Once Bitten (16 page)

E.H. There was no date, either. I examined the book and it seemed genuine enough, though obviously I couldn't vouch for the handwriting. When had Hemingway died? Sometime in the sixties, I thought, but I wasn't sure. I slid the book back into its place and pulled out the one on its right. The Maltese Falcon. By Dashiell Hammett. One of my favourites. Hammett, I knew, had died in 1961, almost ten years before Terry was born. I couldn't remember when he'd written the book but I reckoned it must have been about 1930. Maybe 1929. I didn't open the book because I was scared of what I might find. I held it in my hands and tapped it against my chin and breathed in the smell of a book that was more than sixty years old. I took a deep breath and opened it.

There, on the title page, was a black-inked scrawl. “Lisa - I'll never forget you. Ever,” it said, and there was a signature. Hammett's signature. I had a friend, once, his name was Gilbert Leighton.

We were at university together and then he set up a practice in partnership with a guy from Birmingham and soon after they were up and running he invited me around to his new Harley Street offices. To boast, I guess, to show me how well he was doing even though his marks were an average fifteen per cent below mine all through our academic years. He wanted to take me down to his garage and show me his Rolls, too, but I passed on that. What did impress me wasn't the expensive leather couch or the wood-panelled walls or the gorgeous blonde receptionist with the top three buttons of her dress undone, no, what really impressed me was the collection of signed photographs on one wall, next to his academic and professional qualifications. There was Edward Heath, and a message which said “Gilbert - Thanks for everything, Ted” and there was a head and shoulders shot of a pouting Patsy Kensit with “Love and thanks, Patsy” written in one corner with a flourish. The collection included top politicians, singers, movie stars and media personalities, all with personal messages to good old Gilbert.

I turned to look at him, wide-mouthed, and he was laughing soundlessly and shaking his head.

“Your face,” he said.

“How did you....” I began asking.

“Gloria,” he said.

“Gloria?”

He nodded towards the reception area. "Gloria. The blonde bombshell. She does them for me.

Pretty good, uh?"

“Pretty dishonest,” I answered. He did all right, though. He lives with Gloria in the South of France now and makes a fortune listening to the problems of the super rich.

Maybe that was it, I thought. Maybe Terry likes collecting fake signatures, fake goodwill messages from long dead authors. It didn't seem likely though, and it would be an expensive joke to play, defacing first editions which would fetch thousands at auction. I put back The Maltese Falcon and chose another book at random. Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped. I opened it quickly and I was fumbling so much that I almost missed it but it was there in almost pure copperplate writing. A signed first edition of Kidnapped. With a personal message. A message that referred to black eyes. The book fell from my nerveless fingers and I backed away from it my chest tight. A muscle in my right cheek began to spasm and I put my hand against it and pressed hard, trying to stop the nervous tic. I swang the flashlight back and forth so that I could see the whole length of the library, fearful that there were monsters lurking in the dark corners, waiting to pounce and rip me apart as soon as the beam of light passed them by. It was as if the light was my protection, it was the only thing they feared. Something knocked against my shoulderblades and I leapt forward and whirled round, only to see that it was the bookshelves. I'd backed right across the library. The copy of Kidnapped lay face down. I couldn't bring myself to pick it up. For a moment or two I thought I'd lost the door but then I saw the irregularity among the bookshelves and pulled it open and slipped once again into the hallway. I leant against the wall and pulled the door shut behind me, knowing that I shouldn't have left the book on the floor but figuring that I could always go back later. When I'd calmed down.

I tried the door opposite and was surprised to find a modern office, the same plush carpet but chrome and glass furniture and several expensive looking desk-top computers. The air in the room was definitely colder than in the rest of the building and I guessed there must have been some sort of air conditioning for the computers but it was discreetly hidden away. There were a line of matt black filing cabinets ranged against one of the walls and they weren't locked. On the front of one of the cabinets were letters, A-E, F-K and so on on the front of the drawers. On an impulse I held the flashlight in my teeth with the keys banging against my chin while I pulled open the section that contained F and sure enough there was a file for Ferriman, Terry. A birth certificate, photocopies of credit card application forms, social security number, academic qualifications, passport. And a death certificate. It was there. The death certificate for Terry Ferriman. Aged eleven. I put the file back and pulled out the one next to it. Granger, Helen. There was a birth certificate in the file,

and a death certificate, along with death certificates and the marriage licence of the girl's parents.

I put it back and went to the drawer containing the S files. There was no file for Sinopoli, Lisa,

but as I pushed the drawer shut I saw that the one next to it had a label on that said Dead Files H-K.

