Free Doppelganger by Geoffrey West

time,” I stopped talking, hating to dredge up the
awful memories. “But someone saved my life.”
    “Who?”
    “It’s a long story.” I thought of
the catalogue of trouble I’d only just managed to survive. “I’ll tell you one
day. The point is before meeting Edward Van Meer I never believed that there
was such a thing as pure evil.”
    “Could you ever forgive
him? Say if you knew it wasn’t his fault – that some kind of mental illness
made him do it?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe if I was a
better person I could.” I paused to think. “But no. I don’t think I could.”
    “So do you believe in
forgiveness?”
    “Yes, of course,” I said.
    “Do you really believe in, I
don’t know, some kind of ultimate forgiveness? I mean like God’s forgiveness,
that sort of ultimate redemption? I don’t mean for something ordinary. I mean
forgiveness for doing something awful , something more awful and horrid
than you can possibly imagine. I’d like to believe what the Bible says, that
whatever terrible things you’ve done, as long as you’re truly, truly sorry,
then He can forgive you, even if no one else ever can.”
    I nodded. What she’d said was
depressing me more than I could say. And I was so tired that sleep was
threatening to drag me down.
    “So do you?” she repeated,
turning towards me, eyes wide and imploring.
    “What?”
    “Do you believe in forgiveness,
for absolutely anything ? I mean, supposing, hypothetically, you found
out I’d done something really bad, do you think you could ever forgive me for
it?”
    “Of course I could.”
    “Promise?”
    “Promise.” I grinned, trying to
puncture the tension. “What have you done then? Not declared all your earnings
to the Inland Revenue?”
    She didn’t answer, just closed
her eyes and fell asleep. I lay there listening to her breathing.
    I’d heard about the instant kind
of love, the look-across-a-crowded-room variety, but I’d never believed in it
before. The peculiar feeling I’d experienced when I first met Lucy, the absolute
certainty that I already knew her somehow, seemed like a kind of omen, as
if it was a foreshadow, fate that we would meet, and be together. I know it
sounds crazy, but that’s how it seemed at the time. I looked at her face and I
saw everything I could ever want in my life. Which made no sense at all.
Judging her dispassionately she was no great beauty, she wasn’t even particularly
attractive, but somehow, to me, she was both of those things and many more
besides.
    And yet I had this underlying
feeling that something wasn’t right. A niggling fear that I tried to repress.
    One thing I recollect about that
night was a tiny memory that I’d normally not have thought about, in fact I
only remembered it much later. As I fell asleep beside her after that first
dawn together, my arm around her waist, watching her chest rise and fall,
listening to the slight rasp of her breathing and studying the faint white down
on the side of her cheek, just below the hairline, I wondered if it could be
real, if all this was actually happening to me, or if it was a dream. Next time
I opened my eyes bright daylight was filtering through the crack in the curtains,
illuminating the top of her dressing table: several glass bottles, a small
mirror, and various cosmetics. Standing a little apart from the rest was a
perfume bottle, labelled Heaven’s Dust .
    The same extremely rare brand of
perfume that Caroline Lawrence was certain she’d inhaled on the night she’d
nearly died.
     
    *
* * *
     
    Lucy left for York the following
morning, and on Wednesday evening, after a gruelling day when I’d been talking
to the parents of Bible Killer victim Angela McCree about their daughter, a
strange thing had happened, and oddly enough it upset me far more than it
should have done. Douglas Hosegood’s 1983 book Shocking Killers , that
I’d shown to Lucy a few days previously, had disappeared. I wanted to refer to
it because there were some