Free Falling Sideways by Tom Holt Page B

certain amount of money; so he planted a spurious lock of hair belonging to a female accomplice (his daughter, say) in the auction, knowing that he, David, would buy it and take it to Brother B (Honest John) to be cloned. Meanwhile Brother C (Mr Van Oppen) rented the flat above so as to be in a position to gather photographs and other materials necessary for effective blackmail.
    Well, there were loopholes in the story, but no more than you’d find in the average made-for-TV movie, and if it wasn’t one hundred per cent right, maybe it was along the right lines; it would explain why the girl knew so much about the twenty-first century, the neighbourhood and him, and why the Brothers John—
    He froze, at the junction of Warwick Road and Elm Drive. The Brothers John: three men who looked almost but not quite identical, the differences being mostly such things as length and colour of hair. Maybe they were triplets, born the old-fashioned way; or maybe they’d all come out of a vat of green gumbo under the railway arches at Ravenscourt Park. In which case, it was better than even money that they weren’t the only copies of that particular original floating around the place—
    Close, he suspected, but no cigar; even if the Brothers John really were somehow related to the late Philippa Levens, marchioness of Ipswich (who died childless, remember, in her nineteenth year), was it likely that they’d be able to find anybody, even his/their offspring, who just happened to be an identical, peas-in-a-pod match for the girl in the portrait? Not just a similarity, or even a striking resemblance. Identical (and he should know, since every detail of the face in the picture was ingrained into his mind to the point where it acted as his mental screen-saver, immediately there every time he closed his eyes or allowed his attention to wander). In order to get round that one, you’d have to prise the goalposts another furlong or so apart and find a way to fit mind-altering drugs into the scenario, something that’d make him imagine that the female plant (to coin a phrase) looked like the girl in the painting, when in fact she looked completely different—
    Of course, he could always quit speculating and ask her.
    Or – rather more practical? – he could get a jemmy or a big screwdriver and bust his way into the flat upstairs, now supposedly the home of the enigmatic Mr Van Oppen, and poke about until he found the obvious clue, the letter or file or document. That was what they did in movies.
    (And he’d always wondered about that. For example, if he was the bad guy in a film and the hero and his sidekick burgled his flat, they wouldn’t have a lawyer’s chance in Heaven of finding anything. After all, he lived there and he spent hours vainly looking for letters and bills and stuff that weren’t even hidden.)
    More to the point, he didn’t have a big screwdriver, let alone a jemmy. True, you’re supposed to be able to open locks with a credit card, but David had a fairly shrewd idea that if he were to try that, he’d end up standing outside a locked door holding a sliver of terminally bent plastic. Kicking the door in was probably way beyond his physical abilities, shooting the lock off would require a gun, and it was the Lottery jackpot to a bent pfennig that Mr Van Oppen didn’t leave a spare key under the mat. Assuming, of course, that he’d been telling the truth when he’d said he was the new tenant; David only had his word for that, and right now he wouldn’t be inclined to believe Mr Van Oppen if he told him that snow was white.
    Or he could just ask the girl.
    Yes, it was theoretically possible, like so many things: world peace, an end to famine in Africa, England winning the World Cup. All it would take was a certain amount of courage, strength of character, determination. He knew at least a dozen people – people very like him in many ways