So she’s got a few hours to herself in town. There’s a Tate Late at Tate Modern tonight. She will head over there for a bit and then be back in time for Rob’s return. She’s told herself to stop worrying so much about Rob and his past, the photo by the bed. What does it matter which wrist he wore his watch on when he was younger? His taste in coffee? What side of the bloody bed he sleeps on? She’s also come up with a plan for when he arrives, based on Ajay’s advice. Something to stop Capgras in its tracks.

  She checks herself in Rob’s bedroom mirror, applying some carmine lipstick. There’s a lot of male grooming stuff here and in the bathroom. She likes a man who takes care of himself – it’s still quite a novelty for her. It’s all in the hands, the cuticles. Rob’s are manicured, as unlike Jake’s oil-stained, nail-bitten fingers as you could get.

  She glances around the bedroom, checking that everything is ready for later. This is where she’s going to be with him tonight. And she feels good about it, confident. She deserves all this, a clean start, her new man. A lucky break. Go for the money, girl, as Bex said. And why not? Her ridiculously comfortable new life is just a happy consequence of their relationship, not the reason for it.

  She skips and twirls across the vast living area in one of the Ghost dresses Rob bought her. It’s a while since she’s dressed up to go out for the evening. Scooping up her shoulder bag, she reaches for the front door handle and pulls.

  It doesn’t open.

  She’s always had a thing about these sorts of doors, the ones that require you to press a release button before you can open it. She sees a button on the wall to her right, shakes her head at Rob’s obsession with security, and presses it. There’s a satisfying click and she pulls on the door handle again. It still doesn’t open.

  She presses the release and tries the handle several more times before admitting defeat. God, she hates technology sometimes. There must be something obvious she’s missing. She closes her eyes, opens them again, imagines that she’s an intelligent person walking up to the door for the first time. Look around, press release, pull on door handle. Nothing doing.

  Two minutes later, she’s back in the bedroom, talking on the landline to a receptionist who is trying to connect her to Rob.

  ‘It’s me, sorry to disturb,’ she says.

  ‘You OK?’ Rob asks. It sounds like him. ‘Thought you were going out.’

  ‘That’s the problem. I can’t open the door.’

  She explains the issue she’s having with the release system, playing up the silly-woman-doesn’t-understand-tech thing. She’s got no shame tonight. Whatever it takes. She just wants to head out into the summer evening in her new dress.

  ‘I’m missing something obvious,’ she says.

  ‘First it’s the pool cleaner, then the gas hob, and now this,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry, it must be this end.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She wasn’t too bothered that the pool cleaner in Cornwall was broken – she prefers to swim in the sea anyway – but he fixed it quickly. The gas hob too.

  ‘Both properties are run on the same operating system,’ he says. ‘It’s been experiencing a few problems since the most recent upgrade.’

  ‘It’s a home, Rob, not a bloody computer.’

  Hear yourself, Kate, as Bex would say. She sounds like a spoilt brat.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he says.

  She can hardly complain that there’s a glitch in the door software of the luxury penthouse apartment in Shoreditch where she’s lucky enough to be staying. Talk about a First World problem.

  ‘So how do I get out of here?’ she asks, glancing around at the windows. They’re all sealed; the apartment is regulated by a smart air-con system. ‘I wanted to head over to the Tate for a couple of hours. Before you get back.’

  ‘Give me ten and it’ll be sorted,’ he says. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  Kate walks across the living space and goes upstairs to the roof terrace. It’s a stunning evening: the sun’s beginning to set, softening London’s harsh, jagged skyline with its warm hues. If she is genuinely stuck, could she get out of the building from up here? She peers over the wall. It’s a sheer drop to the street more than a hundred feet below. No chance. The phone starts to ring again downstairs.

  ‘The door’s going to take a while to fix,’ a voice says. It belongs to the irritating woman in Rob’s office who she spoke to earlier.

  ‘Can I talk to Rob?’ Kate says.

