The skin around the bite was swollen, black and yellow and weeping blood.
Was it this that was making him feel so ill? A reaction to the snake bite? What had that thing been?
He dabbed the wound with a tissue, found some antiseptic cream in the bathroom cabinet, applied some and put on a fresh bandage. When he had finished he opened his laptop and started searching snakes. All he could remember was that the snake was brown and had a black marking on it. There were dozens and dozens of different species and types. He stared at the images without recognition. He’d only seen it fleetingly, in the beam of his phone torch.
If it was truly poisonous, surely he’d be dead by now, he reasoned. Didn’t poisonous snakes kill you within hours? It was five days now. Maybe the bite was infected and he was suffering a reaction from that?
He’d see how he felt later.
37
Fourteen years ago
The bandages had come off, and she looked like shit. Black eyes, her face blotched blue and red with bruises. But...
Her nose was brilliant! The kink had gone and now, instead, it was a perfect small, straight nose.
An exact copy of Cassie’s.
The surgeon had done a brilliant job, working from the photograph of her sister that she’d brought in to the Harley Street clinic for her first consultation. On both her nose and her chin.
For the next two weeks she barely ventured out of her small flat, which was a short distance back from the sea in Brighton’s Kemp-town. And when she did, she was glad of the biting cold, because she could wrap part of her face in a scarf, mask her eyes with dark glasses and keep a cap pulled low.
Every day, checking in the mirror, the bruising was fading. The sculpting of her jaw the surgeon had performed was a masterpiece. Every day an increasingly beautiful woman was developing in the mirror, like a photograph in a darkroom tank, steadily coming to life.
Like the photographs of Cassie she studied daily, holding them beside her face in the mirror. As the scars faded, a more and more perfect image of Cassie appeared.
She had blown almost every penny of her childhood savings on this series of operations on her face and body, including money she had stolen over the years from her parents — as well as money she’d drawn out on the fake credit card she’d obtained — and it had been totally worth it!
And it was worth all the hard work waiting tables at a bistro in Hove in order to be free of her parents and independent.
They might have rejected her throughout her childhood as the ugly duckling, while they doted on Cassie. Poor long-dead Cassie.
But she hadn’t finished with them.
A few weeks later, early on a Sunday evening, when she was certain her parents would be in, Jodie drove in her Mini to Burgess Hill. She hadn’t seen them for months, ignoring the messages her mother left from time to time, and declining her request to spend Christmas with them.
Instead she’d spent the day alone in her bedsit, bingeing on movies she’d been storing up to watch, getting smashed on Prosecco and stuffing her face with a ridiculously large Chinese takeaway. She decided it was the best Christmas she’d ever had.
She parked outside the family house and walked past her mother’s shiny new Audi, freshly washed and cleaned — no doubt by her father earlier today — and rang the front doorbell. The stupid triple dingdong-dingdong-dingdong chimed.
Inside, very faintly, she could hear the television.
Then the door opened and her mother stood there, in a baggy jumper, jeans and slippers. And just stared.
She heard her father’s voice above the sound of the television in the living room. ‘Who is it? Are we expecting anyone?’
Her mother continued staring straight at Jodie. As if she was staring at a ghost. Then she began shaking and called out, in tears, her voice quavering, ‘Alastair! Alastair!’
Jodie stood and stared back. Her hair was dyed blonde and styled, from one of the photographs she had taken away, exactly the way Cassie’s was on the day she died.
Her father came out into the hall, in loose-fitting brown cords and a blue V-neck over a pink shirt. He stopped in his tracks when he saw her, doing a double-take.
‘Oh my God, what have you done, Jodie?’ her mother said. ‘Why — why’ve you done this?’
‘Oh,’ Jodie said, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. ‘You know, Sunday afternoon, hey! Just thought I’d swing by as I hadn’t seen you guys in a while.’
Her father stepped forward into the doorway, livid with rage. ‘This is some kind of very sick joke, Jodie.’
Jodie shrugged. ‘Oh, I see, you don’t like my new look.’
‘You nasty little bitch,’ he spat back. ‘You’ll never change. Never. Just go away. Get away from our house, get out of our sight. Your mother and I never want to see you again.’
38
Sunday 1 March
It had been after three in the afternoon by the time Tooth had finally got to his hotel, yesterday. He’d chosen this place because it was large and central, the kind of hotel he liked, where no one would take too much notice of him.
When he’d checked in, the lobby had been filled with men and women in business attire, each wearing a name badge sporting a company logo, all milling around, as if taking a break from whatever conference they were attending.
He was tired when he finally reached his room, and he knew it was dangerous to do too much when you were tired. That’s when you made mistakes. So he just unpacked his few items, showered and changed into fresh clothes, went outside and smoked a cigarette, then returned to his room and crashed out.
He woke at 2 a.m., hungry, ate some chocolate from the minibar, then sat at the desk, flipped open the lid of his laptop, logged on to the hotel Wi-Fi and checked for emails. There weren’t any. He wasn’t expecting any. The email address he used, routed via five different Eastern European countries, was impossible for anyone to trace. And he changed the address every week. The only emails he got were replies to ones he sent.
He closed the lid and looked at the two photographs of the woman from the lobby of the Park Royale West Hotel. A good-looking woman, with some style.
Jodie Bentley or Judith Forshaw. Where was she?
This city wasn’t on the scale of New York. If she was here, he would find her. All he had to do was recover the memory stick and teach her a lesson. Then he could head home.
It wasn’t that long since he had last been here, and he could remember the geography of the city pretty well. And there was something that bothered him. The address he had for the woman, which she had given when registering in New York, was Western Road. From memory, it was a mix of shops and residential flats.
He googled the road and that confirmed it. A curious place for a woman like this to live — he imagined her, from her lifestyle, residing in a more ostentatious part of town. Perhaps this was a false address?
He wondered whether to put on his tracksuit and go out jogging and find it. His brain was wired, but his body felt leaden. He went back to bed and tried to sleep. A siren wailed outside. He heard drunken laughter in the corridor. He gave up after a while, got up and went for a run, in howling, salty wind and pelting rain, then returned to the hotel.
Eight hours later, wrapped in the padded anorak he’d bought in New York, and wearing a baseball cap, Tooth paid the Streamline taxi driver with a ten-pound note, telling him to keep the change.
Light rain was falling. It was freezing. He was tired. Jet lag. His body clock was all messed up. The route on his early-morning run had included where he was right now, 23A Western Road. The Brighton Barista.
Was there any shop in this goddam rain-sodden city that wasn’t a coffee house?