She should never have taken his phone.
Still riding like a maniac he dialled Ruby’s mobile, saying a silent prayer of thanks to gods he didn’t believe in for arranging things just right so that at this moment, when it mattered most, Kiera Roche had finally made a mistake.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Who Loses and Who Wins
Did Kiera Roche really make a mistake when she took his phone? Or did she do it on purpose, so she could taunt him? He was never sure.
Ruby worked her magic with the tracking and the GPS, and Capgras almost caught Kiera. He drove like a madman through the streets of east London and pulled up at the dockside, only a stone’s throw from the self-build site where he lived, just in time to watch the Cordelia sail into the main channel of the River Thames. He yelled in impotent rage and Kiera turned to wave a jaunty farewell. Even from that distance, he could see the grin on her face. Then, to add an extra insult, she held up his iPhone and hurled it in a high, looping, extravagant arc into the muddy, tidal waters.
For a moment Capgras considered stealing a boat to follow her, but he knew little about sailing, and besides, she still had a gun and would undoubtedly use it. Perhaps part of him, deep down, didn’t want to catch her and drag her off to spend the rest of her life in a prison cell. He didn’t care to clip her wings, no matter what she’d done, or how much she had used him, and played him like a fool.
So once again he sacrificed his principles, swallowed his pride, cut his losses - and phoned the police. The control room was a mess, busy dealing with the aftermath of the explosion. The copper barked at him, telling him to try again another day, even after he explained that he gave the warnings, that he knew who did it and where they could be found. It still took an hour before a senior officer called him back. The police listened, at last, but it was too late. Kiera disappeared, and though the coastguard was alerted the Cordelia slipped through the net never to be seen, in one piece, again.
Three weeks later, the wreckage was discovered floating in the mid-Atlantic with, remarkably, an active tracking device that had certainly not been there when half the Royal Navy had been searching the coastal waters. The authorities, in their wisdom, concluded the Cordelia had been wrecked in a storm, and that this time Kiera Roche was undeniably dead.
There were still plenty of people who doubted Tom’s story. Others who questioned his sanity. And some who said it must have been Capgras himself, all along, carrying out those killings and planting bombs in central London. After all, he had a record. And he was known as a trouble-maker. But Kiera’s fingerprints were found at the exhibition hall. A security guard had seen her on the stage, holding a gun. And then there was her letter to the newspapers, explaining it all and taunting her enemies.
“Is she really dead?” Ruby asked, as she and Tom sat together on a table outside a pub overlooking the river.
“Dead to me,” Capgras said. “I won’t see her again. And her name’s dead too. She’ll have to take another. So in a sense, perhaps she is.”
“But you think she’s alive?”
He shrugged.
“And Middleton?” Ruby took a sip from her pint of ale. “Will she use his name again, for her novels?”
“I doubt it. She wrecked the boat to throw them off the scent, so maybe she’ll abandon Lear and write her own stories from now on. Not that she needs to.” She had the money from Middleton’s self-published books. They were still selling and she controlled the bank account. “She’ll have plenty to live on.” Wealth she had been willing to share with him. Was he mad to spurn her offer and stay here? Yes. And no. But it was done, and he’d not see her again.
So he began the hard task of putting Kiera Roche out of his mind.
Hannah had survived the bombing, and the poisoning of the canapés, though their relationship fizzled out soon after. She blamed the trauma, the death toll. Thirteen people died that night, not one of them a writer, most of them wealthy, powerful and self-satisfied from what he gleaned, from the obituaries and the social media back-chat. So maybe Kiera had known what she was doing after all.
For a while he took up spying on Douglas to check his old friend was safe. But everything appeared normal. Doug was going to work regularly at GCHQ. Capgras put it down to cloak and daggers drama. The secret services love that kind of thing, pretending to be James Bond the day long, like kids in a sweet shop, refusing to grow up.
So he got back to reporting on crime and the politics of crime, the economics of crime, the abuse of authority by police and state, the miscarriages of justice and the suffering of the disempowered, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. He wrote a new final chapter for his non-fiction masterpiece and found a new agent, one that secured him a deal a week later. The money wasn’t great but the book would hit the shelves and create ripples that would spread and build into a tidal wave of change. Maybe.
Life went back to something resembling normality. Then, as winter edged towards spring, he finally cut a hole in the side of his shipping container, at Ruby’s instigation.
“It’s like a prison cell in here,” she had said one day, in passing, probably meaning little by it, and not having considered how a throw-away comment could pierce the depths of Tom’s soul.
For Capgras, it was as if she’d flicked a light switch and shown him the truth that had been lurking in the shadows: he’d still not escaped that cell. Or that pain. He’d locked himself in a metal crate as if intent on reliving his torment. But it was time to move on. So he installed a window in his ‘front-room’, through which he could look out on the drabness of the self-build site and the grey weather sweeping in, sodden with rain, from the south west.
Standing there one March morning, he saw a postman striding towards his shipping container. He rarely received mail here and had no post box. Unaware that he was being watched, he opened the door and waved a greeting. The postie handed him a package and indulged in small talk about how hard it had been to find the place.
Tom sat at his table and ripped open the padded envelope. Inside he found a sixty-four gigabyte USB stick which he plugged into his computer. None of the files made sense to him. Most contained nothing but strings of numbers and techno-babble. Was it raw code? There was no clue on the disk. He shook the envelope, thrust a hand inside and pulled out a folded scrap of paper.
In handwriting that was barely legible, and scrawled in green ink, were the words: “A present from GCHQ. Thought you’d be interested.”
Underneath, in capital letters, underlined five times was the single word: “APOSTLE.”
And under that, written in flames a mile high, stood one more word: “HELP.”
The End
The story continues in
Cold Monsters
book two of
The Capgras Conspiracy
From the author
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About the Author
Simon Townley is a British writer and the author of a range of cross-genre novels and short stories. He lives in Devon, England. You can see his Amazon profile here.
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BLOOD READ (Publish And Be Dead)
The Capgras Conspiracy – Book One
By Simon J. Townley
Published by Beardale Books
http://www.beardale.com
[email protected]
Version 1: 2016.07.07
Publisher’s note
This text uses British English spelling.
Cover design by Beardale Books
Amazon Kindle Edition
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
Copyright © 2015 Simon J Townley. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author.
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