And the last time his boss’s arse hurt, Silas caught a serial killer, but he stays quiet.
‘Twenty-four hours,’ Ward confirms. ‘And that’s it. I don’t want Rob being unfairly framed for anything.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Silas says, smiling at Strover.
97
Kate
Kate sits in the back of the stationary car, staring ahead. She can’t bring herself to look at him. Or at the woman. Is it Rob? She needs to hear his voice before she sees him.
He steps forward and opens the rear door on her side. She closes her eyes.
‘How was your journey?’ he asks.
It sounds like Rob.
‘Shocking,’ she says and turns to look at him.
It’s not Rob. Rob was always awkward, restless, buzzing with a warm, infectious energy. This man is focused and withdrawn, dead-eyed.
She manages to step out of the air-conditioned car into the warmth of a French summer’s day, hoping her legs don’t buckle beneath her. Waves break somewhere below the house, seagulls cry above. For four months in Cornwall, this was the soundtrack to her happiness. Now these noises fill her with dread. Is the house the same inside too?
She forces herself to look at him. It’s easier than before. He’s no longer an unknown impostor, no more not-Rob. He’s Gil from Thailand – Gilmour Martin, Rob’s doppelgänger. She can’t believe she slept with this man. She wheels away in disgust at the thought. The tarnished memory. Rob was right to be worried. They both were. His past has finally caught up with him, just as he feared. She prays that Rob, her Rob, is still alive, wherever he is, whatever this man has done with him. If only she had pushed Rob harder when he first mentioned his fear of doppelgängers, persuaded him to tell her more. She might have been able to do something, help him, save them both.
And then she turns to the woman. It’s like standing in front of a mirror. Kate glances at the ground. It’s early afternoon, a high sun. No shadow. Her stomach lurches. And this must be her own doppelgänger. She thinks again of the Rossetti painting in Rob’s office in Cornwall, the couple confronting their doppelgängers. How They Met Themselves.
‘Meet Catrine,’ he says.
The woman seems subdued, broken, dark rings below her eyes. Kate hopes she doesn’t look that unwell. Catrine is wearing a summer dress from Ghost, identical to the one that Rob left for her in the wardrobe, and her hair is up, like Kate’s, exposing a similar neckband. It looks so innocent on someone else. Innocuous. Sporty. Kate shudders again at the pain it inflicted.
‘Catrine’s learnt that life here is more comfortable if you smile,’ he continues. His Irish accent is cold, indifferent. Fake. If it were Rob, he would already have kissed her by now, held her close, checked his phone.
Catrine forces a watery smile. The two women stare at each other, each still trying to take in the other’s appearance.
‘I found her in Finland,’ he says. ‘Amazing how easy it is to track down a double in the digital age.’
Poor woman. Kate can’t bear to think what she’s already endured, the pain that lies ahead for both of them.
‘What have you done with him?’ she asks quietly.
‘Who?’ he asks, taking the car key and remote from Putin.
‘Rob.’
He shakes his head and turns to Catrine. ‘Kate appears to be suffering from a rare delusion called Capgras,’ he says to her. ‘At least that’s what the esteemed Dr Varma believed.’
Believed? She doesn’t like the past tense. Ajay also had his doubts, said how rare Capgras was. It was hardly a formal diagnosis. She thinks back to their conversation in the London apartment. Either the place was bugged, as she thought, or Ajay briefed him afterwards.
‘Sufferers are convinced that the one they love most in life has been replaced by an impostor,’ he continues, holding up his hands in innocent protest.
‘Why are we wearing these collars?’ Kate asks, touching her neck. ‘Rob would never have done this. It’s barbaric. Demeaning.’
She looks at him again, searching his blue eyes for a trace of the man she loved, in case she’s got this all wrong.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Not everyone understands what I’m trying to do here…’
Everyone? She glances around. The place feels empty, isolated. Up behind the main house, further along the headland, another building, long and low, is cut into the side of the cliffs and linked by a gravel pathway. It looks more industrial, like a warehouse. She tries to picture the replica property in Cornwall. The warehouse here has replaced the tennis court. Behind it, the blades of a solitary turbine turn idly in the sea breeze.
‘… but it soon becomes clear why they’ve been chosen,’ he adds, blinking.
Catrine throws her a look, her eyes dark with meaning.
‘And, really, there’s no point in trying to run,’ he says.
Jesus. He saw the note, knows that Ajay tried to warn her. She prays that Ajay is OK.
‘I need your passport,’ he says.
She doesn’t hear his words at first, or at least she doesn’t understand their meaning, and he has to ask her again. She finds the passport in her bag and hands it to him.
‘The driver will show you around,’ he says, giving her passport to Catrine. ‘We have to go.’
He steps forward to kiss her. She jerks her head away as he holds her firmly by the wrist. The neckband remote is in his other hand. She wants to spit in his face, but he doesn’t try to kiss her.
‘Ajay said that you’ve made a full recovery,’ he whispers in her ear. He’s sounding so like Rob again. Tender, kind. And then he speaks again, this time in fluent French. ‘Je n’ai jamais voulu tomber amoureux de toi.’
Kate’s whole body starts to shake as he chucks the remote to Putin and gets into the car with Catrine. He never meant to fall in love with her.
98
Silas
‘Have a read of this,’ Silas says, passing Strover back her iPad. ‘It’s the article that was on Dr Varma’s desk.’
They are sitting in a café around the corner from Queen’s Square. Silas has already given one statement to the Met and the senior investigating officer wants to talk to him again shortly, find out why a prominent neuropsychiatrist was shot dead in cold blood in his central London consulting room. Silas has a good idea. Varma knew too much and had already started to talk, telling Jake where Kate was being taken. It’s what else Dr Varma knew that’s worrying Silas.
He watches Strover as she reads from the iPad. There were a number of interesting documents on Dr Varma’s desk, but two in particular caught his eye. One was a sheet of results for a recognition test he’d conducted at the weekend on Kate – something to do with a P3 brainwave. Another was a printout of a story headlined ‘The Frozen Addicts’. He took pictures of them both on his iPhone and called up the article on Strover’s iPad while she was fetching the coffees.
‘Seems like the drug that the addicts took induced an advanced state of Parkinson’s,’ Silas says.
‘This is awful,’ Strover says, scrolling through the article.