8

  Jake

  Jake snaps shut his laptop and looks around the cramped narrowboat. It’s not happening today. If he’s honest, it’s not happening every day. He thought he might write more after Kate left him, but his productivity has gone down, if that’s possible.

  He locks up and steps onto the bank, glancing back at the boat. One end of the roof is piled up with logs seasoning for the winter, the other is covered with solar panels. All part of living off grid. He needs to water the flowerboxes down by the bow. They were planted with petunias by Kate and are dying.

  The canal has a rare beauty this morning, layers of gossamer mist hanging above the surface of the water. A plump of moorhens retreats into the deep reedbeds on the far bank as he walks on down the towpath. Up ahead, Jake’s favourite bridge, a perfectly poised redbrick arch, reflects in the water to form a shimmering circle of sorts. It’s the one thing that keeps him going: this idyllic haven where he lives like a floating nomad.

  The post office in the village has texted to say there’s a package for him. He enters with a spring in his step – maybe it’s a forgotten translation of one of his books? – and tries not to look at the croissants. He can’t even afford the gas to bake his own bread any more.

  ‘The usual?’ the woman behind the bakery counter asks, sliding one into a paper bag for him.

  ‘Not today, thanks,’ Jake says, sweeping back his long hair. His empty stomach rumbles in protest. ‘I think you’ve got a package for me.’

  ‘Here we go.’ She passes him a padded envelope.

  Jake knows at once that it’s not a book. Too small. At least it’s not a bill. Or a court summons. He’s had too many of those recently. On his way out, he stops to look at the small ads: teenagers offering to babysit, mow lawns. He could do that. Easier than writing. His novels are only published in Finland now.

  He crosses the street to walk in the sunshine and heads back to his boat via the station. As he passes, he spots Bex, Kate’s best friend, on the crowded platform, all big hair and chunky shoes. He likes to chat with her even if the feeling is far from mutual. She’s his last remaining connection with Kate. He didn’t cherish Kate enough, according to Bex. It’s not easy when you’re broke. He hasn’t seen Kate since she left hospital. Since she shacked up with her tech millionaire.

  ‘Alright?’ Bex says as Jake approaches.

  ‘Off on holiday?’ he asks, glancing at her wheelie case.

  He suddenly feels like a hick in his canal clothes that smell of diesel and woodsmoke. There was a time when he was on this platform every morning in a suit, commuting up to London to work as a crime reporter. Kate used to complain that he’d turned feral, become more interested in spotting otters than writing bestsellers.

  Bex nods awkwardly.

  Is she going to see Kate? ‘Somewhere nice?’ he prompts.

  Their conversation is even more stilted than normal. He’s only two years older than Bex, but he feels disconnected, out of touch.

  ‘London,’ she says, without conviction. ‘Friend of a friend.’ With that, she raises her eyebrows and turns to the train that’s just pulling in.

  Back at the narrowboat, Jake steps on board, ducks down below and opens the small package at the galley table. There’s no note, just a memory stick. He checks the printed address label again and looks at the postmark: East London.

  Why was Bex being so weird?

  He slips the stick into the USB port of his old laptop and clicks on the new icon. A video file appears. He leans in closer, watching the grainy CCTV footage that’s already begun to play.

  It takes a few moments to realise that the woman sitting at the bar is Kate. She’s on her own, looking at her phone. Jake glances at the date in the bottom right corner of the screen: ‘10.05 p.m., 14 February’. He shudders at the memory. In the other corner it says: ‘Bluebell 2’. The only Bluebell pub he knows of is on the way to Swindon. A barman comes over and starts up a conversation with Kate. Jake stares, transfixed, as the barman turns his back, fixes a bright orange drink and passes it to her. An Aperol spritz, her favourite.

  The image judders and the CCTV feed is now looking down on Kate. Jake watches the scene play out again from the new angle. ‘Bluebell 3’. It’s like trying to spot a magician’s sleight of hand. And then he sees it. There. A definite pass across the top of the glass, just before the barman slips in the ice.

