Love You Dead (22 page)

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.

Instantly he googled the name ‘
Organza
’ on his phone.

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 fitted. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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, passing 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.

It was growing lighter now and he switched off the head torch. He turned and looked back at the house, which was little more than a speck in the distance. A small, rectangular farm cottage,
sitting up on a slight ridge. It was very secluded, almost half a mile down a rutted driveway from the lane, and ten minutes’ drive from the centre of the village of Henfield.

In many ways the house was an ugly duckling, with tiny windows, each a different shape and size, looking as if it had been designed by an infant playing with bricks. Much of it was clad in
unruly ivy and – at this time of year – skeletal wisteria. But he loved it, and Cleo loved it, too. This was their first proper home together. He felt that his family was safe here,
away from the city, and that it would be a paradise for their son – and for any future children who came along. Cleo said she would be happy to have two more and hoped at least one would be a
girl, not that she really minded. He didn’t care whether it was one, two or three more. He was pretty happy with his lot, right now.