Je n’ai jamais voulu tomber amoureux de toi. Kate has replayed over and over her time with Rob and she doesn’t believe he did fall in love with her – it’s obvious now that he was incapable of loving her, or anyone. But that doesn’t make it any easier to come to terms with his deception. The cold calculation of it all. His cruel patience. He nurtured her back to health because he coveted her ability to recognise a human face. Nothing more. It wasn’t out of love. Or a shared passion for art. Bex tried to joke that she should be flattered – he desired her for her brain, unusual in a man – but they both know there’s nothing funny about what happened to her and to the others.

  Everyone has their darker side, Kate’s aware of that. The face that they hide from the world. Sometimes they might even glimpse it in another, in one of their shadowless doubles that roam this earth, but most people learn not to act on their worst impulses. With Rob it was different. All that talk of doppelgängers, the Rossetti picture, the books – she suspects his fears were genuine, deep-seated, but he used them to blame someone else, to avoid taking responsibility for the evil that lived within him.

  Her super-recogniser brain made the spot in the end, once it had healed. That’s the real irony. He nurtured her back to good health, only for her to identify him for who he really was.

  ‘Want to go for a walk?’ Jake asks, finding her at the end of the garden. ‘I think I saw an otter on the canal this morning. Beautiful place, down towards Crofton. Not far. We could take Stretch and Banger?’

  She looks up at him and smiles. Jake is a good man.

  ‘I’d like that.’

  One month later

  116

  Silas

  Strover’s phone rings. It’s her digital forensics friend.

  ‘I better take this,’ she says to Silas.

  They’re in their usual corner of the Parade Room, just back from raiding a nail bar in Swindon Old Town.

  ‘Sure,’ Silas says, returning to his laptop. He wonders again if there’s anything between Strover and her friend. None of his business. Just like his own personal life is none of hers, although he wouldn’t mind talking about it. Not now that things are looking up. He’s got another counselling session this afternoon with Mel. And Conor’s going round to her place for dinner tonight. She asked if he’d like to join them. He might just do that.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ he asks casually. Strover has finished her call, but she’s sitting in silence, staring ahead.

  ‘What if Rob was right?’ she says quietly.

  ‘About what?’ Silas starts to compose an email to Ward on his laptop.

  ‘About Gilmour Martin.’

  ‘We’ve been through this. Many times.’ He glances up at Strover. She never raises something without a reason, doesn’t like to waste his time. ‘He doesn’t exist.’

  ‘But what if he does? A living, breathing person. And what if, nine years ago, he really did threaten Rob in Thailand, told him he would one day destroy him? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.’

  The first turn of a knot begins to tighten in Silas’s stomach. He’s never heard Strover like this before, so animated.

  ‘Maybe Rob was terrified, took the threat seriously, wanted to do all he could to nullify it,’ she continues. ‘Wanted to be ready when Gilmour came looking for him. And to do that, to understand him better, he had to become more like Gilmour. Live like him in France. Break the rules. It’s then that he devised his ungodly plan, abducted the best super recognisers he could find in Europe, wired them up to live CCTV footage from airports and railways and shopping centres, and Centaur was born. But he didn’t develop Centaur for commercial reasons. It was for his own personal safety – an early warning system.’

  ‘What’s your friend in forensics found?’ Silas asks quietly, not sure if he wants to hear the answer.

  ‘I asked her to run a check on the desktop computer in Bex’s house,’ Strover says. ‘It was playing up at that party they threw for Kate. Jake said he’d been worried about it too.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She found some malware on the hard drive,’ Strover says. ‘A remote access Trojan that hijacks the computer’s camera and microphone.’

  ‘Sounds like Rob,’ Silas says, relieved that Strover’s friend hasn’t unearthed anything else.

  ‘It was activated several times when Jake was staying there, when he was researching Rob. And at the party – a week after Rob died. It’s impossible to trace exactly where it was accessed from, it was routed through too many proxies, but she thinks the last time, at the party, the hacker might have been somewhere in South-East Asia.’

  Thailand. Silas has a sudden urge for a cigarette.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Strover says.

  ‘Go on,’ Silas says, dreading what Strover might say next, how he’s going to break all this to his boss. Dinner with Mel is already looking unlikely.

  ‘Seems like Centaur came on-stream for a few hours on the day Rob was arrested, before the house in France was raided,’ Strover says.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Silas asks. The thought that any real data might have come via the brains of comatose people on a cliffside in Brittany is too sickening to contemplate.

  ‘No one was monitoring it,’ Strover continues. ‘My friend took a look this morning, out of curiosity. Decided to input Gilmour’s biometrics, based on the old Thai files. Just to see if anything came up.’

  ‘And?’

