‘Don’t give up the day job,’ Kate says to Strover. She looks dismissively at the carnations and turns to walk into the house, leaving the door barely open behind her.

  Strover raises her eyebrows at Silas as they follow Kate in. They’ve had warmer welcomes.

  ‘Sorry about the phone calls,’ Strover says, but Kate ignores her.

  ‘You look well,’ Silas says, keen to change the subject. ‘Really well.’

  They walk through the hall, past large modern artworks on the walls, and into the kitchen, where Silas sits down in the sunshine. He wants to settle the mood as soon as possible, dissipate her understandable anger with familiar banter. The three of them used to be close colleagues. A good team. The accident ended all that. He knows she still blames him, the police, for causing her to fall asleep at the wheel, for working her too hard.

  ‘I’m getting there,’ Kate says, dropping the carnations in the sink and running some water.

  Silas looks around the kitchen, nodding at Strover to sit down too. They’re indoors but might as well be outside. The place feels almost tropical, like an outstation of the nearby Eden Project. He took Conor there once, years ago, when he was a young boy. It wasn’t a success. Conor thought it was a zoo and cried all the way round when he was told there weren’t any monkeys in the rainforest dome.

  ‘This is Bex, by the way,’ Kate says, turning to smile at a woman who has just walked into the room. Her hair is wet. ‘My friend from Wiltshire.’

  ‘Preston, actually,’ Bex says.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Bex,’ Silas says, standing up to shake her hand. He wasn’t expecting Kate to have company. ‘You mind if we talk to your friend in private?’

  ‘OK,’ Bex says hesitantly, glancing at Kate for approval.

  ‘Nothing personal,’ he adds. He didn’t mean to sound so formal or abrupt.

  Bex turns to Kate. ‘You alright wi’that?’ she asks.

  Her Lancashire accent suddenly seems to have grown stronger, more assertive. Silas likes Lancashire, used to stay at a great pub in the Forest of Bowland when he wanted to spoil Mel. Cask ales and kippers.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Kate says.

  ‘I’ll take Stretch for a walk then,’ Bex says, picking up a tiny dog from a cushion in the corner. Silas hadn’t even noticed it. He’s put bigger things in a bread roll.

  They all watch in awkward silence as Bex strides through to the hall, fastens a lead on the dog and closes the front door a little too loudly behind her.

  ‘You didn’t say goodbye,’ Silas says, turning back to Kate. ‘Didn’t let us know you were leaving the hospital – leaving Wiltshire.’

  He’s in danger of sounding like a jilted lover, but it upset him when she left without saying anything. They’d spent a lot of time together, working through hundreds of hours of CCTV footage, standing in cold crowds, and he’d visited her regularly in hospital, to interview her about the crash and because he was concerned for her. The whole unit was.

  ‘It was a difficult time,’ Kate says. ‘New beginnings, clean break.’

  ‘Of course.’ Silas pauses, takes in the view again down to the sea. He’d like to retire to somewhere like this, maybe more traditional bricks and mortar, an old coastguard’s cottage overlooking the harbour. He could keep a small boat, enjoy a spot of mackerel fishing. ‘We just want your help.’

  ‘Sounds familiar,’ Kate says.

  ‘One photo, that’s all.’

  ‘Does this have something to do with the fire last night?’ Kate asks.

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘Jake rang,’ she says.

  ‘I didn’t think you two were in touch.’

  ‘We’re not.’ She glances away, embarrassed.

  Strover raises her eyebrows in disapproval at him. She’s right. He hasn’t come all this way to discuss Kate’s love life. It’s why Silas likes working with Strover. She keeps him in check, brings something to the table that he never can, not even after the amount of time he’s spent in nail bars.

  ‘What’s the photo?’ Kate asks.

  Silas turns to Strover, who pulls out a folder from her bag.

  ‘The night of the accident,’ Strover begins, ‘when you were driving home—’

  ‘I really don’t remember anything about it,’ Kate says, interrupting her and glancing at Silas. ‘I’ve told you all I know.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Silas says, sensing her alarm, her reluctance to revisit the accident. For the first month in hospital she wasn’t able to talk about it at all. Even when she was well enough, she couldn’t tell them anything useful. ‘Something new’s come to light, that’s all.’