  Jake sits back, his mouth drying, and picks up the package again, checking inside in case he’s missed anything. Empty. Whoever sent it has spotted something that they want Jake to see too. Why now, six months later?

  He gets up from his desk and glances at his watch. It’s too early for a beer, even on a Saturday. Not that he’s got any. All there is to drink is his kombucha, fermenting in the corner. He puts on the kettle, trying to order his thoughts.

  Valentine’s Day is a date he’ll never forget. Kate was working late, a relief as he hadn’t planned anything romantic. When his phone rang, he thought she might be calling to suggest they meet for last orders. Instead, she accused him of cheating on her. As part of her job, she’d been trawling through hours of recent CCTV footage and by chance had spotted Jake with another woman in a shopping mall. It was a cruel twist of fate and Jake never got the chance to explain.

  An hour later, Kate crashed her Morris Minor Traveller on her way home. He’s always thought it was an accident.

  He doesn’t now.

  9

  Kate

  After Ajay has gone, Kate settles down at the easel, determined to finish the painting of Stretch – less pig, more dog. The results of the recognition tests were encouraging, giving her hope that her painting skills will return too. Stretch, though, has other ideas and won’t lie still. He’s almost six months old and already likes a thirty-minute walk every day.

  ‘You win,’ she says as he trots off out of the kitchen towards the back of the house. She watches him for a second and wonders where he’s going. He doesn’t usually disappear out of her sight. She gets up, paintbrush still in hand, and is about to follow him when she pauses at the fridge. She bought some Cornish Yarg yesterday, thick and creamy. She pulls on the fridge handle, but it doesn’t open. She tries again without success.

  ‘Rob, the fridge won’t open,’ she says a moment later, talking to him on the phone. She’s a lot calmer now than she was a few hours ago. He’s still on the train to London.

  ‘Sorry, it must still be in diet mode. Stops you snacking between meals.’

  ‘But I’m not on a diet.’ Sometimes she despairs of this house, Rob’s love of so-called smart technology.

  ‘I am,’ he says. ‘And it thought I was down for the whole weekend. Try now.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She shakes her head in disbelief. The fridge door opens. Rob controls everything in his life from an app. Everything except her.

  ‘You OK?’ he asks. ‘No more migraines?’

  ‘Hungry.’

  ‘How was it with Dr Varma?’

  ‘He did some tests, thinks my brain is recovering.’

  She suspects that Ajay has already sent over the results to Rob and that Rob is just humouring her.

  ‘That’s great news,’ he says. ‘I said you were improving.’

  ‘I guess so,’ she replies, looking forlornly at her half-finished painting of Stretch.

  After a quick chat – Rob interrupted a work call to take hers – she lets him go. Stretch has not returned. She walks down the long corridor, eating a piece of Yarg. At the far end, it’s right to the big spare bedroom, where Bex always stays, or left to a storeroom. Where’s Stretch gone?

  She stops in her tracks. The door to the storeroom is open. That’s a first. It’s been locked ever since she’s been here. Rob’s got an obsession with laptops and computers and once told her he keeps quite a few of them in the storeroom for security. The whole house is very safe – security lights and cameras everywhere, triple locks on the outside doors. Kate told him it wasn’t necessary, but he installed them soon after she moved in, thought she was being naive about her previous life, the nature of her police work.

  Stretch appears in the doorway.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ she says, as if it’s his idea to be nosy.

  She follows him through the door. It’s more of an office than a storeroom, dominated by a large black desk and a picture on the wall behind. In the corner there’s a stack of old laptops, at least ten of them. There are no windows, which is out of keeping with the rest of the light-flooded house. The back wall is cut into the hillside and the front wall adjoins the guest room.

  ‘Bigger than we thought, isn’t it?’ she says to Stretch, switching on the main light. ‘Much bigger.’

  She walks around the workstation, running her finger across the smooth black marble. There’s a computer screen on the desk, flanked by soundstick speakers, but it’s the black-and-white picture propped up against the wall that catches her attention, even though it’s partially hidden by some card and wrapping.

