Love You Dead

87 Wednesday 11 March

Tooth hobbled on the walking stick he’d stolen from the hospital corridor, clutching his huge package of shopping and a smaller carrier bag as he crossed the foyer of the hotel to the bank of lifts. It took him a good minute — a journey he could normally have made in seconds — to get from the elevator to his room on the fourth floor. Every step was uncomfortable, but for anyone else would have been agony. Tooth had been born with an abnormality — his tolerance levels to pain were far higher than those of most human beings.

Finally, in the sanctuary of his room, after looking around carefully, he sat at his desk and flipped open the lid of his laptop. Nothing seemed to have been touched here. But he couldn’t rely on that for much longer.

He’d always had a rule. He never stayed in one place for too long. Staying in one place was how people could catch up with you, whether it was picking up your scent or picking up your financial trail. He’d had to leave the hospital this morning, because the hotel was only paid up to today; but more than that, ten days was already too long in one place, and he couldn’t risk any longer. Earlier today he’d taken advantage of the shortage of hospital staff to slip away.

But had that cop recognized him in the taxi?

He wasn’t certain, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to take the risk that he had. And that cop sure as hell would not recognize him the next time he saw him.

He began to scan the videos from the sixteen cameras he had concealed in Jodie’s house and the four he had put in her flat in Alexandra Villas. He started with the two he had placed in her reptile room, and it didn’t take him long before his hunch paid off.

He watched her pull on rubber gloves — the time recording gave it as just two hours ago. She removed the lid of a vivarium containing a huge boa constrictor, then took out what looked like a white clay sausage. She placed it on the table, then pulled it open with her hands and removed a memory stick from inside it.

‘Clever girl!’ he said aloud. ‘Oh yes, you are one very clever girl!’

He watched her place the memory stick back in the vivarium, dropping it out of sight into the foliage, then deposit the sausage — t he boa’s excrement — into a bin.

‘So clever!’ he thought. ‘You really are very clever.’ And very sexy too, he thought. I’m sure it would be nice to fuck you. Too bad I’ll never find out.

He opened his packages.