  ‘About that night?’

  He turns to Strover again, keen to let her lead the conversation, allowing him to watch Kate more closely, read her responses.

  ‘It seems you stopped off at a pub on the way home,’ Strover says.

  Kate flinches. ‘We’ve been through this,’ she says. ‘I don’t remember anything, not even leaving the office that night. It had been a pretty shit week.’

  Silas had worked her to the bone. The results were coming thick and fast. And then she’d seen Jake on camera with another woman. A shit week, as she says.

  ‘Where did I go?’ she asks.

  ‘The Bluebell in Rockbourne,’ Strover says. ‘It’s about halfway between Gablecross and the canal.’

  Kate glances up at them both, seemingly surprised. ‘I went there a few times, towards the end. To clear my head.’ She looks down. ‘But I don’t remember going that night.’

  She’s holding something back, Silas is sure of it.

  ‘You ordered an Aperol spritz,’ Strover continues, seeking approval from her boss.

  Silas nods.

  ‘Look, we all know I’d had a drink before the accident,’ Kate says. ‘And we all know why I needed one.’

  Her eyes have a hint of accusation in them. Silas turns away. He pushed the team too hard, he accepts that now. He turns to face her again.

  ‘Why did you choose the Bluebell?’ he asks.

  Kate looks up at him, guilt in her eyes. Christ, his suspicions are right.

  ‘I should never have been there,’ she says. ‘It was a stupid idea. I was frustrated when we were pulled off the county lines job, wanted to prove a connection with the modern slavery gang we were investigating.’

  Silas sighs, shaking his head. As he feared, Kate visited the pub to identify someone. She was a civilian, not a detective, with no legal powers to investigate. ‘So you went there to make a spot,’ he says.

  ‘I know it wasn’t my job…’

  ‘Wasn’t your job?’ Silas can’t help himself, despite Strover throwing another look of disapproval at him. ‘You were acting completely illegally. Putting yourself in grave danger.’

  ‘I didn’t think it would do any harm,’ Kate says. ‘I just sat at the bar, watched who came in and out, that’s all. I’d overheard you talking about the place, that it might be a drugs pub.’

  ‘How often did you visit?’ he asks, more calmly now. Kate was always impulsive, never a great respecter of rules.

  ‘Twice, maybe three times, I can’t remember.’

  ‘You should have told us.’

  He’d suspected that she’d stopped to have a drink somewhere, given the alcohol found in her blood, but they’d never established where. There are a lot of pubs between Swindon and the canal. He can’t be too hard on her. She nearly died, spent months in recovery.

  ‘I didn’t recognise anyone,’ she adds.

  But someone recognised her. Silas watches as Strover produces an A4 photo from the folder and slides it onto the table.

  ‘You didn’t recognise this man, then?’ Strover says. ‘The barman who served you a drink that night?’

  Kate picks up the photo, the blood draining from her face. Silas leans forward, watching her intently.

  ‘You OK?’ Strover asks, resting a hand on Kate’s forearm.

  ‘What is it?’ Silas asks. Something’s very wrong. ‘Do you recognise him?’

  Kate puts the photo down on the table.

  ‘I do now.’

  ‘You do?’ Silas glances at Strover, who looks equally surprised. Neither of them was expecting this. Does Kate remember him from the modern slavery investigation?

  ‘How do you know him?’ he asks as Strover pulls out her notepad.

  ‘Because he’s in the village,’ she says, her eyes moistening. ‘And I think he spiked my coffee yesterday.’

  31

  Jake

  Jake looks for the key under the flowerpot at the back of Bex’s house. It’s a small thatched estate cottage, on the edge of the village. He’s been there many times with Kate, particularly in the early days, before the book deals dried up and Bex started to give him a hard time for not earning more money.

  A black cat comes up to him, rubbing against his legs. He doesn’t remember Bex having one. He leans down to stroke it, more shaken than he realises by the events of the past twelve hours.

