Once Bitten (2 page)

“Pleased to meetchya,” she said. “I would shake hands but, you know...” She shrugged and I noticed for the first time that her hands were handcuffed in front of her. I took out a small tape recorder and a notebook from the briefcase and then put it on the ground, by my chair.

“I'm going to record this interview, it's easier than making notes,” I explained as I pressed the recording button.

“For sure,” she said. She was wearing a grey tunic and trousers which I guessed the police had given her which meant that her clothes had been sent to Forensic.

“Your name is Terry Ferriman?” I said, and she nodded. I smiled and tapped the tape recorder with my pen. “You have to say it out loud, it won't pick up nods.”

“Oh right, yeah, for sure,” she said, nodding her head. “Your accent is really neat. You're English, aren't you?”

I nodded. “How old are you?” I asked.

She grinned mischievously. “How old do I look?” she said, holding her chin up and shaking her head so that her long dark hair swung from side to side, her jet black eyes weighing me up. I'd have put her face at about fifteen, smooth white skin and gleaming Californian teeth. Her lipstick was smeared across her right cheek as if she'd wiped it roughly with the back of her hand. Her body I'd have put at eighteen, maybe nineteen. They'd obviously taken her underwear because when she shook her head I could see the ripple of her breasts under the tunic. She caught me looking at her chest and smiled. “How old do I look?” she asked again.

I felt my face redden and before I could answer there was a bang on the door and the guard opened it to let in De'Ath carrying two cups of coffee, one in each hand, with a file under one arm.

His teeth were clenched and he grunted as he put both cups down on the table so hard that liquid spilled and pooled around them. “Yah! They're hot,” he cursed. He waved his hands in the air and swore. He pointed at one of the cups. “That's yours, white and sweet, just like your good self,” he said to me.

“Whereas your's is black and cool, I bet,” I replied, and he laughed.

“Man, you are one slick Englishman,” he said. “Almost makes me wish we never got our independence.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Can we get on with this, please?”

“Sure,” said De'Ath. He looked over the girl. “Professor Van Helsing introduced himself?” he asked her. “He's the man who's gonna tell us if you're sane or not, so be straight with him, d'yer here?”

She nodded, wide-eyed.

“Has she been charged yet?” I asked him.

“It's coming,” he said. “Paperwork's taking time. They're out in force tonight. When you've finished with her there's a guy in room B who reckons that Satan told him to go and stick up a liquor store and shoot the owner's wife in the face.” He leant against the wall and sips his coffee.

“OK, I'll be along when I've finished here.” I pressed the 'pause' button on the tape recorder and sat and looked at him because there's no way I was going to start questioning the girl while he was there. He finally got the message and left us alone. Alone with the woman guard that is.

“He called you Van Helsing?” Terry said.

“A joke.”

Her brow furrowed.

“Professor Van Helsing. The vampire hunter. The one that went after Dracula. In the book.”

“Oh, right, sure, yeah,” she said, and her manacled hands went up to her mouth and touched the smear of lipstick. Except that I realised that it wasn't lipstick, it was dried blood. I pressed the 'pause' button again to start the tape running.

“Terry, I'm going to ask you some questions, OK? Just relax, they're not tricks, I'm not trying to catch you out or anything. Trust me, OK?”

“Sure. Fire away. Hit me with your best shot.”

“What day is it, Terry?”

“Friday.”

“What month?”

“August.”

“What year?”

“Nineteen ninety two.”

“What year were you born?”

She smiled. “What is this, Wheel of Fortune?” she asked.

“Just help me out, Terry. Answer the questions and then I can go home to my bed. When were you born?”

“Twenty-five years ago,” she said. “Or thereabouts.” She was a lot older than she looked.

“Who is the president of the United States?”

“George Bush.” She giggled and put her hands up to her mouth again. There was dried blood on her hands, too.

“What's the capital of the United States?”

She grinned. “Los Angeles,” she said. She watched me scribble her answer in my notebook and held up her hand, waving it to stop me. “I was joking, Jamie. OK? I was joking. Washington is the real capital.”

I sat back in the chair and gave her a stern look. Or tried to anyway. She wasn't supposed to be using my first name. It didn't show the proper respect, you know? “This is serious, Terry,” I said.

