by Peter James
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.
When he was happy that it was saturated, he discarded both halves of the lemon in his pocket to avoid leaving any fibres from his gloves, went over to the oven, switched on the fan to 170 degrees and put the page inside.
Every few minutes he opened the oven door and peered in. Finally, he smiled and removed the page, putting it on the top of the hob.
He switched the oven off and stared down at the clear brown writing that had appeared, as if by magic. It was a conjuring trick he had learned as a child.
ORGANZA. EMIRATES 442 DUBAI. 11.35 LHR. PASSPORT!
Instantly he googled the name ‘Organza’ on his phone.
Organza fabric . . .
Organza gift bags . . .
Organza cruise ship. Our flagship addition to our fleet!
Orient and Occident Cruise Lines.
Was that where the grieving widow had gone? Spending a chunk of her two hundred thousand stolen counterfeit dollars? To help her through her grief?
How sweet.
How long was she going to be away? Certainly long enough for him to take this house apart. He didn’t know how long you could leave a collection of reptiles for, even with timers fit
ted. A few days, probably. A week? But not much more. Either she had someone who would come in to look after them, who could almost certainly provide him with useful information, or she was planning to be back in a week – or perhaps two at the most.
He’d look up the Organza’s schedule on his computer back in his hotel room and check out the ports of call. Tomorrow, he decided, he’d come and have a chat with the builders. See what he could find out from them. He looked forward to her return. To see what choice cuts he could take from her back home to Yossarian. He liked to reward his associate for his patience in waiting for him with body parts from his victims. And thanks to her well-equipped kitchen, he might be able to take something really tasty. Freeze dried.
50
Monday 2 March
Tooth arrived back in his hotel room shortly after 1 a.m., tired now and getting increasingly angry. Angry with the rain, angry with the goddam cold, angry that he had totally failed to find what he was looking for. And angry he had got a splinter in his finger putting the window boarding back.
He ordered steak and fries, coffee and a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon from room service and stood by the window, looking down at the lights of Brighton seafront and the black water of the English Channel beyond.
While he waited for his meal and drink to arrive, he was planning to return to Jodie Bentley’s house and make a search of every inch of the property. The memory stick could be anywhere. The bitch might have it with her, of course, that was a possibility. He’d searched plenty of residences and offices in his time. He knew all the places where people hid stuff, thinking they were being clever, like fake books, bathroom cabinets, sock drawers, on top of kitchen cupboards, in empty containers, under floorboards. Mostly when people hid stuff, there were indications.
You’d see the tiny indent in a floorboard where a screwdriver had been inserted. The books not entirely flush. Clothes stacked a little bit too neatly at the back of the drawer.
But tonight, nothing. Nada. Goose eggs.
After the room-service guy had delivered his tray and departed, Tooth hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door then, standing on a table, taped over the smoke detector.
He sat down at the table and poured himself a large whisky, then using the coffee cup saucer as an ashtray, lit a Lucky Strike, flipped open the lid of his laptop and googled ‘Organza’, adding, ‘cruise ship’.
Moments later an image appeared of a sleek white liner with a single, rectangular funnel.
He typed the words ‘Itinerary, March’.
The ship had sailed from Dubai yesterday, bound for Mumbai, India, due to arrive in three days’ time. The itinerary carried on for months, the ship steadily making its way to Cape Town, then up the west coast of Africa, then across to Ascension Island and on to Rio de Janeiro. It was a round-the-world cruise.
But there was no way Jodie Bentley would be staying on it for all that time.
He looked at the different legs and journey times. If she disembarked in Mumbai, she could be home in four days. If it was Goa, that would be six days at least before she’d be back. It looked like he had a minimum of four days to occupy himself in this freezing, wet hellhole. Four days to search her place again, if there was any point.
He stared at his meal, the room filled with the smell of it, and wished he was back home in the sunshine, on his boat with Yossarian, the trawl lines stretched out behind him, catching healthy food for them both.
He drained his glass, refilled it and lit another Lucky Strike. A printed sign warned him there was a £250 fine for smoking in this room.
As he dragged on his cigarette, he began to form a plan.
He turned back to his laptop.
51
Monday 2 March
At lunchtime that day, at a private ceremony in the intimate Polaris bar, Rollo and Jodie were married by the Organza’s captain. The service was attended by an elderly American couple as witnesses, with whom they had shared a dinner table last night – Irv and Mitzi Kravitz.
Rollo slipped a wedding band in platinum, purchased from the ship’s jewellery shop, onto Jodie’s finger, and she had placed a ring onto his, too. Throughout the entire ceremony he had looked utterly gooey-eyed.
Sweet.
