‘Well, there is another complication,’ he continued. ‘The police have also informed us that further enquiries are taking place, so I’m afraid our hands are tied.’
‘My poor Rollo has to suffer the indignity of a mortuary fridge while everyone squabbles over his body, is that what you’re saying, Mr Gallagher?’
‘Not at all, Mrs Carmichael. They just need to establish beyond any doubt the cause of your husband’s tragic death.’
‘He was killed by a fucking snake bite, right? By a saw-scaled viper. The Coroner in Goa certified that. What else do they bloody need?’
‘I’m sure it will all be sorted very quickly,’ he said in a soothing voice. ‘I’ll do my best to get all of this resolved, and your husband’s body released to us, just as soon as possible.’
When she hung up, Jodie sat, wondering what Gallagher had meant by ‘enquiries’. What were the police sniffing around for? She made herself a coffee and switched on her computer. One thing was becoming certain, she would have a fight with Rowley’s family on her hands. At the end of the day she would get some of the inheritance. But from the way Rowley’s family already seemed to be heading for a legal battle, it could be a long way down the line. It certainly wasn’t likely to be the jackpot that she’d hoped for, which still seemed to be eluding her.
That was out there somewhere.
She needed to be more selective, she decided, as she started to trawl through the various replies to the advertisements she had placed on dating sites for the rich.
www.sugardaddies.com
www.seekingmillionaire.com
www.millionairematch.com
www.daterichmen.com
And a whole ton more. But she dismissed all the replies she saw waiting for her. She’d learned, through experience of dating dozens of them, how to spot the ones that were only out for affairs. And she didn’t just want someone wealthy. She wanted someone who was super-rich. Would she find him on a website, or in one of the playgrounds of the rich?
She remembered something her beautiful childhood friend, Emira, had once said to her, that had been at the same time disparaging and consoling. ‘Don’t worry, one day you’ll find Mr Right. There’s someone out there for everyone.’
Maybe she’d been too hasty recently. She just needed to bide her time.
She went upstairs, pressed the remote to open the sliding wall then peered through the glass door, into her reptile room, checking as she always did that nothing had escaped. She went in and over to the vivarium containing the nine-foot boa constrictor she called Silas.
A smile broke out on her face as she saw what lay on the floor of the toughened glass container.
87
Wednesday 11 March
Tooth hobbled on the walking stick he’d stolen from the hospital corridor, clutching his huge package of shopping and a smaller carrier bag as he crossed the foyer of the hotel to the bank of lifts. It took him a good minute — a journey he could normally have made in seconds — to get from the elevator to his room on the fourth floor. Every step was uncomfortable, but for anyone else would have been agony. Tooth had been born with an abnormality — his tolerance levels to pain were far higher than those of most human beings.
Finally, in the sanctuary of his room, after looking around carefully, he sat at his desk and flipped open the lid of his laptop. Nothing seemed to have been touched here. But he couldn’t rely on that for much longer.
He’d always had a rule. He never stayed in one place for too long. Staying in one place was how people could catch up with you, whether it was picking up your scent or picking up your financial trail. He’d had to leave the hospital this morning, because the hotel was only paid up to today; but more than that, ten days was already too long in one place, and he couldn’t risk any longer. Earlier today he’d taken advantage of the shortage of hospital staff to slip away.
But had that cop recognized him in the taxi?
He wasn’t certain, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to take the risk that he had. And that cop sure as hell would not recognize him the next time he saw him.
He began to scan the videos from the sixteen cameras he had concealed in Jodie’s house and the four he had put in her flat in Alexandra Villas. He started with the two he had placed in her reptile room, and it didn’t take him long before his hunch paid off.
He watched her pull on rubber gloves — the time recording gave it as just two hours ago. She removed the lid of a vivarium containing a huge boa constrictor, then took out what looked like a white clay sausage. She placed it on the table, then pulled it open with her hands and removed a memory stick from inside it.
‘Clever girl!’ he said aloud. ‘Oh yes, you are one very clever girl!’
He watched her place the memory stick back in the vivarium, dropping it out of sight into the foliage, then deposit the sausage — t he boa’s excrement — into a bin.
‘So clever!’ he thought. ‘You really are very clever.’ And very sexy too, he thought. I’m sure it would be nice to fuck you. Too bad I’ll never find out.
He opened his packages.
88
Wednesday 11 March
‘Mice, lizards, frogs, scorpions and insects,’ Tanja Cale said, as she joined Roy Grace heading along the Major Crime suite corridor towards the conference room for the 2 p.m. briefing.
‘That what you had for breakfast, Tanja?’ he said. ‘No wonder you look so healthy!’
‘No,’ she grinned. ‘It’s what Jason cooks me for dinner every evening!’
He raised a finger to his lips. ‘Sssh, don’t share your secret, everyone will be wanting some!’
‘Guess it depends on the recipe.’
‘And yours is?’
‘Raw and preferably alive,’ she said. ‘You asked me to find out what a saw-scaled viper likes to snack on.’
‘And that’s its diet?’
‘Yep!’
‘In which case, on the whole, I’m glad I’m not a saw-scaled viper.’
‘And Jason’s glad I’m not a black widow spider. They eat their husbands after they’ve made love.’
‘I think if I was a male black widow, I’d be pretty happy if my wife told me she had a headache!’ Grace retorted, as they entered the packed conference room.
‘Well, in case you fancy a change of diet, sir, I’ve found several companies who tie in with the credit card statements who can supply all these creatures, and more.’
‘And get me points on my Tesco clubcard?’
‘Well, unfortunately not that many, sir. I spoke to a gentleman called Danny Yeoman from a large Sussex store, Pets Corner. One of the saw-scaled viper’s favourite foods is cockroaches. But if you buy a box of them, that’s all you need. From then on you can culture them yourself. So long as you have the right bedding and substrate and you give the creature access to water and a warm environment, you really don’t need anything else.’
‘I’ll remember that next time I’m thinking of buying Cleo a saw-scaled viper for Christmas,’ Grace said.
Taking their seats, he brought his team up to speed on the overnight developments regarding Edward Crisp, informing them that Branson and Potting were flying back, and then went on to describe his conversation with Kelly Nicholls last night, his meeting with Pewe earlier this morning and his subsequent meeting with Dr West at the mortuary.
‘I updated the ACC on the latest developments with Operation Spider and our belief that we may well have a black widow operating in this city, who is targeting, marrying then killing elderly rich men. And with West’s opinion that Rowley Carmichael’s death from the venom of a saw-scaled viper might well be suspicious, in that he was apparently bitten in an area of the crocodile farm that is not this creature’s natural habitat, and that there was none of the ecchymosis — skin discolouration — around the bite mark that he would have expected to see.’