Chameleon. Mark Burnell

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      ‘Yes.’

      He turned to look at her. ‘Really?’

      ‘You seem surprised.’

      He looked back at the ground coffee in the pot. ‘Not really. It’s just …’

      ‘Just what?’

      ‘I don’t know …’

      ‘It’s okay, Laurent. I’m not busy.’

      Uncertainty made way for a lopsided grin. ‘No?’

      ‘I just don’t want you to take me for granted.’

      ‘How could I? I don’t even know you. You tell me that you have a temper but I’ve never seen it.’ Stephanie grinned too. Masson let it drop, as she knew he would. ‘You want to come here again?’

      ‘Why don’t you come out to me?’

      ‘Okay. I’ll be finished in the garage at about six thirty, seven.’

      When Masson went to work, Stephanie climbed into her second-hand Peugeot 106 and drove back to the farmhouse. She parked beneath a tree and left the windows rolled down. Despite the cool dawn, it was already a hot morning, a firm wind among the leaves and branches. The lavender bushes were clouds of bright purple that whispered to her as she climbed up the stone steps to the rough gravel beside the terrace.

      It wasn’t anything she saw or heard that made her stop. It was a feeling, a tightness in the chest. Just like her reaction to Olivier’s slap, it was an instinct she couldn’t rinse from her system. She stood still, held her breath and felt her pulse accelerate. There was no apparent reason for it; no door forced, no window broken, nothing out of place. She waited. Still nothing. She told herself she’d imagined it. But as she took a step forward, she heard a noise. A soft scrape, perhaps. One hard surface against another. The sound was barely audible over the wind. It could have been the gentle clatter of a branch on the clay tiles of the barn, or the creak of a rotten shutter on a rusty hinge.

      The memory triggered the response. The mind functioned like a computer. Gathering information, analysing it, forming strategy, assessing risk. She felt herself begin to move, directed by a will that didn’t seem to be her own.

      She hummed a tune to herself as she strolled round the farmhouse to the back. To look at, a girl without a care in the world. Behind the house, she shed her shoes and clutched the drainpipe which rose to the roof gutter. When she’d moved in, it had been loose. During her first week, she’d bolted it to the stone wall herself.

      She began the climb, the surface abrasive against the soles of her feet, the paint flaking against her palms. She was out of practice, testing tissue that had softened or tightened, but her technique remained intact. She pulled back the shutter – always closed, never fastened – and made the swing to the window, grasping the wooden frame, hauling herself up and through, and into a tiny room that the leasing company had fraudulently described as a third bedroom.

      She paused on the landing to check for sound but heard nothing. In the second bedroom, which overlooked the courtyard at the rear of the house, she opened the only cupboard in the room, emptied the floor-space of shoes, pulled out the patch of mat beneath and lifted the central floorboard. Attached to a nail, there was a piece of washing line. At the end of it, there was a sealed plastic pouch, coated in dust and cobwebs.

      For all the serenity of the life she’d made for herself, it had never occurred to Stephanie to dispense with her insurance. She took it out of the pouch. A gleaming 9mm SIG-Sauer P226. In the past, her gun of choice. She checked the weapon, then left the bedroom.

      The staircase was the worst part, a narrow trap. She eased the safety off the SIG and descended, her naked feet silent on the smooth stone. On the ground floor, she moved like a ghost; the sitting room, the cloakroom, the study.

      The intruder was in the kitchen. She felt his presence at the foot of the stairs but only spied him when she peered through a crack in the kitchen door, which was half open. She saw a patch of cream jacket, some back, a little shoulder, half an arm, an elbow. She tiptoed inside. He was facing the terrace entrance, his back to her. He was standing, as if expecting her. Perhaps he’d heard the Peugeot park; he couldn’t have seen her approach from the steps, not from any of the kitchen windows, and yet he seemed to know that she most often entered the farmhouse via the terrace.

      Stephanie managed to place the cold metal tip of the SIG’s barrel against the nape of his neck before he stirred. When he did, it was nothing more than a gentle flinch. He made no attempt to turn around or to cry out with surprise. That was when she recognized the clipped, snow-white hair.

      ‘Hello, Miss Schneider.’ And the clipped Scottish accent. ‘Or should I say, Miss Patrick?’

       2

       You tell yourself it can’t be true. For once, you’re honest with yourself but your first reaction is denial. It has to be a mistake. Your mistake, somebody else’s, it doesn’t really matter. Any excuse will do when you can’t face the truth about yourself.

       Everybody has a talent. This is what the cliché tells us. I think it depends on what you regard as a talent. When the lowest common denominator determines the threshold for that talent, almost anything can count; having a nice smile, being a good liar, not succumbing to obesity. Personally, though, I reject the idea that everybody has a gift. It’s rather like saying ‘art is for the people’. It isn’t. It’s for those who can appreciate it and understand it. It’s elitist. Just like talent.

       Most people have no particular ability. Mediocrity is the only quality they have in abundance. I should know. For a long time, I was one of them. But that was before I discovered that there was an alternative me, that there was another world where I could rise above the rest and excel.

      It’s one thing to discover you’re exceptional. It’s quite another to recognize that what makes you exceptional is unacceptable. What do you do when you finally see who you really are – what you really are – and it’s everything society rejects? You tell yourself it can’t be true. That’s what you do, that’s the first thing. And maybe it’s what you continue to do. But not me. I’d already lied to myself for long enough. When the moment came, I stopped pretending I was someone else and chose to be the real me instead. I chose to be honest.

       Brutally honest.

      ‘How are you, Stephanie?’

      Slowly, he turned round, his face emerging from her memory; ruddy skin stretched tightly across prominent bones, aquamarine eyes, that white hair. He was wearing a cream suit, a dark blue shirt open at the throat, a pair of polished black slip-ons.

      ‘I heard the rumours, of course. That Petra Reuter was back. Naturally, I didn’t believe them. But when it turned out that there was some substance to them, I assumed that someone had hijacked her identity in order to protect their own identity. Just as you once did.’ He squinted at her, perplexed, offended. ‘It never occurred to me that it might actually be you, the real Petra Reuter.’

      Alexander was a man who believed mistakes were made by other people. That was why he was staring at her so intensely. He was looking for an answer.

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