Once Bitten (15 page)

He held up his hand to silence me and took the wallet. “Watch,” he said. “And learn.”

In the distance we heard a siren wail and somewhere in the dark a bottle smashed.

“Relax,” he whispered. “It's probably just a cat.”

The windows were protected by metal grilles which appeared to have been locked from the inside and after Dave had checked them out he shrugged disappointedly. Steps led down to a door and he ran his hands over it and tapped it cautiously. “Metal,” he whispered.

“Can you do it?” I asked.

There were three locks, evenly spaced down the left hand side of the door, and he examined each one. “I can, but it'll take time,” he said. “Let's see if there's an easier way.” We walked further down the alley and took a right turn, walking by a pile of fetid cardboard boxes and a cat which was chewing on something unsavoury. It mewed as we went by, warning us not to tamper with whatever it was it had between its sharp teeth.

By now our eyes were used to the gloom. The moon was still out but there were tall walls either side of the alley and the moonlight couldn't penetrate down to where we were. Just starlight. It was enough. The windows there were also shuttered and covered with grilles. At the end of the alley was the yellow glow of street lights and I hung back to let him go out first. He turned to the right and then stopped to examine the door of the double garage door there before walking on and back to the main road. I caught up with him about fifty yards from the building. “Let's go get a drink,” he said. I took the wallet back from him and put it into my jacket pocket.

He waited until we were in a bar on Sunset Boulevard with a couple of bottles of lager in front of us before leaning over conspiratorially. “It's just like the old days, this, Jamie,” he said, and winked. In his dark sweatshirt and blue jeans he looked a lot more like the burglar of old than the successful and highly-paid computer programmer which he'd become.

“Don't get to like it, Dave,” I warned. I knew all too well the adrenaline kick that comes with breaking the law, I'd seen it many times in the interrogation rooms in precinct houses all over Los Angeles. I didn't want to turn Dave back to his old ways, and not for the first time I regretted asking him along. I had no right to jeopordise his new life, even if I had been the catalyst who caused it. It was as if I was playing God, and the way he was reveling in it and treating it like an adventure just made me feel worse.

He raised his bottle in salute and drank from it, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand,

realising as he did that he was still wearing his black leather gloves. He slid them off and put them into his back pocket.

“The windows are too difficult,” he said. "We'd have to cut our way in. That in itself isn't a problem, a good pair of bolt-cutters will do the job, but we don't have a good pair of bolt-cutters.

And there's a chance that they're wired, though I wasn't able to see anything. The door would be easier, but as I said if you want them picked it'll take time. In a perfect world I'd drill them out but that'll make noise, even with a muffled drill. And again...."

“We don't have a drill,” I finished for him. “Or a muffler.”

“Ain't that the truth,” he laughed.

“OK, so you saw the door to the garage, one of those up-and-over jobs it was?”

I nodded.

“That I can have open in two minutes. It's operated by remote control but there's a lock too, and I can pick that with no trouble at all. The one snag is, it's pretty exposed. Street lights, cars going by.”

“Dave, I don't want you taking any risks, OK? It's just not worth it.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. "If it wasn't important, you wouldn't have asked, I know that.

It'll be OK, but I'm going to need you to keep a lookout for me. We'll walk back, and when we get to the building you hang back thirty feet or so, and start whistling as soon as I reach the door. I'll make it look as if I'm using a key, if I don't get it open in a minute or so I'll leave it and we'll try later. If you see anything that might give us problems, you stop whistling. That's all. No shouting,

no waving, just stop whistling. We'll move on and try later. Clear?"

“Clear,” I said, though I was far from happy about what he planned to do.

He picked up his bottle of lager and clinked it against mine. “Jamie, we'll make a criminal out of you yet,” he laughed.

“What do we do when the door's open?” I asked.

“I guess there'll be another door inside leading to the basement itself. I'll have to pick that for you, too.”

“Dave, I don't want you inside that house. You get me in, and then you get the hell away.”

He shook his head. “Just getting you into the garage won't be enough. I'll have to go inside and deal with the rest of the locks before you can get into the house. And what will you do if there's an alarm inside?“ He saw that I was about to argue and he held up his hand to silence me. ”Jamie, no arguments. Besides, as soon as we're in the garage we'll close the door. We'll be safer there than in the alley.”

“I suppose you're right,” I agreed reluctantly. I think the urge to see inside Terry's mysterious basement had got the better of my judgment.

