‘Catrine’s learnt that life here is more comfortable if you smile,’ he continues. His Irish accent is cold, indifferent. Fake. If it were Rob, he would already have kissed her by now, held her close, checked his phone.

  Catrine forces a watery smile. The two women stare at each other, each still trying to take in the other’s appearance.

  ‘I found her in Finland,’ he says. ‘Amazing how easy it is to track down a double in the digital age.’

  Poor woman. Kate can’t bear to think what she’s already endured, the pain that lies ahead for both of them.

  ‘What have you done with him?’ she asks quietly.

  ‘Who?’ he asks, taking the car key and remote from Putin.

  ‘Rob.’

  He shakes his head and turns to Catrine. ‘Kate appears to be suffering from a rare delusion called Capgras,’ he says to her. ‘At least that’s what the esteemed Dr Varma believed.’

  Believed? She doesn’t like the past tense. Ajay also had his doubts, said how rare Capgras was. It was hardly a formal diagnosis. She thinks back to their conversation in the London apartment. Either the place was bugged, as she thought, or Ajay briefed him afterwards.

  ‘Sufferers are convinced that the one they love most in life has been replaced by an impostor,’ he continues, holding up his hands in innocent protest.

  ‘Why are we wearing these collars?’ Kate asks, touching her neck. ‘Rob would never have done this. It’s barbaric. Demeaning.’

  She looks at him again, searching his blue eyes for a trace of the man she loved, in case she’s got this all wrong.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Not everyone understands what I’m trying to do here…’

  Everyone? She glances around. The place feels empty, isolated. Up behind the main house, further along the headland, another building, long and low, is cut into the side of the cliffs and linked by a gravel pathway. It looks more industrial, like a warehouse. She tries to picture the replica property in Cornwall. The warehouse here has replaced the tennis court. Behind it, the blades of a solitary turbine turn idly in the sea breeze.

  ‘… but it soon becomes clear why they’ve been chosen,’ he adds, blinking.

  Catrine throws her a look, her eyes dark with meaning.

  ‘And, really, there’s no point in trying to run,’ he says.

  Jesus. He saw the note, knows that Ajay tried to warn her. She prays that Ajay is OK.

  ‘I need your passport,’ he says.

  She doesn’t hear his words at first, or at least she doesn’t understand their meaning, and he has to ask her again. She finds the passport in her bag and hands it to him.

  ‘The driver will show you around,’ he says, giving her passport to Catrine. ‘We have to go.’

  He steps forward to kiss her. She jerks her head away as he holds her firmly by the wrist. The neckband remote is in his other hand. She wants to spit in his face, but he doesn’t try to kiss her.

  ‘Ajay said that you’ve made a full recovery,’ he whispers in her ear. He’s sounding so like Rob again. Tender, kind. And then he speaks again, this time in fluent French. ‘Je n’ai jamais voulu tomber amoureux de toi.’

  Kate’s whole body starts to shake as he chucks the remote to Putin and gets into the car with Catrine. He never meant to fall in love with her.

  98

  Silas

  ‘Have a read of this,’ Silas says, passing Strover back her iPad. ‘It’s the article that was on Dr Varma’s desk.’

  They are sitting in a café around the corner from Queen’s Square. Silas has already given one statement to the Met and the senior investigating officer wants to talk to him again shortly, find out why a prominent neuropsychiatrist was shot dead in cold blood in his central London consulting room. Silas has a good idea. Varma knew too much and had already started to talk, telling Jake where Kate was being taken. It’s what else Dr Varma knew that’s worrying Silas.

  He watches Strover as she reads from the iPad. There were a number of interesting documents on Dr Varma’s desk, but two in particular caught his eye. One was a sheet of results for a recognition test he’d conducted at the weekend on Kate – something to do with a P3 brainwave. Another was a printout of a story headlined ‘The Frozen Addicts’. He took pictures of them both on his iPhone and called up the article on Strover’s iPad while she was fetching the coffees.

  ‘Seems like the drug that the addicts took induced an advanced state of Parkinson’s,’ Silas says.

  ‘This is awful,’ Strover says, scrolling through the article.

  Awful doesn’t come close to describing what happened. In 1982, six drug users in the San Francisco Bay area consumed an impure form of synthetic heroin that turned them into living statues, rendering their bodies rigid and twisted. The neurotoxic contaminant, later identified as MPTP, had targeted dopamine-producing neurons in a part of the brain, the substantia nigra, that coordinates movement. The results were devastating, much like the debilitating last phase of Parkinson’s. Although the addicts’ bodies were catatonic, their minds were normal, alert and fully aware of the world around them.

  ‘Dr Varma had highlighted the line about the local neurologist who found the addicts in various jails and psychiatric wards,’ Silas says. ‘Apparently he reversed their condition with a drug called levodopa.’

  ‘And kickstarted research into Parkinson’s in the process,’ Strover says, finishing the article. She looks up, waiting for an explanation, a connection with what they’re investigating.

  ‘We can’t assume there’s a link,’ Silas says, ‘but Dr Varma had also highlighted the line about the addicts’ minds remaining normal. And there was another article open on his laptop.’ Strover looks up. Silas knows she’s wondering if he left any fingerprints on Dr Varma’s screen, but she’s too polite to ask. He didn’t. ‘It was about locked-in syndrome,’ he continues. ‘Those patients who appear to be in a persistent vegetative state but are in fact fully conscious. They’re also frozen, in a sense, unable to move their bodies – except for one part. Their eyes.’