For the next few days of what he called their honeymoon, and she viewed more as an endurance test of feigning adoration and horniness, they would be to the outside world the besotted newlyweds. Most of their fellow passengers were either elderly couples or elderly widows, and she had noticed, since embarking on the cruise, the frequent glances thrown in her direction – some of disapproval, some of envy, at the considerable age gap between herself and her new husband.
Irv had quietly asked Rollo if he was concerned about the age gap, and in reply, Rollo had quoted Joan Collins. ‘If she dies, she dies,’ he’d said.
But it didn’t bother her. She was focused, and full of excitement, about their first port of call, Mumbai, India.
And especially about one choice of shore excursion listed in the ship’s daily newspaper.
The Mumbai Crocodile Farm
Walk through Mumbai bush to a crocodile swamp.
See these prehistoric reptiles in their natural environment.
And don’t worry, we feed them daily on chickens – not tourists!
It was one of four shore excursions on offer. Rollo was keen to take the one that offered a visit to a gallery displaying the work of local artists, followed by a crafts market. But he deferred to his new bride and her fascination with reptiles, and they signed up at the Purser’s office to the crocodile farm tour.
She gave him a big kiss. Followed by another. She told him he was the most wonderful man in the world.
He replied that he still could not believe his luck. That such a gorgeous, smart, caring woman, so much younger, could have fallen in love with an old git like himself.
She’d replied that she’d always loved the wisdom of older men, right from her late teens. That older men made her feel safe, and that she found them – and Rollo in particular – extremely sexy.
Not as sexy, she excluded from the conversation, as what she had learned about his personal wealth from her assiduous trawls through the internet. He had sold his gallery in Cork Street plus goodwill, according to one website, for a figure in excess of ten million pounds. He had a personal art collection, housed partly in his Knightsbridge townhouse and partly in his Brighton seafront mansion, estimated to be worth over eighty million pounds.
For that amount of loot she was prepared to put up with pretty much anything. But thanks to his neglect of his diabetic condition, his libido was at a fairly low level. So far on this trip she’d only had to endure sex with him once.
She had a plan in place. India was home to a number of venomous creatures.
And one in particular.
52
Monday 2 March
It was part of Roy Grace’s nature that he started to worry whenever things were going well in his life. There was always a balance, a yin and yang. One quote that often came into his mind at such times was from Anthon St Maarten: ‘If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day.’
He was thinking about this as he let himself out of the back door of their cottage into the darkness of the morning, in his tracksuit and trainers. It was shortly after 5.00 a.m. Breathing in the fresh, chilly country air, he switched on his headlamp torch and stretched, then set off.
Humphrey barked happily and jumped up exuberantly, trying to snatch the red tennis ball out of the plastic thrower his master was holding high up above him.
‘Wait, boy, OK?’
Humphrey responded with another bark.
‘Sssshhh! Don’t wake up Noah, he’ll never go back to sleep, and your mum will be mad with me! They’re going to take you for another walk later, OK?’
He strode in the breaking morning light across the frosty wet grass of the unkempt lawn, pa
ssing the hen coop – and in the beam of his torch saw all five of their hens huddled together on the roof of their house, where they seemed to spend every night.
‘Why don’t you sleep inside in the warmth?’ he chided them, wondering how many eggs he’d find when he checked later.
God, he was loving country life, wondering as he had done so often these past couple of months why he hadn’t made the move sooner. They’d bought the cottage shortly before Christmas and, thanks to his leg injury, he’d been able to spend almost all of January here on sick leave, helping Cleo to get the house straight. She had started back at work last week and they now had a part-time nanny helping to take care of Noah, Kaitlynn Defelice, a personable and competent young Californian who they had found after hours of research.
Grace hadn’t yet got used to having a nanny around and needed to remember, constantly, that he could no longer walk about naked or just in his boxers. Cleo was really happy to be working again, back at the mortuary; much though she loved their son, she had been getting restless, starting to find being stuck in an isolated house, with just the relentless baby routine, not fulfilling enough. She missed adult company and the stimulus of work. In addition, things that would take minutes at home, pre-Noah, now took hours.
As Grace opened the back gate and flicked the ball, watching Humphrey bound forward across the huge, barren field that the local farmer had given them permission to walk in, he thought how blissful it was to be able to take the dog out without having to bring a plastic bag to pick up his mess. He set the timer on his watch and began a brisk walk.
He broke into a trot for a few steps, testing his right leg as he crossed the eight-acre field, stopping several times to retrieve the ball from Humphrey’s mouth and flick it again, until he reached the stile on the far side. The dog ran beneath it as he climbed over it, then carried on striding across the next, equally barren, field. When he reached the ten-minute limit set by his physiotherapist he dutifully slowed into a normal walk.