‘No, sir.’
‘Great — why the hell not?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
They both looked at the blurry photograph again for some moments. Then the DC continued, picking up the memory stick. ‘I went up to the CCTV Control Room at Heathrow to see if I could track Jodie Bentley’s movements after passing through Passport Control. I’ve got her heading to the escalator down to Baggage Reclaim, but then she vanishes.’
‘Vanishes?’
‘Possibly she went into a toilet and changed her hair and put on a different hat. On this stick I’ve got the footage from the arrivals hall, but I couldn’t see her on it. There’s a dozen or so women of similar build emerging into it, but none of them that look like her, or are dressed like her. She had three large suitcases on a trolley at Atlanta Airport. She must either have got a porter or another trolley at the carousel.’
‘What about the taxi companies and limousine services at the airport?’ Grace asked. ‘Any of those take a single woman to Brighton? Also, what CCTV footage is there of people outside the building?’
‘I’ve put in a request for that footage and I’m working through the taxis and limousines, sir.’
Grace looked at the detective’s eager face. ‘Well done!’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Next he called the Financial Investigations Unit at John Street police station. He spoke to Kelly Nicholls, and asked her to see if she could find anything on a woman, aged in her thirties, from the Brighton area who had recently been in the United States, going under the name of Jodie Bentley, Judith Forshaw or Jemma Smith.
Then he went home.
29
Thursday 26 February
‘Yes, yes, yes, yes! OH, YESSSSSS, YESSSSSS! Oh my God you are incredible! Yes, YES, YESSSSSSSSS! OHHHH, OHHHHHHH, OHHHHHHHHHH!’ Jodie screamed in ecstasy — or rather what she hoped sounded like ecstasy. She clawed her nails down Rollo Carmichael’s naked back as, crushing her with his weight, he kept on thrusting as deep inside her as his not-very-well-endowed and slightly flaccid penis would go. She shot a discreet glance at her wristwatch. Only three minutes had elapsed. Too soon.
She’d been right in her original assessment of Carmichael. While he wasn’t a lawyer or a banker, he had been a Mayfair art dealer in a very serious way. The Impressionists he’d dealt in ranged in value up to figures with ridiculous rows of noughts at the end. He had a house in Knightsbridge which he used just as an occasional pied-à-terre and which, from the address she had managed to get out of him, she had discovered on the internet to be worth a good ten million, and his main home was now here in the city, this beachfront house, valued at more than three million pounds. If she played her cards right, this could truly be the catch that set her up for life. And he had excitedly invited her to join him on an exotic cruise he’d booked — he was flying out on Saturday afternoon. He had no one to go with, could she possibly drop everything and join him — please?
He’d apologized earlier for not having any Viagra tablets. She’d whispered to him, very sensually, that she would consider herself quite a failure if she couldn’t arouse him without them.
Now as he continued, as heavy as an elephant, grunting with grim determination, clammy with perspiration, his breath sweet with alcohol, she was reminded of a description by the former girlfriend of a grossly overweight MP, who had said that making love to him was like having a wardrobe fall on top of her with the key still in the door.
That was sort of what it felt like now.
To distract herself she thought about the different techniques of her past lovers — if that was the right word for her conquests. Walt Klein, fortunately, never lasted more than a few seconds before coming. Before him, Martin Granger, short and wiry, had used a curious rocking motion, as if drilling a bore hole. And before him, God, Ralph Portman was big on what he thought was erotic foreplay, repeatedly biting her nipples so hard she screamed in pain.
She glanced at her watch again. Coming up to four minutes. A respectable time. She needed him to feel a man, to believe that he was satisfying her because that would make him feel so good! Their first time. In this gorgeous house with huge bay windows overlooking the sea. Champagne in the ice bucket on the coffee table. Alcohol. Alcohol made these things bearable, doable and, just occasionally — although not right now — enjoyable.
It was their second date this week. She had a three-date rule, she’d told him cheekily when he’d made advances after their first dinner, just two days ago, on Tuesday. He would have come down to see her again last night, he told her, but he had to attend some tedious City Livery dinner, of which he was on the Court — whatever that meant.
She was still fretting about the break-in at her house. Although the house had an alarm, she never set it because the last thing she wanted was having to have keyholders, and the risk of the police going in and snooping around should it be set off. Hopefully this was nothing more than some low-life intruder taking advantage of the easy access via the scaffolding. Shit, the saw-scaled viper and the poison dart frog could have escaped out into the open — although in this cold air they wouldn’t have survived for long. Luckily they were still there and she’d managed to put them safely into new vivariums. She had been so angry her first impulse had been to call the police — but she had worked hard to preserve her anonymity, and just had to swallow it. As well as the fact, of course, that keeping these creatures without a local licence was illegal. She had bought some of them at poisonous reptile shows in Houton, in Holland, and at Hamm, in Germany. Bringing them into England in their little cardboard boxes was always easy. She just walked straight through Immigration with them inside duty-free carrier bags.
She hoped the little bastard — or bastards — had been bitten. Serve them bloody right! It did occur to her this break-in might be connected to the memory stick and cash, but if that had been the case, the house would have been turned upside down. She doubted they’d have been put off by her reptiles.
She’d been fascinated by venomous reptiles ever since she was a small child and an uncle had given her a book on wild animals. The furry and fluffy ones hadn’t interested her at all. But the snakes, spiders, crocodiles and frogs had. Other girls her age played with dolls. She kept snakes. Probably another reason, she had often reflected, why her father found her strange. Her snakes never minded that she had a big hooked nose and no tits.
One evening she put one of her grass snakes beneath the sheets at the bottom of Cassie’s bed. Then she had lain in her own room and waited for the screams. They had sounded so sweet, so beautiful. Totally worth having the snakes confiscated the next day!
She’d met her first husband, Christopher Bentley, in the reptile house of London Zoo when she was twenty-two; he was forty-eight and recently divorced. A few months before meeting him, she’d left home and used all her savings, together with a fake credit card — which she managed to use for a few weeks to draw out sums of cash — to have a Harley Street nose and chin job, followed by a boob job.
Having made a small fortune in property early on, and not needing to work again, Christopher’s big interest was venomous reptiles. He had spent a considerable amount of his adult life travelling in India, Africa and South America, where he had developed a fascination for these creatures. He had written two books on venomous snakes and one on poison frogs, and had been the adviser on setting up reptile houses at several zoos in the UK.
She’d found him fascinating, too. And attractive. The first time she entered his own private reptile house, in the basement of his handsome Regent’s Park home, a stone’s throw from the zoo, she was captivated.