  She lifts it up, blows off the dust and studies it more closely, her head spinning. It looks pre-Raphaelite and has been done in pen and ink and brush. The inscription in the corner says ‘DGR’ – Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A couple dressed in medieval clothes are walking through woodland. They appear to have stumbled across their doubles, identical in every respect: same physical features, medieval clothing, matching feathers in their caps. The woman has fainted and her terrified man has drawn a sword to confront his double, staring into the whites of his eyes. The only thing that distinguishes them is that the couple on the left has been framed with an ethereal glowing light, to denote that they’re the doppelgängers.

  If only it were that easy.

  She perches on the edge of the office chair and stares intently at the picture, her heart racing as she looks for clues: how to tell when your boyfriend’s been replaced by a double.

  She stays like that for a long time, holding the picture in front of her as she tries to recall some of the tricks and techniques from her old police job. Gait, facial features, tells – she knew about them all once. Her boss even sent her on a behavioural analysis course. She reminds herself that she was pretty good at recognising people, one of the best. She was never wrong.

  So what is it with Rob that’s different?

  She replays the details of her recent funny turns as dispassionately as she can. Something about him has definitely changed. It’s hard to describe, but it’s almost as if he’s impersonating himself, over-emphasising the little tics, the blinking eyes, the hand through his hair. Physically he looks identical, but there’s something about him – is it his blue eyes, what they’re hiding? – that doesn’t sit right with her.

  She props the picture back against the wall, walks over to a row of bookshelves and glances at some of the titles. Most are to do with business investment. Some are about coding, others are about health, neurotechnology and bio-engineering. There are several books about consciousness, exploring the twilight zone between life and death, another about locked-in syndrome. And on the bottom shelf a row of paperbacks. She bends down and pulls one out. It’s an old, well-thumbed book by Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Double. She reads the blurb on the back, returns it to the shelf and pulls out another faded paperback: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. Written in 1824, it’s about a Gothic double.

  She doesn’t know what to think about all this doppelgänger stuff. Rob is clearly more obsessed with it than she realised. So obsessed that he keeps it under lock and key.

  That doesn’t mean he’s been replaced by one. Of course he hasn’t. Bex was right to call her out on that. A double would have to look identical, imitate Rob’s mannerisms, perfect the way he talks. He would have to learn everything about Rob’s history, about her…

  She pushes the thought away. She’s just being silly again. She also feels – unreasonably, perhaps – a little misled about the storeroom that isn’t. It’s a full-blown office, full of Rob’s things. Maybe he does work in here, when she’s asleep, which is often.

  She calls Stretch and closes the door after him. Rob must have forgotten to lock it in their rush to get to the train station earlier. And then she goes back in to take the copy of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. She’ll have plenty of time to read and return it. But before she’s reached the desk, her phone rings. It’s Bex.

  10

  Kate

  ‘I feel like an undercover cop on a stakeout,’ Bex says, whispering. ‘Is this what you used to do in your old job?’

  ‘Where are you?’ Kate asks, trying to put a lead on Stretch, who is desperate for his walk.

  ‘Pret a Manger, Paddington station. Rob’s train is about to arrive on platform one.’

  ‘Are you actually going to meet him?’ Kate asks, closing the front door behind her. She can’t be bothered to follow Rob’s instructions and triple-lock it. And she hasn’t set the alarm in weeks. This is rural Cornwall, not Shoreditch. She heads on down to the lush green field below the house, Stretch pulling on his lead, and cuts across to the coast path that runs along the bottom of their land, marked by a herringbone slate wall.

  ‘I’ll say hello if… if something doesn’t seem right…’ Bex’s words tail off. ‘I’m tucked away in a corner,’ she continues. ‘Got a clear view of people walking past. I’ll chat to him if he sees me.’

  Kate tries to picture her in the window of Pret. ‘Thanks, Bex.’

  Bex explains that she’ll do some galleries after intercepting Rob and then come on down to Truro this evening.

