Doppelganger (8 page)

“How are you Millie?”

“My name’s Millicent, and you
know it.”

“I forgot.”

“Like you forgot that once you
were a reputable BIA, before you sold out to write those crappy books. You’d
better clear off, Jack, you’re not welcome here. You’ve made it clear what your
attitude is to the police. You’re either with us or against us.”

“Who’s us? You and your pals in
the dirty old caravan?”

She shrugged. “I have loyalty.
I’d never write anything defamatory about a retired police officer.”

I turned to look at the figure
striding towards us, who’d just come out of the caravan. DCI Fulford looked
even more angry than the last time I’d seen him.

“Dr Lockwood was snooping,”
Millicent Veitch said, smirking as she turned towards the newcomer. “I was just
about to ask someone to escort him away.”

“My God, you’ve got some nerve!”
The Scottish DCI glared at me for a moment, twisting his lips into that
trademark scowl. “Millicent worked with you on a case once. She’s been keeping
us amused about it.”

I thought back to the one time
I’d worked with Dr Millicent Veitch for another force. A case of domestic
abuse, where Millicent had argued forcibly that the estranged  husband of the
murdered woman had ticked all the psychological boxes as her killer. I’d argued
that he’d been innocent, but no one had listened to me, and the husband, Damon
Allbright, had been sent down for 16 years, thanks to incriminating evidence
belatedly found at his flat. A month afterwards he was freed when it was
discovered that the evidence had been planted by the actual killer, who’d
killed himself and left an explanatory note. That, of course, was the nub of
our antipathy: Millicent was one of those people who’ll always hate you if
you’re right about something. But our animosity was based on more than that.
Our professional disagreement cloaked a more primeval feeling of friction
between us that I had never really understood myself.

“I don’t want to see you anywhere
near here,
ever again
, Dr Lockwood.” Fulford said.

“You don’t have jurisdiction over
a car park, Chief Inspector.”

“Don’t get clever with me, I’ve
got your measure, laddie! Come along to try and get some gossip have ye?”

“I was hoping–”

“Aye, I know what you were hoping
for, to get a glimpse inside the Incident Room. If you don’t leave this minute,
you’ll be arrested, and if I ever see you hanging around here again, the same
applies.”

As I left, I thought I noticed
Fulford’s hand glide surreptitiously along Millie’s arm, and she responded by
moving a little closer to the senior officer.

I had a beer in the Queen’s Arms
on the way home. It was around lunchtime, and I knew Dave Parsons often popped
in. My hunch paid off.

“Fuck off Jack, do you want to
get me sacked?” Dave said when he saw me, looking round furtively to check no
one was watching.

“No one’s going to know, Dave.
Maybe I can help the investigation?”

“How?”

I shrugged. “I’m a BIA, remember,
and if your assessment of the Veitch woman matches mine – that she’s a
head-in-the-clouds academic with no real crime hunter’s instinct, maybe you
could do with a fresh viewpoint?”

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“Sit down, mate. If you give me
anything I swear I won’t reveal my source.”

Dave hesitated, scratched his
long aquiline nose, then pointed towards one of the private cubicles at the
back of the pub. “Five minutes is all you get.”

He told me about the latest
victim, Rebecca Fenton. This time her head had been more or less pulverised,
literally smashed to a wet, fragments-of-skull-filled, mess, most likely by a
hammer or heavy metal object. This time, as well as a Bible laid open on her
chest, there was a copy of TS Elliott’s book Murder in the Cathedral, and a note
saying, “As Thomas died, so did she”.
Murder in
the Cathedral
is
a dramatised account by the famous English poet T S Elliot, summarising the
life and death of St Thomas. The shock and outrage of St Thomas’s barbaric
death and his subsequent sainthood, was the reason why Canterbury has been a
magnet for pilgrims since medieval times.

Apart from the method of her
murder, Dave couldn’t tell me much more. Anna wasn’t a religious person, had no
affiliation to any church that her family knew of, so why someone should
compare her to one of the world’s most famous sainted martyrs was anyone’s
guess.

