‘If he has bought another Tesla, it’ll be in London,’ Kate continues. ‘With Rob. But then someone thought they saw him in the village this morning.’

  ‘And?’ Silas asks. Last time he looked, he was working for Wiltshire CID not bloody Relate.

  ‘Can you check? You know, the number plates. See if it was his new car?’

  ‘If it’s been stolen, Rob needs to report it,’ Silas says.

  ‘I don’t think it’s been stolen.’

  Where’s Kate going with this? She seems so ill at ease, uncomfortable. ‘Can’t you just check with Rob?’ he asks.

  ‘Not really,’ Kate says, looking down awkwardly.

  ‘If you give us the number plate, we’ll run a search,’ Strover interjects, glancing at Silas, who turns away. She’s out of order, but the damage is done.

  ‘Won’t be a moment,’ Kate says, walking over to the corner of the kitchen, where she finds a scrap of paper. ‘Someone in the village made a note of it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Strover says, taking it.

  Silas will talk to her later.

  39

  Kate

  ‘You just need to speak to Rob,’ Bex says, glancing at the missing person poster that DI Hart left on the kitchen table. ‘Ask him up front if he was here this morning in a new car. End of. For your own sanity.’

  She’s right. Kate was about to call him when Hart and Strover dropped in to say goodbye. She feels sorry for Hart. His son has caused him so much pain in recent years. She’ll keep an eye out for him, for what it’s worth. Scan the summer crowds on the beaches. Old habits die hard.

  ‘Will you also talk to Rob?’ Kate asks.

  ‘Gladly,’ Bex says. ‘Give him a piece of my mind.’

  Kate’s angry with him too. Earlier, they’d worked themselves up into a gin-soaked lather as they discussed the possibility that Rob might have come back down to Cornwall without telling her. Was it to see the woman who met him at Truro station? It might explain why Rob didn’t wave back at Mark. Kate’s also frightened. And still a little drunk, which isn’t helping her paranoia. If it wasn’t Rob in the car, who was it?

  ‘I’ll start by asking him what he’s been doing today – in a casual way, of course,’ she says, for her own benefit as much as Bex’s. ‘But we also need to see where he’s speaking from.’

  If he’s in a car, she’ll challenge him, explain that Mark from the gallery saw him driving past this morning. It would mean he wasn’t in his London flat when they spoke earlier. For most of that conversation, he was just a blur on her phone.

  ‘You going to facetime him?’ Bex asks.

  ‘On my laptop – connected to the big screen next door.’

  Bex gives her a quizzical look. ‘Really?’

  ‘That way we can see the background properly, work out where he’s calling from.’

  Ten minutes later, they’re all set up in the sitting room, Kate’s laptop connected to the vast TV set. Rob is going to appear much bigger than he is in real life. Huge. As big as he was last night on the French news. If they’re looking at someone else, it will show. At least, that’s the theory.

  They both sit on the sofa and Kate opens up FaceTime, her desktop mirrored on the large screen.

  ‘This is so weird, Kate,’ Bex says.

  ‘You focus on him, I’ll look at the background.’

  Kate’s still not sure whether she’s strong enough to do this. Her fear is that the moment Rob appears on the big screen, she’ll feel like she did before and have to end the conversation. She can’t deal with the disorientation, the overwhelming sense that the man she loves has been replaced by a stranger. It’s like a rug being pulled from under her feet so hard that she’s spun upside down. Also, she’s been trained to look at a face as soon as she sees it, beginning with the nose and then taking in the whole, studying it for likenesses. Holistic facial recognition. Will she be able to look away quick enough?

  She dials his number on FaceTime. Rob answers almost immediately, an image flickering into life on the vast screen. She can’t cope. Keeping her eyes averted, she gets up and walks to the door, where she hovers.

  Bex looks over to her anxiously and then turns back to the screen.

  ‘Hi, Bex. What’s up with Kate?’ Rob says. ‘Everything OK down there?’

