Love You Dead (21 page)

‘You know what I like about this job?’ Johnny replied.

‘No, but I think you’re about to tell us,’ said Declan.

‘It’s very nice to land a helicopter without anyone shooting at you.’

Suddenly the purple phone in the room rang.

‘Bollocks!’ the doctor said, checking his watch as he walked over to answer it. ‘Just a few more minutes and we’d be off shift! Typical!’

‘Bad attitude!’ chided the pilot.

Tooth, standing on the wooden platform on the first-floor level of the scaffolding, heard the distinct thrashing of an approaching helicopter. A short while earlier, listening
to the howl of sirens, he had waited, concealed in the garden, holding the chisel and hammer he had found in the garden shed, in case they were coming to this house. But some distance away, the
sirens had died down.

Emergency vehicles attending an incident – or accident – of some kind. He set to work on the window boarding. Someone had done a thorough job, and it was a full ten minutes before
he’d removed enough of the wood to be able to see into the interior of the room.

He didn’t like what he saw.

It was a very well-equipped reptile room, lined with glass vivariums, lamps, water pumps and timer-controlled feeders. That was the reason why she had all the dead rodents in her freezer.

He could see snakes, including a huge python, a boa constrictor and some much smaller ones, spiders, frogs and several vivariums teeming with scorpions. Nasty-looking beige ones with tiny claws.
For his last mission in the army, to Iraq, he’d been given a lecture on identifying these critters. The smaller the claws, the more deadly the sting. And the ones he could see, in a row of
vivariums lined against one wall, had claws that were all but invisible.

Jodie Bentley had weird taste in pets, he thought. Not his thing at all. He hated all these fuckers. Not much scared him, but reptiles did.

The cat had been lucky not to scratch all the way through the wall. Didn’t it know the saying ‘curiosity killed the cat’?

He could see a glass door, but it looked like there was a solid wall behind it, and that made him very curious. How come she had a room that had no apparent door into it?

The helicopter was coming closer. He looked up and saw the lights only a short distance away. For a moment he wondered if it was a police helicopter looking for him, and flattened himself
against the house.

The brightly lit skyline of Brighton was dead ahead of them in the clear night sky, as the twin-jet, black and white liveried MD 902 Explorer helicopter, flying on visual at
155 mph, tracked the A23 south. Johnny Spelt, the pilot, observed the familiar night landmarks of Shoreham power station to the west, the Palace Pier, as he still liked to call it, and the Brighton
Wheel to the east of it. It was easy to see the entire shoreline – the long necklace of street lights, beyond which was the pitch dark of the English Channel.

He lived in Brighton and knew the geography of the city intimately. A short distance in front of the Wheel was a whole cluster of flashing lights of emergency vehicles. Liaising on the radio
with the police inspector on the ground, he descended to 500 feet and hovered.

Below they could see a car embedded in a lamp post, part of which had fallen on the vehicle’s roof, with a cordon round the scene. Inside the cordon was an ambulance, a fire engine and
several police cars.

‘Golf Kilo Sierra Sierra Alpha,’ crackled the inspector’s voice.

‘Golf Kilo Sierra Sierra Alpha,’ Spelt responded.

‘Please land in East Brighton Park, there’s a car waiting to transport you to the scene.’

As he spoke, Spelt could see below them to the left the wide, dark area of the park at the bottom of Wilson Avenue. He pulled on his night-vision goggles, wiggling the strap around his headset,
and looked down, studying the area carefully. Apart from a figure some distance away exercising a dog with a ball-thrower, and the flashing blue lights of the waiting police car, the area was
deserted. Plenty of room for them. He removed the goggles and switched on the helicopter’s powerful search light, immediately able to see the greensward of the park.

Two minutes later they touched down. With the rotors still turning, Dee Springer and Declan McArthur unclipped their safety harnesses, removed their headsets and hung them up. Then, clutching
their bags of medical kit, they jumped out onto the grass, clambered into the rear of the waiting police car and were driven the half-mile to the accident scene.

They were met at the cordon by a paramedic who briefed them quickly.

‘His head and legs are trapped and the fire crew is cutting him free. He appears to have severe head and spinal injuries as well as what looks like internal haemorrhaging.’

The paramedic raised the blue and white police tape and they ducked under and ran across to the car, pulling on protective gloves and barely glancing at several police officers close by. The
driver’s door had been cut free and was lying on the road, and two Fire and Rescue officers were crouched down, cutting through the front of the roof with a huge hydraulic pincer. Inside the
car was a thin man, all in black, wearing a black beanie and leather gloves, his neck twisted. Dee Springer shone her torch in. The man was barely conscious. His face was the pallid colour common
in any trauma victim, but blood was leaking from his eyes, nose and mouth. He was breathing in short, clearly painful bursts.