“Millie V reckons he’s someone
perfectly ordinary, probably a dull character, who can hide behind a façade of
respectability,” Dave concluded, “and he’s obviously a religious obsessive,
though that may be something he keeps private.”

“And what do you think?”

“She’s pissing in the wind like
the rest of us, but faffs around inventing bollocks to try and impress Fulford.
A lot’s riding on this case for Fulford. He hates the media, as you may have
gathered, and he’s not big on police politics. He retires next year, and if he
could solve this case it would be a massive boost to his ego, whereas if he
fucks it up he’ll be remembered as the incompetent twat who let people be murdered
unnecessarily. Underneath his bluster he’s shit-scared of messing up, and he
can’t take the pressure. He’s nervous. Jittery.” Dave sipped his beer. “And
that kind of feeling rubs off on the team. He bawls people out for no reason,
he gets excited if there’s the tiniest slip-up. Between you and me Jack, I
haven’t got a good feeling about this business. We need more troops, more
resources, the budget won’t stretch to the overtime we need. For instance,
there was a string of similar killings in Nottingham a few years ago, and I
think we should liaise with the team working on that, see if there are
similarities. Fulford won’t even consider it. He’s so petrified of getting
things wrong, he’s scared of taking any initiatives.”

“That’s bad.”

“It’s not bad. It’s disastrous.”

*
* * *

The phone was ringing when I
opened the door to The Gatehouse. It was silent for a few moments, so I thought
it was a wrong number. But just as I was about to hang up, a gravelly voice
whispered. “You taking the hint, Jack? Are you abandoning the book?”

 “Who is this?”

“Yes or no, you fucker?”

“Tell me who you are.”

“Does that mean you’re not giving
it up? We meant what we said. You won’t know when it’s going to happen. A
bullet or a knife. Or you’ll get pushed under a train–”

“You’ve made your point.”

“Then make the right decision,
mate.”

When the phone rang again I
snatched it up quickly, heart racing. It was Douglas Hosegood’s wife, Cecile.

“Cecile,” I said in surprise.
“Good to hear from you.”

I’d always considered her a
lovely person. Naturally kind and charming and also highly intelligent, Cecile
was a reasonably accomplished poet, well known on both sides of the Atlantic.
She’d always been kind to me, protective in the same way that Douglas, my old
friend the writer who’d helped my early career, had been. Something in her
voice scared me.

“It’s Douglas.” I could tell she
was close to tears. “You know he had a heart bypass operation five years ago?
In the last couple of months he’s gone down and down. They say he’s got to have
another bypass as soon as possible. He’s got it into his head that he’s not
going to get through the operation. He wants to see you one last time.”

My heart sank. Douglas dying? It
couldn’t be the case. My memories of Douglas were of a tall strong man, his
silver hair and beard giving him a king-like aura of power and patriarchal
strength. I’d pictured him enjoying himself in Paris for years to come.

“Will you come?” Cecile asked.

“I’ll be with you tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Jack. Thank you!”

I dozed on the Eurostar, having
taken the train to London’s St Pancras station. Flying would have been quicker,
but there’d been industrial action at the major airports, and I didn’t want to
risk unforeseen delays. There was something soporific about the blackness as we
entered the Channel Tunnel. And I had the dream again, the frightful terrifying
dream of the shadowy, faceless figure above me, the pressure on my neck,
everything going dark. I woke up abruptly, sweating with fear. But everything
was okay, the rumble-bump of the train as we shot through green fields with odd
looking electricity pylons spanning the grassland, the occasional picture-book
farmhouse punctuating the vast green fields. Why do you never see such weird
triangular shaped electricity pylons in England, I wondered?

I ordered something to eat, and
the sandwich and coffee tasted of nothing at all as I worried about Douglas.
After I’d eaten I closed my eyes again, trying to remember my most vivid
memories of my friend. I hadn’t known him that long, but he’d helped me so much
when I tackled my first True Crime book, that I thought of him as a good
friend. 

