One week later

  112

  Silas

  Silas pushes back his chair in the Parade Room, resisting the urge for a smoke. He and Strover are in their usual corner, but he’s only been at Gablecross for an hour. It’s been another long day in London and he has to be up there again tomorrow to assist the Met with its ongoing investigation into Rob’s double life and sudden death. Armed Response were right to think that Rob was pulling out a gun. A pistol that matched the one in Thailand was found in his jacket. But Silas is in no doubt that Rob would have turned the gun on himself and taken his own life if they hadn’t dropped him first. They’ve yet to find the person who shot Dr Varma. All they know is that the assassin must have returned the gun to Rob sometime between him landing his helicopter in Swindon and arriving in Nile Street.

  Strover has returned to local duties, patrolling the nail bars and pop-up brothels of Swindon. Ward’s orders. She’s not happy, wanted to stay on the case. The boss is still embarrassed by his closeness to Rob and he’s been throwing his weight around, lashing out at junior officers. Silas will have a quiet word, tell him to back off Strover, not that she can’t look after herself.

  He checks his watch. The first counselling session with Mel is at nine tomorrow morning. Should he cancel? He was hoping for an early night, but that plan is already out the window. He’s short-tempered when he’s tired, uncompromising. Scratchy. Maybe he should delay the session for a week, wait until he’s on top of his work, less exhausted, more willing to listen. He feels better already and reaches for the phone, but it’s started to ring. Conor.

  ‘Hi, Dad, just checking you’re still on for tomorrow?’ Silas has never heard his son sound so upbeat, optimistic. ‘Mum’s well happy you’re coming.’

  ‘Of course,’ he says, spinning in his chair away from Strover. He doesn’t want her to see him wiping a tear from his eye. ‘I’ll be there.’

  It’s early days, but Conor’s rehab is going well and the information he’s supplied has led to the arrests of the remaining members of the modern slavery OCG, who were also running the county lines network in Swindon, just as Silas suspected. The Bluebell pub too has been shut down. It also looks like Conor will be spared from prosecution in return for his cooperation. As for the boat fire, no one has considered Conor’s possible involvement and Jake has no wish to press charges.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Strover says five minutes later as they walk out of Gablecross station to the car park. It’s dusk and feels more like winter than summer, dark clouds brooding over the Swindon skyline.

  ‘Sure,’ he says. He’s got a grip now.

  ‘When did you first realise that it was Rob and not Gilmour?’ she asks.

  Silas looks across at her as they reach his car. She’s been uncharacteristically quiet since Rob’s death. It happens a lot in police work, when you back the wrong horse. She was convinced Gilmour Martin existed. He was too, for a while.

  ‘There never was a Gilmour Martin,’ he says as they both get into the car. Rain has started to drift across the deserted car park. ‘Gilmour didn’t frame Rob. Rob framed Gilmour, created him – a French-speaking figment of his imagination. His darker side made flesh.’

  ‘What about the matching fingerprints from Thailand?’ she asks.

  He reaches for the ignition and then pauses as the rain intensifies, hammering down on the car roof. She’s owed an explanation.

  ‘That’s the moment when I knew Gilmour and Rob were one and the same,’ he says, sitting back. ‘Rob changed in Thailand, came up with his big plan. Whenever he needed to break the law, he decided he would adopt Gilmour’s persona. He would always blame his double, claim he was being framed. The brain farm in Brittany? Gilmour Martin’s idea. When Rob shot the man in Cornwall, he was driving around in a Tesla registered to Gilmour. The backstory he created online? The fake Facebook friends like Kirby? They all added to the myth that Gilmour wanted to bring him down. And of course he fed Kate with the same tosh too – just enough disinformation to make her question her own sanity.’ Silas shakes his head. How’s Kate ever going to recover from this? Jake’s support will be crucial, if she’ll accept it.

  ‘But how did Rob expect to get away with it, that’s what I don’t understand,’ Strover says.

  ‘The arrogance of the psychopath,’ he says. It never ceases to amaze him.

  ‘And the night of Kate’s crash? The video sent to Jake?’ Strover asks. ‘Was that all Rob too?’

  Silas nods, glancing out at the car park. It seems a long time ago now. ‘Back then, Rob was beginning to assemble his team of super recognisers. He just hadn’t bothered to consult any of them. He came here the day before the accident, to check out Kate’s work movements. The following night, he’s sitting in the corner of the Bluebell pub, watching, waiting to abduct her, but then someone else gets to Kate first.’

  ‘The barman.’

  ‘He spikes her drink, on the orders of the OCG, whose members she had identified.’

  ‘And who’d recently been arrested,’ Strover adds.

