Love You Dead

29 Thursday 26 February

‘Yes, yes, yes, yes! OH, YESSSSSS, YESSSSSS! Oh my God you are incredible! Yes, YES, YESSSSSSSSS! OHHHH, OHHHHHHH, OHHHHHHHHHH!’ Jodie screamed in ecstasy — or rather what she hoped sounded like ecstasy. She clawed her nails down Rollo Carmichael’s naked back as, crushing her with his weight, he kept on thrusting as deep inside her as his not-very-well-endowed and slightly flaccid penis would go. She shot a discreet glance at her wristwatch. Only three minutes had elapsed. Too soon.

She’d been right in her original assessment of Carmichael. While he wasn’t a lawyer or a banker, he had been a Mayfair art dealer in a very serious way. The Impressionists he’d dealt in ranged in value up to figures with ridiculous rows of noughts at the end. He had a house in Knightsbridge which he used just as an occasional pied-à-terre and which, from the address she had managed to get out of him, she had discovered on the internet to be worth a good ten million, and his main home was now here in the city, this beachfront house, valued at more than three million pounds. If she played her cards right, this could truly be the catch that set her up for life. And he had excitedly invited her to join him on an exotic cruise he’d booked — he was flying out on Saturday afternoon. He had no one to go with, could she possibly drop everything and join him — please?

He’d apologized earlier for not having any Viagra tablets. She’d whispered to him, very sensually, that she would consider herself quite a failure if she couldn’t arouse him without them.

Now as he continued, as heavy as an elephant, grunting with grim determination, clammy with perspiration, his breath sweet with alcohol, she was reminded of a description by the former girlfriend of a grossly overweight MP, who had said that making love to him was like having a wardrobe fall on top of her with the key still in the door.

That was sort of what it felt like now.

To distract herself she thought about the different techniques of her past lovers — if that was the right word for her conquests. Walt Klein, fortunately, never lasted more than a few seconds before coming. Before him, Martin Granger, short and wiry, had used a curious rocking motion, as if drilling a bore hole. And before him, God, Ralph Portman was big on what he thought was erotic foreplay, repeatedly biting her nipples so hard she screamed in pain.

She glanced at her watch again. Coming up to four minutes. A respectable time. She needed him to feel a man, to believe that he was satisfying her because that would make him feel so good! Their first time. In this gorgeous house with huge bay windows overlooking the sea. Champagne in the ice bucket on the coffee table. Alcohol. Alcohol made these things bearable, doable and, just occasionally — although not right now — enjoyable.

It was their second date this week. She had a three-date rule, she’d told him cheekily when he’d made advances after their first dinner, just two days ago, on Tuesday. He would have come down to see her again last night, he told her, but he had to attend some tedious City Livery dinner, of which he was on the Court — whatever that meant.

She was still fretting about the break-in at her house. Although the house had an alarm, she never set it because the last thing she wanted was having to have keyholders, and the risk of the police going in and snooping around should it be set off. Hopefully this was nothing more than some low-life intruder taking advantage of the easy access via the scaffolding. Shit, the saw-scaled viper and the poison dart frog could have escaped out into the open — although in this cold air they wouldn’t have survived for long. Luckily they were still there and she’d managed to put them safely into new vivariums. She had been so angry her first impulse had been to call the police — but she had worked hard to preserve her anonymity, and just had to swallow it. As well as the fact, of course, that keeping these creatures without a local licence was illegal. She had bought some of them at poisonous reptile shows in Houton, in Holland, and at Hamm, in Germany. Bringing them into England in their little cardboard boxes was always easy. She just walked straight through Immigration with them inside duty-free carrier bags.

She hoped the little bastard — or bastards — had been bitten. Serve them bloody right! It did occur to her this break-in might be connected to the memory stick and cash, but if that had been the case, the house would have been turned upside down. She doubted they’d have been put off by her reptiles.

She’d been fascinated by venomous reptiles ever since she was a small child and an uncle had given her a book on wild animals. The furry and fluffy ones hadn’t interested her at all. But the snakes, spiders, crocodiles and frogs had. Other girls her age played with dolls. She kept snakes. Probably another reason, she had often reflected, why her father found her strange. Her snakes never minded that she had a big hooked nose and no tits.

One evening she put one of her grass snakes beneath the sheets at the bottom of Cassie’s bed. Then she had lain in her own room and waited for the screams. They had sounded so sweet, so beautiful. Totally worth having the snakes confiscated the next day!

She’d met her first husband, Christopher Bentley, in the reptile house of London Zoo when she was twenty-two; he was forty-eight and recently divorced. A few months before meeting him, she’d left home and used all her savings, together with a fake credit card — which she managed to use for a few weeks to draw out sums of cash — to have a Harley Street nose and chin job, followed by a boob job.

