Love You Dead

88 Wednesday 11 March

‘Mice, lizards, frogs, scorpions and insects,’ Tanja Cale said, as she joined Roy Grace heading along the Major Crime suite corridor towards the conference room for the 2 p.m. briefing.

‘That what you had for breakfast, Tanja?’ he said. ‘No wonder you look so healthy!’

‘No,’ she grinned. ‘It’s what Jason cooks me for dinner every evening!’

He raised a finger to his lips. ‘Sssh, don’t share your secret, everyone will be wanting some!’

‘Guess it depends on the recipe.’

‘And yours is?’

‘Raw and preferably alive,’ she said. ‘You asked me to find out what a saw-scaled viper likes to snack on.’

‘And that’s its diet?’

‘Yep!’

‘In which case, on the whole, I’m glad I’m not a saw-scaled viper.’

‘And Jason’s glad I’m not a black widow spider. They eat their husbands after they’ve made love.’

‘I think if I was a male black widow, I’d be pretty happy if my wife told me she had a headache!’ Grace retorted, as they entered the packed conference room.

‘Well, in case you fancy a change of diet, sir, I’ve found several companies who tie in with the credit card statements who can supply all these creatures, and more.’

‘And get me points on my Tesco clubcard?’

‘Well, unfortunately not that many, sir. I spoke to a gentleman called Danny Yeoman from a large Sussex store, Pets Corner. One of the saw-scaled viper’s favourite foods is cockroaches. But if you buy a box of them, that’s all you need. From then on you can culture them yourself. So long as you have the right bedding and substrate and you give the creature access to water and a warm environment, you really don’t need anything else.’

‘I’ll remember that next time I’m thinking of buying Cleo a saw-scaled viper for Christmas,’ Grace said.

Taking their seats, he brought his team up to speed on the overnight developments regarding Edward Crisp, informing them that Branson and Potting were flying back, and then went on to describe his conversation with Kelly Nicholls last night, his meeting with Pewe earlier this morning and his subsequent meeting with Dr West at the mortuary.

‘I updated the ACC on the latest developments with Operation Spider and our belief that we may well have a black widow operating in this city, who is targeting, marrying then killing elderly rich men. And with West’s opinion that Rowley Carmichael’s death from the venom of a saw-scaled viper might well be suspicious, in that he was apparently bitten in an area of the crocodile farm that is not this creature’s natural habitat, and that there was none of the ecchymosis — skin discolouration — around the bite mark that he would have expected to see.’

‘When you say suspicious, boss,’ Jon Exton asked, ‘what do you — or Dr West — actually mean?’

‘In Dr West’s view,’ Grace replied, ‘the venom might have been delivered to Rowley Carmichael by some other means than a bite.’

‘What kind of other means?’

‘Well, according to West there is only one other way to deliver it in a lethal form and that’s by injection. Carmichael was an insulin-dependent diabetic, who injected himself four times daily. Could his darling new bride have accidentally substituted his insulin with snake venom? It’s a possibility we can’t rule out, given her past form, which is pretty interesting. There are all the identities of Jodie Bentley, who would have become Jodie Klein by marriage, but whose prospective husband fell over a cliff in Courchevel, France. She then married Rowley Carmichael, who died a few days after their marriage. Interestingly, Jodie Bentley’s first husband, Christopher, also died from a saw-scale viper bite some years ago.’ He paused to sip his coffee.

‘She seems very adept at creating false identities. I informed ACC Pewe that at the present time, whilst we are putting a lot of resources into finding her, we do not know the whereabouts of this extremely clever and dangerous lady. We are aware of one poste-restante address she is known to use, and we have asked them to notify us when she next turns up, but not surprisingly they are reluctant to cooperate. And we don’t have the resources to place surveillance on her known addresses to see if she appears. What we are doing is keeping an eye on the CCTV camera footage in the streets outside them, but it’s a huge task. We’ve had nothing back on her phone, and therefore Michelle Websdale has not been able to set up a meeting with her.

‘We have two problems right now. The first is locking this woman up before she finds her next husband — and possible victim. The second is that so far all evidence against her is largely circumstantial and we need something more solid to arrest her.’

He brought the briefing to an end, and asked Tanja Cale and Glenn Branson, who was just back from Lyon, to come to his office.

A few minutes later, sat around the table, Roy began the meeting by saying, ‘If we are correct in our assumption that Jodie Carmichael is targeting wealthy older men, I suggest we put someone in place, with a carefully created background, who fits this mould. A retired, secretive multimillionaire, whose wife died some time ago, who is perhaps terminally ill and has returned to Brighton to spend his last days here. We use social media to seed his fake background as a rich philanthropist. I’m thinking we work with some of the local papers, the Argus in particular, but also the Brighton and Hove Independent, the Mid Sussex Times and the Sussex Express, to run features on him, and consider the local media, too — such as Radio Sussex, Latest TV, perhaps get an interview with him on the Albion Roar — about how much he’s missed attending his home football team’s games; and how honoured the city is that he’s chosen Brighton to spend his last days, that sort of thing.’

‘Isn’t there a problem, sir?’ Tanja said. ‘That anyone checking would see there is no historic social media trail?’

Grace nodded. ‘You are quite right, Tanja. I discussed this with the Chief Superintendent of the Financial Crimes Unit at the City of London Police and with the Commander of the Scotland Yard Fraud Squad.’ He smiled. ‘They’re well ahead of the curve and they anticipated these kinds of problems very early on. Almost from the get-go of so-called “social media”, they’ve been on it. Seeding and creating false identities first on MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter, and more recently on Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and all the others. Name an identity and they have it. In our case, a reclusive multimillionaire, who’s a widower and has made the decision to leave the bulk of his estate to charity.

‘Bloody hell, that’s smart!’ Glenn said.

‘I thought so, too!’ Roy Grace replied. ‘Mostly in the police we’re constantly playing a game of catch-up with villains. Nice to think we have some visionaries who occasionally put us ahead of the game. The Financial Crimes Unit of the City of London Police are sending one of their detectives down to advise us today.’

‘Do you have someone in mind for this undercover officer, sir?’ Tanja asked.

‘I don’t yet,’ he replied. ‘The Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team can approach the Covert Policing Unit to identify a suitable officer who has been trained in this field. It’s actually been so well managed, historically, that no one knows who any of these people are. The normal procedure would be to use a detective from out of area, but that’s not always possible.’

‘What about risk to the officer concerned?’ Tanja Cale asked.

‘That’s what we have to manage in the full risk assessment,’ Grace said. ‘But that’s what we all do, every day, isn’t it? We try to make our city a safer place. To do that, all of us at some time have to take risks. I’ve never met a good police officer who, at some point, didn’t have their life on the line. The day we aren’t willing to do that is the day to quit.’

Cale and Branson nodded.