Love You Dead

49 Sunday 1 March

Tooth found it after twenty minutes of meticulous searching. The remote control was at the back of a shelf above a row of dresses in dust protectors, hanging in a closet in a spare room. When he stood out on the landing and pressed it, the wall at the end began to move sideways, slowly, steadily, to reveal a glass door, the one he had seen through the window.

He stood, waiting until it was fully open, and stepped forward. Through the glass, to his disgust, he could see the containers of reptiles. He waited some moments, just in case something in there had gotten out, then armed himself with the locked blade of his knife and stepped in through the glass door, instantly screwing up his nose at the rank, sour smell of the creatures housed here.

He shone his beam around, all the time keeping a wary ear open in case the woman suddenly returned. But even more of a wary eye on the floor and up at the ceiling in case anything roamed free in here.

A large humidifier in the centre of the floor made a steady hum. The atmosphere was damp and warm, tropical. There were some broken vivariums on the floor, and on a shelf above them were several different-sized snake hooks; a pair of heavy-duty, long-sleeved gloves hung from a peg. Apart from this small area and the window area, the rest of the room was stacked to the ceiling and wall-to-wall with glass vivariums. Each was plumbed into a water system, with its own lighting, and most of the creatures inside appeared motionless.

Tooth’s survival when he had been in the military, serving overseas in desert and jungle environments, had partly depended on not being bitten by anything venomous, and he had a fairly good knowledge of dangerous reptiles and arachnids.

In one of the containers, with a habitat of small rocks, sand and plants, was a shiny black spider, about three inches across, with a leathery-looking black sac on its back shaped like a rugby ball. A funnel-web, he recognized. Capable of killing in fifteen minutes. In another miniature tropical forest he saw the ugly black carapace of a large scorpion. Without a swift antidote, its sting would be fatal to even a strong, fit human. Another section of vivariums, with misted sides, contained several small, ochre-coloured frogs with black eyes. Golden dart frogs, he knew. Reckoned to be one of the most deadly creatures in the world.

Next to them was a stack of vivariums containing small snakes. Saw-scaled vipers. Against the far wall was the biggest of the containers, a good six-foot square, with tropical plants in it, housing a huge sleeping python with a bulge in its midriff.

A rodent from the freezer?

In another container were brown cockroaches. It was filled with the disgusting creatures, each of them a good two inches long, all crawling over each other. Yechhhhh.

Not much made him shudder, but being in this room did. And his head was full of questions. Why was the window boarded up? To stop light getting in or to maintain the secrecy?

Why keep this room secret?

You only kept something a secret that you wanted to hide. What did Jodie Bentley want to hide — these creatures, or something else?

He went back out of the room, closed the doors and replaced the remote where he had found it. He spent the next three hours searching through each of the rooms in turn, careful to leave no trace. He found nothing.

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.