For the sake of pairing some of these adjuncts to the novel alongside their respective chapters, I am taking liberties with the Alphabet but we are back to D now…
My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge is to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), will consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. Some 12 chapters are already written so I have a bit of a head start…
Doppelgänger is a word that refers to a person who looks “the spit” (spitting image) of another – it’s from the German (they love portmanteau words) but literally means “Double Walker”!
In myths and legends, doppelgangers have been harbingers of doom or evil twins and more recently the meaning is more neutral – merely someone who resembles another. An article in BBC Future, explores research into the chances of finding your real-life Doppelgänger and, reassuringly “Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that’s only a one in 135 chance that there’s a single pair of doppelgangers.”
So strictly speaking – ( and Spoiler Alert) the person who appears in this next chapter is not so much a Doppelgänger by appearance, as by profession. Criticise if you will, but on this, I choose to exercise the godlike authority of the author – I like this chapter title!
Chapter 6
Doppelgänger
The real Inspector James looked decidedly put out and agitated. He was sat on the same chair as his namesake of the previous day, drinking a cup of tea which Jack’s mother had made for him. Douglas was off with Chloe.
“But why didn’t you ask to see some ID yesterday?” the Inspector said tetchily.
“It never occurred to me,” replied Jack. “The name was correct and I was expecting him – albeit the next day. Oh, and he looked like an off-worlder – more so than you in fact!”
“in what way?” The Inspector asked suspiciously.
“Well, he was pale, not sunburnt like everyone around here. Granted he could have come from nearer the poles but then there was the way he dressed, it was very plain, grey, non-descript. You seem to have acquired some of our local colourful clothes – you could blend in here!”
“Yes well, the weight restrictions on the space lift meant it was easier to buy new clothes here. They are not what I would normally choose.” The Inspector looked down at his flowery shirt styled according to research into the original Hawaii island on Earth and actually known as a Hawaiian shirt. He shrugged as if to disavow himself from his outfit. “As for the suntan, I have been here for seven months now!”
“There was something else about him though,” said Jack “he asked a lot of questions about life here on Hawaii 2 that a native would know the answer to, as if he had only been here a short while and was still discovering the place.”
“What sort of questions?”
“Well, he asked how Anna and I had afforded to build this house. He said on Hawaii 1 this would be a luxury hotel or house and only very rich people could afford it.”
“And what did you tell him?”
Jack repeated the explanation he had given to the other man the previous day.
“What else did the imposter ask you?
Jack went through the questions about the train, why he and Anna had gone to the Buffet Car and how they had ended up together in the toilet.
“The other inspector…”
“If that’s what he is, and it seems doubtful!” said Inspector James
“Well whoever he was, he seemed to know a lot about the investigation. I mean he spoke like he owned it – like he really wanted to solve it.”
“Why, what gave you that impression?”
“He told me straight away that it was a bomb and not a gas explosion.”
Inspector James frowned and tutted and said “Go on, what else?”
“He said that the President and the Rangers decided to put out the gas explosion story to ease public fear and to try to draw out a claim of responsibility He said that every legitimate user of Gentex had been contacted to audit the stocks but nothing has been found out of order.”
The Inspector thumped the arm of the chair and said “I can tell you, Mr Gulliver, that I, would never have revealed so much detail to a sus… a person of interest!”
“You were going to say suspect! Am I a suspect, Inspector James?”
“Well no, you’re not, not since you explained those last few details about why you and Anna were where you were. We had more or less ruled you out anyway.”
“That is exactly what he said yesterday!” Jack’s tone was slightly challenging for as much as he had felt at ease with the doppelganger, he did not like the real Inspector James’s manner.
“Yes, well he does seem to have a good knowledge of the investigation I grant you. We kept the whole bomb thing under wraps very carefully, but I suppose a ranger might’ve let something slip to a family member or worse still spoken directly to whoever this man is.”
“What about your staff?” said Jack, who did not like the Inspector casting aspersions on the Hawaii 2 Ranger service. They were the nearest thing that the planet had to a police force and since there was virtually no crime, the Rangers’ duties extended to many other areas such as highway administration, rescue and wilderness guiding. They were highly respected and one of the few jobs on Hawaii 2 where entrance was by competition and that was only to reduce the numbers of applicants to manageable numbers.
“I don’t have any staff.” Said Inspector James. “The cost of travel and the in tractable nature of the case meant that my partner went back to Hawaii 1 after six weeks. Talking of travel, your late wife was highly respected in her field, did she tell you how her research had gone, we couldn’t find any computer of hers on the train.”
