The Replacement Phenomenon

  The kitchen was straight ahead of him, through an archway. As he entered, he discovered a modern room strewn with almost every conceivable built-in appliance in stainless steel. The kitchen clearly cost at least twice as much as the one recently fitted in his own house, but it also looked as though it had not been used for quite some time. There was a smell of stale dust in the air, the kind of smell you only get from buildings that are left empty for more than a couple of weeks.

  He had a quick look in the refrigerator, and for the first time saw something other than emptiness. There was milk, cheese, bread, and two tomatoes. He closed the fridge and opened the freezer. There wasn't much there - just a bag of frozen peas and a bag of oven chips, both in the top compartment. This guy had put enough food in here to last him a few days. He closed the freezer door and suddenly had a thought.

  Jake had to quash the uneasiness which was rising inside him again. He was inside the house with this guy and he still had no idea what he was going to do. He didn't need to hurt this person, but he did need information. Maybe he would need to resort to hurting the guy to get information, the way he'd seen on TV. He didn't know whether he was prepared to do such things.

  Interrogation was something Jake had never thought he'd have to resort to, but this was a desperate time and it required desperate measures. He'd already managed it once, with some success, over the past few days.

  He needed a weapon. All he'd seen so far was food, but there must be other things in the house. He started looking through cupboards and drawers. There was nothing else. No rolling pins, no knives, nothing remotely like a weapon. He searched more of the downstairs of the house. There was nothing in the spacious dining room or in the narrow living room. This guy was obviously living upstairs with very little in the way of home comforts.

  A single thought came into his head. Maybe he could use some of the food as a kind of weapon when confronting the spy. He went back to the freezer, opened one of the drawers, and pulled out an open pack of frozen peas. He poured a couple of them into his hands and squeezed one between his fingers. They were solid, but probably not solid enough. He dropped a couple of them onto the floor and stepped on them.

  The idea seemed like something out of a cartoon, but he considered pouring them onto the landing and hoping the guy would slip on them like marbles. That didn't seem like it was going to work, and would likely only result in the guy being upset that his dinner had just been stepped on. Frozen peas would never support the weight of a person.

  He kept his attention on the bag of peas. He dropped the bag into one hand from the other, and decided that there was not enough weight behind it to knock anyone over. He put the bags back in the freezer and decided he would have to make do with his hands and his mind to defeat this guy.

  Jake was thinking hard and coming up with very little. All he'd seen was food. The weapon idea clearly wasn't going to work. He needed something to distract the spy upstairs long enough for him to get up there and see what he could find out.

  Jake had a sudden spark of inspiration. He opened the freezer again, and took out the open bag of peas. He shut the door and quietly made his way up the stairs.

  The top of the stairs was dark. All the doors leading onto the compact landing were closed. He needed to make this person believe that there was someone downstairs. The stairs and the landing had been stripped of its carpet, leaving floorboards exposed. This would make it harder to be quiet when moving across the landing. He heard shuffling from the door facing the stairs. Opening the bag as much as he could, Jake poured the peas onto the stairs and the floor below, then he let go of the bag.

  The clattering sound of a couple of hundred peas on wooden floors was enough to alert the watchman. Jake quickly moved to the side of the door opposite the stairs.

  “Who’s there?” Jake heard the man ask. He had a weedy sounding voice. Jake suspected he was not a tough, meat-headed thug like those he'd dealt with previously. Then footsteps approached the door. The handle moved and the door opened. Jake pressed himself against the wall as much as he could in the hope that he wouldn’t be seen.

  The guy stood at the top of the stairs and peered down, seeing the bag of peas below. He was around five and a half feet tall and was as thin as a rake. Jake was sure he could easily take him in a fight, but still hoped to avoid one.

  The man continued to look to the base of the stairs. Jake had never seen anyone actually scratch his head in confusion until that moment, and he had to hold back a brief laugh at the sight of the man's reaction.

  The watchman started walking down the stairs to investigate. When the hallway was clear, Jake sneaked into the bedroom unseen through the open doorway.

  A large pair of binoculars stood near the window. Jake picked them up and walked to a sports bag in the middle of the floor, finding only spare clothes inside.

  Jake’s head spun around as he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Still holding the binoculars in his right hand, he hid behind the door. He seemed to have been doing a lot of that lately. He could see through a gap where the hinges held the door. This stranger was about to walk through the doorway.

  Jake readied himself for a fight, and started swinging his right hand. As if choreographed, the guy walked into the room just as the binoculars came swinging around the door. They hit him full in the face. A small thud was made by a small object hitting the floor, apparently dropped by this man.

  With the blow to the face, the man keeled over and clutched his face, letting out a pained cry. At the same moment, Jake brought the binoculars crashing down on the back of his head. With the second blow, he hit the floor, and was now motionless. If Jake could have taken and used the binoculars before the assault, he certainly couldn’t have used them afterwards. A couple of the lenses were now cracked, indicating that the two blows were harder than Jake had realised.

