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?
He entered. Admittedly the place had an enticing smell. It was furnished with a number of tables, each with computer terminals. A single saddo sat at one, and a couple of men in bad jeans, bomber jackets and baseball caps sat at another, by the front window. Could they be plain-clothes cops, surveying the passers-by? He looked at them again and decided not.
He walked to the rear of the shop. There was a drinks menu on the wall and beneath it a display of cupcakes, a carrot cake and assorted panini under a glass counter. Behind the counter stood a bored-looking woman in her twenties, with a face that might have been prettier if it wasn’t caked in make-up and her blonde hair hadn’t been styled by Medusa, he thought.
‘I’m looking for 23A Western Road,’ he said.
‘Uh-huh. You’ve found it.’ She sounded like she’d rather be defrosting a fridge or watching paint dry than having to talk to him, or anyone. S
he had two black sticks in her hair. Tooth wondered for a moment how she would feel having them stabbed through each of her eyes.
‘I’ve come to pick up mail for my girlfriend, Jodie Bentley. She also uses the name Judith Forshaw.’
‘Uh-huh.’ She tapped a keyboard beneath his line of sight. Then after a moment looked back at him with nobody-home eyes. ‘Do you have her passport and password?’
Tooth gave her a smile. His best smile. ‘I guess she forgot to tell me I needed them.’
‘What’s your accent?’ she asked.
‘American. Midwest. Wisconsin.’
She startled him by smiling. ‘It’s cute.’
‘You think so?’
She nodded.
‘Know what I think?’
She shook her head.
‘You need someone to fuck your brains out.’
She smiled again. ‘That’s so cute. Know what I think?’
Tooth leaned forward, with the smile of a piranha. ‘Tell me?’
‘You’re a nasty little perv and a lech. Go fuck yourself.’
She pointed up at the ceiling. He followed her finger and saw the CCTV camera that was right on his face.
He cursed. Shit, shit, shit. Fucking jet lag. How the hell had he not looked for cameras when he’d come in? Instantly he turned and walked away, in confused fury. As he reached the door he heard her call out, in a big, loud, phoney Southern accent.
‘Y’all have a nice day now!’
Without turning round, he raised a hand and gave her the bird with his middle finger.
‘That the size of your dick?’ she called after him.
Tooth stepped out into the drizzle. He was fuming. Tiredness had made him screw up and potentially be noticed.
He turned and stood for a moment, fighting his urge to storm back in. But that wasn’t why he was here. It wasn’t why he was paid to be here.
He strode angrily away.
39
Sunday 1 March
While Rowley lay fast asleep, snoring beside her, Jodie was wide awake in bed, in their luxurious cabin, sitting up with her laptop balanced on a pillow, feeling the gentle motion of the ship rocking her in the light swell. Taking stock.
The daily ship’s programme for tomorrow lay in front of her. The shore visit lecture; line dancing class; carpet bowls; craft class with Jill and Mike; bridge lessons; keep-fit classes – one in particular had made her grin, titled, ‘Sit and Get Fit!’ The evening highlight was the comedian Allan Stewart.
But she wasn’t interested in any of the items. She was totally focusing on the plans she had made for her future, all those years back. The rich man Cassie had said she would marry only in her dreams. Well, there was one rich man who might be dreaming right now, judging from his rapid eye movements. And this time tomorrow she would be married to him. Sure, her right to inherit could be challenged by his family, but whatever the result she would be coming away with a handsome chunk of change after he died. All he had to do was make it through the night.
Then from tomorrow, with a ring on her finger and the marriage certificate signed, she could make her move. She looked at him. Mouth open, droning snore, drool running from the corner of his mouth, that same self-satisfied expression that so much reminded her of her father.
God, how I would love you dead!
She found a diary entry she had made way back in her teens – and, like all her old diaries, had scanned into a password-protected electronic document for safekeeping.
This entry, she remembered, must have been just before the time she’d put a nine-inch diameter Colombian Huntsman spider in Cassie’s bed. The spider was totally harmless to humans, but both Cassie and her parents had a major sense of humour failure over it. And over the snakes and frogs – all harmless – that she liked to let roam free around her room.
All her arachnids and reptiles – even the ones her parents had actually bought her (at her request) for birthday and Christmas presents – had been confiscated, this time permanently. Afterwards she wrote:
There are a lot of myths about snakes – in particular about the venomous ones. Listen. The saw-scaled viper is called the world’s deadliest snake, because it kills more people than any other. In India alone it kills 58,000 people every year – 13,000 more than are killed in car crashes in the United States!
But it’s not actually the world’s most venomous snake – that title goes to the Belcher’s sea snake – one bite has enough venom to kill one thousand people! But because it lives in the waters of South East Asia and Southern Australia, it rarely bites humans.
