Authors: Lee Weeks
‘Ordinary spiders?’ asked Bowie.
‘No, they’re not ordinary in this country. We have spiders that can bite but . . .’
She turned to look at Robbo, whose enthusiasm was unleashed.
‘Doctor Harding asked me to look into the types of spider that would be a match for the venom. There are a couple of possibilities, none of them native to this country. We do have spiders
that can bite – even the house spider can nip you if cornered – but none of ours would be able to cause infection like this.’
‘We have now identified different sized fang bites on the victims,’ said Harding. ‘Hawk has more than one type of poisonous spider.’
Robbo started a slideshow of spiders on his laptop.
‘What happens when you’re bitten?’ Bowie asked as the images flashed up.
‘Within a couple of hours it starts to itch and swell,’ answered Harding. ‘And within a few days, left untreated, the ulcers form and start eating away at the flesh. There is
no cure for that.’
Robbo clicked on images of bite wounds. There was a sharp intake of breath from Carter. ‘Christ.’
‘The wounds have been recorded at twenty-five centimetres in diameter,’ Harding stated. ‘Bacteria creeps in and then infection from these bites is common. Limb amputations are
the only answer as gangrene sets in.’
‘There’s no cure?’ asked Carter. He stared at the photos of the wounds and his face paled.
‘There’s anti-venom.’
‘What about the antibiotics you found in her blood?’ asked Bowie. ‘If he knows a lot about these spiders he knows that he can’t cure the ulcerated sites with antibiotics.
So he plans to kill them slowly, giving them small amounts of antibiotics just to prolong the agony. Is that what it looks like, Doctor?’
Harding nodded.
‘The antibiotics would only have prolonged life but not enough to halt the necrosis or prevent renal failure. All of the victims were about to go into kidney failure. Their organs were in
a dire state from the poison in their systems.’
‘We’ll contact pet shops in North London and start asking for customer lists.’
‘There’s an exotic pet shop near me. I’ll go and ask some questions,’ said Carter.
Robbo closed his laptop. ‘It would be worth ordering in some anti-venom just in case we have the pleasure of meeting the man and his pets.’
Harding got back to the Whittington and found Mark still working. She had a bottle of wine in her hand and another in her bag.
‘Thought we could do we a little R&R?’ She planted the wine on the table and threw her coat over the back of the chair.
Mark looked worried. ‘Just realized I haven’t sent the debris from Emily Styles’ hair off for analysis.’
Harding’s expression instantly changed to one of annoyance.
‘Did you sift it?’ she said brusquely.
‘Yes.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Still in the fridge waiting to be sent to the lab.’
A flash of anger crossed Harding’s face. ‘You better call them now and you can get it across to them yourself.’
‘Yes, Doctor.’ Harding walked through to the specimen store, a room off the post mortem room, and opened the fridge. Inside were labelled bags and plastic pots and trays. She found
the set of specimens belonging to Emily Styles and pulled out the packet labelled hair residue. She took it back to her desk and tipped the contents into a clean tray.
‘What are you looking for?’ asked Mark as he came to stand behind her.
She was momentarily distracted by the nearness of his body. His leg was against hers as he watched what she was doing.
‘We may as well do the first part of the analysis ourselves to save time. I want to dry it off. We know so much more about our man now. I want to make sure we didn’t miss anything.
I’ll just keep it thirty minutes then you can go.’ She turned to see if he was okay with that and found him so close that she couldn’t breathe. She turned back to the desk and
began picking through the debris with tweezers.
‘What’s that?’ Mark pointed to a small silver object on the tray.
‘It’s a fish scale.’
‘No it’s not – it’s too big, wrong shape.’ Mark pulled on a fresh pair of gloves and Harding tapped the scale onto a slide. He took it across to the microscope.
Harding joined him as he looked at it then stood back for her to see.
‘Snake.’
She nodded. ‘Well done. What kind?’
Mark took a few minutes to look it up on the laptop.
‘It’s a python – a very big one. This size of scale you’re looking at, one over twelve foot.’
Harding sat down at her desk and brought the X-rays of Emily Styles’ neck injuries up onto the screen.