We finished our lagers and went back to the house. As we'd agreed I held back and whistled as best I could as Dave knelt down by the lock and inserted one of the metal picks from the wallet. He tried a second, and a third, then a fourth, then he straightened his back and lifted the door with a grating sound that set my teeth on edge. He slipped inside and I followed him. As I shut the door a pick-up truck drove by but I doubt that the driver would have seen anything.

A fluorescent light had flickered on as soon as he'd swung the door open and it bathed the concrete floor in a stark white light that was almost blinding after the soft yellow streetlights outside. It was musty-smelling as if it hadn't been used though there was a small patch of oil on one side of the garage as if a car had been there recently. Terry's Porsche maybe? There were metal racks against one of the walls and a selection of tools but they were dust-covered and festooned with cobwebs so she obviously wasn't much of a mechanic. Or, more probably, the Porsche never needed any work doing on it, Teutonic engineering and all that. “Jamie, you can stop whistling now,” said Dave, with a grin.

To the left was a white-painted wooden door with a brass lock. Dave carefully ran his fingers around the door frame, peered through the cracks at either side and at the top and bottom, then went to work with his picks. It took him three minutes and the I heard a metallic click and the door slowly opened inwards. Dave made as if to go through the door but I stepped forward and pulled him back.

“No,” I hissed. “I'm on my own from here on in. Thanks for everything, Dave, but you must go now.”

He looked as if he was about to refuse but he could see that I was serious. “OK,” he said.

“Close the door after me.”

He told me to switch off the light and as I did he swung the door halfway up, ducked under it and was away. I closed it behind him and stood in the dark waiting for my eyes to get accustomed to the dark. They didn't. I waited for a full five minutes but I still couldn't see my hand when I held it in front of my eyes. The garage was completely lightproof. I couldn't even remember where the light switch was in relation to where I was standing. I groped against the wall but couldn't find it, then took a step to the left and banged against something wooden. Had there been a crate there before? Or a box? I couldn't remember. I felt a cold breeze on my left cheek and I turned my head that way but couldn't see anything. Was that the direction of the door leading inside the house? I squinted a little and it seemed as if there was a grey rectangle in the blackness but it could have been my eyes playing tricks.

I remembered I had a miniature Mag flashlight on my keyring, a present from Deborah in the days when she used to buy me presents. Way back when. I pulled it out of my pocket, the keys jangling like a wind chime, and twisted the light on. I ran the circle of light around the walls of the garage and allowed it to settle on the white door. There was a cool breeze coming from that direction, but I couldn't understand how that could be because all the windows Dave and I had seen had been shuttered and locked.

I decided against switching on the light and walked carefully across the garage floor to the door.

It made no sound when I pushed it and I stepped over the threshold, holding my breath. Beyond the doorway was a red-carpeted hallway. There was a rough mat on the floor and I wiped my feet on it and then stepped onto the plush pile. It made a quiet brushing noise as I walked, the sound of a cat being stroked. As I swung the flashlight around I saw another beam of light and a figure in the shadows and I jumped back, my heart thudding, and it jumped back simultaneously and I realised I'd been frightened by a mirror.

“Calm down, Jamie,” I muttered to myself. The mirror was old, very old, obviously an expensive antique. It was as tall as a man and the frame was gold-painted. I looked at it closely.

No, gold leaf more likely. Real gold. It must have been worth a fortune. The door from the garage had opened into the middle of the hall, facing the mirror, and it stretched out to the right and left.

There were two doors leading off the hall, one at either end, and I decided to head for the right,

hoping that there weren't any more locks and wondering what I'd do if there were. I worried too about alarms and thought that maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to send Dave away. It would also have made me feel a lot better wandering around in the dark if I'd had someone with me, but I knew that was childish. There was nothing to be frightened of in the dark. That's what I told myself, anyway.

There was a brass knob on the door and I turned it slowly and pushed. It opened and there was no sound from the hinges, just the swishing of the bottom of the door against the thick carpet.

Beyond was another hall off which led at least eight doors. There were probably more but the thin beam of light couldn't penetrate any further through the darkness. I was starting to feel like I was in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy game I used to play at university, where you go through a maze fighting imaginary demons and monsters, but you've no idea of where you're going or where the monsters are - the only one who knows is the guy controlling the game, the Dungeon Master. All you are told about is the tiny bit you're in, be it a cave or a room or a corridor with a thick red carpet.

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.