Love You Dead

by Peter James

  He’d apologized earlier for not having any Viagra tablets. She’d whispered to him, very sensually, that she would consider herself quite a failure if she couldn’t arouse him without them.

  Now as he continued, as heavy as an elephant, grunting with grim determination, clammy with perspiration, his breath sweet with alcohol, she was reminded of a description by the former girlfriend of a grossly overweight MP, who had said that making love to him was like having a wardrobe fall on top of her with the key still in the door.

  That was sort of what it felt like now.

  To distract herself she thought about the different techniques of her past lovers – if that was the right word for her conquests. Walt Klein, fortunately, never lasted more than a few seconds before coming. Before him, Martin Granger, short and wiry, had used a curious rocking motion, as if drilling a bore hole. And before him, God, Ralph Portman was big on what he thought was erotic foreplay, repeatedly biting her nipples so hard she screamed in pain.

  She glanced at her watch again. Coming up to four minutes. A respectable time. She needed him to feel a man, to believe that he was satisfying her because that would make him feel so good! Their first time. In this gorgeous house with huge bay windows overlooking the sea. Champagne in the ice bucket on the coffee table. Alcohol. Alcohol made these things bearable, doable and, just occasionally – although not right now – enjoyable.

  It was their second date this week. She had a three-date rule, she’d told him cheekily when he’d made advances after their first dinner, just two days ago, on Tuesday. He would have come down to see her again last night, he told her, but he had to attend some tedious City Livery dinner, of which he was on the Court – whatever that meant.

  She was still fretting about the break-in at her house. Although the house had an alarm, she never set it because the last thing she wanted was having to have keyholders, and the risk of the police going in and snooping around should it be set off. Hopefully this was nothing more than some low-life intruder taking advantage of the easy access via the scaffolding. Shit, the saw-scaled viper and the poison dart frog could have escaped out into the open – although in this cold air they wouldn’t have survived for long. Luckily they were still there and she’d managed to put them safely into new vivariums. She had been so angry her first impulse had been to call the police – but she had worked hard to preserve her anonymity, and just had to swallow it. As well as the fact, of course, that keeping these creatures without a local licence was illegal. She had bought some of them at poisonous reptile shows in Houton, in Holland, and at Hamm, in Germany. Bringing them into England in their little cardboard boxes was always easy. She just walked straight through Immigration with them inside duty-free carrier bags.

  She hoped the little bastard – or bastards – had been bitten. Serve them bloody right! It did occur to her this break-in might be connected to the memory stick and cash, but if that had been the case, the house would have been turned upside down. She doubted they’d have been put off by her reptiles.

  She’d been fascinated by venomous reptiles ever since she was a small child and an uncle had given her a book on wild animals. The furry and fluffy ones hadn’t interested her at all. But the snakes, spiders, crocodiles and frogs had. Other girls her age played with dolls. She kept snakes. Probably another reason, she had often reflected, why her father found her strange. Her snakes never minded that she had a big hooked nose and no tits.

  One evening she put one of her grass snakes beneath the sheets at the bottom of Cassie’s bed. Then she had lain in her own room and waited for the screams. They had sounded so sweet, so beautiful. Totally worth having the snakes confiscated the next day!

  She’d met her first husband, Christopher Bentley, in the reptile house of London Zoo when she was twenty-two; he was forty-eight and recently divorced. A few months before meeting him, she’d left home and used all her savings, together with a fake credit card – which she managed to use for a few weeks to draw out sums of cash – to have a Harley Street nose and chin job, followed by a boob job.

  Having made a small fortune in property early on, and not needing to work again, Christopher’s big interest was venomous reptiles. He had spent a considerable amount of his adult life travelling in India, Africa and South America, where he had developed a fascination for these creatures. He had written two books on venomous snakes and one on poison frogs, and had been the adviser on setting up reptile houses at several zoos in the UK.

  She’d found him fascinating, too. And attractive. The first time she entered his own private reptile house, in the basement of his handsome Regent’s Park home, a stone’s throw from the zoo, she was captivated.

  The walls were lined with glass showcases, housing a huge collection of deadly snakes, spiders and frogs. He knew so much about all of them, and delighted in sharing his knowledge. He had rattlesnakes, a death adder, a Gaboon viper, a saw-scaled viper, a tiger snake and a whole variety of black mambas, as well as a range of spiders, including redbacks and funnel-webs. He also had a fascination with scorpions, keeping Indian reds, deathstalkers and Arabian fat-taileds.

  They excited her. She was awed by the power these small creatures had. The ability to kill a human being with a single bite or sting, or in the case of some frogs, just contact with their skin. Christopher told her, too, that a scorpion unhappy with its environment, or surrounded by a ring of fire, could commit suicide by stinging itself in the back of its neck.

  She liked that. The thought that if she wasn’t happy, she could just go, ‘I’m outta here,’ and end it all. She figured she would, one day. But not yet. Not, hopefully, for a long time. She was enjoying life and had plans. Big plans.

  He had shown her the cabinet of meticulously labelled antidotes for the bites and stings of each of these creatures, and how to administer them – and in what time frame before paralysis or death. Most importantly of all, he taught her how to use the various implements he kept to handle his collection.

