Stephen Leather - Once bitten

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.