“Oh, for sure,” she sighed. “For sure it is.” She leant forward and looked at me intensely with her jet black eyes. “The black guy, now he's serious, Jamie. He's trying to bring me real grief, but you? You, Jamie, you're a pussycat.“ She smiled and winked. ”Fire away.”

“Can you name three cities beginning with the letter D?”

“Detroit, Dallas, Durham.”

“Durham?”

“Yeah, Durham. It's in England.”

“I know, it's just a strange city to think of, that's all.”

She shrugged.

“Have you been there?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” she sighed, and I wasn't sure if she was joking or not.

“What's your favourite food?”

“Are you hitting on me?” she said coyly.

“No,” I said.

“Lasagna. What's the point of these questions?”

“They help me assess your state of mind. What was the last film you saw?”

She looked up at the ceiling, thinking. There was dried blood on the underside of her chin, a thin streak as if she'd run a bloody finger gently along it and left behind a trail. She lowered her eyes and caught me staring at her neck. “TV or movie?” she asked.

“Doesn't matter.”

“Casablanca.”

“What's your favourite colour?”

She looked down at her gown. “Well it shitfire sure ain't grey,” she said. "Black, maybe. Yeah,

I like black."

“Which weighs the most - a pound of coal or a pound of feathers?”

“Shoot, Jamie, we did that one at school. They're the same.”

“Which would you rather have, a dog or a cat?”

“Neither.”

“You don't like animals?”

She shrugged. “Don't like, don't dislike. Neutral.”

“Do you know why you're here?”

“Yes.”

I waited but she didn't expand on her answer, she just sat back and looked at me.

“Will you tell me why you think you're here?”

“They, like, think I killed a man.”

“And did you?”

“Are you a psychologist or a detective?”

“Fair point,” I replied. “How do you feel?”

“About being here?” I nod. “Scared, I guess. Confused. A bit, like, angry. Yeah, angry, for sure.”

“Why haven't you asked for a lawyer?”

“I haven't done anything wrong, that's for sure.”

I asked her a few more general knowledge and current affairs questions and then I switched off the tape recorder and put my pen in the inside pocket of my jacket. “OK, Terry. That's it. I told you it'd be painless.”

“Is that all?”

“That's the first bit over.” I picked up my briefcase, opened it and took out my portable computer. She watched as I flicked up the screen and powered it up. The disc whined and the orange screen flickered into life. It asked me for my password and I typed in “Deborah” and I made a mental note to change it because her name brought back too many memories.

“OK,” I said. I moved my chair next to her's and swivelled the computer round so that we could both see the screen. I looked up at the guard and asked her if she'd take the cuffs off Terry.

“I'll have to check,” she said and went out, to look for De'Ath I guess and to get his blessing.

“You really should ask for a lawyer,” I said to Terry.

She shrugged. “I haven't done anything,” she said. "I mean, like, it's their problem, not mine,

you know? Their mistake. I'll be back on the streets before you know it. I'm cool, you know?"

“I can recommend a good lawyer. If you change your mind.”

She smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Jamie. But no thanks.”

The guard came back with two uniformed officers, which I reckoned was piling it on a bit thick because the girl was showing no signs of aggression and she certainly wasn't on Angel Dust or anything else that was going to give her the strength of ten men, or even one. One of the men stood by the door, his hand on the gun in his holster. The female guard unlocked Terry's handcuffs while the second man went and stood behind us.

Terry massaged her wrists.

“Better?” I asked.

“Yeah, thanks. What do you want me to do?”

“OK, this is just another test, just like the questions I asked you before, except this time they're on this screen. All you have to do is to make choices.”

“Multiple choice questions?”

“That's right, just like you did at High School. Each question will give you a choice of two answers, yes or no. You use the mouse to indicate your choice.” I showed her how to use the mouse and she nodded. I pressed the start button and a single line of type flashed up on the screen.

“I prefer cold weather to hot weather,” it said. “This is an example,” I explained. "If you prefer cold weather to hot weather, you indicate Yes. If you prefer hot weather, you indicate No. It's as easy as that. The machine will ask you five hundred questions. Some of them will be very straightforward like this one, others might seem a little strange. But you must answer yes or no.

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,