The woman who hated me.

What was she doing at my house?

I closed my eyes, felt the effect
of the drugs carry me into oblivion.

*
* * *

Much later, when I was sitting up
in a hospital bed, she explained what had happened.

“I came to see you to apologise,”
she began. “When I spoke to the sister on Edith Grendel, she explained that the
policewoman had told me why you’d come. I had no right to talk to you like
that, or to leap to ridiculous conclusions. I suppose it’s the stress of being
a single woman, living alone in this town, that’s got me so uptight. The
killer’s got us all looking over our shoulders, panicking at the thought of
being his next victim. The policewoman said it was thanks to you that Caroline
Lawrence is alive. And that you’d only come to find out how she was.”

“How did you know where I live?”
I asked

“I’ve got a friend in the
hospital IT department. You were admitted last year for a hernia operation, and
your address was in the system.”

“You broke the law.”

She smiled. “Lucky for you I
did.”

“If you hadn’t come I might have
bled to death in here on my own.”

“The front door was wide open –
it looked as if you’d had a burglary, so I just walked in. I could tell
something was wrong. Sorry about your house, or cottage or whatever you call
it.

“It’s kind of an almost-house. It
was once the gatehouse to a large mansion, and I converted it into a home.”

“Well I’m afraid they’ve made a
bit of a mess.”

I stayed in hospital overnight,
and in the morning my new friend came to see me, just after the police had
interviewed me. They didn’t hold out much hope of catching my attackers, and I
didn’t imagine they’d make too many efforts to try.

She insisted on driving me home.

Lucy was wearing a tight-fitting
bright red coat, its brass buttons fastened up to the neck against the cold
wind. Her hands were slim fingered, the nails trimmed square but the same pink
I remembered seeing at close quarters when I woke up in the ambulance. She
drove fast and decisively, frowning in concentration as she stared at the road
ahead.

“How’s Caroline Lawrence?” I
asked her.

“Recovering well, apparently. The
police have talked to her. I haven’t been around her ward to see her, but I
gather she’s being discharged soon. Someone told me she wants to see you, they
say, to thank you for what you did.”

“For nearly killing her?”

“For saving her life. Make no
mistake, someone was after her, and might have caught her. It was a clear
country road at night. She knows you could hardly have been able to stop in
time.”

“Small consolation for killing
someone.”

“Of course. It would have been an
awful thing to live with.”

“It is.”

“You mean it’s happened to you
before?”

“Yes, a long time ago.” I thought
of Martin Gallica, the man I’d accidentally run down and killed when he’d
dashed out into the road under the influence of cocaine and alcohol. How I
still remembered his face staring at me through the windscreen in the seconds
before he died. I stifled the memory.

“Hope you don’t mind, but I’d
rather not talk about it,” I said.

“Sure. We’ve all got memories we
lock away. And I’m sorry for being such a bitch the other day, the ridiculous
misunderstanding that was all my fault. I really am sorry about all that’s
happened.”

“Well I met you. Something good
came out of it.”

“Good? After the way I behaved I
wouldn’t have blamed you for never wanting to speak to me again.”

We drove up Hedgers Lane, the
narrow road leading to the Gatehouse, which once marked the entrance to the
Adelaide Manor, long since demolished to make way for an estate of luxury
flats. She pulled up behind my car in the front yard. “Will you come in for a
minute?” I said.

“Sure you don’t want to be left
alone to crash out?”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t
sleep at the moment. My mind’s buzzing, and everything hurts too much.”

“It’s none of my business, but
you told me that these characters who beat you senseless want you to stop
writing some gangster’s memoirs.”

“That’s right.”

“And that if you don’t, they’re
going to kill you.”

“That’s what they said.”

“So you’re abandoning it?”

“I made an agreement, signed a
contract. The book’s almost finished. All I can do now is try and get my
publisher to accelerate production as fast as they can. Once it’s in the shops
the threat’s over.”

She stared at me aghast. “You
mean you’re going to defy them?

I nodded, the movement making me
wince with pain. “Next time I’ll be more prepared.”

*
* * *

It turned out that Lucy had only
lived in Canterbury since May. We were sitting in my living room, Lucy on the
battered old sofa, while I was in my favourite old armchair.

“So you’re a nurse at the hospital?”I
asked.

“Oh no. I just volunteer there
one day a week. I’m actually a miniaturist.”

“What’s that?”

“I make dolls’ houses, as well as
furniture for dolls’ houses.”

“Somebody buys
furniture
for dolls’ houses?”

She nodded seriously. “There’s a
big market – particularly in the States. I charge a lot for my pieces, but I
have to – people don’t realise how long they take to make, how much patience
you need.”

“And skill, I should think.”

“It certainly takes patience.”

“So where were you before you
came here?”

“Cambridge. But a friend here
told me she was going to Australia for a couple of years but didn’t want to
sell her flat and workshop. She lets me have it at a very reasonable rent.”

I knew the town pretty well,
though my undergraduate days had been spent at New College, Oxford. “Do you
like Canterbury?”I asked eventually.

“Yes and no. I love the Kent
countryside, and of course the Cathedral. If I get upset, I only have to go
there, sit for a while and I feel this overwhelming sense of peace. That’s what
is so awful about the Bible Killer making references to Thomas Becket,
Canterbury’s martyr, and his associations with the Cathedral. The idea that
somebody so twisted and evil could refer to a saint, to actually try to copy
the way Thomas was brutalised after his death.”

“Yes. But apart from that, you
still like the town?”

“It’s okay. But I haven’t really
settled here yet. It’s hard to get to know people.”