  Jake discarded the binoculars and thought perhaps he should make sure the guy wasn’t awake. He nudged him, prodded him, and shook him, but there was no movement. The guy was out cold, but Jake had no idea how long he would remain that way.

  He searched quickly through the bag in the middle of the floor before he checked the man’s pockets. Inside were several pieces of paper, some keys and a wallet. He also discovered that the small object he had heard falling to the floor earlier was in fact a mobile phone. He took all of the objects and made his way downstairs. He wasn’t about to hang around to find out what was going to happen when the guy woke up again.

  This man might only be unconscious for a couple of minutes. Jake was going to make quite sure that he was long gone by the time the guy realised what had happened. He unlocked the back door, exited and locked it again. With this man’s possessions, he now had enough to continue his own investigation, and hopefully to make the guy’s surveillance job a lot more difficult.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Jake was sitting at his office desk for what seemed to be the first time in weeks.

  In his suit jacket pockets were the articles he had acquired during the morning's activities. He held a cream coloured business card belonging to the man he'd immobilised in his hand. "L. Miller Private Investigator" was printed along the top of the fancy looking card in dark red lettering. This guy was a professional P.I. He must have been hired at some expense by the people behind these attacks, to make sure they received reliable information.

  Jake wondered if L. Miller had any idea what his investigations were leading to. Surely he had a professional reputation to uphold, didn’t he? Even a P.I. had to operate within the law, and such activities would make him an accessory to murder, at the very least. The police would undoubtedly want to question him if they found out he'd been investigating people who would eventually be eliminated by his clients. Either L. Miller had no idea what was happening as a result of his investigations, or he was being paid enough that it didn't matter to him what would happen to the unknowing subject of his spying.

  Maybe Jake was thinking about thi
s too deeply. He could concentrate on these things later, but now he had to figure out who was next on the list for the killers.

  He had searched through the investigator’s bag while he had been inside the house but he had found nothing. He hadn’t bothered taking it, but now he wondered whether perhaps he should have done. He may have missed vital information in his hurry to leave.

  He retrieved the papers from his pockets. These scraps of paper had small details of his family's life scribbled on them. There was a chart to record his family's actions. Everything he found related purely to his family. This guy seemed to know nothing of the other targets, or if he did he had not written them down. It seemed, from the information he'd found, that this guy might be completely unaware of what he was involved in.

  Jake still hadn't looked at the guy's phone. He was sure he'd find nothing there but clients and family contacts. He turned on the phone, but there was a crack in the screen. It must have happened when he was hit with his own binoculars using considerable force, causing the phone to tumble to the bare wooden floor. It meant that only half of the screen worked. He couldn't read anything on that display.

  Just as he concluded that the phone was useless to him, it started ringing. He couldn't make out enough of the number displayed for it to be useful to him. He couldn't decide whether to answer it or not.

  This could well be the people who had hired him to spy on Jake’s family. On the other hand, it could be a new client. It could be someone the P.I knew, who would instantly recognise that this was not Mr Miller's voice.

  With indecision setting in, he let instinct take over again. He held the phone to his ear and said, “Miller.”

  “I wondered if you'd ever answer.” It was a man with a deep, menacing voice. “We have a family set for tomorrow, you'll come in after that. Do you have enough information?”

  “I do. The family have a set routine day to day, so they are ready when you are.” Jake responded, and then thought he'd take a risk. “What about the others? Have they been taken care of?”

  The other voice responded with a harsher tone than before, “That is no concern of yours. You're getting paid to do a job. Just do it.”

  “That is not good enough, sir,” Jake responded. “I mean, I have my reputation to consider. I need proof that I'm not being set up to take the fall for something.”

  “Reputation? You're a P.I. You guys barely have a reputation above politicians and rodents. Why can't you just stay out of things and be happy with a few grand at the end of it?”

  “I guess I'm never happy unless I know everything. I'm just an inquisitive fellow I suppose. Where can we meet to discuss this?”

  “The factory. Meet me there in an hour and you'll have your proof. Then I want to hear no more about this.” With that, the mysterious man hung up.

  Jake had an hour to formulate a new plan. This guy would be at the factory in an hour or less. Jake needed to surprise him with something, but what?

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Jake looked at his watch again, even though he'd looked at it just seconds before. The first time he had looked at it he didn’t really pay attention to the time it showed. That was his entire objective in looking at his watch, but he was so distracted by his thoughts that somehow his mind hadn’t registered what his eyes had seen.

  The time was still just after 10:30am. The man with the evidence would be there any minute, and Jake would be waiting, along with a large piece of wood he found lying on the floor of the factory.

  The factory was the way it had been when he'd first seen it. The furniture was back, allowing Jake to wait comfortably behind the elaborate desk. He sat in the leather chair and rested his makeshift weapon against his side of the desk. He had already checked the desk for clues but had found nothing. It seemed he had been lucky to find something useful in the drawers on a previous visit. His only chance of information would be the guy on his way to this spontaneous rendezvous.