  ‘He’s a little busy in a meeting right now,’ the woman replies. ‘He’ll call you right back.’

  Kate slams the phone down, mimicking the woman’s silly voice. He’s a little busy in a meeting right now. The vast apartment suddenly feels airless. This is ridiculous. She’s trapped, a victim of modern technology. She walks back over to the front door, looks around and notices a small security camera mounted in the corner of the room, to the right of the entrance. Rob wanted cameras inside the house in Cornwall, but she put her foot down. So he installed some around the outside of the property instead. This camera is definitely pointing into the room, straight at her. She walks over to it and peers up into the dark lens, trying to ignore a growing sense of dread.

  65

  Jake

  ‘She’s probably at a gallery or something, turned her mobile off,’ Bex says, calling from the car. The drive up from Cornwall has been traffic-free and she reckons she’ll be home within the hour.

  ‘I’ve been trying her all evening,’ Jake replies, putting away some cutlery. It’s the last bit of tidying up he needs to do before Bex arrives. ‘Texts, calls.’

  He knows what Bex is thinking. It’s none of his business what Kate’s doing in London, why she’s not replying.

  ‘Did you have a row today?’ Bex asks. ‘When she stopped by the village?’

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  Quite the opposite. Jake felt they’d got on almost too well.

  ‘Maybe she’s just feeling guilty,’ Bex says. ‘You know, seeing her ex on her way up to be with the new man in her life.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  There’s no one new in his life. He can’t imagine it. An image of them in their first few months together flashes through his mind. Walking back from the pub to the boat 12 years ago, drunkenly singing ‘Alarm Clock’ by The Rumble Strips, the two of them wrapped in his tatty old overcoat. He blinks away the memory. He’ll be crying in a minute.

  ‘What’s the urgency anyway?’ Bex says.

  Jake glances at the computer in the other room, thinking back to the light that came on beside Bex’s ‘interactive porn camera’, the cursor moving by itself. And the way the screen woke up when Kate was here earlier. Was the computer’s built-in microphone listening to their conversation? It can happen. Either way, he’s increasingly confident that Bex’s computer has been compromised in some way.

  ‘That guy Kirby I was chatting with on Facebook Messenger, when I was signed in as Kate,’ he says, stepping out of the back door into the cool air, away from the computer, ‘it was a fake account. “Kirby” died five years ago.’

  He wanted Kate to be the first to know, but there’s no harm in telling Bex.

  ‘Died?’ Bex says, unable to conceal her shock. ‘So who the bloody hell were you chatting to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Jake has been trying to find out all evening. Using a virtual private network in an attempt to remain anonymous on Bex’s computer, he logged into Facebook as Kate and searched through the list of Rob’s twenty-five other friends – not many for a leading techpreneur, but that was Rob’s personal account not his public one. Jake was unable to find matches in the real world for any of them, apart from Kirby, which suggests they might all be fake accounts.

  ‘It makes no sense,’ Jake continues. ‘If Kirby’s dead, the whole story, what happened in Thailand, could be fake.’

  There’s something about the story though that Jake can’t ignore. His newspaper boss used to hold up an old wine glass and flick it whenever he was presented with a story that bordered on the fanciful. ‘Does it have the ring of truth?’ he’d ask as the glass resonated around his office. Jake can hear the ring now.

  ‘Maybe it was Rob you were chatting to?’ Bex says, her voice quieter.

  The thought has crossed Jake’s mind too. ‘He’s not the sort to play games,’ he says. ‘To make things up.’

  The irony of defending Rob isn’t lost on him. ‘Unless, of course, he wanted to deliberately frighten Kate,’ he adds, unable to resist a dig.

  ‘He’d never do anything like that,’ Bex flashes back. ‘He loves her, Jake. I know you don’t want to hear it, but he truly loves her.’

  ‘I’m sure he does.’ Cherishes her. Jake has heard it all before.

  He glances up at a flock of Canada geese circling late and low over the canal. Something must have disturbed them.

