Stephen Leather - Once bitten

I opened one of the doors and entered a room which must have been about twenty feet square with high ceilings and no windows. There was a glittering chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling and a brass light switch by the door and there were paintings on all of the walls. I couldn't see much detail of the paintings because the flashlight didn't throw enough light to illuminate them entirely, I could only examine them a little at a time. They were big, and obviously old. Some of them were sea scenes, big galleons engaged in bloody battles with cannons firing and sails flapping in the wind, others were landscapes, images of farming practices that had long gone.

I looked for signatures in the corners of the paintings but couldn't find any, though I was pretty sure one of them was a Turner. I'd been around the Turner collection at the Tate in London and the one on the wall was definitely similar. If it was a Turner, Christ, what would it have been worth?

Millions, I guess.

I left the gallery, checked up and down the corridor, and went into the next room. The door felt much heavier and I really had to push to open it, and once inside I could see why. The back of the door was faked up to look as if it was covered in shelves of leather-bound books. When I closed the door it formed part of a bookcase and it was difficult to see where the join was, to make out which were real books and which were the fakes. I opened the door and left it ajar because I was sure that otherwise I'd have trouble finding my way out of the room again. It was about twice as long as the first room and lined from floor to ceiling with books. The ceiling was high, at least twelve feet, and there were several small stepladders so that you could reach the books on the top shelves. There must have been several thousand books in the library and I walked around, reading the titles in the light of the flashlight. One wall was composed entirely of fiction, and it looked as if most of them were first editions. It was an eclectic mix, modern thrillers, detective stories from the forties, classics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, poetry, romances, ghost stories. The rest of the books were non-fiction, a wide range of subjects, geography, science, cooking, a whole collection of text books everything from anatomy to zoology. They were in many different languages, too, I spotted French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and some that I couldn't identify. I wondered where she had got all the books from, they all seemed in pristine condition as if they'd been bought by the yard by some interior decorator.

I couldn't see any order to the collection, either, they weren't grouped in subjects, or languages, or alphabetically, and I shone the torch around looking for a catalogue system of some kind, a card index or a computer. There was nothing.

She either had an incredible memory or didn't care where the books were. Had they even been read? I took one of the books, a first edition of For Whom The Bell Tolls and flicked through it. It was in beautiful condition but two of the pages had been bent over as if to mark the place where she'd finished reading so I guess that answered my question. I flicked the pages with my thumb making a rippling noise and I saw writing on one of the pages near the front, a scribble in blue ink.

I went back page by page until I got to the one that had been written on. I read the inscription and it felt as if the temperature of the room had dropped by ten degrees. I looked up at the door but it was still only slightly ajar and there was no breeze. I shuddered and reread the words on the page.

"To the girl with the blackest eyes I've ever seen." He hadn't signed it, but his initials were there.

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.