“That is exactly what he said too.”
Jack noticed the inspector stiffen slightly. I told him she wouldn’t have taken one because of the weight on the space lift and that all her data was on a memory chip.”
“Okay, that makes sense, but we didn’t find one of them either.”
“You wouldn’t have it was disguised as a pendant and, oh, I just remembered, he took the pendant with him yesterday. He said he would return it to me today without any classified work left on it.”
“Well I think we both know that isn’t going to happen now.” The Inspector said bitterly. Jack thought of the personal things that might have been on Anna’s pendant and once again felt the difference between the two inspectors. Despite the fact that the first one appeared to be an imposter who had also stolen the pendant device, Jack still somehow preferred him than this man who showed very little sympatico for Jack and his loss.
“And what do you mean by classified work?”
“Well, he asked me if I knew that Anna’s work had been classified as secret. I hadn’t thought much about it I knew she felt it could change everything for Hawaii 2 but she hadn’t told me it was classified before she went.”
“Curious!” said the Inspector thoughtfully. “Everything else he told you is true as it happens, though it goes against all protocols of investigation to reveal so much, yet on this one thing, he lied to you! Very curious!”
“So have you got any idea who he might have been and why he impersonated you?”
“No I don’t! He might have been an off-worlder but he might not, he could be connected to the investigation but he could have just stolen the details in order to appear credible. As for motive, well he has your wife’s research! As if this case wasn’t baffling enough before – and now this!”
“So what are you going to do now Inspector James?”
“Well, first of all, I will send a sketch artist to see if you can come up with an image of the imposter and then we will search the databases for him. In the meantime, please let me know if you do hear from him but to be honest I expect he has long gone by now. Here is my number.”
Jack took the card “Okay I will do that, Inspector.”
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
The real Inspector James had wasted no time and the sketch artist arrived that afternoon – a likeable man whose passion for his calling whilst by no means untypical of Hawaii 2 was infectious.
“You might expect that there would be an app for doing this job or that it could be done remotely he expounded but studies have shown that it works best face to face, if you will excuse the pun! I myself have been doing this for twenty-five years and I never want to do anything else! Not that I often get called upon to do it in anger, so to speak – no crime or none that merits my skills. I am mainly a portrait artist. Shall we get started?”
The process took a good hour to complete for despite an initial reluctance to help identify the doppelgänger, lurking at the back of Jack’s mind, the portrait artist’s enthusiasm and dedication for what turned out to be a particularly tricky identification gradually won Jack over and in the end, he found himself wanting to succeed in dredging up details of the false Inspector James in order to please the artist. However, it was difficult Jack discovered because it was not just the man’s clothes that had been nondescript but his face too proved elusive. Jack could picture the expressions that had played across his features, sympathy, smiles, quizzicality, but to produce a static image of the face at rest – well it was as if a fog descended on his memory. There were no scars, no facial hair, not even distinctive wrinkles to remember – it was as if the man had a plastic face that returned to its factory condition in between expressions. Jack explained this to the artist who told him there were certain people who had the ability to express many looks and none and these were the hardest individuals for people to remember. He had only once come across such a person before and they had never been caught so he had not had the chance to evaluate his efforts with several witnesses to identify the man.
“Let’s hope this time might be different!” said Jack encouragingly. Eventually A sketch was produced with which Jack was as satisfied as he could be and it was immediately scanned and sent off to Rangers headquarters for comparison with the databases. The real Inspector James had accompanied the sketch artist so that he could get a first look at the image and had spent the hour looking around the tree-house with Jack’s permission. Having been all over the house, Inspector James asserted that he found it “Interesting!” but with such lack of conviction compared to the reactions of his doppelgänger, Jack felt he was merely being polite.