  Silas starts up the car, watching the rain dancing in the headlights. ‘Rob’s noticed the barman’s sleight of hand and follows Kate home, worried about her. Imagine his shock when he rounds the corner and finds her Morris Minor smashed up against a tree. It’s his worst nightmare. His best super recogniser is suddenly fighting for her life, possibly brain damaged. He does everything he can but leaves moments before the ambulance arrives – he’d been about to bundle her into the back of his car, remember.’

  ‘And the pub CCTV?’ Strover asks as they drive out of the car park.

  ‘After the crash, Rob goes back to the Bluebell and hacks into its cameras, studies the footage.’

  ‘Man-in-the-middle attack,’ Strover says. ‘Unencrypted password.’

  ‘Piece of cake for a techie like him. After confirming that her drink was spiked, he searches everywhere for the barman. Rob now knows he must protect Kate at any cost, allow her time to recover. The last thing he needs is for her to be targeted again by the OCG. But the barman has already gone to ground, spooked by this mysterious man in a silent Tesla.

  ‘Six months later, the gang members are sentenced and Rob fears for Kate’s life all over again, even though he’s installed heavy security down at the house in Cornwall. But he hasn’t been able to find the barman. So he sends the pub footage to Jake, knowing that he will pass it on to us, hoping we’ll realise the danger Kate’s in. It also keeps Jake busy – as Kate’s ex, he’s been doing some unhelpful digging into Rob’s business affairs. And then the barman tracks Kate down to Cornwall, spikes her coffee at the harbour café, and she nearly drowns.’

  ‘He also tries to run her over in the street,’ Strover says. ‘And me.’

  Strover is still indignant about the incident in Cornwall, has taken it surprisingly personally.

  ‘This time Rob’s onto him,’ Silas says, picking up the story again. ‘He drives down to Cornwall – in a car registered to Gilmour Martin – and shoots the barman, making sure he uses a gun that can be linked back to Gilmour in Thailand.’

  ‘So you were right,’ Strover says, sitting back. ‘Rob was her guardian angel.’

  ‘More of a fallen one. He was keeping her safe – for his own hell on earth.’

  113

  Kate

  ‘Eyes closed!’ Bex says, taking Kate’s hand.

  Kate is back in the village for the first time, standing on the doorstep of Bex’s house on crutches. She does as Bex instructs, but Bex has no idea how hard she’s finding it. How hard she’s finding all of this. It’s not her leg, which is in plaster. Or her ribs, which are still bruised and sore. It’s her eyes. She never wants to close them again.

  ‘OK!’ Bex says.

  Kate opens them like a surprised child. Bex’s kitchen has been decked out with balloons and banners, a large ‘Welcome Home’ strung across the dresser. Bex has always loved throwing parties – ‘Jacob’s joins’, as she calls them, where everyone brings along a dish. All Kate’s old friends from the village are here. Jake too, standing at the back, stooped a little because of the low ceiling. Kate wants to cry, but she knows she must hold it together. This is her past, but it’s also her future.

  And then she spots Stretch, who trots over to see her, and she is unable to hold back the tears any longer.

  ‘Weenie toes,’ she says, scooping him up.

  ‘And he’s got a bestie,’ Bex says, looking across at Jake. The crowds part and Kate sees another dachshund, tiny in Jake’s big arms. It must be the one from the house in Brittany. She hobbles over and takes it from him.

  ‘Hey, he’s mine,’ Jake says, pretending to hang on to him. ‘He’s called Banger,’ he adds, as she holds the two dogs up to her face. ‘DI Hart’s choice.’

  She kisses both dogs. And then she kisses Jake too. Nothing lingering – it’s early days – but a cheer still goes up around them.

  ‘Like the dress,’ Jake whispers.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says.

  It’s the orange one he retrieved from the canal – and still reeks of diesel.

  They’ve talked a lot in the past week, starting with her rescue, how he managed to resuscitate her – ‘just like jump-starting an engine,’ he’d quipped. And then they talked more seriously. She’s even let him try to explain what happened at the shopping centre. She can’t forgive him. Not yet. He was by her hospital bedside all the time in France and then he took her to her mum’s, where she stayed for a few days. It was healing to stand back from everything, try to get some perspective on all that’s happened. She still can’t believe what Rob was planning to do to her – to her brain.

  ‘You alright?’ Bex says, finding her on her own in the kitchen a few minutes later.

  She’s lucky to have Bex as her best friend. ‘Fine,’ she says, looking out of the window into the garden, where Jake is talking to a couple of friends she remembers from the canal. Single men in their forties, both fleeing broken marriages, trying to start again. Stretch and Banger are chasing each other around the flowerbeds.

