Doppelganger Read Online Free Page B

met in the middle of her forehead; those eyebrows did
their best to ameliorate the web of frown lines in her forehead that came and
vanished at a moment’s notice.
    The weird feeling that I’d met
her before wouldn’t go away. I racked my brains. But the memory was as elusive
and enigmatic as a lost dream.
    The shuddering lift had almost
rattled down to the ground floor. “Wait a minute,” she said slowly, her eyes
narrowing. “Jack Lockwood the True Crime writer. Already in the lift when the
only ward above us is Edith Grendel. Please tell me it’s a coincidence that we
just happen to have a patient there who’s been the victim of an attack?
The Bible Killer’s latest?”
    “I came to see how she was.”
    “Priceless!” she stepped
backwards, glaring at me. “Couldn’t you have had the decency to wait until the
killer’s been caught before you push in and ask questions?”
    “Look I’m not–”
    “Don’t you think that poor girl’s
had a bad enough experience already, without a self-seeking opportunist like
you upsetting her?”
    “Listen–”
    “I’m sorry, but this is so
wrong . They surely didn’t let you talk to her?”
    “She can’t talk to anyone.”
    “Good! My God, I thought
journalists were the lowest of the low, but you make the gutter press seem like
saints! Did you know that girl nearly died?”
    The lift had already stopped and the
doors were open.
    “Have you any idea–”
    As I brushed past her I
accidentally knocked her arm, so that she dropped some of the files onto the
floor, and, in scrambling to retrieve them, dropped the rest, so that their
contents were spread across the lift floor in a tidal wave of paper. I stepped
over her kneeling figure as she scrabbled around trying to gather things
together.
     
    *
* * *
     
    When I got home I found it hard
to sleep. Lucy Green’s accusation of my being a self-seeking opportunist had
upset me more than I realised. It wasn’t what she said, so much as the distaste
in her eyes as she looked at me. In fact it was much more than that, it was
something I couldn’t explain, a bizarre affinity I’d felt for her from the
moment I’d set eyes on her face. An affinity that she obviously didn’t share,
and the knowledge upset me deeply.
    Lucy Green. Lucy . Again
and again I concentrated on her face, but try as I might I couldn’t remember
her features in detail. I remembered soulful dark eyes, dark hair, a turned-up
nose. More than anything, for a reason I couldn’t explain, I longed to see her
again.
    All my life I’d heard those
stories of seeing someone across a crowded room, an instant recognition, true
love at first sight, and I’d dismissed it as nonsense. It had never happened to
me before, not with the various girlfriends I’ve had, or even with my ex wife.
The feeling was like a tidal wave, and all the more disquieting because I
couldn’t rationalise it. I simply longed to see her again, and the longing was
delicious, exciting, yet somehow toe-curlingly terrifying.
    Then my thoughts ran back to the
fact that earlier in the evening I’d had more email threats and phone messages
from Sean Boyd. The biography I was writing about Boyd, a well known London
‘face’ in criminal circles, was causing me serious problems. Hero or
Villain? honestly seemed to me to be a fairly non-controversial summary of
the man’s childhood and career so far. Even if I was to have been stupid enough
to allege his guilt in specific criminal activities, he ought surely to realise
that Truecrime Publications would never print anything he could sue us for. In
fact, it was going to be a fairly innocuous book, because of the wretched legal
restrictions, something that would almost paint him in a Robin Hood light, so
why on earth was he was so determined to prevent publication?
    It was easy to get my agent’s
contact details from my website, but not my personal numbers. Yet, somehow,
Boyd had got hold of my private mobile number and personal email,