It had been at my first book
launch, at a smart hotel in London’s West End. Douglas giving a speech about
his protégé, Jack, who, he was convinced, was going to be a bestselling author,
given time. As he spoke I remembered the hours he’d spent with me, advising me
on the Fred West book, telling me what angles to delve into, the best way to make
it an entertaining read. And in time, Douglas’s prediction had almost been
correct. Though I’d never penned a bestseller, Douglas had helped me to carve
out a decent living, doing work I enjoyed. Without him I might easily have
tackled my first book wrongly, so that it flopped, instead of being a success.

The environs of Paris crept up on
me like clawing fingers tearing my heart. Douglas might be close to death. I
couldn't take it in. I couldn’t accept it.

Cecile welcomed me into their
town house in the 11th Arrondissement, along Boulevard Richard Lenoir, only a
short walk from the Place de la Bastille. As I emerged from the Bréguet Sabin
metro station I remembered the 18th-Century, German-designed graceful buildings
in that area, the surprisingly traffic-free roads with their lovely
multi-storey houses and hotels and apartment blocks interspersed with rows of
neat shops. Douglas  met me at the door and he appeared in better shape than
I’d been expecting. He wanted to take a break outside, he told Cecile. He
wanted a walk.

So, with Douglas hobbling along
at a snail’s pace, dressed up in a warm coat with a red silk scarf, and using a
wooden walking stick with a large bulbous handle, we walked out and down the
steps of the Breuget Sabin metro and emerged at St-Michel Notre Dame station,
and walked up beside the river, then crossed the Petit Pont bridge to the Ile
de la Cité and the square in front of Notre Dame cathedral, where we found a
vacant bench near the entrance to the Crypte Archéologique, the large excavated
area under the parvis where there were the remains of the original cathedral St
Etienne and other ancient streets and houses dating back to Gallo-Roman days.
It was approaching twilight and the grand cathedral with its three grand arched
entrances and soaring nave was like a benign friend in the background. We were
surrounded by tourists, and it struck me that this was what Douglas wanted, to
be with people, not cooped up in his house. Beside us were some bushes where a
couple of tiny birds perched on branches. Douglas took some bread from his
pocket, gave a slice to me, and we threw crumbs to the little birds as we
talked.

“So, Jack, you think you’ve found
the love of your life.” He smiled.

“If you met her you’d
understand,” I told him. And, in the selfish way that people who are newly in
love behave, I rambled on about Lucy, her good points, her bad points, how I
was hoping we could settle down together as soon as her current assignment was
completed. I even told him about her foreshortened third finger, though
goodness knows how that came into the conversation.

“Jack, my boy, you’ve really got
it bad.” Douglas stared ahead, smiling to himself.

“If only you could meet her,
Douglas. You’d love her, I know you would.”

“I will meet her, perhaps at your
wedding. God willing.”

Lucy’s photograph, that I had on
my phone, had met with his approval. “
Serious woman, Jack, not some flighty
piece
.”  Though, looking back on all that’s happened since, I’ve tried to
remember everything he’d said or done, but I can’t. Parts of our talk are just
gone forever.  And that’s the saddest thing of all.

“The really crazy thing is,
Douglas,” I wittered on, “When I met her, I felt as if I’d met her before
somewhere. Yet I know I haven’t. It sounds ridiculous I know.”

“And you’re going to tell me that
you knew her in another life? Reincarnation?” He grinned. “Jack, you idiot, I
give up on you. Next you’ll be giving up writing true crime and going in for
Mills and Boon romances.” The smile vanished as soon as it had arrived, and he
frowned for a second. “But you know, funnily enough, when I saw her photo, I
myself thought there was something familiar about her face, and I’m not even in
love with her! Maybe we both knew her in a former life?”