  She’s really going the distance – and for what? Kate holds onto the memory of that unfamiliar look in Rob’s eye, the overwhelming sense of disconnect that she felt.

  ‘I had nothing planned this weekend anyway,’ Bex adds. ‘Just the usual gang in the Slaughtered Lamb tonight. It’s not been the same since you left.’

  Kate used to go to their local a lot with Jake, found herself drinking more and more. She tells herself she doesn’t miss him, the claustrophobic life they shared, particularly on days like today. The salt-fresh air, blue sky, the sea laid out like sheet glass below her. She’d been going out with Jake for years, since they met at university. Perhaps it was the combination of their jobs – a portrait artist and an author – that did for them in the end, living and working in each other’s pockets on a tiny narrowboat. Or the fact that they couldn’t seem to have children. Their careers never quite took off either, which didn’t help. It was why she took the police job in the end. One of them had to earn some money.

  ‘Hold up, here comes his train now,’ Bex says.

  ‘He’ll be at the front,’ she says. ‘First class.’

  ‘Of course he bloody will.’

  They both stay silent for a few seconds. Kate can picture the crowds of people flooding onto the platform, some back from their holidays, others in town to shop. She used to spend a lot of time watching crowds, guessing what they did as she looked for the match. Too much time.

  ‘Can you see him?’ she asks. Why is she so nervous?

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You remember what he looks like?’

  ‘Relax, Kate. I’m on it.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m just—’

  ‘I know you are.’ Bex pauses. ‘No sign of him yet.’

  Maybe Rob’s tricky investor isn’t in London and he got off the train at Reading. Bex’s silence seems to last forever. The coast path’s high hedgerows are humming with bees. Above her, seagulls soar in the rising air currents. And then she hears another noise, one that she’s heard a few times in recent weeks. She scans the clear sky and spots a drone out in the bay, heading towards her.

  ‘There he is,’ Bex suddenly says. ‘Even more of a looker than I remember.’

  ‘Is he with anyone?’ Kate asks, watching as the drone approaches. The sight and sound of it make her uneasy, cutting through the coastal calm. Rob has recently invested in a start-up drone courier company. He tests a lot of his gadgets down here. Is that one of his? It can’t be. He’s in London.

  ‘On his own,’ Bex says.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I can’t see anything strange about him, Kate. That’s all I can say. Right lanky sod, isn’t he? And so young! How old is he again?’

  ‘Twenty-nine.’ The drone is above her now, hovering high above the coast path.

  ‘Cheeky. Dead cool bag over one shoulder. Sound familiar?’

  ‘All good. What about the way he’s walking?’ You can tell a lot by the way someone walks.

  ‘Preoccupied,’ Bex says. ‘He’s just pulled out his phone.’

  Kate’s own phone flashes up a message that he’s on the other line. ‘He’s trying to call me,’ she says, not sure whether to be reassured or scared.

  ‘Are you going to answer it?’

  ‘No.’ She lets the call go to voicemail. The drone starts to move away, back out to sea.

  ‘He’s stopped on the platform. He’s glancing around,’ Bex says. ‘Nice smile. Looks like he’s leaving you a long, loving message.’ She pauses. ‘Hang on.’

  ‘What?’ Has Bex noticed something about him?

  ‘Shitters, he’s heading in here.’

  ‘What are you going to say?’

  ‘Better go.’

  ‘Just tell him the truth, that you’re coming down to see me, waiting for your train,’ Kate says, but the line’s already dead.

  11

  Kate

  Kate stops on the coast path and leans against the drystone wall. London feels so far away. At least Bex has got an excuse for why she’s up in town. Rob knows Kate was going to ask her down. And Bex is a good bluffer. She tries to guess what they’ll talk about. Rob will confide that he’s a bit worried about her but won’t go into details. He’s too decent to be indiscreet. And Bex will flirt with him, pick some fluff off his shoulder, which will make him blush and blink.

  ‘Shall we carry on?’ she asks Stretch, who is pulling at the lead again. ‘Keep ourselves busy?’