The black mamba is pretty cool. It’s the world’s fastest snake – it moves at twelve miles per hour and its bite can kill in thirty minutes. The king cobra can kill an elephant in an hour. The inland taipan can kill a human in fifty minutes.
I love that!
So many people are scared of them. Not me, though. No snake ever told me I had a hooked nose, no snake ever told me I had no tits. I don’t judge them and they don’t judge me. They need me to feed and water them. In return, they do me favours.
I feel they should be rewarded for services rendered. But how do you reward a snake? What do they appreciate? Food, shelter, water? Sometimes I think when I come back in the next life, I’d quite like to be a snake. Much less complicated. Did you ever see a snake look in a mirror and pull a face? Did you ever see a snake that had a complex about how it looked?
Me neither.
40
Sunday 1 March
Tooth stood by the beach, in front of a row of shuttered Victorian arches, staring morosely through the rain out to sea. To his right was a large building site, with a central structure partially covered in scaffolding, out of which rose a construction like a huge spike soaring into the sky. A hoarding had a futuristic architect’s drawing of something that looked to him like a spaceship and the wording i360. It reminded him of the Space Needle in Seattle.
A short distance out in the sea stood a rusting mass of girders, all that remained of what had once been the West Pier. Over to his left was the Brighton Pier and a short way along the shore, past the pier, what looked like a large wheel. He smelled rotting weed and boat varnish. He found seaside resorts in the rain depressing. This place reminded him in a way of Coney Island, where he’d once spent ten days in winter waiting for a man he’d been paid to torture and kill to show up. He didn’t think there was a more depressing place on earth than Coney Island in the rain.
A new smell hit his nostrils, the aroma of a grilling burger or maybe French fries, that was making him feel hungry, despite the large room-service breakfast he’d eaten less than a couple of hours ago. He turned towards Brighton Pier, walking past a closed, gaily painted hut boasting the legend, in white letters on a turquoise strip, BRIGHTON SHELLFISH AND OYSTER BAR.
Head bowed against the wind, he was thinking hard about all the places a stylish woman like Jodie Bentley would visit, and where she would be known. He couldn’t check the city records until tomorrow, so for now he decided to take her photograph around hotel bars, restaurants and cafés, and show it to cab drivers.
The one who had driven him to Western Road had shaken his head, blankly.
He walked up the steps onto the promenade and stared at the buildings across the road in front of him. A wide row of hotels and restaurants stretching for a mile or more in each direction. Right opposite him was the dark red facade of the Metropole Hotel. He crossed the road, entered, went up to the reception desk and approached one of the uniformed males behind it.
‘I’m a private detective working for a US law firm,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to trace this lady who has come into an inheritance that she’s not aware of. We don’t know her name, but we believe she might be the deceased’s only surviving relative.’ He showed photographs of Jodie Bentley.
Five minutes later, six different people had come to look at the photograph, and all of them had shaken their heads.
He left and walked the short distance al
ong to the imposing white facade of the Grand Hotel, set behind its private parking crescent. Standing in front of the revolving door was a liveried doorman.
Tooth approached him with the same story. The doorman studied the photograph carefully, then said, ‘Yes! I recognize her. She’s been here a number of times, charming lady. She was here last week for dinner – let me think – was it Wednesday – no – I was off then. Tuesday. Yes, it must have been Tuesday!’
‘Do you know her name?’
‘No, but she had dinner here with a gentleman. Come with me!’
Tooth followed the doorman inside, past the reception desk, to the restaurant entrance, where there was a smartly dressed greeter.
‘Michele, this gentleman’s trying to find a lady who had dinner here last Tuesday.’
‘Right, thank you, Colin.’ She looked at the photograph Tooth proffered. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, she’s been here a few times. Hold on a moment.’ She opened a large, lined register filled with names and times, and flicked back a few pages. Then she ran a finger down it and stopped.
‘I think this was her – the reservation was made in the gentleman’s name. Mr Rowley Carmichael. Is that right?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Tooth said. ‘What can you remember about them?’
She apologized for a moment as a group of four people turned up for lunch; she ticked them off her list and led them through into the restaurant. Then she returned. ‘I’m trying to think. I’m afraid we have a large number of people every day. If you can wait a moment, I’ll go and ask Erwan, the maître d’, if he can recall anything. Can I borrow the photograph?’
Giving her his most charming smile, he handed it over, maintaining eye-contact flirtatiously.
She returned a few minutes later. ‘Erwan remembers her!’ she said. ‘She was dining with a much older gentleman, and they asked him to call two taxis at about eleven o’clock.’
‘Is there a particular cab company you use?’ Tooth asked.