That evening when his mother Chloe and Douglas had all gone to bed, Jack was sitting in the living room mulling over the events of the last two days when his phone made a text delivery chime. He hadn’t felt the vibration, which he had set up for when he was doing some noisy building task, because Jack was essentially a social being and liked to react straight away to messages from friends and family, His late father had never been able to understand it, preferring to wait till he stopped for a cup of tea in order to catch up with his correspondence – but as Jack pointed out, the text might be from Anna in the first place telling him she had made them tea since she didn’t work to any set time table when it came to tea breaks. Another small shadow of pain crossed Jack’s face with this domestic memory as he reached into his pocket for the phone. When Jack clicked the screen on, there was no message waiting as indicated on the message icon and he was wondering if he had imagined it when the chime rang again but still with no vibration and once again, no notification appeared. Moreover, Jack realised, the sound was not coming from his phone at all but from the armchair opposite, the one where his visitors had sat. He went over to investigate and stuffing his hand down the side of the seat cushion soon found and retrieved a phone which proved to be the very same model as his. This was not surprising in itself – the range of phones models available on Hawaii 2 was not great. In the early days of the colony phones necessarily been imported and the emphasis has been on reliability and lightness because of the cost of importation. Now Hawaii 2 was a mature enough world to support its own manufacturing plants for such goods however the range of products was still small partly because the total market population was relatively small and there was no possibility of export but also because the culture of Hawaii 2 did not embrace wasteful fashions. The phones were made to last not to be updated every year or at least not the hardware, decorative cases, software and ring-tones, however, were seemingly endless in variety allowing the people of Hawaii 2 to express their individuality through customisation which they did with a passion. In any case, mobile phones had been around since the original Earth and in the centuries years since they had long ago evolved to the point where there was little new that could be invented. This did not stop the manufacturers on other home-worlds trying to repackage the phones as frequently as they could – conning the market with apparent novelty. No what surprised Jack was that the message notification chime was exactly the same as his own phone and frankly he could not believe that possible, as he and Anna had recorded the tone together using a particular spoon and a large glass bowl that rang beautifully when struck with the spoon. They made a single ring for his phone and a double-tap for hers so they could distinguish between the phones and the idea that anyone else could have that very ring tone on their phone seemed impossible to Jack. Yet when he flipped on the screen, there was the number two on the message icon! Returning to his seat Jack opened the messages the first one read:
“YOUR HOUSE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY BUGGED NOW PRETEND THIS IS YOUR PHONE AND DON’T SAY A WORD!”
The second message read: “I HAVE THE PENDANT READY TO RETURN AS PROMISED BUT AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE THAT IS NOT SO SIMPLY DONE IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO MEET ME AND LET ME EXPLAIN MY ACTIONS THEN REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE WITH JUST A.FULL STOP ONLY”
It was obvious to Jack who the message was from and he realised that this phone must have been secreted by the doppelgänger yesterday in the knowledge that by now, Jack would have been interviewed by the real Inspector James. The idea that the house might be bugged was as shocking as the relief to be in contact with the man whom he instinctively liked and seemingly trusted, because with no hesitation, Jack replied to the message with a single full stop.
A few minutes later another chime rang out.
“LAST MESSAGE. DON’T REPLY. MAKE AN APPOINTMENT TO SEE YOUR DENTIST – BRING THE PHONE WITH YOU ON THE DAY, I WILL KNOW WHEN IT IS. THE PHONE HAS A SCRATCH ON THE SCREEN TO DISTINGUISH IT FROM YOUR OWN – DON’T USE IT EVEN THOUGH YOUR CONTACTS ARE IN IT AS YOUR FRIENDS WON’T RECOGNISE THE NUMBER. SEE YOU SOON JACK. DON’T TELL ANYONE ELSE”
Jack sat back stunned!
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
One week later Jack alighted from the overhead travelator system at a tower in New Orleans. The towers that had supported the irrigation system for the Garden of Eden Project had been re-purposed to form the transport infrastructure that linked the settlers in the forest with the capital. Once the burgeoning forest had performed it’s climate changing wonder and started to generate its own rainfall water supply, the water pipes were replaced with cables that carried lightweight cars in a one-way system. Jack ascended the tower on the nearest town bound track by means of a light-weight lift and on returning home would descend a tower on the outbound loop, one grid-line away on the system of recycled towers, Paths led from the tree-house to the respective towers. the lifts on the city towers were more substantial in respect of the much heavier usage they got as compared with the Towers in the forest which served at most two or three houses.
No sooner had Jack alighted than he received a text on the phone with the scratch on it. He kept both phones in the same pocket, they were slim enough not to notice a difference but he had to pull one out and then the other a minute or two later so as not to look suspicious having picked the wrong phone to begin with.
“JUST GO INTO THE DENTIST’S SURGERY AND I WILL SEE YOU THERE”
So Jack made his way to his dentist, waited to be called in and took his place in the chair but before he had got any further than small talk, condolences on the part of the dentist and an explanation of how he felt he needed a check-up after six months in a coma, the dentist’s assistant popped in from reception and called the dentist out to deal with some problem.
Moments later a side door opened and in came the doppelgänger.
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feedback is so valuable at this stage…