I looked at the cabinets, there were six of them and five contained dead files. Each cabinet had six drawers which meant that there were thirty drawers full of dead files and when I pulled open the one labelled R-S it was packed tight and I had to struggle to get the Sinopoli file out. It was the paper trail of a life, the life of Lisa Sinopoli: her birth certificate, her exam results, her bank statements, pay cheques from her time in Hollywood, receipts, deeds to property she'd owned, a marriage certificate confirming that she'd tied the knot with Greig Turner when she was twenty two years old, and two death certificates. One, the real one, I suppose, showing that she'd died of TB at the age of six. The other, the one she'd have needed to kill off the identity when she moved on, was dated 1940 and had her as thirty years old. No doubt the war would have made changing identities easier, though by looking at the stacks of files she was well used to it. If I read it right, the dead files were identities she'd already used. The other cabinet contained files of future possibilities.

Part of me held out a vague hope that maybe she was just involved in some complicated credit card scam or cheque-kiting or any other common-or-garden fraud. That I could cope with, that wouldn't have me waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. But then I remembered the signed copy of Kidnapped and I knew that there was no straight forward explanation for it. I wondered how far back the dead files went. I flicked through the ones in the R-S drawer and got back to 1847, a woman called Anne-Cecile Rullier but I couldn't make sense of the documents,

what with them being in French and all. It was also obvious that the more recent the file, the more documentation it contained, showing that it was getting progressively harder to maintain a new identity. That probably explained why there were computers in the room.

I went over to one of the machines, a top of the range IBM, and I managed to switch it on but I couldn't get into its files.

I left the air-conditioned room and tip-toed along the hall to the next door and went in. It contained a display of Egyptian artifacts and they were old, old, old. There were statues, a lot of gold jewellery, a gold cat that reared up on its back legs as if playing, and some stones with hieroglyphics on. I wondered if they were recent acquisitions, and I hoped they were because I didn't like to think what the alternative possibility was. That was too much to even consider right then.

I pushed open the next door down the hall and shone my flashlight on the wall opposite. Terry's face looked back at me, the eyes glinting, the skin a pale white, and it took a second or so during which my heart stopped beating before I realised that it was a portrait, a life-size painting hanging on the wall. It was a good one, almost like a photograph. She was sitting in a straight-backed chair by the side of a Victorian fireplace, unsmiling and with her hair tied back but it was definitely Terry. I played the beam of light along the wall and it illuminated a second portrait, this one much older and not quite as good. The room was full of portraits, some of them were clearly very old,

the varnish going brown and the colours fading, others appeared fresh and new as if they'd just been painted yesterday. They were all of Terry, with one possible exception and that was a Picasso that may or may not have been her. It was difficult to say because there was an eye in one corner and a nose in the middle but I figured there was a fair chance it was meant to be her because the eye was jet black. Picasso painted her, can you believe that? Robert Louis Stevenson gave her a copy of his book and Picasso painted her. There was a single statue in the room, a life size sculpture of her in pure white marble.

Her voice, when she spoke, made me jump and I dropped the torch. "I know it's vain, Jamie,

but I get such pleasure looking at them," she said. I whirled round but I couldn't see her and the thought flashed through my mind that she must be able to see in absolute darkness.

“Terry,” I said. “Is that you?” Of course it was her and I know it was a stupid thing to say but I couldn't see a thing and for all I knew she could have been standing there with an axe in her hand. I knelt down and groped for the flashlight and shone it in the direction of her voice. She was sitting at the far end of the room in a leather wing chair and when the beam of light hit her face she threw up her hands to shield her eyes, blinking and turning her head.

“Jamie, there's a light switch to your left. Why don't you just switch that on?”

I did as she said and a series of recessed lights snapped on. She sat demurely in the chair, her hands back on her knees, her head on one side as she looked at me. She was wearing a black dress that I vaguely realised, then the I remembered that I'd never seen her in a proper dress before. I turned and looked at the portrait, the big one that had startled me when I first entered the room. It was the same dress.

I looked back at her and she'd got to her feet and was walking towards me. I hadn't heard her move.

“Do you think it's vain?” she asked.

I shrugged. “They're beautiful pictures,” I said. “I can see why you'd want to keep them.”

She held out her hand and I looked at it.

“The flashlight,” she said. “Give me the flashlight.”

I gave it her and she switched it off and handed it back to me, the keys jingling in the silence.

“What are you doing here, Jamie?” she asked, brushing her hair behind her ears as she spoke.

I thought of lying, I thought of saying that I'd come round to see her and found the garage door open, that I was hoping to give her a scare, but I knew there was no point because she'd caught me prowling around her apartment in the dark like some amateur burglar. No, I couldn't lie, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her the truth, that I believed that Terry Ferriman wasn't her real name and that whoever she was she'd been on the earth for at least two centuries and probably a hell of a lot longer than that. The Egyptian artifacts worried me. I could just about cope with the concept that a girl could live for a couple of hundred years, but the possibility of thousands of years sent my mind reeling.