  He didn’t try to catch up with the man in the forest or ask him if he knew anything about his boat or the fire. He didn’t trust himself not to do something stupid. It was the sound of the striking match that set him off, bringing back memories of the flames dancing down the towpath. Of course it wasn’t him – it would be too risky to hang around the next day, given the number of police in the area – but Jake is haunted by what he was told once, how arsonists like to return to the scene of their crime.

  After finding the key and letting himself into the house, he gives Bex a call.

  ‘Does the mog need feeding?’ he asks. He stopped it coming in through the back door.

  ‘Not mine,’ Bex says. ‘Give it milk if you’re feeling soft.’

  ‘Just wanted to say thanks,’ Jake says, looking around the small kitchen. It’s not much bigger than the galley on his boat. And the oven clock is wrong. He’ll have to fix that. So many friends have oven clocks flashing the incorrect time. It’s almost a fulltime job resetting them.

  ‘No worries,’ she says. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Is Kate with you?’ he asks, ignoring her question. Her sudden kindness is unsettling. With one hand, he opens the fridge, pulls out a plastic bottle of milk and looks around the kitchen. He takes a bowl from the drying rack and pours some milk into it.

  Bex pauses before she answers. ‘Not right now.’

  ‘But you’re with her in Cornwall,’ he says, putting the bowl on the floor. He opens the back door and lets the cat in.

  ‘I was going to tell you yesterday, at the station…’

  He remembers their frosty encounter on the platform. ‘So that’s why you didn’t want to talk to me.’

  ‘I was in a rush.’

  ‘I’m not checking up on you. Or Kate. None of my business. It’s just that I spoke to her last night. We haven’t talked for months. And then you texted me this morning.’

  ‘Kate was worried,’ Bex says. ‘We both were.’

  ‘But Rob isn’t down there now?’

  ‘He comes and goes,’ she says. ‘Busy man. Works hard, does Rob.’

  Jake ignores the barbed comment, the implication that he’s a slacker. ‘Where are you?’ he asks as the line crackles with wind.

  ‘Walking Kate’s daft dog on the coast path.’

  ‘I didn’t know she had one.’ A sudden sadness wells up in him. Kate always wanted a dog, but he was never keen. Too many friends’ cars smelling of wet fur. There’s so much about her new life that he doesn’t know.

  ‘It’s easy to miss him,’ Bex says.

  ‘Where’s Kate, then?’

  ‘She’s with the police. Her old boss DI Hart and a female colleague. Did you know they were coming down?’

  ‘No idea,’ Jake says, surprised. Odd that they didn’t mention it when they took his statement. ‘I was with them both last night. On the canal. They came out to investigate the fire.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why they’re down here. I didn’t have time to find out before they asked me to leave.’

  ‘They don’t think it was Kate?’

  ‘Of course they bloody don’t. Kate? She loved that boat.’

  ‘Did she? I think she hated it by the end.’

  They must be going to talk to her about the CCTV footage, see if she remembers anything about that night. She won’t like a visit from the police. Doesn’t want anything to do with her past life. With him.

  ‘Is everything OK? With Kate?’ he asks. ‘You sound—’

  ‘Everything’s fine.’

  She pauses. He knows something’s wrong. It might explain why she’s being so nice to him all of a sudden. And he’s happy to wait, resist filling the silence until she tells him.

  ‘Did she ever talk to you about doubles?’ Bex asks eventually.

  ‘Doubles? Not that I remember. Except when I was ordering too many at the bar.’

  Jake has a weakness for Talisker, an expensive habit that didn’t help their finances.

  ‘I’m serious, Jake. She’s become fixated with the whole idea down here. Thinks that Rob might be…’

  ‘Might be what?’ Jake has no idea where Bex is going with this.

  ‘She thinks Rob might have been replaced by a doppelgänger,’ Bex continues. ‘Apparently he spoke to her about it once, said he has this fear of meeting his double, that the double would take over his life. And what’s really freaking her out, she says, is that he did actually meet someone who looked just like him, when he was younger, on a beach in Thailand. It’s meant to be bad luck if you meet your doppelgänger once. Meet them twice and you’re toast. She’s been unable to get the idea out of her head ever since.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Kate,’ Jake says.