  It sounds like Rob and he appears to be talking from a room rather than his car. The voice is loud and clear, coming from all around them, thanks to an array of sunken Bose speakers. At least he’s not in Cornwall. Not visiting some floosie in Truro.

  ‘Hi, Rob,’ Bex says, casting another imploring glance at Kate.

  From where Kate’s standing, she can listen to his voice without having to look at him.

  ‘She was here, but…’ Bex falters. Kate rolls her hands encouragingly, urging Bex to carry on, to bluff. She’s great at charades. ‘There’s someone at the door,’ Bex continues. ‘Rang the bell just as we were calling you.’

  Kate raises both hands in the thumbs-up sign to encourage her.

  ‘People are so friendly down there,’ Rob says. ‘Dropping by all the time. No one ever knocks on my door here in Shoreditch.’

  Kate tiptoes into the room, stepping in far enough to be able to see the screen. Rob seems to be doing something else, eyes down. She forces herself to look away from his face, aware of his movements but not his expression. All she needs to do is focus on the background. It looks exactly as it did earlier, when he said he was calling from his flat.

  She steels herself and walks over to the back of the sofa where Bex is sitting.

  ‘Hi, babe,’ she says, leaning over Bex’s shoulder. The laptop is on the table in front of them. She keeps her eyes firmly averted from both images of Rob’s face. She’s often talked to him in the past on FaceTime while she’s been doing something else – cooking, yoga, painting. It’s quite common for her not to be looking into the camera.

  ‘Who was at the door?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh, Mark from the gallery,’ she says breezily. ‘Asking if Stretch fancied a walk.’

  She is aware of Rob smiling.

  ‘Did you lock the front door afterwards?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course,’ she says.

  Bex nudges her, subtly pointing at something she’s just scribbled down on a piece of paper:

  This is nuts! It’s definitely him. And he’s gorgeous.

  Maybe it is nuts, but something’s still niggling her.

  ‘So are you guys just facetiming for a friendly chat or what?’ he asks.

  ‘Don’t you like our company?’ Bex says, leaning into the camera in her flirt mode. She’s still a bit drunk too.

  ‘You know I love it, Bex,’ Rob says. ‘It’s just that I’ve got someone on the other line and the small matter of a company to float…’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Kate interjects. He’s busy with work. He always is. ‘Just wanted to ask about the pool. The automatic vacuum’s stopped cleaning the bottom.’ It’s her turn to improvise now.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he says.

  The robotic vacuum that criss-crosses the bottom of the swimming pool all day ground to a halt earlier. It could have been worse. A few weeks back, the cover started to roll over the pool while she was swimming in it, coming up behind her. She got out just in time – it was terrifying. Rob played it down afterwards, said that the cover’s sensors would have detected a body in the water and stopped, but she hasn’t been in the pool since.

  She takes a deep breath, telling herself that Rob’s in London, that she’s worrying unnecessarily. It’s no good.

  ‘Rob,’ she says. ‘I need to ask you something else.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘About Mark,’ she begins, her voice shaking.

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘He’s good.’

  Rob doesn’t know him as well as she does, but he’s bought a number of pictures from his gallery in recent months.

  ‘Actually, he thinks he saw you in a Tesla.’

  ‘When?’

  She detects a faint tightening of his voice, a hint of alarm. Bex tenses too, shaking her head as if this is all so unnecessary.

  ‘A couple of hours ago,’ she says.

  ‘That would be pushing it,’ he says, seemingly untroubled by the allegation. She needs to see his face so she can read his reaction better, but she daren’t look into his eyes. ‘Even for a Tesla. I’m three hundred miles away. And the car’s with you anyway. Isn’t it? I presume you’ve checked it hasn’t been stolen?’

  She’s about to reply, ask him if he’s bought another car, when a military jet passes over the house, so low and loud that Bex ducks involuntarily. Kate’s got used to the noise. There’s been a lot of RAF activity in the area recently. And then a second one flies over.

  Kate can’t help herself: she looks up at Rob’s face on the big screen. He is staring back at them, a fear in his eyes that she’s never seen before, as if he knows he’s about to be found out. It’s not him. She lunges forward and is about to shut the laptop when she and Bex both hear it again. One jet, followed by the roar of another. Except that this time the sound is coming from the Bose speakers all around them.