“Well?” she said. She was standing less than an arm's length from me, her head tilted up and a hint of a smile on her lips.

“Who are you?” I said, which wasn't exactly original but it was all I could come up with.

“Who do you want me to be?” she replied, almost whispering.

“You're not Terry Ferriman,” I said, the words catching in my throat. “The real Terry Ferriman is dead.”

“Do the police know?” she asked, not denying the accusation.

“Yes,” I said. “They're looking for you now. I'm surprised they haven't been here already.”

“They know about the basement?” she said, frowning, and I realised that of course they didn't.

De'Ath would have sent men around to her small apartment upstairs. Unless they were lucky like me they wouldn't discover that she owned the whole building.

“No, you're right. I don't think they do.”

“How did you find out?” she asked, and I told her about her neighbour and my conversation with the real estate agent.

“And how did you get in?” I explained about Dave Burwash and she laughed and reached up to touch my cheek. “Clever boy,” she whispered softly. “So clever.”

“What's going on, Terry?” I said. “Who are you?”

She dropped her hand from my cheek and took me gently by the arm, leading me to the door.

She didn't speak as she took me along the hall and opened another door. She went in first and switched on the lights and I followed her. It was a long room with no windows but tapestries on the walls stopped it from feeling claustrophobic. The furniture was comfortable and obviously antique, there were wooden chairs with red velvet cushions, a chaise longue and two overstuffed sofas either side of a marble fireplace. The fire wasn't lit and there was a screen in front of it depicting a castle with a knight on horseback riding up to the portcullis. On a low oak sideboard there was a collection of photographs in silver and gold frames and as she guided me to one of the sofas I saw that she was in some of the pictures and that most of them were black and white.

“Do you want a drink, Jamie?” she asked as she sat me down. “You look as if you need one.”

I nodded. I think I must have been in a state of shock. I felt as if I'd been hypnotised.

She walked over to the sideboard where there was a group of bottles and decanters on a silver tray. “Brandy?” she said over her shoulder and I said that would be fine. At least I tried to, I'm not sure if the words came out or not. I watched her as she poured brandy from a decanter into a crystal glass. There was something different about her, and it wasn't the fact that she was wearing a dress for the first time. It was more they way she held herself, she was carrying herself like a woman and not like a gauche girl the way she'd been when I first met her. And there was something else.

“I think you'll like this,” she said as she carried the glass over to me. I realised then what it was,

what it was that had changed. Her voice. Or rather the way she was speaking. Gone was the “gee whizz” breathless Valley Girl voice and in its place was the soft but confident tones of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. She'd dropped an act and I knew with a cold certainty that I was about to have the real Terry Ferriman revealed to me. It wasn't knowing the truth that frightened me, though, it was not knowing what she planned to do after she'd told me. I'd fallen in love with Terry Ferriman, not the person who sat gracefully on the sofa next to me with her hands folded in her lap and watched me sip the brandy in the way that a cat watches a mouse it has cornered.

“Good?” she said.

“Very good,” I said though if the truth were told I couldn't taste a thing as a warm glow spread down through my chest.

She smiled. “That brandy was laid down in 1802, Jamie,” she said. “Three years after Napoleon took power in France.”

“Really?” I said, eyebrows raised. I took another sip but I still couldn't taste it. The glow was spreading to my stomach, though, and I felt a little light-headed.

“It was,” she continued, “a very good year.”

“For brandy?” I said.

“For many things,” she said. “It was a glorious summer.”

My head swam and I shook it to try and clear it and I panicked, wondering if maybe she'd drugged me. I remembered the dream, her crouching over a body, blood on her mouth, and I remembered the feel of her warm lips against the skin of my neck.

“Drink your brandy and relax, Jamie,” she said. "And don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you.

Trust me." Her voice was as soothing and as warming as the brandy but part of me felt that she was talking to me like a doctor talks to a patient. How could I trust someone who'd lied to me in the way that she'd done. Hell, nothing I knew about Terry Ferriman appeared to be the truth. I swallowed the rest of the brandy in one gulp.

“What were you looking for, Jamie?” she said, taking the empty glass from my hands. She rubbed it between her palms as she watched me.

“I don't know. The truth I suppose. I guess I wanted to know the truth. Does that sound banal?”

“And did you find it?” she asked, ignoring my question.

“I saw the files,” I said. “I saw the dead files, the identities you've used. And I saw the ones that you'll be using in the future. How old are you Terry? Who are you?”

“You really want to know?” she asked. "Do you really think you could deal with it, Jamie? You say you came here to discover the truth. But is that what you really want? Think about it, Jamie.