‘Here’s our tourniquet. So wide it crushed her neck, not just the vertebrae, severing her spinal cord but also her jawbone and her trachea. It pushed her jawbone back into the
cranium.’ She phoned Carter. He was on his way home to get a few hours’ rest. He had the phone on speaker.
‘While you’re in the pet shop find out all you can about any owners of very large pythons in the area. We’ve found a scale in the debris from Emily Styles’ hair.
There’s no doubt it’s what strangled her.’
Carter finished the call and pulled into his street, parked up and walked into his house. Cabrina had fallen asleep on the sofa and Archie was next to her. He picked Archie up as Cabrina opened
her sleepy eyes.
‘Hello, babe – didn’t think you’d make it back.’
Archie didn’t stir. Carter took him upstairs and put him to bed. By the time he’d come back downstairs Cabrina was in the kitchen; she had poured him a glass of wine and was heating
up some food for him. He came up behind her and put his hands around her waist as he nestled into her neck.
‘Sorry – do I smell like baby? Archie and I had a bath.’
‘Lucky Archie.’ He moved her hair away from her neck and kissed the soft line of her neck that he loved.
She closed her eyes. ‘I’ve missed you, babe.’
‘Good.’ He smiled and held her tighter. ‘Promise you’ll never stop missing me.’
‘Please. Please, I’ll do anything, don’t hurt me any more.’
Hawk stood over Danielle and pulled her upright by her wrists.
Danielle felt nauseous. Now that she could open her eyes she realized that her vision was blurred. Her heart was racing. The room was unbearably hot. She watched him move in a distorted fog
around her. She listened to his speech from some distant place. She vomited bile; her stomach retched and strained and he turned up the music. He lifted her out of the coffin and held her close to
him as he swayed to the music. He began carrying her towards the back of the room and he ducked his head under the rafters. Danielle could not stand. Her head was spinning. She felt herself being
lowered. He held her under her shoulders as he dangled her in mid-air and she felt the cold and damp close around her. He dropped her into a pit.
He waited until she finished vomiting to speak:
‘Tracy messed up.’ He turned to Danielle. ‘You all mess up. Like mother like daughter – whores and bitches.’ The pain shot through her back as she lay on the bottom
of the dug-out hole. She looked up to see him peering down at her over the edge of the hole, ten feet above her. He shone the torch at her and it reflected off the walls around her. She looked at
the scratches. White flecks of nail and flesh were embedded in the earth.
Next morning, Carter pushed open the door of ‘The Exotic Pet Shop’ on Caledonian Road and was pleasantly surprised. He had been dreading setting foot inside any
place that had things that scuttled or slid, but the woman sitting on a stool behind the counter to his right smiled and he instantly felt better. She was pretty, with feline eyes and a mane of
black hair that started as a loose bun on the top of her head and then tumbled down till it reached her waist. She had long false eyelashes and pouting pink lips. She looked like she’d
stepped out of a Sixties girl band in a leopard-print mini-dress.
‘Hi. My name is Detective Inspector Dan Carter.’ He showed his warrant card. ‘I need some information.’ She didn’t seem to object. ‘What’s your
name?’
‘Silky.’
From the corner of his eye Carter spied movement. Stacks of boxes containing jumping insects, labelled ‘crickets’, ‘locusts’. Silky kept her eyes on Carter as he bent low
to look at the insects.
‘Funny type of pet. Not so scary as I imagined.’
‘They’re just food for the others.’
Carter stood and took a step towards Silky, who had a tattoo of a snake running up her arm and flicking its forked tongue into the crevice of her neck.
‘Who eats those then?’ Carter smiled, embarrassed at his mistake but at the same time wondering if Silky was wearing knickers; somehow he didn’t think so.
‘The spiders.’ She sat back on her stool. ‘Is it a spider you were interested in?’
Carter tipped his head to one side, swivelled on his heels and shrugged.
‘Possibly. Actually I need some information about some of these
pets
.’ She didn’t seem to object. He glanced around the shop at the tanks and cages.
‘Do you have a favourite?’
‘Yes. That’s easy,’ she answered as she got out of her seat, eased down her dress from where it had lodged at the top her thighs and swivelled her hips around the side of the
cash desk as she appeared by his side. ‘I’m a tarantula type of girl.’ She walked over to the wall full of glass containers. Carter followed her and stood eye to eye with a
six-inch-wide, hairy spider. He stepped back.