  He heard the heavy but worn factory door open and close, followed by footsteps on the bare concrete. He had arrived. After a few seconds the footsteps approached the door to the room in which Jake waited. He spun the chair to face the window to keep the element of surprise. He didn't want this guy recognising who he was, or who he wasn’t, and then run before Jake could get his hands on the details of the killing spree.

  The door opened. “Take a seat,” Jake requested, sticking out his right arm, indicating his location. The man obliged, sitting in a much less expensive seat on the other side of the desk.

  “I don't see why we're doing this. My boss is gonna be mad when he finds out I showed this stuff to anyone, let alone a P.I.” The man had a thick East London accent with a deep, gravelly tone to his voice.

  “Don't you trust people in my profession?” Jake asked accusingly as he spun the chair around, fully expecting to see a reaction from the man sitting opposite him. The guy didn't flinch. He had obviously never met this private investigator face to face but had communicated solely by brief telephone conversations. It was likely any exchange of information was done using some kind of mail-drop.

  The man was a very heavy set individual. He was the kind of person who may be asked to purchase an extra seat by an airline when taking a flight. Jake wondered if he'd eaten someone his size for breakfast that morning. It looked like such a thing was certainly possible. The man had dark eyes and an evil stare. He had thick eyebrows that seemed to almost meet in the middle above his ski-slope nose and had thinning black and grey hair covering the top of a high forehead.

  The large man placed an A4 sized manila envelope on the desk and slid it towards Jake. He opened it, withdrew about ten pages, and scanned them, trying to commit as much as possible to memory.

  “Why is this all happening?” Jake asked.

  “I'm not answering that one. You've already asked too many questions. All I'll say is that all these people should never have been poking their nose into other people's business.” The man responded in a less than polite tone. “This conversation is over.” he said, standing up. He reached across the desk and snatched the papers out of Jake's hands.

  Unluckily for Jake, he happened to be on a page with pictures of him and his family. “What the hell?” he yelled. “You're not Lauren Miller. What the hell are you doing here and what's going on? Where's the P.I?”

  Jake needed to shut this guy up quickly. In a flash he'd grabbed the large plank of wood and whacked the big man across the face with it. He fell to the floor in an instant, groaning. The large piece of wood made a surprisingly loud thudding noise when contact was made with his head once more. With that, Jake grabbed the papers from the desk with one hand, dropping the wood he’d held in the other. He ran as fast as his legs could take him out of the factory towards his car. He thought the man wouldn’t be far behind him, despite his size, and would be trying to recover the situation if he managed to catch him up.

  Jake made it to his car, hurriedly climbed inside and started the engine, ignoring the beep signalling he was not wearing his seatbelt. He put the automatic in drive, removed the handbrake with the button to the left of the steering wheel with a clunking sound, and pressed his right foot on the accelerator as hard as he dared.

  The car flung forward, thrusting Jake into his seat. He had not been so aggressive in his driving since getting the car and was surprised at how quickly it could move with a bit of prompting. He was driving out of the concrete car park at speed when he heard the all-too-familiar sound of a gunshot behind him. His left wing mirror shattered and he realised this guy was actually quite a good shot. That no doubt made up for his size and the lack of speed that came with it.

  As he turned right out of the entrance and headed as far away as possible, a thought occurred to Jake. This man now knew that he knew something. He would have access to Jake's details within minutes. Very soon he would know where he lived and worked, and he had nowhere he could hide. Jake's best move for now was to keep driving. He had a mostly full tank of petrol and
a heavy right foot. He could get a long way from this place, where the overweight thug would have no chance of finding him.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Jake had been driving for two and a half hours, and was sure there was no one following him. He was a couple of counties away in a motorway service station. He sat at a table of the small diner on the site, holding the evidence in his hands.

  The diner in which he sat was typical of hundreds all over the UK. They were known by their bright red sign showing a chubby character with a smile on his face – not exactly a logo to encourage healthy eating, but it was indicative of the type of food on the menu. Every meal seemed to include at least one type of fried food. Most dishes included several.

  He was now sitting at a round wood-effect laminated table, with a portion of French fries and a cheeseburger on an oversized plate being placed there by a young and thin smiling waitress. He suspected she didn't eat much of this type of food herself. To the right hand side of the plate were several pieces of paper containing the names of the people that had been targeted by D.I Arnold and with whoever he had been working.

  There was a list of perhaps twenty names. Jake’s family were perhaps fourth or fifth down the page. For each family named, there was a sheet containing their details. This was a big cover-up. He wished he knew what they were covering up. These people must all have something in common. They'd all been somewhere and seen something recently, but what had they seen? What could Amy and the kids have seen that he didn't see?

  The more Jake discovered about this whole series of events, the less it made sense to him, and the larger the conspiracy was becoming. He felt very much as though he was in over his head, and there was no one he could talk to about this. He had felt alone at various points over the past few days, but now he felt more alone than ever. No one was going through what he was going through. No one could understand his plight.