  Kate stares at Bex in disbelief. ‘He’s in Cornwall.’

  40

  Jake

  Jake sits down in front of Bex’s computer again, keen to discover more about Capgras syndrome. He’s just been back over to the canal, retrieving a few more sodden items that have floated to the surface. It was a depressing scene. People were friendly, but that just made it worse.

  It seems that Capgras is brought on by physical or cognitive changes in the brain. Kate definitely had a lesion in her fusiform gyrus – Jake remembers discussing it with her doctors soon after the accident – but why would Capgras only manifest itself now, six months later? A psychological trigger, perhaps, such as Rob’s alarming talk of doppelgängers. It’s the sort of thing that might mess with Kate’s head at a time when she’s still fragile and possibly suffering from feelings of disconnectedness – another common precursor to Capgras. Bex is certainly worried about her.

  Jake remembers what she said about Rob meeting his doppelgänger in Thailand when he was twenty-one, how he lives in fear of their paths crossing again. What happened at that first meeting? And why doesn’t Rob want to talk to Kate about it? He calls up Facebook and logs in – to Kate’s account. It feels wrong, but he tells himself he’s doing it for her benefit. As he suspected, she hasn’t changed her email or password. Nor has she posted recently. Kate always did have a love–hate relationship with Facebook. She is clearly in a hate phase. A quick scan of her friends – he was unfriended soon after she left hospital – and he finds Rob.

  The articles he’s read all mentioned Rob’s young age – twenty-nine – and how he’s achieved so much before he’s even thirty. He checks Rob’s date of birth. Rob turns thirty in ten days’ time. A relatively big birthday. Jake will be thirty-five later this year, an anniversary he plans to ignore. Kate is bound to cook up something nice for Rob. She was always springing birthday surprises on Jake – in the early days, anyway. For his own thirtieth, she took him away to Paris, where thirty friends met him on the steps of Sacré- Coeur in Montmartre. She also tended to leave things late, planning them at the last minute.

  Jake scans through Rob’s profile. He doesn’t seem to have many friends on Facebook and there are hardly any posts. It looks more like a token presence, a gesture. He probably prefers Instagram and some trendy messaging app of his own to communicate with his techmates.

  It doesn’t take Jake long to find exactly what he’s looking for: an old Facebook friend, someone who has known Rob for a long time. Kirby looks the part. American born, he used to work for him in the early days – around the time when Rob visited Thailand. It’s worth a try. He must know Rob well and might be able to shed some light on what happened. According to his profile, he likes to travel and even mentions South-East Asia. Jake opens up the messages tab, enters his name and creates a new message. Kate’s never been in touch with him before, which makes things easier. He just hopes they haven’t met in real life yet. Taking a gamble, he begins to type:

  Hey, Kate here, I’m pulling together a few ideas for a surprise birthday party for Rob. It’s his big 3-0 coming up soon! Please don’t say anything to him. Any good stories to tell? Funny anecdotes from his past?! Kx

  Jake sits back, reading the message. Has he over-cooked Kate’s enthusiasm? He knows this is bad, that Kate will hate him for it, but he hits the return key and sends.

  41

  Silas

  ‘You crossed a line,’ Silas says as they drive out of the village and head towards the A30.

  ‘Sorry,’ Strover says. ‘I just took the number plate. We don’t have to run a check on it.’

  He lets her stew in silence as he nurses the car down a narrow road. He loves Cornwall’s lanes, particularly when they’re in full bloom like this, wildflowers tumbling over high drystone walls. They weren’t so much fun when he was towing a caravan, five-year-old Conor yelling in the back, Mel beside him, stressing over an old road atlas.

  ‘We spent a year working together,’ Strover says, breaking the silence. ‘I like Kate.’

  ‘We all do. That doesn’t mean we start checking her new toyboy’s number plates just because he might be having an affair.’

