Tanja Cale passed her a box of tissues. Jodie pulled one out and wiped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her handkerchief still clutched in her hand.
‘How did you feel at that moment?’ DS Cale asked her, gently.
‘It was the worst moment— the worst moment of my life.’
Jodie then described what happened in the aftermath and the impact on her family.
Guy Batchelor pulled a sheaf of paper from his inside jacket pocket. He handed one sheet to Jodie, one to her solicitor and one to Tanja Cale. ‘Jodie, search officers found a diary from your childhood in your house, yesterday. This is a photocopy of an entry from it. For the benefit of the tape it is marked exhibit GB/9, the first anniversary of your sister’s death, after you had visited the grave with your parents. I’ll read you the last part of what you wrote:
‘My family. My embarrassing family. The things they say. But this really made me laugh. Mum suddenly said she wanted to light a candle for Cassie, have it burning on the table with us during our meal. So my dad went up to the bar and asked if they had a candle they could light for his daughter. Ten minutes later the chef and two other members of staff appeared with a small cake, with a candle burning in the centre of it, and walked towards us, all smiling at me and singing “Happy Birthday to You”!
‘I’m still laughing about that, even though it’s nearly midnight and I’ve got homework to do for tomorrow that I’ve not even started yet.
‘But, honestly, I have to say, I’ve not felt so great in a long time!’
He laid the sheet of paper in front of him. ‘That doesn’t sound much like a grieving sister to me.’
Jodie stared into his eyes as if she was looking right into his soul. ‘Really? Have you ever lost someone you loved? I had a year of hell living with the guilt that I was somehow responsible. Sure, I remember that day with my parents, and the ridiculous mistake that pub made bringing a birthday cake. It did make me laugh, of course it did. The whole stupidity of it. It did cheer me up; for the first time in a whole year I actually smiled.’
‘OK, Jodie, let’s move forward to Christopher Bentley. He was an experienced reptile handler — one of the world’s foremost experts in venomous snakes among other creatures. Yet he allowed himself to be bitten by a deadly saw-scaled viper. Can you tell us how you think that might have happened?’
Jodie and her solicitor exchanged looks. She gave him a steady nod and turned back to the detectives. ‘I’m afraid that all experts get over-confident. To be honest, the way he treated some of his venomous creatures really worried me and I warned him several times. From the way he acted with them, he was starting to believe that he had somehow tamed some of them, and he was taking fewer and fewer precautions handling them.’
For the next fifteen minutes they asked a number of questions about the day it happened.
Batchelor studied his notes for some moments. ‘We’d now like to ask you some more questions about Walt Klein. When did you meet him exactly?’
‘In August, last year, in a hotel bar in Las Vegas — the Bellagio.’
‘Can you tell us what happened about a month ago?’
Without looking at her lawyer, she said, ‘Sure. We went skiing to Courchevel in the French Alps — he was a very keen skier.’
‘What was the nature of your relationship?’
‘We were engaged to be married.’
‘And what happened while you were there in Courchevel?’
‘Walt was a real — what we skiers call powder hound. He loved skiing fresh powder snow — they get a lot more in the US than we do in Europe. We’d been there several days and there was finally a really great dump of snow overnight. But it was still snowing heavily in the morning. He woke, raring to get up on the slopes. I tried to dissuade him, as the forecast was for the weather to improve later in the morning, but he was determined to get the fresh powder before it was skied out. So we went up together.’
She sniffed, and sipped some water. ‘We got to the top of the cable car and I told Walt to follow me — I’d skied there before and he hadn’t. I made several turns, then stopped to wait for him — and he never appeared. I figured he must have taken a different run — I’d taken a blue — the easiest — because of the conditions — but thought he might have taken a red or a black. After a while I realized he must have gone on, so I skied down to the bottom, to the place where we’d agreed to rendezvous if we lost each other.’ She shrugged. ‘But he never showed up. And that evening...’ She again raised the tissue to her eyes, hoping she wasn’t overdoing it.
‘What happened that evening?’ Cale asked, gently again.
‘A police officer told me he had been found at the bottom of a sheer drop.’
‘You were engaged to be married,’ Batchelor said. ‘Did you know that Walt Klein had written you into his will?’
‘No comment,’ her solicitor said.
‘It’s OK,’ she said to him, then turned to Batchelor. ‘He was worried, he’d had some heart issues. He didn’t get on that well with his two children, he said they were spongers and hardly ever bothered to contact him or come and see him. It was his idea — he wanted to stop them getting every cent when he died.’
‘Very kind of him,’ Batchelor said.
‘What are you implying?’ Clifford Orson said.
‘I’m making an observation. Let’s move on. Jodie, you say you were engaged to be married to Walt Klein?’
‘Correct, yes.’
‘Did Walt Klein ever talk to you about his financial affairs?’
‘No, never.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘I was engaged to him, of course I loved him very much.’
‘So was there a reason why you didn’t attend his funeral?’
‘No comment,’ her solicitor said firmly.
Ignoring him, Jodie replied, ‘Actually, there was. His son and daughter met me at the airport when I arrived back in New York and made it very clear I would not be welcome. I felt it would be extremely disrespectful to attend in those circumstances.’
The two officers then asked her a number of questions about the meeting at the law firm in New York and the circumstances of her stay at the hotels.
‘OK, thank you, Jodie. Let’s move on to your second husband, Rowley Carmichael. You told us yesterday that you first made contact with him through an internet dating site and had spent several months exchanging messages. When did you actually meet him?’
She reddened, then thought hard, and knew it was not going to look good. ‘Last month,’ she said.
‘Can you remember the date?’
‘February 24th.’
Batchelor studied his notes again. ‘Tuesday, February 24th?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your fiancé, Walt Klein, was buried on Friday 27th February. So you were dating Rowley Carmichael three days before your fiancé’s funeral?’
Jodie turned to her lawyer.
‘My client would like to take a short break,’ Clifford Orson said.
118
Sunday 15 March
‘The time is 11.35 a.m., Sunday 15th March, interview resumed with Jodie Carmichael in the presence of her solicitor, Clifford Orson,’ DS Guy Batchelor said.
He repeated the question he had asked before and reminded her she was still under caution.