‘Fubar Bundy,’ she said under her breath. The gallows humour of her profession. It stood for ‘Fucked up beyond all recovery but unfortunately not dead yet’.

Declan kneeled and spoke to the driver. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Lurrrrr,’ the driver responded.

‘I’m a doctor. What’s your name?’

‘Lurrrshhhh.’

‘Can you move your arms?’

The driver raised them a fraction and half closed his hands.

Declan heard the crackle of a radio and a siren wailing in the distance, coming closer. ‘We’ll have you out in a few minutes and we’re going to fly you to hospital.’

Normal practice with trauma victims was to inject them with a ketamine-based anaesthetic, to restrict the capillaries and reduce blood loss. Clearly some major internal bleeding was
occurring.

He peeled off the man’s left glove, to take his pulse. Then stared in shock for some moments, as he looked at the man’s hand in the beam of his colleague’s torch. Blood was
leaking out under his fingernails. He curled his finger round the man’s wrist and quickly found the median nerve. He’d been expecting him to have a weak pulse, but to his surprise it
was hammering, dangerously. He counted, checking against his watch.

One hundred and eighty, he estimated broadly after counting for twenty seconds. Enough to kill someone with a heart condition or give them a stroke. He looked back at the man’s bleeding
eyes. His pupils were hugely dilated.

‘Have you been taking any drugs?’ he asked, gently.

‘Lurrrrrrrshhh. Lurrrrshhh.’ Without warning, he coughed up a large globule of bright blood which spattered on the white, sagging airbag.

The doctor’s brain was racing. The man must have taken something – but what? Brighton was a party town. He’d attended people in a bad way here before, clubbers who’d
swallowed a whole cocktail of stuff they’d bought from street dealers. But he’d never before seen symptoms quite like this.

‘Can you tell me what you’ve taken tonight?’ he asked, firmly but calmly.

‘Shnufog,’ the man murmured. His voice was almost drowned out by the grinding sound of the hydraulic cutter.

‘Could you say that again?’

‘Frog.’

‘Frog?’ Dee said, very gently, kneeling beside him. ‘Did you see a frog?’ she coaxed.

The whites of his eyes were veined with red and blood ran, like tears, from between his lids. ‘Schfrog. Schnake.’

‘You saw a frog and a snake? Have you taken any drugs tonight?’

The man’s eyes were closing. Declan took his pulse again. The rate was lower this time. He wasn’t sure whether this was a good or bad sign. He’d never encountered anything like
this. He asked his colleague for the syringe and ketamine.

‘Shankle,’ the man said, suddenly. ‘Shankle.’

‘Stay with us!’ Dee said. ‘Please stay awake and tell us as much as you can remember. What have you taken?’

‘I think he said
ankle
,’ Declan said. He looked at the man’s face. ‘Is that it? Your ankle?’

But his eyes were shut now and he no longer responded.

The doctor leaned into the footwell, with his torch, pulled up the man’s trouser legs and pushed his socks down. He could see swelling and bruising round the right ankle, and two tiny
pinprick marks.

‘Have you injected yourself?’ he asked, but got no reply.

He then checked his pulse again. It was dropping at an alarming rate. Dee tapped him on the shoulder and signalled for him to move out of earshot of the patient.

As he stepped a couple of paces back from the car, Dee Springer said, ‘Look, I think he’s been poisoned – either taken some drug or eaten something. I heard of symptoms like
this from someone who’d eaten a puffer fish that hadn’t been prepared properly. Could it be something highly toxic like that?’

‘Take a look at his ankle. I think he’s injected something or possibly been bitten by something very small – and I don’t know what to give him,’ Declan said.
Normally calm, able to cope with any victim however bad his or her condition, he seemed close to panic at this moment. The possibility was also going through his mind that this man might have some
kind of tropical disease that could be contagious. If so, there was no way they could take him in the helicopter and risk contaminating it for future patients.

Dee leaned close to the victim. ‘Sir, we’re going to help you get better. But we need you to tell us what’s happened. Did you eat something tonight? Have you taken any drugs?
Has something bitten you? Have you been abroad recently?’

There was no response.

She stepped back and said to the doctor, ‘We need to get him to the poisons unit at Guy’s in London – that’s my view.’

Declan checked the man’s pulse again. It had dropped to thirty-five. One hundred and eighty down to thirty-five in the space of minutes. Guy’s was an hour’s flying time away.
It would be close to 10 p.m. by the time they got him there. They would radio the patient’s symptoms ahead of their arrival, giving the hospital time to get a specialist team on standby. But
if he had a tropical disease, which might be contagious, could they take the risk of him contaminating the helicopter?

They had to give it a go, he decided. They always gave it a go. And, more often than they sometimes dared to believe, they succeeded.

Those were the sweetest moments. The reason they all did this job.

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.