  Mostly they were very basic, and the snakes he tended to handle with a metal stick, like a skewer with a curved end, and his bare hands.

  On that first day, he took her to his reptile room to show her a new arrival, a small cardboard box sealed with gaffer tape containing a saw-scaled viper, which he cheerily told her had killed more people in the world than any other snake. It lived in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. It was extremely aggressive, he said, and moved fast, coiling and uncoiling in a sidewinder motion, making a sizzling sound as its scales moved together.

  She was astonished to watch him pull away the gaffer tape with his bare, ungloved hands, and open up the box with his hooked metal stick. Then he upended it into a red plastic bin and slammed down a ventilated lid.

  She’d noticed that even he had looked nervous during this last part of the operation.

  ‘What’s your fascination with these creatures?’ she had asked him.

  ‘Their power,’ he had replied, simply. ‘Here we are, us humans, with all our sophistication. Yet any of these creatures, some with brains the size of a pinhead, can kill us; some in hours, some in days.’

  He had delighted in talking her through the biochemistry of their bites and stings. All the different ways that the venom acted on the human body without the antidote.

  For some reason she found herself particularly drawn to the saw-scaled viper. The way its bite was fatal. And that there was only a two-hour window in which to administer the antidote.

  Too bad, eight years after they were married, that Christopher had missed an antidote window. Well, not strictly true. She’d jolted his arm when he’d been holding a saw-scaled viper by the neck. And she had previously substituted the antidote with a placebo.

  Hey ho, so much for the so-called placebo effect!

  By the time he’d been admitted to the Toxicology Unit at Guy’s in London he was already bleeding through his eyes and every orifice.

  He’d had to go. He was adamant he didn’t want to have
children, and that didn’t fit with her plans. And he wasn’t rich enough for all the things she wanted in life, including a child – she wanted this more and more badly as time went on, and her biological clock was ticking away.

  But two good things had come from that marriage. A substantial chunk of his estate, after death duties, enabling her to buy property – a house and a bolthole flat in Brighton, and another bolthole flat in London – and not to have to worry about money in the short term. And she’d also learned the importance of having a glass door into the reptile room so you could see, before entering, if any of your pets were out of their containers.

  Just like she had at home.

  She glanced surreptitiously at her watch again. Enough time now. She began writhing, clawing wildly at him, and screamed out, ‘OH, MY DARLING, YESSSS, YESSSSSS, YESSSSSSS, I’M – I’M – I’M—’

  Suddenly, Rollo Carmichael shuddered, then stiffened in every part of his body except for the bit that actually mattered right now, which went limp and slipped out of her.

  She felt his whole weight on top of her, crushing her.

  ‘Darling?’ she said.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Rollo? Did you . . .?’

  He let out a faint gasp of air.

  ‘Rollo?’

  Gripping his head, she turned his face towards hers. He stared dead ahead. Unblinking. Nobody home.

  ‘Rollo?’ she said, gently. Then more loudly. ‘Rollo? Rollo? No, don’t do this to me. Rollo?’

  There was no response.

  30

  Friday 27 February

  Jodie Bentley was a no-show. As Tooth had expected. As he had predicted. As he had told his paymaster, Sergey Egorov. If the Russian asshole had listened, Tooth wouldn’t be standing in an icy wind, in falling sleet, freezing his nuts off. He’d be on a plane back to New York from Brighton, England, with the memory stick that Egorov had paid him one million dollars to recover. He always took his payment up front; he didn’t need to do cash on delivery, because he always delivered.

  He stood in a fleece coat, fur-lined boots and Astrakhan hat, a short distance up the hill at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. At least, he figured, Walter Klein could take comfort in the fact that his casket was more luxurious than the jail cell he’d probably have spent at least the next fifteen years in. A plane, taking off from LaGuardia, thundered overhead. He heard the distant clatter of a helicopter and the even more distant, mournful honk-honk of a fire engine. Below, the funeral cortège was leaving. A long line of black limousines – a grand cortège, he thought, for a scumbag whose assets had all been frozen.

  But Tooth wasn’t here to judge the man.

  A siren wailed. Another plane roared overhead. He put a cigarette in his mouth, cupped his hand over his lighter flame and lit it.

  He waited, smoking it down to the butt, until the last vehicle had left the cemetery gates, then trampled it out in the grass. He walked back to his rental Ford, climbed in, started the engine and put the heater on full blast. Then he drove out of the cemetery, too. He headed to the storage depot where he deposited his gun and knife, then on to JFK Airport.

  He dumped the car at the Sixt rental area in the parking lot, called his client from a payphone there and updated him.

  ‘Go to England,’ Egorov instructed him.

  31

  Friday 27 February

  It was Angi’s birthday. Shelby told her he’d been given the night off from his warehouse job – by agreeing to work tomorrow, Saturday night, instead – so he could take her out to celebrate.

  Angi had only recently moved to Brighton, from landlocked Coventry, having split up with her partner, and she was enthralled by the novelty of living in a seaside resort. So although he had no appetite today, he treated her to a fish and chip dinner with champagne at the Palm Court restaurant on the pier.

