Kate follows her gaze. The screen’s just lit up. Someone must have knocked it. ‘My body’s still sore,’ she says.
‘And… psychologically?’ Strover asks quietly.
‘The good news is that I don’t seem to have Capgras,’ Kate says.
‘I’m so pleased,’ Strover says.
The psychiatrist Kate saw in France was adamant that she was never suffering from the rare delusion. And who was she to argue with a Frenchman about Capgras, given it was named after a psychiatrist from Toulouse? Rob’s talk of doppelgängers undoubtedly messed with her head at a time when she was suggestible and suffering from feelings of disconnectedness, but the psychiatrist also had another explanation.
‘One day I just woke up and saw Rob for who he really was,’ she says.
‘I like that,’ Strover says.
‘Me too.’
When she was well enough, when her powers of recognition returned, she was able to see right through him, beyond Rob’s public face and into his dark heart. It means that, in a way, she was right when she thought she saw an impostor in his tennis gear in Cornwall, heading off from Truro station, asleep in his London apartment. He was an impostor, always was, whether he was in her left field of vision or her right. And she was too, for a while, living a life that wasn’t hers.
‘Does that computer normally come on like that?’ Strover says, clearly troubled by the screen. A green light has lit up next to the small camera.
‘Better ask Bex,’ Kate says.
After finding Bex and introducing her to Strover, Kate slips out to the garden. Her plan is to live here for the foreseeable future – Bex says she can stay as long as she likes. Jake is camping up in the woods – the boat is too much of a wreck to be salvaged – but he’s just had some good news from a publisher. There’s some interest in a new novel idea he shared with his agent while she was with her mum. A high-tech spin on an old gothic trope, apparently. He’s already talking of getting another boat, wants her to help him choose it. As she says, early days.
If Rob hadn’t died, Hart says he would have been charged with two murders and twelve abductions, including her own. At first she pleaded with DI Hart in the French hospital that he keep looking for Rob. She was still convinced that Rob had been replaced, that he couldn’t have been responsible for such depravity. That the last five months had been one elaborate play-act at her expense was too much to comprehend. It took her a long while to absorb Hart’s lengthy and patient explanations that there never was a double called Gilmour. He also gave her a book: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. It’s the copy she picked up in Rob’s office but never got around to reading. One of the Devon and Cornwall police officers who searched the house fancies himself as a bit of a bookworm and told Hart there’s a possible connection. She’ll read it one day, when she’s feeling stronger.
Je n’ai jamais voulu tomber amoureux de toi. Kate has replayed over and over her time with Rob and she doesn’t believe he did fall in love with her – it’s obvious now that he was incapable of loving her, or anyone. But that doesn’t make it any easier to come to terms with his deception. The cold calculation of it all. His cruel patience. He nurtured her back to health because he coveted her ability to recognise a human face. Nothing more. It wasn’t out of love. Or a shared passion for art. Bex tried to joke that she should be flattered – he desired her for her brain, unusual in a man – but they both know there’s nothing funny about what happened to her and to the others.
Everyone has their darker side, Kate’s aware of that. The face that they hide from the world. Sometimes they might even glimpse it in another, in one of their shadowless doubles that roam this earth, but most people learn not to act on their worst impulses. With Rob it was different. All that talk of doppelgängers, the Rossetti picture, the books – she suspects his fears were genuine, deep-seated, but he used them to blame someone else, to avoid taking responsibility for the evil that lived within him.
Her super-recogniser brain made the spot in the end, once it had healed. That’s the real irony. He nurtured her back to good health, only for her to identify him for who he really was.
‘Want to go for a walk?’ Jake asks, finding her at the end of the garden. ‘I think I saw an otter on the canal this morning. Beautiful place, down towards Crofton. Not far. We could take Stretch and Banger?’
She looks up at him and smiles. Jake is a good man.
‘I’d like that.’
One month later
116
Silas
Strover’s phone rings. It’s her digital forensics friend.
‘I better take this,’ she says to Silas.
They’re in their usual corner of the Parade Room, just back from raiding a nail bar in Swindon Old Town.
‘Sure,’ Silas says, returning to his laptop. He wonders again if there’s anything between Strover and her friend. None of his business. Just like his own personal life is none of hers, although he wouldn’t mind talking about it. Not now that things are looking up. He’s got another counselling session this afternoon with Mel. And Conor’s going round to her place for dinner tonight. She asked if he’d like to join them. He might just do that.
‘Anything interesting?’ he asks casually. Strover has finished her call, but she’s sitting in silence, staring ahead.
‘What if Rob was right?’ she says quietly.
‘About what?’ Silas starts to compose an email to Ward on his laptop.
‘About Gilmour Martin.’
‘We’ve been through this. Many times.’ He glances up at Strover. She never raises something without a reason, doesn’t like to waste his time. ‘He doesn’t exist.’
‘But what if he does? A living, breathing person. And what if, nine years ago, he really did threaten Rob in Thailand, told him he would one day destroy him? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.’
The first turn of a knot begins to tighten in Silas’s stomach. He’s never heard Strover like this before, so animated.
‘Maybe Rob was terrified, took the threat seriously, wanted to do all he could to nullify it,’ she continues. ‘Wanted to be ready when Gilmour came looking for him. And to do that, to understand him better, he had to become more like Gilmour. Live like him in France. Break the rules. It’s then that he devised his ungodly plan, abducted the best super recognisers he could find in Europe, wired them up to live CCTV footage from airports and railways and shopping centres, and Centaur was born. But he didn’t develop Centaur for commercial reasons. It was for his own personal safety – an early warning system.’
‘What’s your friend in forensics found?’ Silas asks quietly, not sure if he wants to hear the answer.
‘I asked her to run a check on the desktop computer in Bex’s house,’ Strover says. ‘It was playing up at that party they threw for Kate. Jake said he’d been worried about it too.’
‘And?’
‘She found some malware on the hard drive,’ Strover says. ‘A remote access Trojan that hijacks the computer’s camera and microphone.’