And sitting there with Douglas
looking up at the grand edifice of Notre Dame, I prayed that this wouldn’t be
my last memory of Douglas.

“All we’ve done is talk about
me,” I said, guiltily.

“That’s what I want to do,”
Douglas said quietly. “I’ve had nothing but doctors and consultants and
surgeons going on at me ever since this damned business started a couple of
weeks ago, and I’m sick and tired of medical matters. I just don’t want to
think about it.” He paused to catch his breath, now clearly exhausted by the
walk. “I want to try and remember what it was like when I could stand up
straight and stride around and breathe deeply and look at beautiful people and
beautiful places and eat decent food and enjoy a few drinks. Ask anyone who’s
physically ill, and it’s only their outside that’s ill, inside they’re healthy
as they’ve ever been, their mind is healthy. That’s what I want to pretend,
Jack my boy, just for this one night, that’s what I want to pretend.”

It was then I noticed just how
ill he was, how much weight he’d lost, the rings under his eyes. And the
breathlessness.

“You just don’t know what it
feels like to be tired all the time,” he went on. “Everything’s an effort. The
strain of fighting to get your breath. Of worrying about Cecile worrying about
me. I just want to go in, get it done with, and, with God’s help, come out of
it the other side. And if it’s the other thing, well so be it.”

“You’ll get through this,
Douglas, I know you will.”

“I’m not kidding myself, Jack,
believe me. I died once already for half an hour. I didn’t tell Cecile, but I
had the whole works, you know? The tunnel, the bright light, the overwhelming
sense of peace. And I’ve got to say it wasn’t so bad. See, I’ve already bought
the ticket and waited on the platform. I just don’t particularly want to get on
the train. Not yet. Got too much I want to do.”

We sat in silence for a few
moments. I put my hand on his shoulder and gently squeezed, and at my touch he
cleared his throat noisily. It struck me that just as things could go the wrong
way for him tomorrow, they could equally well go wrong for me too. Until I’d
gone to the Welsh castle, I was more or less a moving target. 

I was aware that death, for me,
could arrive in a number of ways: a bullet from a man on a motorbike when I was
wandering along the road thinking about something else. My car being rammed
from behind, followed by a sudden ambush. Maybe even a knife in my back while I
was standing in the middle of a crowd. Living for the next month was going to
be a rollercoaster of fear, possibly a case of several touch-and-goes. It was
so ironic that just when I had the prospect of a wife and, in the course of
time maybe even a child, held in front of me, something real and wonderful to
live for, the whole caboosh might be snatched away from me before it had even
begun.

Poor old Douglas. Dear old
Douglas. Why was I thinking about myself at such a time, when I should have
been thinking of nothing but him?

“The House of God.” Douglas said
quietly, looking up towards Notre Dame. “I’ve never been much of a believer,
you know that? But when you come face to face with your own mortality, somehow
it all seems to make sense. Cecile has always been a good Christian, but me,
I’ve had my doubts.”

“Notre Dame Cathedral. And Sacré
Coeur,” I mused. “Seeing buildings like this always confirms what you once said
to me.”

“What was that?”

“There’s always more good than
evil in the world. And good always wins in the end.”

“Sure. But what I didn’t say was
you can never be absolutely sure which is the good and which is the evil until
it’s too late.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will Jack. One day. One day
when your heart’s been broken a few more times. Then you’ll understand.”

I didn’t think about his words or
their significance, until long afterwards, when my life had catapulted into the
maelstrom.

And that’s how I’ll always
remember him. Dear old Douglas. Sitting peacefully, feeding the tiny birds in
Notre Dame Square. And I somehow concertina the picture in my mind so it
expands outwards and I see the whole of that part of Paris, there with Douglas
in the middle of the beauty of it all. The Pont Neuf bridge and the lights that
were twinkling in the buildings. The Quai des Orfevres with the three-storey
high paintings on the huge windows. The long line of regimented golden
buildings with their magnificent yellow-lit fenestration ranged along the
riverbank. The lights dancing off the river and twinkling in the stained glass
of the cathedral.

