Love You Dead

47 Sunday 1 March

Tooth, standing on the wooden platform on the first-floor level of the scaffolding, heard the distinct thrashing of an approaching helicopter. A short while earlier, listening to the howl of sirens, he had waited, concealed in the garden, holding the chisel and hammer he had found in the garden shed, in case they were coming to this house. But some distance away, the sirens had died down.

Emergency vehicles attending an incident — or accident — of some kind. He set to work on the window boarding. Someone had done a thorough job, and it was a full ten minutes before he’d removed enough of the wood to be able to see into the interior of the room.

He didn’t like what he saw.

It was a very well-equipped reptile room, lined with glass vivariums, lamps, water pumps and timer-controlled feeders. That was the reason why she had all the dead rodents in her freezer.

He could see snakes, including a huge python, a boa constrictor and some much smaller ones, spiders, frogs and several vivariums teeming with scorpions. Nasty-looking beige ones with tiny claws. For his last mission in the army, to Iraq, he’d been given a lecture on identifying these critters. The smaller the claws, the more deadly the sting. And the ones he could see, in a row of vivariums lined against one wall, had claws that were all but invisible.

Jodie Bentley had weird taste in pets, he thought. Not his thing at all. He hated all these fuckers. Not much scared him, but reptiles did.

The cat had been lucky not to scratch all the way through the wall. Didn’t it know the saying ‘curiosity killed the cat’?

He could see a glass door, but it looked like there was a solid wall behind it, and that made him very curious. How come she had a room that had no apparent door into it?

The helicopter was coming closer. He looked up and saw the lights only a short distance away. For a moment he wondered if it was a police helicopter looking for him, and flattened himself against the house.