The walls were lined with glass showcases, housing a huge collection of deadly snakes, spiders and frogs. He knew so much about all of them, and delighted in sharing his knowledge. He had rattlesnakes, a death adder, a Gaboon viper, a saw-scaled viper, a tiger snake and a whole variety of black mambas, as well as a range of spiders, including redbacks and funnel-webs. He also had a fascination with scorpions, keeping Indian reds, deathstalkers and Arabian fat-taileds.
They excited her. She was awed by the power these small creatures had. The ability to kill a human being with a single bite or sting, or in the case of some frogs, just contact with their skin. Christopher told her, too, that a scorpion unhappy with its environment, or surrounded by a ring of fire, could commit suicide by stinging itself in the back of its neck.
She liked that. The thought that if she wasn’t happy, she could just go, ‘I’m outta here,’ and end it all. She figured she would, one day. But not yet. Not, hopefully, for a long time. She was enjoying life and had plans. Big plans.
He had shown her the cabinet of meticulously labelled antidotes for the bites and stings of each of these creatures, and how to administer them — and in what time frame before paralysis or death. Most importantly of all, he taught her how to use the various implements he kept to handle his collection.
Mostly they were very basic, and the snakes he tended to handle with a metal stick, like a skewer with a curved end, and his bare hands.
On that first day, he took her to his reptile room to show her a new arrival, a small cardboard box sealed with gaffer tape containing a saw-scaled viper, which he cheerily told her had killed more people in the world than any other snake. It lived in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. It was extremely aggressive, he said, and moved fast, coiling and uncoiling in a sidewinder motion, making a sizzling sound as its scales moved together.
She was astonished to watch him pull away the gaffer tape with his bare, ungloved hands, and open up the box with his hooked metal stick. Then he upended it into a red plastic bin and slammed down a ventilated lid.
She’d noticed that even he had looked nervous during this last part of the operation.
‘What’s your fascination with these creatures?’ she had asked him.
‘Their power,’ he had replied, simply. ‘Here we are, us humans, with all our sophistication. Yet any of these creatures, some with brains the size of a pinhead, can kill us; some in hours, some in days.’
He had delighted in talking her through the biochemistry of their bites and stings. All the different ways that the venom acted on the human body without the antidote.
For some reason she found herself particularly drawn to the saw-scaled viper. The way its bite was fatal. And that there was only a two-hour window in which to administer the antidote.
Too bad, eight years after they were married, that Christopher had missed an antidote window. Well, not strictly true. She’d jolted his arm when he’d been holding a saw-scaled viper by the neck. And she had previously substituted the antidote with a placebo.
Hey ho, so much for the so-called placebo effect!
By the time he’d been admitted to the Toxicology Unit at Guy’s in London he was already bleeding through his eyes and every orifice.
He’d had to go. He was adamant he didn’t want to have children, and that didn’t fit with her plans. And he wasn’t rich enough for all the things she wanted in life, including a child — she wanted this more and more badly as time went on, and her biological clock was ticking away.
But two good things had come from that marriage. A substantial chunk of his estate, after death duties, enabling her to buy property — a house and a bolthole flat in Brighton, and another bolthole flat in London — and not to have to worry about money in the short term. And she’d also learned the importance of having a glass door into the reptile room so you could see, before entering, if any of your pets were out of their containers.
Just like she had at home.
She glanced surreptitiously at her watch again. Enough time now. She began writhing, clawing wildly at him, and screamed out, ‘OH, MY DARLING, YESSSS, YESSSSSS, YESSSSSSS, I’M — I’M — I’M—’
Suddenly, Rollo Carmichael shuddered, then stiffened in every part of his body except for the bit that actually mattered right now, which went limp and slipped out of her.
She felt his whole weight on top of her, crushing her.
‘Darling?’ she said.
There was no reply.
‘Rollo? Did you...?’
He let out a faint gasp of air.
‘Rollo?’
Gripping his head, she turned his face towards hers. He stared dead ahead. Unblinking. Nobody home.
‘Rollo?’ she said, gently. Then more loudly. ‘Rollo? Rollo? No, don’t do this to me. Rollo?’
There was no response.
30
Friday 27 February
Jodie Bentley was a no-show. As Tooth had expected. As he had predicted. As he had told his paymaster, Sergey Egorov. If the Russian asshole had listened, Tooth wouldn’t be standing in an icy wind, in falling sleet, freezing his nuts off. He’d be on a plane back to New York from Brighton, England, with the memory stick that Egorov had paid him one million dollars to recover. He always took his payment up front; he didn’t need to do cash on delivery, because he always delivered.
He stood in a fleece coat, fur-lined boots and Astrakhan hat, a short distance up the hill at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. At least, he figured, Walter Klein could take comfort in the fact that his casket was more luxurious than the jail cell he’d probably have spent at least the next fifteen years in. A plane, taking off from LaGuardia, thundered overhead. He heard the distant clatter of a helicopter and the even more distant, mournful honk-honk of a fire engine. Below, the funeral cortège was leaving. A long line of black limousines — a grand cortège, he thought, for a scumbag whose assets had all been frozen.
But Tooth wasn’t here to judge the man.
A siren wailed. Another plane roared overhead. He put a cigarette in his mouth, cupped his hand over his lighter flame and lit it.
He waited, smoking it down to the butt, until the last vehicle had left the cemetery gates, then trampled it out in the grass. He walked back to his rental Ford, climbed in, started the engine and put the heater on full blast. Then he drove out of the cemetery, too. He headed to the storage depot where he deposited his gun and knife, then on to JFK Airport.
He dumped the car at the Sixt rental area in the parking lot, called his client from a payphone there and updated him.
‘Go to England,’ Egorov instructed him.
31
Friday 27 February
It was Angi’s birthday. Shelby told her he’d been given the night off from his warehouse job — by agreeing to work tomorrow, Saturday night, instead — so he could take her out to celebrate.
Angi had only recently moved to Brighton, from landlocked Coventry, having split up with her partner, and she was enthralled by the novelty of living in a seaside resort. So although he had no appetite today, he treated her to a fish and chip dinner with champagne at the Palm Court restaurant on the pier.
As she sat opposite him eating heartily, dousing her batter in salt and her chips in vinegar and ketchup, he sipped his glass of champagne and pushed his food around the plate, barely managing a couple of small mouthfuls.
‘What’s the matter, my sexy man — not hungry?’
‘My appetite’s for you,’ he said with a forced smile. ‘You’re making me so crazy for you I can’t eat!’
He felt her foot, minus shoe, pressing between his legs.