Paris at its best. Douglas at his
best.

Life.

*
* * *

I remember talking to a man who’d
seen a lot of active service in the Second World War. He’d been telling me
about his friend whom he’d had to leave seriously injured in a field hospital,
and I asked him about their last conversation – for he’d told me that they’d
both known that the other man was going to die. I asked him what were the final
words he’d said to him. And my old friend had said, “Oh I can’t remember
really. I think as I was leaving, my last word to him was “goodbye”.”

That’s it really. Prosaic
mumblings are all we’ve got in life. At least I’d told Douglas that I loved
him, and he’d been embarrassed. And while it would be nice to think that some
of the last words I said to Douglas were pearls of wisdom, they weren’t. Just
goodbye, be seeing you soon, you’ll be okay. And he went along with the
charade, when he, wise old bird that he was, knew very well that he’d never see
me again. 

And after that night, things
started moving fast.

Nothing was ever the same again.
And absolutely nothing was the way it seemed.

I sometimes look upon that day in
Paris as the real beginning of my nightmare.

Because the events that turned my
world upside down smashed into my life, just like an accident, completely out
of the blue.

And even now I’m still living
with the consequences.

*
* * *

I got home the following day,
Wednesday, worn out and aching for bed. The flashing light was on my
answerphone. A message from Lucy, wondering how I’d got on. And another one:

“Jack? This is Douglas.”

The message was timed last night,
about 8 o’clock. My mobile had been switched off, so he’d been unable to reach
me on the journey home.

“Something you have to know
about,” Douglas’s deep rasping voice hurried on. He sounded upset. Very upset.
“I’m ninety per cent certain, but, my God, Jack, how I’m hoping I’m wrong.
Can’t go into it on a message. I’m going to courier a parcel to Truecrime –
that’ll explain everything. Looks like I won’t be speaking to you until after
the operation, so promise me you’ll
fetch that parcel
, soon as you can.
You must get that parcel urgently, Jack, you could be in serious danger.”

The message ended. What did it
mean? Douglas wasn’t prone to fanciful ideas, but he’d sounded scared and
concerned. Whatever would it be about? Luckily, Truecrime’s London offices
weren’t too far out of my way to Wales. I’d call in on the way, I’d told
Douglas all about my trouble with Sean Boyd's people, and maybe he had some
ideas about what I could do, maybe he was even in touch with police who knew
more about Sean Boyd than I did, and there was something in the parcel that
could connect Boyd with someone or something. If it wasn’t about that, I
couldn’t imagine what it could mean.

Next I phoned Douglas’s home, in
case Cecile had some news about the operation. No answer, just the answerphone.
Of course. She would be at the hospital, waiting.

I called the hospital, and after
muttering in my schoolboy French, luckily someone came on the line who spoke
English. I was told that Mr Hosegood’s operation had gone as well as could be
expected and he was recovering in the intensive care ward.

I pressed the disconnect button,
a wave of joy and relief washing over me. So far so good.

You could be in serious danger
.
Douglas had said.

I’d told him all about the Sean
Boyd situation, so Douglas knew that I was already in serious danger, so why on
earth was he adding to it? Maybe, in his heightened emotional state the night
before his big op, he’d exaggerated things out of all importance.

*
* * *

Next morning, after a long lie-in
I started my journey to Wales. By midday I was on the M25, heading for London.
I pulled into a service station and took the risk of extracting the Glock
automatic from its Sainsbury shopping bag and placing it under my car’s seat.
Then I phoned Stu, telling him I was on my way to Glamorgan to interview the
father of Annie Marie Molloy, the first Bible Killer victim, who’d agreed to
give me some background on the murdered woman. After that, the plan was to go
south to Llantrissant Manor, Godfrey’s house in the valley near Brecon, to settle
in and get started on my work. Finally I rang Ann Yates  at Truecrime.