“No boyfriend?”

She shook her head. “Actually
there was a guy at Cambridge who I thought was
the
one. But, well, we
had our differences. That was one reason for wanting a complete fresh start up
here. Since I came I’ve been working non-stop. Stuck in my workshop most of the
time. Volunteering at the hospital is the only time I get out and meet people.
As well as trying to be useful, I thought it might be a way to make friends,
but it hasn’t worked out that way. Everyone has their own life. They’re all
busy. Nurses aren’t all the welcoming kind-hearted angels you see on the TV
soaps. I’m not into partying and drinking, which seem to be the main
preoccupations of the younger ones, and the older people have their own
families, they don’t want to be bothered with me.”

She frowned as she stared at me.
“Can I ask you something personal?”

“Go ahead.”

“How can you bear to  work with
the kind of people you write about? Vicious gangsters. Killers. Corrupt
policemen.”

“I’d like to be winning the
Pulitzer Prize for literature, but it’s not going to happen. This genre is what
I do best, it’s what I know about. I’m also a Behavioural Investigative
Adviser, that’s what used to be called a criminal profiler, though I only get
jobs now and again. As for the people I deal with, I don’t have that much to do
with them – usually just dig around for the facts and deal with them in my own
way. Interview people for a short period – victims mostly, perfectly nice
people as a rule.”

“Such as Sean Michael Boyd?”

“He’s an exception. I’ve had
situations like the Boyd problem before. You just have to keep things in
perspective.”

Her mouth twisted in distaste.
“But writing about criminals and murderers. It must be horrid.”

I loved the way she said
‘horrid’. Such a quaint, almost antique word that I hadn’t heard in years.

“My theory is that people are
fascinated by evil,” I explained. “Perhaps because it’s so rare. I think what
appeals to the readers is the loss of control. Maybe we’re all fascinated about
doing something violent to some hate figure, but of course we never do it.
Civilisation, a sense of right and wrong, a conscience, whatever you care to
call it, stops us breaking the rules. But a sociopath, or sometimes even an
autistic person, has no conception of conscience. It’s hate without a
handbrake.”

“And people like to read about
violence?”

“Yes they do. I believe it’s the
ultimate ‘What if?’ syndrome. Everyone wonders what would happen if they lost
control and went around killing anyone they didn’t like. That’s the fascinating
question: how a killer can just plumb the depths of cruelty and viciousness
without feeling any kind of remorse? Some of them are literally killing
machines with the brakes off.”

“Doesn’t it depress you? Make you
feel as if you’re, I don’t know,
tainted
somehow?”

I smiled as I shook my head. “I
have a friend, the true-crime writer Douglas Hosegood. Great man. He retired
long ago, but he helped me when I was starting out, writing the book about Fred
West, the man who murdered his own daughters. West was a conundrum. Undoubtedly
what anyone would call a truly evil man, and yet he had charm, a lot of people who
didn’t know him well, liked him. He could cheerfully slice up the bodies of his
daughters, yet while he was in prison they say he was a coward, scared of being
bullied. Workmates who joined in his banter thought he was a great guy, always
lively and cheerful, up for a laugh, housewives enjoyed flirting with him. Mind
you, discovering all the unbelievable things that man did, it’s true, I found
that it was really upsetting me, and I confided how I felt to Douglas. He
explained, no matter how incredibly ghastly the crimes are you have to report,
you have to keep it strictly professional. You never ever get involved, you
don’t even allow yourself to have an opinion. You’re an observer, an evaluator
of the facts, nothing more.”

“I certainly couldn’t do it. I’d
get too involved with the victims.”

“Sure, in spite of my best
efforts I can’t help empathising to some extent. But the good thing is,
whatever terrible indignity and cruelty has been committed, it’s over and done
with, the beast has been caught, and no one is still suffering.”

“Except the relatives of the
victims.”

I nodded. “But the victims
themselves, they’re at peace. And, with any luck, there’s usually the
satisfaction of knowing that the perpetrator has been punished or he’s already
dead.”

“With any luck.”

We talked about all kinds of
things. She was interested in my work, and I showed her Douglas Hosegood’s
first book – he’d signed the old copy he’d given me – and she smiled as she
leafed through the pages.
Shocking Killers
had been published in 1984,
and was one of my most treasured possessions. It reminded me of dear old
Douglas, who was now enjoying his retirement in Paris with his wife, Cecile,
who had been a well-known poet in the ‘70s. As Lucy looked at the chapters on
the
Wolfman of Amsterdam
, and the
Killer Postman of Carlisle
, I
told her about how Douglas had drilled into me the principles of never letting
an urgent deadline get in the way of integrity. And never letting even the most
awful murder upset you personally. His logic kept me sane in the long lonely
dark hours when I was struggling to relate the unspeakable antics of killers,
criminals and psychopaths.

Lucy left at around twelve. I
took her phone number and promised to call her.

My bathroom had a full-length
mirror on the wall beside the bath. I looked at my face and didn’t like what I
saw. I needed a shave, my hair looked wild, and there were dark shadows under
my eyes. My ex-wife used to say I was good looking – regular features, blue
eyes, and at thirty six I still have all my own hair – it’s blond, a legacy of
my Viking ancestors, according to my grandmother. My nose had been broken
during my days as an amateur bare-knuckle boxer, but the break isn’t too
obvious, more of a charismatic slope to the left, or so I kid myself. I have a
small scar along my chin, that in cold weather assumes a rawness and redness,
making it stand out like a welt. Someone once told me I looked a bit like
Robert Redford in his younger days. But somehow I don’t think Robert would be
best pleased.