  ‘He’s alright, is Jake,’ Bex says, clocking the direction of her gaze. ‘Pulled his finger out when it really mattered. Managing to suss what Rob was about. Going looking for you like that. Not such a lazy git after all.’

  It’s good to hear Bex say nice things about him. For so long she disapproved of Jake.

  ‘I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for him,’ Kate says quietly. She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to make sense of everything that’s happened, to process the nightmare of the Brittany house, her suicidal leap off the cliff. ‘I was unconscious when I hit the water. Passed out with pain. And fear.’ She gives a rueful smile. ‘The cliffs were a little higher than I realised.’

  Bex turns to Kate and hugs her, long and hard. ‘Bit of a hero, isn’t he, our Jake?’ she says. ‘You know he saved DI Hart’s son too?’

  ‘So I hear.’

  Jake mentioned something but only in passing. It was DI Hart who filled her in with the details, during one of the interviews he conducted at the hospital in France.

  ‘And he’s really sorry,’ Bex says. ‘You know, about what happened.’

  ‘I know he is,’ she says.

  ‘He’s still daft about you,’ Bex adds.

  Kate smiles and catches Jake’s eye in the garden.

  114

  Silas

  Silas approaches the village, shuddering at the memory of what he and Strover saw in France: the dimly lit warehouse, like a hospital ward. The French police discovered eleven other super recognisers, all in a catatonic state. By the time he and Strover reached Brittany, they had been taken to hospital, where they remain. Doctors are confident that they’ll eventually regain full mobility, thanks to the notes that Silas found on Dr Varma’s desk about the cure given to the frozen addicts in California in the 1980s. A nurse’s life was saved too. Her heart had stopped, but the paramedics managed to resuscitate her. Another body was found – a man who had died of a seizure.

  ‘What about the other super recognisers?’ Strover asks as they pull up outside Bex’s house. Silas will leave Kate’s homecoming party to Strover, get an early night before tomorrow’s counselling session. ‘Were they all taken by Rob too?’

  ‘Their abductions went much more smoothly,’ Silas says. ‘He kidnapped each of them in the Tesla registered to Gilmour. In England, Rob tried to avoid ANPR, but if any cameras did pick him up, the car was registered to Gilmour. Kate was the prize though, the brain he coveted the most, the fusiform gyrus that lit up like no other, and he was prepared to wait for her to recover. Centaur would have to wait too. Only when she was well again could he begin to roll out the system, using the super recognisers’ exceptional P3 brainwaves to recognise faces from hundreds of thousands of images. And all this time, if he ever was discovered, he could claim he was being framed by Gilmour Martin, the double from his past who had apparently promised to destroy him.’

  ‘So there was never a Gilmour Martin in Thailand either?’ Strover asks quietly.

  Silas shakes his head. Rob’s properties in Cornwall, London and Brittany have been painstakingly searched by forensics in the past week. Silas would like to have questioned Rob, but the evidence against him is still overwhelming.

  ‘Thailand was Rob too,’ he says. ‘An old phone was found hidden in his Shoreditch apartment. There’s a video on there of Rob talking to himself on a beach on Ko Samui. The date it was recorded fits – nine years ago, just before his twenty-first birthday. Forensics showed it to me tonight. It was a long drunken dialogue with himself but set up to look as if another person was addressing him.’

  ‘And we’re sure he wasn’t talking to Gilmour?’ she asks.

  Strover won’t let it go. Getting it wrong about Gilmour will make her a better detective in the long run.

  ‘Rob was looking straight at the camera, telling himself that if he was to really succeed in business, he must be prepared to do bad things, questioning whether he had it in him. “You’ll need to do this, you might even need to do that.” And they were pretty bad things, including taking another’s life.’ Shortly afterwards, he was arrested, after being seen waving a gun around at someone else’s party.’

  ‘It wasn’t his twenty-first party then?’ Strover asks.

  Two people come out of Bex’s front door. It sounds like a good evening, full of laughter. Silas will catch up with Kate properly when things have settled down.

  ‘We think he was travelling alone,’ he says. ‘Two days later, Rob found a drug dealer on the beach and shot him dead. At least, that’s what the Thai police now think happened, based on the video. Cheap life, no big deal. And that’s when Gilmour Martin, the name Rob had given to police two days earlier, came of age.’

  115

  Kate

  ‘The boss sends his apologies,’ DI Strover says to Kate as they stand in the corner of Bex’s sitting room. The party’s been going a while, but Strover has only just arrived.

  ‘He’s a busy man,’ Kate says. She wants to see DI Hart, thank him for his help, but now’s not the time.

  ‘How you feeling?’ Strover asks, glancing at Bex’s computer in the bookcase beside Kate.

  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.