‘Are they venomous?’
She smiled, amused. ‘All spiders are venomous. Some more than others.’
Carter tried not to shiver. He was worse than Cabrina when it came to spiders. He was going to have to stop being a wimp about it if he didn’t want Archie to be the same.
‘Have you ever been bitten?’
The woman nodded. ‘A few times.’
‘But some spiders can kill?’
‘Of course. I keep a stock of anti-venom in my fridge.’
He moved away from the spiders.
‘What about for snakes?’ They moved on to the far end of the small shop and a large tank with a coal-black snake inside.
‘Snakes eat mice, rabbits – small mammals of some kind. It depends on the size of the snake.’
‘Do they eat them live?’ Carter bent to peer in at the snake.
‘No. Not any more. Well, not unless you have a snake that won’t feed otherwise. They are farmed, killed humanely and we sell them frozen.’
‘Do you have regular clients?’
‘Yes. We have our regulars. Once you buy one pet you tend to want more and the same people come in to buy feed for them.’
‘Do you have a newsletter that people can subscribe to on your website?’
‘We notify people of offers – that kind of thing.’
‘Can I get a copy of the list of subscribers for that?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s not a private thing.’
Carter bent down to look at the snake sliding its underbelly up the glass as it slid up towards the top of the tank.
‘I bet you know all the real spider and snake enthusiasts around North London?’
‘We tend to know one another, yeah. People need advice, that kind of thing. We keep in touch.’
‘Do you think you know everyone around the area who has a large snake?’
She thought about it and shrugged again. ‘That’s a hard one. I doubt it. Someone could source their food from someone other than me, like online. They could be self-sufficient and
breed their own insects. If they bought a snake from me then I keep a record.’
A young woman passed them as she came from a door at the back of the shop.
‘Just going downstairs – mind the till for me, Barb,’ she said as she passed.
‘Okay, no probs.’
She turned to Carter: ‘Would you like to see a big snake?’
‘Love to.’
She led the way through the door and down the stairs that turned sharply around to the left. Downstairs they walked into a small hot room with a massive tank running the length of it. Inside was
a snake that fitted it.
‘Jesus! How big is that thing?’
‘
That
is Lulu and she’s about sixteen feet.’
‘How much does she weigh?’
‘About nine stone.’
Carter walked over to the tank and came level with the curled snake.
‘She’s a python,’ said Silky. ‘I’ve had her for ten years but she’s just too big for me to have at my house now.’
He shook his head, impressed. ‘Yeah – I bet. Do you handle her?’
‘Sure, I get her out most days. Except when she’s hungry – like most women she gets bad-tempered then.’
‘And how often does she get hungry?’
‘Once a month.’
‘Then what? Half a dozen rabbits?’
‘Just one.’
‘If she eats that then she won’t eat again?’
‘Not for a month.’
‘She won’t bother to kill?’
‘No. I mean I still wouldn’t handle her alone. Once she coiled around your neck, you wouldn’t be able to get her off. She might not even be looking to eat you, just to defend
herself or to feel stable, just to get a hold on something.’
‘Could she eat you?’
‘Lulu?’ Carter nodded. ‘I’d be too big for her but she could eat a baby, a small child. In the wild they have been known to eat people. They can grow to fifty feet and
can weigh one hundred and thirty-five kilos.’
‘Would she eat another snake?’
‘No. But a decapitated snake can bite itself. A snake’s body can go on moving for hours.’
‘Jesus – that’s evil.’
She laughed. It was beginning to feel uncomfortably warm and small in the room. They seemed to be standing awfully close. He looked at his watch.
‘Thanks so much for your help – if I can have that list now.’
‘Yeah, sure.’ She led the way back up the stairs and stopped halfway. She caught Carter staring at her bum. ‘Do you want to give me your number? I can ring you if I think of
anything else you ought to know about spiders or snakes. Maybe you could buy me a drink sometime and I’d let you pick my brains?’ He followed her back to the counter.
‘I’d love to but police business, rules and all that – you understand.’
She cocked her head to one side and smiled. ‘I understand. She’s a lucky woman.’