  As she sat opposite him eating heartily, dousing her batter in salt and her chips in vinegar and ketchup, he sipped his glass of champagne and pushed his food around the plate, barely managing a couple of small mouthfuls.

  ‘What’s the matter, my sexy man – not hungry?’

  ‘My appetite’s for you,’ he said with a forced smile. ‘You’re making me so crazy for you I can’t eat!’

  He felt her foot, minus shoe, pressing between his legs.

  ‘I like you being crazy for me,’ she said. ‘I want you always to be crazy for me.’

  He smiled again. He wasn’t actually feeling that great, but he didn’t want to spoil her big day. He finished his glass of champagne, called the waiter over and ordered a pint of lager, hoping that alcohol would make him feel better. Hell, he’d splashed out on a taxi here, so they could have a proper celebration, so might as well get his money’s worth, he figured.

  He’d woken that morning to find a small swelling on his ankle. But nothing that bothered him too much. It didn’t seem to have grown any bigger during the day. But he definitely wasn’t feeling right tonight, not one hundred per cent, not firing on all cylinders. He was a little giddy and a bit clammy, as if he had a touch of flu.

  Of course, that was probably thanks to the horrible ride Angi had insisted he take her on, the Booster, before going to the restaurant. It had soared them up in the air, flipped them over and then over again. And then, when he thought he couldn’t take any more, they’d gone over yet again. And again. His brain still felt as if it was revolving.

  Angi looked at him and frowned. She took a tissue out of her handbag, leaned forward and dabbed his chin. ‘It’s still bleeding.’

  Shelby touched his chin where he’d nicked himself shaving earlier. He’d put a styptic pencil on the cut, which normally did the trick. But as he removed his hand he saw fresh blood on his finger. He pressed the tissue to his chin, called a waitress over and asked if she could find a small plaster for him.

  Then he downed the lager fast and ordered a second pint. Angi’s plate was clean, he realized, as she picked up her last chip, mopped up the blob of ketchup on her plate and popped it in her mouth.

  ‘Was it the ride?’ she asked, chewing, looking at his huge, barely touched portion of cod.

  He nodded, forlornly. ‘’Fraid so. Never been very good with them.’

  ‘Feeling queasy, are you?’

  ‘A little,’ he admitted.

  ‘I know a good cure for that!’

  He felt her foot pressed into his crutch, stroking from side to side.

  ‘Hmmmmn,’ she said. ‘I’m sensing some improvement.’

  He gave her a weak grin. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m sensing that too.’

  ‘I think I need to take you home to bed,’ she said.

  ‘The night is young,’ he said, evasively, unsure he could manage anything right now.

  ‘My point exactly.’

  She wiggled her foot.

  He downed his second pint, hoping that might do the trick. It didn’t. It sent him running to the toilets where he threw up violently.

  32

  Friday 27 February

  Tooth sat in the back of the limo taking him to JFK Airport. Whenever possible he took limousines in New York. He hated yellow cabs. He hated the often erratic nature of the drivers and the cramped rear quarters of many of the vehicles, sitting with his face pressed up against a scratched Perspex screen, having to endure an endless loop of advertising videos. He only took a yellow cab when he needed to.

  Like last Saturday.

  He wasn’t looking forward to his shitty Continental night flight to London, in coach. He always flew coach, because no one took any notice of coach-class passengers. None of the cabin crew remembered them. And he had always survived by being a chameleon, by not being noticed or remembered. Just as he had in his days as a sniper in the military. He was good at being patient, waiting. He had nothing else to do with his time. No one to care for or worry about. Except Yossarian. And Yossarian was fine right now. Mama Missick would be spoiling the dumb mutt rotten. Just like himself, just like the dog, big old ugly Ma
ma Missick didn’t have anyone else in the world. They were three of a kind. Stuck together. Riding the carousel that was spinning at 1,040 mph. This meaningless Planet Earth. Riding and waiting for oblivion. Well, Mama Missick was different. She was waiting to go to Heaven.

  Luckily for her, Tooth figured, one day oblivion would take care of her disappointment.

  Tooth didn’t do Heaven.

  33

  The past

  It happened eighteen years ago, but Jodie could remember it vividly. It was funny. Whatever her parents thought, Jodie found it funny. Almost hysterically funny. It still brought a big smile to her face. A smile of glee, a smile of satisfaction, a smile at the whole ridiculousness of it all.

  But of course she hadn’t dared to smile at that actual moment. She’d managed to look every bit as shocked as her parents.

  It was the first anniversary of Cassie’s death. Her sister was receding into the past in both her memory and in the photographs around the house. She was pleased to see that the really big portrait photograph of her, the one that sat in its frame on the windowsill in the lounge, the one in which she looked so truly beautiful, was starting to fade significantly.

  There were so many photos of Cassie that the house had the feeling of a shrine. A shrine to Cassie. Beautiful Cassie. Daddy’s pet, Mummy’s pet, teacher’s pet. Perfect Cassie. Jodie often wondered whether, if it had been her instead of her sister, would there have been this same outpouring of grief? This same kind of shrine?