‘Was she with Rob?’ Bex asks.
‘I don’t know any more,’ he says, trying to pacify the attendant with an upheld hand. ‘It looked like him. But I think it must have been Gilmour. I’m driving on to the house.’
‘What’s going on, Jake?’
‘I wish I knew,’ he says, getting into the car. The attendant is still cross with him. ‘She looked really unwell, whoever she was,’ he says, driving off. ‘And I think she might have just taken Kate’s place in the world.’
100
Kate
‘We haven’t got long,’ Putin says, opening the front door of the house. ‘I don’t know why you need to see inside, but he insisted.’
‘Who?’ Kate says, following him into the hall, eyes widening. ‘Who insisted?’
‘He likes us to call him “Gil” when he’s here.’
She shakes her head, looking around in disbelief. The interior is identical to the house in Cornwall, down to a copy of the Financial Times neatly folded on the chair in the hall. The same Persian rug on the concrete floor, white lilies in an identical glass vase. And then she hears the unmistakeable sound of little feet. A dachshund comes trotting out of the kitchen to greet them, sniffing at Putin’s leg.
‘He’s a rat,’ he says, kicking the dog away.
Kate winces, desperate to scoop him up in her arms. He looks just like Stretch.
‘What’s his name?’ she asks, leaning down to beckon the whimpering animal, but he’s already retreated to the kitchen. She doesn’t blame him. She’d run away if she could.
‘What does it matter?’ Putin says. He picks up a plastic supermarket bag of what looks like clothing and throws it to her. ‘You need to change into this,’ he says. ‘In there.’ He nods at the bedroom, waving the remote at her. She looks inside the bag and then at him. It’s a hospital patient gown. A pair of flip-flops too.
She walks into the bedroom, expecting it to be the same as the one in Cornwall. And it is, including the canvas photos on the wall. Except that the couple are on what must be a local beach in Brittany and it’s Catrine, not her, emerging from the waves. She can’t tell if it’s Rob or not behind her. She assumes it’s Gilmour.
She closes the door and leans against it, breathing heavily. It’s such a relief to be on her own, even for only a couple of minutes. Every inch of her is slick with sweat. She tries to calm herself, to trawl through her super-recogniser training, find something – anything – that might help her. Nothing. She takes off her clothes and puts on the gown with a terrible sinking feeling. It’s a bad fit. They always were. She hated her time in hospital, the sterile smell, the nylon sheets, the machines winking at her bedside through the night. Only the staff were nice – and Rob, who came to visit her that day. Why is she wearing a gown again? It’s as if the past six months haven’t happened and she’s back in hospital.
Something awful is about to happen to her, that’s all she knows. She sits on the end of the bed, staring out at the terrace and the sea beyond. Brittany might look like Cornwall, but it feels very different now.
She gets up and tries the outside door. Locked. No surprise. She’s been brought to this place for a reason. She thought it was by Rob, who wanted her to help him spot his doppelgänger, but it’s too late for that. Gilmour is already here.
A knock on the door. Putin enters the room before she has time to answer.
‘We need to go,’ he says, looking Kate up and down.
She slips on the flip-flops and follows him through the atrium, past an easel with one of her unfinished paintings of Stretch. She guesses it was too much to find a doppelgänger who could paint too. The kitchen area is tidier than in Cornwall, but apart from that it’s the same.
‘If he likes something, he sticks with it,’ Putin says, waiting for her to catch up with him. She doesn’t want to walk in front, conscious that her gown barely ties up at the back. ‘Houses, cars, women.’
‘Is there more than one of you?’ she asks.
‘He’s looking,’ Putin says, touching a hand to the scar on his head. ‘These things take time. I also like to think I’m unique.’ For the first time since he picked her up at Paddington, he smiles, creasing his tiny eyes.
She doesn’t smile back. ‘What happened?’ she asks, nodding at the scar.
‘Gil made me well again. I was fitting twenty, thirty times a day. Then he put a neural probe in my brain.’
‘No more fits?’
He shakes his head, grinning again. ‘But I seem to enjoy the pain of others more than I did before. An added bonus.’
She shudders and looks away. Rob once told her he’d invested in a medtech company that implanted electrodes in the brains of epileptics.
‘Please, drink some water,’ he says, gesturing at a jug and a glass on the sideboard. He must assume he has quicker reactions than Kate. For a moment, she thinks about hurling the jug at his face, reaching for a kitchen knife. She knows where everything is, after all. He seems to read her thoughts and unnecessarily checks the remote in his hand.
‘Where am I going?’ she asks as they walk past the sitting room. She peers in, sees a big TV screen on one wall.
‘Not in there.’ He smiles. ‘That’s his porn room.’
She thinks back to the couple she saw on the TV late at night in Cornwall. A porn habit still doesn’t fit with the Rob she knows.
Putin accompanies her through the back door of the kitchen and out onto the gravel path that leads up to the warehouse. This time he waits for her to walk in front.
‘Where are we going?’ she repeats.
‘To work,’ he says as they near the warehouse.
Is this her last chance to escape? It’s up to her now. Jake, Bex, Rob, DI Hart – no one else can save her. She glances around at the grounds of the house. A high security fence dotted with cameras encloses rolling lawns, an overgrown vegetable patch, a small apple orchard. Her heart sinks. Nowhere to run to.
On the seaward side, there are only sheer cliffs. She hadn’t realised how remote the house is. No other properties are in sight in either direction. She looks out across the English Channel, wondering if Cornwall is visible through the sea haze, and inhales a large lungful of air. And then, as she turns around, she notices a delivery van drawing up at the gates. The driver gets out to talk into an intercom. Her heart starts to race. A path runs down from the warehouse, around the main property and out to the drive. This is her moment. It’s more important that the driver hears her than that she reaches him. She won’t get five yards before she’s electrocuted.
She takes a deep breath and runs.
‘Hey!’ she shouts at the top of the voice, sprinting down the path, away from Putin, dreading the imminent agony. ‘Hey! Help!’
She gets further than she expected – almost five yards – before she’s cut down by the shock and thrown to the ground. The pain is so much worse than before. Far worse. She’s in too much agony to scream or shout. This time she might actually die.
‘That was so stupid,’ Putin says, walking over to her. ‘So fucking stupid.’ He’s mad with anger, the veins bulging at his temples.