  In truth, he’s less bothered than he sounds. He just needs to put a marker down, remind her who’s in charge.

  ‘That’s not why she asked,’ Strover says.

  Silas glances across at her, surprised. Has he missed something? Female intuition again. ‘So why did she?’

  ‘She’s asked us to do two things for her,’ Strover says. ‘Search for a facial match with Rob. And check that he wasn’t driving around Cornwall when he was meant to be in London. It’s not just Rob who’s worried about doppelgängers. Kate is too.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I just think we should check it out, that’s all. Given everything that’s happened to her in the past twenty-four hours.’

  Silas’s phone starts to ring on the car intercom.

  ‘Talk of the devil,’ he says, glancing at the display screen. It’s the Control Room at Devon and Cornwall Police.

  ‘Any news?’ he asks.

  Maybe he could put in for a transfer down here, while he’s still got some miles on the clock.

  ‘Your Beamer’s been found.’ It’s the same officer he spoke to earlier, when he rang through to the Control Room with the car’s details. ‘A couple of miles up the coast, in a car park behind Nare Head.’

  ‘No sign of the driver?’ Silas asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Can you get forensics to have a look? Take some prints?’

  There’s a pause before the man speaks, clearing his throat. ‘This is Cornwall, not Swindon,’ he says. ‘And it’s a Sunday afternoon. Do you know how many forensics we have across the force?’

  Silas doesn’t want to get drawn into an argument over a lack of resources. It would be a quick race to the bottom. ‘The car was stolen and the driver tried to run down one of our officers,’ he says.

  ‘We’ve taken a good look around the area. No sign of anyone.’

  He’s not going to win this one. At least they’ve found the car. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he says, hanging up.

  ‘Funny place to leave a stolen car,’ Strover says, looking up the location on a map on her phone. ‘Remote.’

  Silas is thinking the same thing. An abandoned car near coastal cliffs usually means only one thing: suicide. It doesn’t make any sense. An hour earlier, this man had tried to run down Kate. The day before, he’d nearly drowned her.

  ‘Ask that friend of yours in digital forensics to run a check on Rob,’ he says. ‘See if she can find a facial match.’

  Strover turns to him in surprise. ‘Really?’

  ‘Why not?’ he says defensively. Strover’s friend is good, a digital investigator who’s helped them on previous cases.

  ‘Isn’t that crossing a line too?’ she asks.

  Possibly, but they came barging into Kate’s new life today, reminding her of a past that she clearly wants to forget. Strover’s right. It’s the least they can do for an old colleague.

  ‘And check the plates she gave you,’ he says, ignoring her surprise. ‘See if he’s been giving her the runaround.’

  42

  Jake

  Kirby replies almost immediately to Jake’s Facebook message. He works in tech too, somewhere in Silicon Valley. No doubt another one of those beanbags-for-chairs start-ups where being on social media 24/7 is all part of the job.

  Kate! I’ve heard so much about you. And so far only wonderful things ☺ Great idea. What sort of anecdotes are you after? So many! And when’s the party-party?!

  Jake sits back. He can’t introduce doppelgängers too quickly into the conversation, but he also doesn’t want to be on Facebook for long, given he’s using Kate’s account. He’s already been logged in for half an hour and it’s beginning to feel increasingly disloyal. He’s about to start typing a reply when a new message window pings open on the screen.

  He freezes. It’s from Rob.

  Hey?! Thought you’d given FB up for the summer???? Ring me? Been trying to call you back. What happened with FaceTime? Need to get comms sorted down there. Can’t get through on landline either. You OK? xx

  Should he just ignore it? If he replies, he could blow everything. The chances of making a mistake are too high. For whatever reason, it seems like Kate doesn’t want to talk to Rob right now.

  He logs out without replying to Rob. Kirby will have to wait.

  43

  Kate

  Kate’s completely forgotten that there’s a beach clean this evening. Not that they need one around here. They all do their bit – runners, dog walkers, even the tourists, who are pretty good at clearing up after themselves. But Kate wants to go along tonight, to take her mind off all that’s happened this weekend.