  There’s another explanation for the chat he had with ‘Kirby’, one that would change everything. ‘Or perhaps I was chatting with Gil himself, the double on the beach,’ he suggests.

  ‘Gil?’ Bex says, surprised. ‘I thought you were Mr Sceptical about all that doppelgänger stuff.’

  He is. Just not quite as sceptical as he was.

  ‘All we can be sure of at the moment,’ he says, ‘is that someone who isn’t Kirby wanted Kate to hear about Thailand.’

  ‘But how would they have known Kate would message Kirby out of the blue? It was Kate – you – who contacted them.’

  That’s what’s troubling Jake too. He walks out across Bex’s lawn in the moonlight, peering down at the well-kept flowerbeds, feeling the wet grass beneath his bare feet. Kate used to keep an allotment in the village.

  ‘What if, just for a moment, we buy into this whole doppelgänger narrative and assume that it was Gil who replied to me, pretending to be Kirby,’ he says. ‘He’s back in the UK after nine years, jealous of Rob, of all that he’s achieved, and with only one thing going for him in this world: he looks identical to Rob. If you were set on taking over someone else’s life – becoming that person – social media would be as good a place as any to start. And maybe he’s already begun. If all Rob’s friends are fake accounts, monitored by Gil, it wouldn’t matter which one of them Kate contacted.’

  ‘And I thought it was just me,’ Bex says. ‘You really think that’s what might be happening?’

  Jake can’t be certain about anything any more, not since he discovered Kirby was dead. ‘We have to consider it,’ he says.

  ‘But why would Gil break cover and let Kate know what he’s up to?’ Bex asks.

  ‘To send a warning to Rob? A blackmail sting? I don’t know, Bex, but if the story about the birthday party is true, he’s got form threatening others. Maybe he’s in no rush, assumes that Kate will eventually tell him.’

  Jake is starting to sound like the resident conspiracy theorist in the Slaughtered Lamb. He blames the internet. He’s been reading a lot of stuff about doubles, and there’s ample evidence online that what Rob told Kate is true: it’s so much easier now to track down your lookalike. And Jake can’t forget how Kate explained to him what it was like to see Rob and believe he was an impostor. She sounded utterly convinced, professional. Like she used to in work mode, when identifying a criminal.

  ‘Whoever it was, Kate needs to know that Kirby’s dead,’ Bex says. ‘I’ll try her now. Nothing personal, but she might pick up if I ring her.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Jake says. ‘And drive carefully.’

  ‘This car drives itself.’

  He’d forgotten that Bex is in Rob’s fancy Tesla.

  ‘I’m sure there’s an innocent explanation for all this,’ he adds, without much conviction. ‘I just worry that something else might be going on – that Kate might be in real danger.’

  66

  Kate

  Kate lies back in the roll-top bath and turns on the hot water tap with her big toe. She’s been in here almost an hour and has become quite adept at the manoeuvre. Her trip to Tate Late has been well and truly scuppered. Rob has tried his best to get the front door sorted, but there’s a problem with the facial-recognition software. The contractor is not answering, but Rob thinks he’ll be able to override the system with his master key when he returns.

  They’ve also discussed couriering the key over here to let her out, but Rob is now at another office across town and by the time the key’s arrived, he’ll be back here in person. He’s also nervous about handing the master key over to a stranger, which is fair enough. She’s a woman on her own and he doesn’t want anyone turning up to let themselves in.

  She reaches across and takes another sip of Sancerre. She knows there might be an alternative explanation for what’s happened here tonight: the front door could be fixed sooner, but Rob is being over-cautious about her personal safety. He doesn’t want her wandering the streets of London so soon after the court trial in Swindon. A part of her would be furious if that were the case. How dare he decide what she can and can’t do? But in light of what happened in Cornwall – her drink being spiked, her nearly being run down in the street, the dead body on the beach – she can hardly be angry with him if he’s being over-protective of her. She’s lucky to have someone who cares.

