Stephen Leather: Once bitten

How is it that Snoopy starts all his books? It was a dark and stormy night. Yeah, that's it. It was a dark and stormy night. I guess that's as good a way as any of starting it, because that's a perfect description of the weather outside right now, the wind roaring and wheezing like some malevolent monster wanting to force its way in and tear me apart, the rain smashing and splattering against the windows, occasional flashes of lightning shooting jaggedly across the infinite blackness of the midnight sky.

There's another way that'd be just as good, just as pertinent: once upon a time. That's how they start all the fairy tales, isn't it, the phrase providing a clear and present signal that what you're about to read is a figment of someone else's imagination, that no matter how scary the story you're starting from the premise that it's not true, that it can't be real. Maybe that would put you at ease, if you knew for a fact that it never happened, that I imagined it or made it up. OK, that's how I'll start it then. Once upon a time it was a dark and stormy night.

So who am I? My name's Jamie Beaverbrook, and I'll be forty-six years old next month.

Maybe. The desk I'm sitting at is considerably older than I am and it's in better condition. It's one of those big, military looking things with brass handles and legs as thick as a ship's mast. The desk is in front of a large picture window that overlooks the ocean. The chair is what they call a captain's chair, a thick, padded leather seat with a curved back that comes up to about my kidneys.

It's on wheels so I can scoot it from side to side. When I decided to use the room as a study I put the desk facing away from the window, towards the door, so that when I was working I wouldn't be distracted by the view. It's a hell of a view, a view you could die for the real estate agent told me, and she was right, but with both fingers of the clock pointing directly up there isn't much to see just now.

There's a computer on the desk, a Toshiba laptop with a hard disc and an orange screen. On the far left is a swan-necked brass lamp which illuminates the desktop in a pale yellow light. Every now and then there's a flash of white behind me, throwing my shadow across the desk and filling the study with a stark brightness like the flashgun of a camera and it's followed a few seconds later by the distant rumble of rolling thunder that I can feel deep down in my stomach. I used to know a way of calculating the distance of a storm, something to do with the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. You count the number of seconds that elapse between the lightning and the thunder and then divide by something. Seven. Or six. Whatever, it's been a long time since I cared how far away a storm was, but I still count the seconds. Habit, I suppose. Or instinct.

There's a bottle of whisky on the desk, half full, or half empty, depending on your point of view.

Next to it is a crystal tumbler, and that's half empty, too. In front of the glass is a small bottle of tablets, capsules actually, red and green. The cap on the bottle is one of those child-proof ones, you have to push it and turn it at the same time. There's a seal on it too, and it hasn't been broken. Yet.

In my hands is an envelope, a large one. It's sealed. I sealed it, almost ten years ago, and across the flap is my signature. Who says doctors have unreadable writing? Yeah, I'm a doctor. A psychologist, really. A criminal psychologist. If you need proof, my diplomas and stuff are on the wall to my right, next to the bookcase. Proof, that's what's in the envelope, or at least it was ten years ago when I sealed it, signed it, and placed it in a safety deposit box in the custody of a bank on Washington Boulevard. I retrieved it this afternoon, half an hour before the bank was due to close.

Lightning flashes and almost immediately afterwards the windows shudder and there's a deafening crash that makes me jump and I spill some of the whisky as I raise the tumbler to my mouth. My hands are shaking, partly because of the storm but mainly because of what's in the envelope. It goes quiet then, an unearthly silence, as the eye of the storm passes over the house, the pressure so intense that I can feel my ears pop and I swallow hard. I put down the empty tumbler and refill it, and then slit open the envelope with a paper knife in the shape of a miniature Spanish sword. The air is thick, too thick to breath, and my skull feels as if it's going to burst like an overripe watermelon. I look at the clock on the wall and it looks as if it has stopped, as if I've been trapped forever at this single moment of time, like an insect in amber, then there's a flash as millions of volts discharges itself from the clouds and the spell is broken and the second hand ticks again.

I tip the contents of the envelope out onto the desk: a sheaf of photocopied sheets which lie there overlapping like a gin rummy hand, and a black and white photograph, six inches by four inches, of a girl. The girl. The picture is a close up of her face framed by shoulder-length black hair parted in the middle, a young heart-shaped face, no lines or creases, smiling lips, slightly arched eye-brows that give her an amused look as if you've just tried to chat her up with a line she's heard a thousand times before. The hair on the right hand side of her head is behind her ear as if she'd just pushed it there before the photograph was taken. Because the photograph is black and white and not colour you can't tell what colour her eyes are, other than that they're dark, but I can tell you that they're black. Really black. Not dark brown, not grey, but pure black, as black as her hair. As black as the night. The eyes look out of the photograph straight at me, accusingly, and when I put it to the side of the papers she still looks at me. Still accuses me.

The name on the case-notes, her name, is Terry Ferriman, but later on in the investigation we added the alias Lisa Sinopoli. And a few others. So why are the case-notes just photocopies and not the real thing? Because they took the originals away, that's why, along with the tapes I'd made of our sessions together. I'd had a hunch that they were going to do that so I'd run off copies and stuck one set in the safety deposit box rented under a false name. Today was the first and only time I'd been back to the bank because I was never sure whether or not I was being followed. I'd given a second set of copies in another sealed envelope to my lawyer, Chuck Harrison, but they disappeared within forty eight hours of my handing them over and he denied that he ever saw them.

Good old Chuck. I wonder what happened to him. They never found his body.

The hairs on the back of my neck go up and I shiver, it feels as if someone is watching me and I whirl round as lightning flashes and there's a face at the window, a haggard face fractured with worry lines and deep set eyes, the hair uncombed and the mouth open. My heart leaps and I raise my hands to protect myself but the figure in the window does the same and I realise that it's my own reflection. So that's how far gone I am, now I'm jumping at shadows. My hands are shaking again, worse than before, and the papers make rustling noise like dead leaves in the wind. I drop the papers and put my hands under the cone of light thrown by the lamp. I don't remember exactly when my hands began to wrinkle, it was a gradual process, but it's obvious that they're no longer the hands of a youngster, the greenish veins are clearly outlined under the tough suntanned skin and the lines over the knuckles are deep furrows that don't disappear when I clench my fists. There are dark brown liver spots and a scattering of moles and I'm sure they weren't there when I was younger, the sign of skin cells going genetically maverick. The signs of age. God, please God, I don't want to get old and I don't want to die. I want to stay just as I am. No, that's not right, I want to stay just as I was, when I was thirty five maybe. At my peak. Before she came into my life. Her eyes stare back at me from the photograph, and now her image appears to be smiling.