Stephen Leather - Once bitten

You can't pass or say both, or neither. You must pick the answer that is closest to the way you feel."

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the screen.

"There's no time limit, but try to answer the questions as quickly as possible. You must concentrate. No daydreaming, OK?"

She looked at me with her unblinking black eyes and grinned. "For sure, Jamie, it's no great intellectual challenge, is it? How do I, like, start?"

"I'll do it," I said. "You ready?"

She nodded and I set the program running and moved my chair away to let her get on with it. I leant back in my chair and watched her deal with the questions. She crouched forward slightly, her jet black hair falling across her face. She seemed at ease with mouse and her eyes remained fixed on the screen. The clicks of the mouse being depressed were fairly evenly spaced, three seconds at the most. Five hundred questions, three seconds a go, one thousand, five hundred seconds in all.

Twenty-five minutes.

When she finished she looked up at me and held up her hands like a child showing that they were clean.

"Finished," she said in a sing-song voice. "Did you make up all the questions?"

"Most of them," I answered.

She shook her head from side to side and sighed. "You are one weird dude," she said. "Totally, totally weird."

"What did you find strange?" I asked as I pulled the computer towards my side of the desk.

"The ones about, like, death. And killing. And the fact that every question was asked twice, but, like, in reverse. Why was that?"

"To check that your answers are consistent," I said. That's what I told her, but that was only part of the reason. The time difference between the question being flashed on the screen and the mouse being pressed was also important. It gives a clue as to how much thought is being put into the answer, or how much confusion it has caused. And the time taken to deal with the same question when asked in reverse is even more significant. That's what the computer program does, compares the answers and the time intervals with profiles of more than a thousand case histories. And then it gives me the information I need to make a judgment on her sanity.

"To check that I'm not lying?" she said.

"Something like that," I said. "But if you've done nothing wrong, Terry, you've nothing to worry about."

"Have you finished, sir?" the female guard asked me, and when I said I had she pulled the girl's arms behind her and handcuffed her again.

"Does she have to be handcuffed all the time?" I asked.

"It's procedure, sir," she answered.

I stored Terry's answers in a new case file and then ran a sorting program through them. It flashed WORKING for a minute or so and then the word DONE came up. It only took a few minutes, but the program represented more than ten years of my life. I'd started the research as part of a post-doctorate project trying to come up with a computerised version of the Rorschach Ink Blot Test. I got myself into a dead end on that one and I'd switched to the more easily computerised question and answer psychological evaluation systems, such as the Cattell Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire and the Graduate and Managerial Assessment system. In the past interpretation of the tests required a hell of lot of experience and the results were as much down to the examiner as to the person taking the tests. That's where the Beaverbrook program scored: by allowing the computer to grade the results it did away with the personal foibles of the guy doing the interpretation. I did a couple of papers on the computerization possibilities and they were well received and I managed to attract extra funding from a couple of mental health charities and I went onto the second stage of the research – developing a subsidiary program which would assess the validity and reliability of the individual tests. The normal way of testing was to repeat the tests, or variations of them, on several occasions and then to compare the results and run them through a Standard Error Of Measurement equation. What I was trying to do, though, was to come up with a one-off evaluation system, something that would act as a sort of Litmus test, an instantaneous verdict: sane or insane. I eventually came up with a variation of the Spearman-Brown Prophecy Formula which took the results of one test and effectively split them in half and treated them as if coming from parallel tests. It took the world of psychometrics by storm, I can tell you, and lost me a lot of friends. No-one likes to be told that a computer can do their job faster and more efficiently, especially psychologists with twenty years clinical experience.

I asked for the results in graph form and the screen cleared and then horizontal and vertical lines sprouted from the bottom left hand corner followed by diagonal wavy lines that represented the parameters within which previous cases suggested normal personalities would lie. A small flashing star marked Terry's profile. Dead centre. This girl was more stable than I was.

"Am I, like, OK?" she asked.

I smiled. "You're fine, Terry."

She grinned. "Can you do me a favour now?"

"Depends what you want," I told her.

She nodded her head sideways, indicating her arms handcuffed behind the chair. "Can you get them to take these off me. They hurt, for sure, and my nose, like, itches."

"I'll try," I said, getting to my feet and picking up the briefcase. "I'll ask De'Ath."

"Don't go yet," she said. "Scratch my nose for me, first. Please."

"Are you serious?"

"You don't know how shit fire serious, Jamie. It itches like you wouldn't believe."

She smiled and nodded, looking earnestly at me like a dog asking for a bone. I sighed and reached over and scratched her slowly on the tip of the nose. She groaned quietly, her eyes closed.

The door banged open and I flinched. "You finished?" De'Ath asked.

I felt my cheeks go red because I was sure he'd seen me touching her and there was a supercilious smirk on his face.

"Yeah, I'm done," I said. I nodded at Terry and went to the door, which De'Ath held open for me.

"Jamie?" she said, and I looked back at her. "Thanks," she said, and winked at me.

De'Ath followed me out into the corridor. "Well?" he asked.

"She seems fine to me," I said. "Though it might have been a help if you'd told me beforehand that she was a girl."

He laughed. "I must've forgotten," he said. "Sorry 'bout that."

"What did she do, Samuel?"

"Stabbed a guy, in the heart. Then slashed his throat. When we found her she was crouched over him, lapping at the blood. We haven't found the murder weapon yet, but it won't be long. And what we don't want is for her to spring some vampire story on us, you know. Now, is she sane or not?"

"As sane as you or I," I said. "Or at least as sane as I am. You I'm not sure about."

"That's all I need to know, Doc."

"And Samuel?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't tell people that my name is Van Helsing. It's not funny."

"You know what your problem is, Beaverbrook? You've no sense of humour, that's what."

"From you, dumb shit, I take that as a compliment. Now who's this other guy you want me to see?"

De'Ath took the file from under his arm and opened it. "Name's Kipp, Henry Kipp. Six priors, five of them armed robbery. He's…"

"Come on De'Ath," I interrupted, "you know you're not supposed to give me information like that. I'm only supposed to make my judgments on the basis…"

"OK, OK, stay calm, man. Forget what I said."

"You're always pulling dumb stunts like that, so don't tell me to forget it," I said. "These people deserve a fair hearing, and for that I have to be completely impartial."

Our argument was cut short by the swing doors being banged open and a gruff voice echoing down the corridor. "Well if it isn't Batman and Robin."