Stephen Leather - Once bitten

"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.