Think about what the truth means."

Greig Turner flashed into my mind, the shrivelled husk of a human being, decaying while the girl he loved stayed the same. What was worse, knowing that he was dying, knowing that he'd lost her, or knowing that she would still be around long after he'd been buried or cremated or whatever they did with the bodies of faded-out movie stars. Would he be happier if he thought she had died,

or that she too was living out her final years in a wheelchair in some hidden-away nursing home? I remembered the look of horror on his face when I'd told him that the photograph of Terry Ferriman was a recent one and not an old picture of Lisa Sinopoli, the girl he'd married and lost.

“Greig Turner,” I said. “Did he know?”

“No,” she said emphatically. “Not then he didn't.”

“I went to see him,” I said. “He knows now.”

“He knew before you went to see him, Jamie. Or at least he suspected. That's why he hired a detective to track me down.”

“Matt Blumenthal.”

“Matt Blumenthal,” she repeated.

“You killed him here, didn't you?” I said. “In this basement.”

“He died here. But I didn't kill him.”

“Who did?”

“That's part of knowing the truth, Jamie. First you've got to decide if you want to know everything.”

“Why did you have Turner's photograph in your apartment upstairs?”

“He was my husband. I always felt close to him. I wanted his picture around.” She went over to the sideboard to refill my glass.

“So why didn't you stay in touch with him? Why did you leave him?”

“You saw him. Doesn't that answer your question?”

“You left him because he was old? You wouldn't see him because he's dying and you're still young?”

She shook her head. “No, that's not it at all. It was for his sake, it was his feelings I was trying to protect. How do you think he'd feel knowing that I'm the way I am and he's the way he is? I thought it was better that he thought I was dead. And if he hadn't hired that detective, and if you hadn't gone to see him, then maybe he'd have died a lot happier than he did.” She came back with the glass and held it down to me. My right hand was shaking as I took it and I used both hands to hold it to my lips.

“You know he's dead, then?” I asked after I'd swallowed.

“Yes, I know he's dead.” She sat down next to me and put her hand on my knee.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“To spend time with you,” she said. “To be with you.”

“For how long?”

“For ever,” she said and looked at me steadily. I could feel myself beginning to drown in her bottomless black eyes and I had to pull myself back.

“That's not possible and you know it,” I replied.

“It's possible,” she said.

“How?”

“That's part of knowing the full truth, Jamie. First you've got to decide if you can handle it. If you really want it.”

“Didn't Greig Turner want it? Didn't he want to stay with you for ever?”

Her hand clenched on my leg and I felt the nails bite into the cloth of my trousers and pinch the skin underneath. "I didn't leave Greig because he was getting old. He left me. He was the one who betrayed me, he's the one who couldn't keep out of other women's beds. I loved him, I begged him not do it, but he wouldn't listen. He threw it away. And by the time he realised what he'd lost,

it was too late. He wasn't trying to get me back, that's not why he hired Blumenthal. He found out that I'd been paying his bills at his nursing home in Big Sur. I think he suspected then that something was wrong. He didn't want me back, Jamie. He just didn't want to die."

“Nobody does, Terry. Shit, do I still call you Terry, or what? What name do you use?”

“Terry is fine.”

“What was your original name?”

“The first?”

“Yeah, the first.”

She laughed. “It was such a long time ago,” she said and then she said something that sounded like “Malinkila” and I asked her to repeat but I still couldn't make my mouth form the sounds.

“Egyptian?” I said and she nodded and we both knew then that I'd reached the point of no turning back.

“You're ready?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You're sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then ask.” She settled back in the sofa and waited while I tried to get my thoughts in order.

There was so much I wanted to know. I wanted to know who she was, how old she was, who had killed Matt Blumenthal, why she had been found with his body, and what she meant when she said she wanted to be with me forever.

“How old are you? What are you?” I asked.

“I'm not quite sure, that's the answer to both questions, Jamie. I think it's been between four and five thousand years, but for a long time I wasn't counting, if you know what I mean. Time didn't have the same meaning back then. I was just living, surviving. Moving from place to place, from country to country.”

“But you were born in Egypt?”

“Yes.”

“Four thousand years ago?”

“Or thereabouts. I remember the Great Pyramids being built at Giza, and the Sphinx, and I guess that was about 2,500 BC. It took me a long time to get my head straight too. You can imagine what it was like, when all around me were getting older and I stayed the same, exactly as you see me today. For centuries I lived as an outcast, scared to live near people for too long because they always turned against me in the end.” She said it the way I once told a nephew that I remembered the days before colour television and push-button telephones. That piece of news was greeted with an eight-year-old's gasp of amazement but that was nothing to how I felt at her matterof-