  And it’s turned into a good night in, given the circumstances. She has watched a movie on Netflix, drunk too much wine and eaten a whole bar of Peruvian dark chocolate, which he also bought for her, and she’s now feeling sick. She still hasn’t turned on her mobile and talked to Jake. Their worlds feel further apart than ever as she lies here in Shoreditch, sipping Sancerre. If Jake saw her now, he could be forgiven for thinking that the only impostor is her.

  A call on the landline disturbs her drunken reverie. She reaches across to pick up the receiver, careful not to get it wet. It’s Rob again.

  ‘You still in the bath?’ he asks. His voice is gentle, reassuring. Familiar.

  ‘How did you guess?’ she says, wishing he were here with her. To her right, of course.

  ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t how I wanted it to be,’ he says enigmatically.

  ‘How you wanted what to be?’ she asks, her smile fading.

  The tone of Rob’s voice is beginning to scare her. Does he mean their evening together?

  ‘Don’t wait up for me,’ he says, sounding almost tearful now. ‘I love you.’

  ‘Wait,’ she says, sitting up.

  The line dies. At the same moment, the lights go out, plunging her into darkness. The bath suddenly feels very cold. Her thoughts try to follow a rational route, like flowing water, feeling their way along the most sensible, scientific path, obeying the laws of physics. It must be a power cut, connected in some way to the faulty front door. The house is over-engineered, too much can go wrong. Something else has come up at work and Rob won’t be back until even later. He was interrupted on the phone, didn’t sign off.

  She sits in the darkness for a few moments, aware of her quickening pulse. There’s a noise in the main room. Automated, an electrical hum of some kind. Maybe there isn’t a power cut, just an issue with the lighting. She steps out of the bath, feels for the dressing gown, and shivers as she wraps herself in its soft cotton embrace.

  She walks into the main room and watches with horror as the space begins to steadily darken around her. Steel security blinds are sliding down the inside of the windows and the last of the London skyline is disappearing behind them. Within seconds the blinds have shut out the remaining light of the city and she’s now in total darkness. Is the apartment going into lockdown, turning into one big panic room? It’s the sort of paranoid security feature Rob might have. Jesus, just how dangerous can Shoreditch be?

  She remembers the roof terrace, turns and feels her way towards the door at the bottom of the stairs. Pulling it open, she’s relieved to see evening light spilling in through the terrace door that she left open earlier. She scrambles upstairs as fast as she can, as if oxygen-starved, and rushes out onto the grass. She feels better already.

  The night is balmy, London bathed in a lambent halo, at odds with the drama playing out below. She pauses to get her breath back, tells herself to stop worrying. Why was Rob talking like that on the phone? His voice sounded so fragile, conflicted.

  She has a sudden urge to call Jake. He’ll know what’s going on, what’s happening to the house. Where to find the fuse box or master switch or whatever. He’s so practical. This was always her favourite time of day when they were living on the boat. In summer, the two them would sit out in the cockpit, chatting and laughing in the twilight glow, glasses of wine in hand, their heads full of dreams and madcap plans. In those moments, everything used to seem possible.

  She looks around at the other buildings, lights shining out into the London twilight. No one else is without power. It’s just Rob’s apartment. And then she’s aware of another light in the sky, red and flashing, heading towards her. For a second she doesn’t know what it is until she hears the telltale buzz of a small drone.

  She stands back, stepping towards the doorway as it approaches. Is it one of Rob’s toys? Maybe it’s delivering the master key? It’s the sort of childish thing he’d do, now that he’s invested in a drone courier company. But there’s nothing playful about the hum of its four small propellers. Or the camera, suspended below the drone, its dark lens angled straight at her.

  The drone is hovering a few feet away now, at eye level. It starts to move forward, as if ushering her inside. She backs away, but it continues to follow her. Christ, can drones fly indoors? Without thinking, she ducks inside and slams the door shut behind her, frightened of being hurt by its blades.

  There’s a sickening click as the glass door locks. She knows what will happen next. Breathless, she stares at the drone, still hovering outside, as the apartment’s final steel blind begins its inexorable descent.