  ‘I know. And last night she saw this footage on French TV, an interview with Rob about his new tech office in Brittany or something. She woke me at one thirty in the morning to watch it, convinced that it wasn’t Rob. It was all very weird. Apparently Rob doesn’t speak a word of French – Kate’s been trying to teach him – but this guy was talking fluently. And then we found a French book in Rob’s office. I told her he’s just a quick learner but she’s really worried by it, thinks she’s going mad.’

  Jake pauses for a moment, trying to take in what Bex has just said about Kate. ‘Ever see Invasion of the Body Snatchers?’ he asks. ‘Nineteen fifties sci-fi horror movie about alien clones?’

  He and Kate used to watch a lot of movies on the boat together, particularly in the early days, on long winter nights. But he watched that one on his own. She wasn’t into horror.

  ‘God, years ago, I think,’ Bex says. ‘Donald Sutherland screaming at the end?’

  ‘That’s the seventies remake. It’s the original one I was thinking about. Kevin McCarthy as the doctor who sees a number of patients apparently suffering from Capgras syndrome. In fact it turns out they’re “pod people” – extraterrestrial doubles with no emotion.’

  ‘What’s Capgras syndrome?’

  ‘That’s what made me think of the film. It’s a very real delusion, apparently. Nothing sci-fi about it at all. I read about it after watching the film. You’re convinced that the person closest to you – your partner, say, or family member – has been replaced by a double.’

  Silence. And then Bex speaks, her voice quiet. ‘Do you think that’s what’s going on with Kate?’

  ‘Could be – I’m no expert. But it sounds a lot more likely than Rob being replaced by a French-speaking doppelgänger.’

  32

  Kate

  Kate scans the beach with the pair of binoculars borrowed from the National Coastwatch lookout hut behind her, aware that her hands are trembling. The hut sits on the end of a rocky promontory, with good views of the beaches back towards the village and the other way towards Nare Head. She often drops by for a chat here on her walks. A Union Jack flutters above it whenever someone’s on duty.

  ‘This is exactly what I came down to Cornwall to leave behind,’ she says, moving her focus systematically from one person to the next: sunbathers, dads playing French cricket with their children, friends throwing a Frisbee in the surf. Above them, by the footpath, a long lunch queue snakes its way towards the Secret Shack, her favourite café. Best seafood chowder in Cornwall.

  She still hasn’t got over the shock of the photo of the barman that Silas and Strover showed her. Afterwards, they told her they thought he’d spiked her drink at the pub too. She’s sure it’s the same man that she saw at the café before she went for a swim. When there’s a match, it’s just obvious. A spot. He’s also in the background of her photo of Rob, which means that he’s been watching her for a while – and that it wasn’t cramp that nearly caused her to drown.

  ‘I can’t promise I’ll recognise him,’ she adds.

  Hart is aware that the accident left her without her old powers of recognition. What he doesn’t know is that Dr Varma now thinks her ability to remember faces is returning. She just wishes her ability to paint them would come back too.

  ‘Take your time,’ Strover says behind her.

  She’s obviously still feeling guilty about the flowers. So she should. It’s a while since they’ve seen her and they used deception to enter her house. Why did she open the door when all she could see on the security camera was a bunch of carnations? She should have known. Rob only ever sends lilies. A part of her wanted to slam the door in their faces, but there’s an undeniable bond between them, forged over months of working too hard together, that Kate suspects will never be broken. They lived in each other’s pockets when the unit was running, learnt to rely on each other.

  ‘I can’t see him,’ she says, lowering the binoculars. ‘You need to tell me if I’m right to be feeling this scared.’

  She’s told them what happened after she drank her coffee in the harbour café yesterday. And neither of them believes it was cramp either.

  ‘There’s no conclusive proof that your drink was spiked at the pub, or your coffee yesterday at the café,’ Hart says, taking the binoculars from her and focusing on birds diving far out at sea. ‘But it’s looking that way. You must be careful. Don’t do anything impulsive.’