‘How good? He’s a freak. More than a hundred IDs in the past year. Don’t know about you, but I’ve been twenty years in the force and can count the number of people I’ve identified on one hand.’
Silas’s own record is not much better. Maybe two hands. ‘And he’s never disappeared before?’ he asks.
‘Never. Loves his job, his family. Not like him at all.’
49
Jake
It’s been an hour since Jake ended his online chat with Kirby and he is still struggling to process what Rob’s old colleague told him. He’s been down to check on the boat again, harvesting some wild garlic from the towpath on the way back, and he is now in Bex’s kitchen, rustling up something to eat. Cooking has always been his way of relieving stress.
He finds a wooden chopping board and starts to slice some shallots he found in a cupboard, thinking again about what Kirby said. He had to delete the message thread, which means he’s got nothing to read through again, no evidence that any of their chat actually happened. It all seems too unreal, the beach party in Thailand far away in time and place.
Should he ring Kate? Confess that he logged into her Facebook account and conducted a conversation with an old friend of her new man? He can’t. She’d murder him. On the other hand, she might welcome the information, given her current obsession with doubles.
His phone rings before he can decide whether to call her. It’s Kate. Fuck. She must know already about Facebook. Rob saw Kate online and presumably mentioned it to her. He lets it ring out. And then she rings again. She always used to do that, knew when he was ignoring her calls. If he doesn’t answer it now, he knows she’ll keep ringing until he does.
‘Kate?’ he says tentatively.
‘Have you been logging into my Facebook account?’ She’s angry, fuming, like she was the night of her accident.
‘No,’ Jake says, protesting. He should have switched off his phone. ‘What’s happened? Is everything OK?’
‘You’re lying.’
How come Kate and Bex always know?
‘OK, so I logged into your account by accident. I thought I was logging into mine.’
‘You’re still lying.’
And she’s still angry.
There’s silence as she waits for him to come clean.
‘Jake?’ she asks, her voice marginally less hostile.
‘I’m here.’
He closes his eyes, knowing there’s worse to come before the storm blows itself out. He picks up a handful of mushrooms and begins to slice them.
‘Why did you log into my account?’ she asks.
There’s no way out. ‘I didn’t read any of your private messages,’ he says.
‘Oh, that’s OK, then.’ She’s furious again. ‘What do you expect me to say, Jake? I know you hacked into my Facebook account, but that’s alright because you didn’t read any of my messages? Jesus, and you wonder why I wanted out.’
Neither of them speaks for a while, all the years of their relationship stewing in the exhausted silence. Maybe it really was best that they split up. He feels empty. There’s nothing left to say or give. He starts to chop the wild garlic.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks quietly.
‘Cooking.’ He pauses. ‘Wild garlic carbonara.’ It was one of her favourite dishes.
‘Something awful happened down on the beach tonight,’ she says in a low voice, breaking the silence. He can sense she’s close to tears.
‘Tell me. What was it?’
She explains about the dead barman.
‘And he’d been shot in the head?’
He feels so sorry for Kate. She moved to Cornwall to get away from that world, her police work. It must have been awful for her. It might also explain her anger. She’s clearly still in shock.
‘Looked like it,’ she says. ‘DI Hart thinks it’s drug-related.’
That would make sense if it was the Bluebell barman. ‘I’m sorry it was you who found him,’ he says.
‘Actually it was Stretch, my dog. Poor little sausage. At least Bex was with me.’
Jake has yet to meet Stretch.
‘I spoke to Bex earlier today,’ he says, changing the subject. ‘She said you’re worried about Rob. That he has a bit of a thing about the double he met in Thailand.’
‘Bex was talking out of turn,’ she says. ‘She also thinks I’m delusional.’
‘She’s concerned for you. We all are.’
Bex must have mentioned Capgras to her. Jake scrapes the ingredients together on the wooden board with a knife.
‘That’s why I logged into your Facebook account,’ he continues.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I wanted to see if anyone in Rob’s past knew what actually happened in Thailand, that’s all.’ He braces himself for her reaction. ‘So I contacted one of his friends.’
‘Contacted? How?’
He tosses the shallots and garlic and mushrooms into the pan, standing back as they fry in the spitting oil.
‘By pretending to be you.’
He screws his eyes tight shut as he waits for the eruption.
‘Me? Fuck you, Jake. Seriously, fuck you. Who? Who did you contact? I can’t believe you did that.’
Jake shakes the pan around until her anger subsides. And then he relates everything that Kirby told him, as much as he can remember about the double called Gil at the party in Thailand. Perhaps he shouldn’t have deleted the chat, then she could have read it for herself.
‘I thought it might help,’ he adds. ‘I’m sorry. It was totally out of order, completely wrong of me, I know.’
It’s a while before Kate speaks, and when she does, she’s calmer, more composed. ‘I knew it was more serious than Rob was letting on. But he doesn’t…’ She pauses, falls quiet.
Jake breathes a sigh of relief. She’s no longer shouting. He finds some pasta in a cupboard, puts it on to boil. They always talked, eventually, if there was a problem, sorting things through in their own muddled way. Except for the time that she saw him on the CCTV cameras with another woman. They’ve never talked about that.
‘Rob doesn’t what?’ he prompts, not sure if he wants to know the answer.
‘He doesn’t burden me with stuff,’ Kate says in a small voice. ‘Makes it hard to understand what’s going on with him.’
She hesitates again. Jake focuses on the pan.
‘Jake?’ Kate asks quietly.
‘I’m still here.’
‘Do you think Rob might… might have been replaced by him? Gil? The man in Thailand?’
‘No, Kate, I don’t.’ Her voice frightens him. She doesn’t sound herself. He pauses, takes a deep breath. ‘Did Bex mention anything about this condition called Capgras? It’s a—’
‘She told me,’ Kate says, interrupting him.
Silence. No one likes to be told they might be delusional.
‘So what do you think?’ he asks.
‘I’m talking to Dr Varma about it.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s a neuropsychiatrist, one of the best in the country. Rob pays.’