Having made a small fortune in property early on, and not needing to work again, Christopher’s big interest was venomous reptiles. He had spent a considerable amount of his adult life travelling in India, Africa and South America, where he had developed a fascination for these creatures. He had written two books on venomous snakes and one on poison frogs, and had been the adviser on setting up reptile houses at several zoos in the UK.

She’d found him fascinating, too. And attractive. The first time she entered his own private reptile house, in the basement of his handsome Regent’s Park home, a stone’s throw from the zoo, she was captivated.

The walls were lined with glass showcases, housing a huge collection of deadly snakes, spiders and frogs. He knew so much about all of them, and delighted in sharing his knowledge. He had rattlesnakes, a death adder, a Gaboon viper, a saw-scaled viper, a tiger snake and a whole variety of black mambas, as well as a range of spiders, including redbacks and funnel-webs. He also had a fascination with scorpions, keeping Indian reds, deathstalkers and Arabian fat-taileds.

They excited her. She was awed by the power these small creatures had. The ability to kill a human being with a single bite or sting, or in the case of some frogs, just contact with their skin. Christopher told her, too, that a scorpion unhappy with its environment, or surrounded by a ring of fire, could commit suicide by stinging itself in the back of its neck.

She liked that. The thought that if she wasn’t happy, she could just go, ‘I’m outta here,’ and end it all. She figured she would, one day. But not yet. Not, hopefully, for a long time. She was enjoying life and had plans. Big plans.

He had shown her the cabinet of meticulously labelled antidotes for the bites and stings of each of these creatures, and how to administer them — and in what time frame before paralysis or death. Most importantly of all, he taught her how to use the various implements he kept to handle his collection.

Mostly they were very basic, and the snakes he tended to handle with a metal stick, like a skewer with a curved end, and his bare hands.

On that first day, he took her to his reptile room to show her a new arrival, a small cardboard box sealed with gaffer tape containing a saw-scaled viper, which he cheerily told her had killed more people in the world than any other snake. It lived in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. It was extremely aggressive, he said, and moved fast, coiling and uncoiling in a sidewinder motion, making a sizzling sound as its scales moved together.

She was astonished to watch him pull away the gaffer tape with his bare, ungloved hands, and open up the box with his hooked metal stick. Then he upended it into a red plastic bin and slammed down a ventilated lid.

She’d noticed that even he had looked nervous during this last part of the operation.

‘What’s your fascination with these creatures?’ she had asked him.

‘Their power,’ he had replied, simply. ‘Here we are, us humans, with all our sophistication. Yet any of these creatures, some with brains the size of a pinhead, can kill us; some in hours, some in days.’

He had delighted in talking her through the biochemistry of their bites and stings. All the different ways that the venom acted on the human body without the antidote.

For some reason she found herself particularly drawn to the saw-scaled viper. The way its bite was fatal. And that there was only a two-hour window in which to administer the antidote.

Too bad, eight years after they were married, that Christopher had missed an antidote window. Well, not strictly true. She’d jolted his arm when he’d been holding a saw-scaled viper by the neck. And she had previously substituted the antidote with a placebo.

Hey ho, so much for the so-called placebo effect!

By the time he’d been admitted to the Toxicology Unit at Guy’s in London he was already bleeding through his eyes and every orifice.

He’d had to go. He was adamant he didn’t want to have children, and that didn’t fit with her plans. And he wasn’t rich enough for all the things she wanted in life, including a child — she wanted this more and more badly as time went on, and her biological clock was ticking away.

But two good things had come from that marriage. A substantial chunk of his estate, after death duties, enabling her to buy property — a house and a bolthole flat in Brighton, and another bolthole flat in London — and not to have to worry about money in the short term. And she’d also learned the importance of having a glass door into the reptile room so you could see, before entering, if any of your pets were out of their containers.

Just like she had at home.

She glanced surreptitiously at her watch again. Enough time now. She began writhing, clawing wildly at him, and screamed out, ‘OH, MY DARLING, YESSSS, YESSSSSS, YESSSSSSS, I’M — I’M — I’M—’

Suddenly, Rollo Carmichael shuddered, then stiffened in every part of his body except for the bit that actually mattered right now, which went limp and slipped out of her.

She felt his whole weight on top of her, crushing her.

‘Darling?’ she said.

There was no reply.

‘Rollo? Did you...?’

He let out a faint gasp of air.

‘Rollo?’

Gripping his head, she turned his face towards hers. He stared dead ahead. Unblinking. Nobody home.

‘Rollo?’ she said, gently. Then more loudly. ‘Rollo? Rollo? No, don’t do this to me. Rollo?’

There was no response.