The man’s eyes were closing. Declan took his pulse again. The rate was lower this time. He wasn’t sure whether this was a good or bad sign. He’d never encountered anything like this. He asked his colleague for the syringe and ketamine.
‘Shankle,’ the man said, suddenly. ‘Shankle.’
‘Stay with us!’ Dee said. ‘Please stay awake and tell us as much as you can remember. What have you taken?’
‘I think he said ankle,’ Declan said. He looked at the man’s face. ‘Is that it? Your ankle?’
But his eyes were shut now and he no longer responded.
The doctor leaned into the footwell, with his torch, pulled up the man’s trouser legs and pushed his socks down. He could see swelling and bruising round the right ankle, and two tiny pinprick marks.
‘Have you injected yourself?’ he asked, but got no reply.
He then checked his pulse again. It was dropping at an alarming rate. Dee tapped him on the shoulder and signalled for him to move out of earshot of the patient.
As he stepped a couple of paces back from the car, Dee Springer said, ‘Look, I think he’s been poisoned — either taken some drug or eaten something. I heard of symptoms like this from someone who’d eaten a puffer fish that hadn’t been prepared properly. Could it be something highly toxic like that?’
‘Take a look at his ankle. I think he’s injected something or possibly been bitten by something very small — and I don’t know what to give him,’ Declan said. Normally calm, able to cope with any victim however bad his or her condition, he seemed close to panic at this moment. The possibility was also going through his mind that this man might have some kind of tropical disease that could be contagious. If so, there was no way they could take him in the helicopter and risk contaminating it for future patients.
Dee leaned close to the victim. ‘Sir, we’re going to help you get better. But we need you to tell us what’s happened. Did you eat something tonight? Have you taken any drugs? Has something bitten you? Have you been abroad recently?’
There was no response.
She stepped back and said to the doctor, ‘We need to get him to the poisons unit at Guy’s in London — that’s my view.’
Declan checked the man’s pulse again. It had dropped to thirty-five. One hundred and eighty down to thirty-five in the space of minutes. Guy’s was an hour’s flying time away. It would be close to 10 p.m. by the time they got him there. They would radio the patient’s symptoms ahead of their arrival, giving the hospital time to get a specialist team on standby. But if he had a tropical disease, which might be contagious, could they take the risk of him contaminating the helicopter?
They had to give it a go, he decided. They always gave it a go. And, more often than they sometimes dared to believe, they succeeded.
Those were the sweetest moments. The reason they all did this job.
49
Sunday 1 March
Tooth found it after twenty minutes of meticulous searching. The remote control was at the back of a shelf above a row of dresses in dust protectors, hanging in a closet in a spare room. When he stood out on the landing and pressed it, the wall at the end began to move sideways, slowly, steadily, to reveal a glass door, the one he had seen through the window.
He stood, waiting until it was fully open, and stepped forward. Through the glass, to his disgust, he could see the containers of reptiles. He waited some moments, just in case something in there had gotten out, then armed himself with the locked blade of his knife and stepped in through the glass door, instantly screwing up his nose at the rank, sour smell of the creatures housed here.
He shone his beam around, all the time keeping a wary ear open in case the woman suddenly returned. But even more of a wary eye on the floor and up at the ceiling in case anything roamed free in here.
A large humidifier in the centre of the floor made a steady hum. The atmosphere was damp and warm, tropical. There were some broken vivariums on the floor, and on a shelf above them were several different-sized snake hooks; a pair of heavy-duty, long-sleeved gloves hung from a peg. Apart from this small area and the window area, the rest of the room was stacked to the ceiling and wall-to-wall with glass vivariums. Each was plumbed into a water system, with its own lighting, and most of the creatures inside appeared motionless.
Tooth’s survival when he had been in the military, serving overseas in desert and jungle environments, had partly depended on not being bitten by anything venomous, and he had a fairly good knowledge of dangerous reptiles and arachnids.
In one of the containers, with a habitat of small rocks, sand and plants, was a shiny black spider, about three inches across, with a leathery-looking black sac on its back shaped like a rugby ball. A funnel-web, he recognized. Capable of killing in fifteen minutes. In another miniature tropical forest he saw the ugly black carapace of a large scorpion. Without a swift antidote, its sting would be fatal to even a strong, fit human. Another section of vivariums, with misted sides, contained several small, ochre-coloured frogs with black eyes. Golden dart frogs, he knew. Reckoned to be one of the most deadly creatures in the world.
Next to them was a stack of vivariums containing small snakes. Saw-scaled vipers. Against the far wall was the biggest of the containers, a good six-foot square, with tropical plants in it, housing a huge sleeping python with a bulge in its midriff.
A rodent from the freezer?
In another container were brown cockroaches. It was filled with the disgusting creatures, each of them a good two inches long, all crawling over each other. Yechhhhh.
Not much made him shudder, but being in this room did. And his head was full of questions. Why was the window boarded up? To stop light getting in or to maintain the secrecy?
Why keep this room secret?
You only kept something a secret that you wanted to hide. What did Jodie Bentley want to hide — these creatures, or something else?
He went back out of the room, closed the doors and replaced the remote where he had found it. He spent the next three hours searching through each of the rooms in turn, careful to leave no trace. He found nothing.
Back in the hall he stood still, thinking. Was the memory stick, and maybe the cash, too, hidden in one of those glass containers, guarded by one of the host of venomous creatures in there? He wasn’t about to go sticking his hand in any of them, gloves or no gloves. He’d wait until Jodie Bentley came home and get her to do that for him. Without gloves.
Or were the cash and the stick even here at all? Perhaps she’d stashed them in a safe deposit box somewhere.
He looked at his watch. It was ten past midnight. Late for someone to be out on a Sunday night. Particularly a grieving widow.
Where was she?
Where the hell was the stuff?
Where would he have put those items himself?
There were a million possibilities in a house this large. The reptile room was just one of them. It could be up in a roof space, or in the garden, buried someplace. He could search for a week and still find nothing. He needed Jodie. Within ten minutes of finding her, having her alone in a room, she’d tell him. She’d be begging to tell him. Screaming it out.
No one he’d ever gone to for information had remained silent.
Back in the kitchen he looked again at the notepad he’d seen earlier on the island unit. Looked at it closely. There were faint indentations.
He went over to the fridge and found in a drawer in the vegetable section what he had been hoping for. Lemons, inside a string net.
He removed one, cut it in half and began to squeeze, hard, letting the juice fall over the indentations on the sheet of paper at the top of the notepad.