Love You Dead

51 Monday 2 March

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.