  Strover pauses before she speaks. ‘It picked up a match.’

  Silas turns to look at her, closing his laptop. He definitely needs a cigarette. ‘Where?’ he asks.

  ‘Heathrow. Terminal 2. Waiting to board a flight to Thailand. She’s checked the airport data. No matching names on the manifest, no passport photo matches. Just a dirty spot made by Centaur – she’s sending over the smudge now.’

  Silas leans across as Strover opens an email on her own laptop and clicks on the frame grab from the CCTV footage. He doesn’t see the figure at first, but then he notices him in a queue, wearing a baseball cap – and glancing up at the camera.

  ‘That’s him,’ she says, pointing at the screen.

  Could it be? Silas leans in closer. There’s a taunting look of triumph in the man’s eyes that Silas doesn’t like. Doesn’t like at all. An air of mission accomplished. Of a job well done.

  ‘Maybe Gilmour didn’t need to frame Rob to destroy him,’ Strover offers, sitting back. ‘Just the threat of his arrival was enough to lead Rob astray. It became self-fulfilling, made him bend the rules, abduct super recognisers, kill barmen. He was desperate by the end, would have done anything to stop Gilmour coming for him. And he finally knew the game was up, that Gilmour had won, when we confronted him outside his flat in Shoreditch. There was only one way out. Give Gilmour what he wanted, what his doppelgänger had come for. His life. His soul.’

  Silas stares at the image in stunned silence. It must be one of Rob’s other doubles. There were seven in total, weren’t there? And his features are barely visible. The likeness is only passing. It’s a software error. A case of mistaken identity.

  Just another face in the crowd.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my consummate agent, Will Francis, and everyone at the London office of Janklow & Nebsit, particularly Kirsty Gordon, Zöe Nelson, Emma Winter, Ellis Hazelgrove and Rachel Balcombe. Thanks too to Kirby Kim and Brenna English-Loeb in the New York office.

  I am indebted to all the team at Head of Zeus, my UK publishers, particularly Laura Palmer, the best editor in London; Florence Hare, Maddy O’Shea, Chrissy Ryan, Vicky Joss, Dan Groenewald and Nikky Ward. A special thank you too to Lucy Ridout for her forensic copyediting and spot-on suggestions, as ever. And thanks to Jon Appleton for proofreading.

  All roads in the fascinating world of super recognisers lead to Dr Josh P. Davis, Reader in Applied Psychology at the University of Greenwich, who has helped police forces around the world screen people for their preternatural ability to remember faces. He was very generous with his time and considerable expertise (and looks uncannily like the Olympic swimmer Duncan Goodhew…). For more information about super recognisers, visit superrecognisersinternational.com.

  Dr Chris Solomon is Managing Director of Visionmetric, which specialises in intelligent facial composition software. I’m grateful to him for explaining the P3 brainwave (and for Justin Morshead for introducing me to Chris).

  And thank you to Emma Mitchell, a former police officer who works as a super recogniser, for shedding light on her enviable ability to remember faces, as well as some of the nicknames she gives people.

  Hannah Fry’s Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine is essential reading for anyone wanting to know more about the shortcomings of facial recognition software.

  Thanks also to Detective Superintendent Jeremy Carter of Wiltshire Police, who once again answered all my procedural questions. Any mistakes are, of course, mine. Wiltshire Police doesn’t yet have its own super recogniser unit but it can only be a matter of time…

  Andrew Nason kindly took me out in his Tesla Model S with his son Ben, who shared his extensive knowledge of the car. Some liberties have been taken with the vehicle’s remote access features but not many. It’s an extraordinary vehicle.

  Other people who have helped: Jake Farman, for his knowledge of boats and engines; Rob Pender, who first told me about the ‘frozen addicts’ of California; Freddie, Lily and Jess Thomson for sharing the nuances of Lancashire lingo; Margaret Hewinson for being a good sounding board; Toby Ashworth for his continuing encouragement and support; Gordon Morrison for the police anecdotes; Mark Hatwood for agreeing to appear as a version of himself; Peter Evans and National Coastwatch Portscatho for all the voluntary work they do; Tatams for the wonderful coffee; Bruce Mason and Jason Welland for telling me about life on the canal; and Abigail Dent for being an early reader.

  Finally, thank you to my family, Felix, Maya and Jago, and most of all my wife Hilary, whose love and support continues to make everything possible.

  About the author

  J.S. Monroe read English at Cambridge, worked as a foreign correspondent in Delhi, and was Weekend editor of the Daily Telegraph in London before becoming a full-time writer. Monroe is the author of eight novels, including the international bestsellers, Find Me and Forget My Name, both published by Head of Zeus. He also writes under the name Jon Stock.

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