Mid-afternoon, Jago rang Laurie Spink again. Spink was now body and soul the property of the Effort, because it was easier to give him an extremely well-paid regular column than think of someone else to write for the supplement. And now that Jago had his number, he could expect the usual Jago call.
‘I need some geneticists.’
‘I’ve got a tutorial.’
‘I need them this minute.’
So Spink had reeled off a few names, some of them with phone numbers. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he added. ‘Copy by Friday, yes?’
‘Just one more thing. What do you know about Stefan Johansson’s work? He hasn’t done anything on monstrous boobs that he’s keeping quiet about?’
‘Oh, a lot of his notes were lost, unfortunately.’
Jago had been doodling. He stopped. ‘Lost when?’
‘When he died.’
‘Stefan Johansson died? Since this morning?’
‘No, no. Three or four years ago. Tragic. A fire. Best cloning brain outside the US. I suppose most people don’t know about it. He used his own genetic material for research – ghastly end. Led to all sorts of enquiries and bans, but it was mostly hushed up. Wife went mad, terrible stories.’
‘But he’s teaching at Imperial.’
‘Can’t be.’
Jago blinked hard. In a second he had cut off Spink and phoned Imperial. They had no Johansson. He phoned the cuttings library; they promised to e-mail an obituary from an obscure science journal. He cast his mind back (a manoeuvre that did not come easily to him). How much had Viv known about Stefan when they introduced him to Belinda? Nothing. Viv’s sister met him in the canteen, that’s all. He was an impostor! A cheating, clever impostor! Like, like—
‘Get me the names of some impostors quick!’ he ordered his secretary.
Jago was nearly hyperventilating. What a great story! What a madly dangerous scheme to take the identity of a famous dead scientist and, moreover, pretend to be Swedish. Jago’s mind raced, as he scanned the obituary that had just arrived on his screen. Key words leapt out at him. ‘Cloning … brilliant … Swede … pseudogenes … Sweden … reckless … only in the mind of Robert Louis Stevenson … Human Genome Project … very, very mysterious … Malmö.’
Jago couldn’t read it properly, because he never did read anything properly. But he got the idea. The man they knew as Stefan – who was he? ‘Unless, unless—’ he muttered. He scrolled to the end, scrolled to the top again. More key words leapt out. ‘Gene sharing … Malmö … foolhardy experiment … replica … Frankenstein … condemned by scientific fraternity
… Church … offence against God … mutation … Abba … Malmö.’
But then he looked at the picture, and everything changed. It was Stefan. Stefan was dead, yet alive. A great shiver of excitement went up his spine. He heard again Stefan saying, ‘Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy!’
The conclusion was staring him in the face.
‘Oh my God. The man we know as Stefan Johansson … is a clone.’
Running from the Gemini café, Maggie choked on tears of humiliation. Good grief, if this was what happened when you just popped out for a bacon sandwich she’d become a vegetarian immediately. For someone with Maggie’s particular invisibility complexes, here was a triple calamity: (a) the man she’d condescended to sleep with had entirely failed to recognize her the next lunch-time; (b) he was a bastard and was the partner of her therapist, to whom she now couldn’t talk about it; and (c) after all that Michael Schumacher nonsense, it turns out he’s really interested in classical dance! ‘They’re all the same,’ she sobbed openly, as she ran home. ‘All the bloody same.’
‘Margaret?’ Leon was now calling after her and, from the sound of it, running. His feet were slapping the pavement, and he was gaining on her. Why was he calling her Margaret? ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard,’ she muttered as she ran.
‘Margaret, could you stop, please?’
She turned into her own street. Nearly home. Her heart was pounding as she picked up speed to escape him, and saw – emerging sheepishly from her flat, with hair slightly dirtier than it had been last night – Leon. He stopped and lit a cigarette, then started ambling in the opposite direction.
‘Aieee!’ she cried. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’
Looking back, she saw Leon running towards her; looking forward, she saw him walking away. What an irony, she thought, as she staggered against the wall, clutching her chest. To spend all your professional life practising double-takes. And then, when a double-take would really come in handy, just fainting away on the spot.
‘Well,’ said Linda, ‘I had no idea doubles could be so interesting!’
As Linda boiled the kettle and opened some biscuits she’d thoughtfully brought, Belinda found herself feeling spectacularly happy. What an intelligent and intuitive woman Linda was. Everyone else scanned the ceiling for flies when she talked about The Dualists, or fiddled with a dinner napkin. It had the same turn-off effect as Stefan telling people he came from Malmö or, indeed, from Scandinavia. In both situations, her mother would say, ‘That’s nice,’ then steer the conversation to the new range from Dolce and Gabbana. Linda, however, was of finer empathetic stuff. She had seen instantly not only that Belinda’s book urgently needed writing but that it needed writing well.
‘So do people meet their doubles in real life?’ Linda asked.
‘No. Not that I know of.’
‘Shame. Because, as you say, most of us are leading double lives, aren’t we?’
‘At least double, yes. Or we wish we had two lives, just to deal with everything.’
It felt odd to talk about it. Could Linda truly be interested?
‘So is it that one person is really two people? Or two people are really only one person?’
‘Both. The main thing in most doubles stories is that the hero has his life taken over by a dark, malevolent force that shares his identity and implicates him in misdeed. Or sometimes the double just gobbles him up. I’ve got lots of theories about it. That’s why I’m writing the book.’
Linda made the tea, as if it were perfectly normal to potter in Belinda’s kitchen. With airy confidence, she gave Belinda Stefan’s favourite mug, and opened a new packet of tea-bags because she didn’t know the system with the old brown jar.
‘Well, I think you’re right,’ Linda decided, putting the milk away in the fridge in the wrong place. ‘You mustn’t feel guilty about making time to write your special book. Our special work is what we’re put on earth to do. I firmly believe that.’
Belinda nodded. Should she ask what Linda’s special work was?
‘And, as you said before,’ Linda continued, ‘men have always shut themselves away to write books, without anyone accusing them of neglecting the household chores. I mean, Tolstoy didn’t write Crime and Punishment in between trips to Asda.’
‘You say the best things, Linda.’
‘Thank goodness you don’t have any children.’
‘Mm.’
Linda reopened the fridge and ran a professional eye over its contents. She took a