  Strover glances down again at the frozen addicts story on her iPad.

  ‘As I say, there might not be a connection.’ He pauses. For once in his life he’s not sure if he wants to join the dots, but he knows he must, however shocking the final picture might prove to be. ‘If Dr Varma’s notes are anything to go by, Kate’s P3 results were extraordinary, suggesting an almost complete recovery. Apparently, this P3 wave is an involuntary response in the brain when you recognise someone – and it’s much more pronounced in a super recogniser. Kate was shown hundreds of images in rapid succession – at least ten a second – and her brain made a spot. “Jeff.” She’s clearly got her old recognition skills back. Her eyes are working again.’

  He can see Strover’s still not sure where he’s heading with this, how it relates to the bigger picture: Rob being framed by Gilmour. She looks tired. They both are.

  ‘What’s Rob’s latest project?’ he asks, keen for Strover to see the pattern emerge for herself, know what it feels like.

  ‘Facial-recognition software,’ she says.

  ‘What else is he into?’

  ‘Medtech, fitness gadgets, drone deliveries, charity art shows.’

  ‘And?’

  Strover’s done a lot of digging into Rob’s business empire. She closes a window on her iPad and opens another file. ‘Direct neural interface technology,’ she reads. ‘Man and machine.’

  She looks up at him, eyes widening, the horror dawning on her face.

  ‘In this case a P3 spike in the human brain, and recognition software,’ Silas says. ‘And if that brain belongs to a super recogniser, so much the better. The more the merrier, wherever you can find them, but only the best. Nottingham, Dublin, Hamburg, Paris, Swindon…’

  99

  Jake

  ‘I’ll call you again when I get near the coast,’ Jake says, checking the rearview mirror of the rental car he’s just picked up at Brest Bretagne airport.

  ‘Be careful,’ Bex says, still tearful. He’s rung her several times since breaking the news to her about Dr Varma, first from his Eurostar train and then while he was waiting for his flight from Paris to Brest. She’s taken Dr Varma’s death badly and is worried what that means for Kate. For him too.

  ‘DI Hart’s alerted Europol about Gilmour Martin,’ Jake says.

  ‘And no one knows where Rob is?’ Bex asks.

  ‘I’m hoping I’ll find one of them at the house,’ he says. ‘And Kate.’

  ‘Jake, I really think you should leave this to the French police.’

  He wonders whether he should too. Dr Varma’s death has escalated things, made the authorities sit up, but he still wants to be here in France, wants to do something. Kate called him last night clearly in distress and he failed to stop her being taken away from the flat this morning.

  ‘Gilmour must have friends in high places,’ he says. ‘How else did he get Kate into France?’ He’s still haunted by Dr Varma’s words. You have no idea who you’re dealing with here.

  Twenty minutes later, as he’s queuing through roadworks in Saint-Renan, Jake idly glances across at a Carrefour supermarket. Beside it is a petrol station. The traffic lights in front of him turn green and he’s about to pull away when someone catches his eye on the station forecourt. It looks like Rob, standing beside a car as he refuels. There’s someone in the passenger seat too: a woman.

  He turns around at the next junction and pulls off at the petrol station, drawing up behind the car. Rob, if it’s him, has gone inside to pay, leaving the woman on her own. Scanning the tills, Jake gets out, careful to keep his face turned away, and walks up to the car. The passenger window is down and the woman is wearing sunglasses, staring impassively ahead. Jake’s mouth goes dry. Could it be her?

  ‘Kate,’ he whispers, checking the tills again. Rob is out of sight, must be buying something.

  The woman turns, but not with the speed of someone responding to their own name. Is it Kate? She’s tired and sallow. Possibly drugged.

  Jake hangs his head. It looks like her.

  ‘Jesus, Kate, what’s going on?’ He puts a hand through the open window, touching her shoulder. ‘Are you alright?’

  The woman recoils from his touch as if he’s a pariah.

  ‘Please, you mustn’t talk to me,’ she says. ‘Move away from the car, I beg you.’

  Jake stares at her in disbelief. She looks like Kate, but she doesn’t sound like her. There’s a trace of another accent in her voice, but he can’t place it. Scandinavian?

  ‘Oh God, where is she?’ he asks, looking up at the tills. The man has just paid and is turning to leave the shop. He’s no longer sure it’s Rob. ‘What’s he done with Kate?’

  ‘You must go – please.’ The woman has tears in her eyes now, and she’s nervously fingering a rubber necklace.

  ‘Just tell me where she is and I’ll go.’ Jake takes a step back. Has the man seen him? He’s striding across the forecourt with what looks like a key fob in his outstretched hand.

  Jake turns his back and bends down to fiddle with his rear tyre, out of sight, pretending to unscrew the valve cap.

  ‘She’s at the house,’ the woman says.

  A moment later, Jake hears the car drive off. He stands up, barely able to breathe, and pulls out his phone.

  ‘I thought it was her, Bex,’ he says as an angry pump attendant comes towards him. ‘But it wasn’t.’

  ‘Que faites-vous?’ the attendant demands, gesticulating wildly for him either to buy fuel or to bugger off.

  ‘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.