Peter James - Love You Dead

She pulled, theatrically, a handkerchief out of her bag.

‘Would I be correct also in saying that you currently keep several of these snakes in a room at your house in Roedean Crescent, Brighton?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Are you aware just how deadly these creatures are?’

‘Absolutely. You’d have to be a bit stupid not to be.’

‘Are you aware that a licence under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act is required to keep these creatures?’

‘I am.’

‘You told us yesterday in interview that your late husband, Christopher Bentley, had such a licence. Despite his death, you maintained the licence in his name at an unoccupied flat in South Kensington, London. May I ask why you never transferred the licence to your own name and never notified any relevant authority that you had moved these reptiles to Brighton?’

She looked at her solicitor again, who nodded that it was OK for her to answer.

‘I’ve been busy,’ she said. ‘I suppose I just haven’t got round to it yet.’

‘Busy for all those years?’ Tanja Cale asked her, with a hint of sarcasm.

‘I thought that if it was a valid licence, it didn’t matter where they were actually housed.’

‘You certainly have been busy,’ Batchelor said. ‘Let’s go back in time a little. I understand that you were present when your older sister, Cassie, died. You outlined the brief details in yesterday’s interview but could you tell us the circumstances in detail?’

‘No comment,’ her solicitor interjected.

‘No, it’s OK,’ Jodie said. ‘It was a terrible accident. Our parents had taken us over the October half-term to Cornwall. We were staying in Boscastle. Cassie and I went for a clifftop walk. She asked me to take a photograph of her at a particular high point. She stepped back right to the cliff edge. I was really worried and told her to move away. She told me I was being a wuss and instead she took a step further back. Then she stumbled and — she — she — suddenly—’ Jodie closed her eyes. ‘Oh God.’ She opened them again. ‘I’ll never forget the terrible look on her face. One second she was there, then she — she—’ Tears filled her eyes. Her voice broke. ‘She just dropped out of sight.’ She paused, apparently to compose herself, then sniffed. ‘I crawled to the edge and looked, and I could see her body down on rocks, way below. I don’t know how far. Two or three hundred feet.’

Tanja Cale passed her a box of tissues. Jodie pulled one out and wiped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her handkerchief still clutched in her hand.

‘How did you feel at that moment?’ DS Cale asked her, gently.

‘It was the worst moment— the worst moment of my life.’

Jodie then described what happened in the aftermath and the impact on her family.

Guy Batchelor pulled a sheaf of paper from his inside jacket pocket. He handed one sheet to Jodie, one to her solicitor and one to Tanja Cale. ‘Jodie, search officers found a diary from your childhood in your house, yesterday. This is a photocopy of an entry from it. For the benefit of the tape it is marked exhibit GB/9, the first anniversary of your sister’s death, after you had visited the grave with your parents. I’ll read you the last part of what you wrote:

‘ My family. My embarrassing family. The things they say. But this really made me laugh. Mum suddenly said she wanted to light a candle for Cassie, have it burning on the table with us during our meal. So my dad went up to the bar and asked if they had a candle they could light for his daughter. Ten minutes later the chef and two other members of staff appeared with a small cake, with a candle burning in the centre of it, and walked towards us, all smiling at me and singing “Happy Birthday to You”!

‘ I’m still laughing about that, even though it’s nearly midnight and I’ve got homework to do for tomorrow that I’ve not even started yet.

‘ But, honestly, I have to say, I’ve not felt so great in a long time! ’

He laid the sheet of paper in front of him. ‘That doesn’t sound much like a grieving sister to me.’

Jodie stared into his eyes as if she was looking right into his soul. ‘Really? Have you ever lost someone you loved? I had a year of hell living with the guilt that I was somehow responsible. Sure, I remember that day with my parents, and the ridiculous mistake that pub made bringing a birthday cake. It did make me laugh, of course it did. The whole stupidity of it. It did cheer me up; for the first time in a whole year I actually smiled.’

‘OK, Jodie, let’s move forward to Christopher Bentley. He was an experienced reptile handler — one of the world’s foremost experts in venomous snakes among other creatures. Yet he allowed himself to be bitten by a deadly saw-scaled viper. Can you tell us how you think that might have happened?’

Jodie and her solicitor exchanged looks. She gave him a steady nod and turned back to the detectives. ‘I’m afraid that all experts get over-confident. To be honest, the way he treated some of his venomous creatures really worried me and I warned him several times. From the way he acted with them, he was starting to believe that he had somehow tamed some of them, and he was taking fewer and fewer precautions handling them.’

For the next fifteen minutes they asked a number of questions about the day it happened.

Batchelor studied his notes for some moments. ‘We’d now like to ask you some more questions about Walt Klein. When did you meet him exactly?’

‘In August, last year, in a hotel bar in Las Vegas — the Bellagio.’

‘Can you tell us what happened about a month ago?’

Without looking at her lawyer, she said, ‘Sure. We went skiing to Courchevel in the French Alps — he was a very keen skier.’

‘What was the nature of your relationship?’

‘We were engaged to be married.’

‘And what happened while you were there in Courchevel?’

‘Walt was a real — what we skiers call powder hound. He loved skiing fresh powder snow — they get a lot more in the US than we do in Europe. We’d been there several days and there was finally a really great dump of snow overnight. But it was still snowing heavily in the morning. He woke, raring to get up on the slopes. I tried to dissuade him, as the forecast was for the weather to improve later in the morning, but he was determined to get the fresh powder before it was skied out. So we went up together.’

She sniffed, and sipped some water. ‘We got to the top of the cable car and I told Walt to follow me — I’d skied there before and he hadn’t. I made several turns, then stopped to wait for him — and he never appeared. I figured he must have taken a different run — I’d taken a blue — the easiest — because of the conditions — but thought he might have taken a red or a black. After a while I realized he must have gone on, so I skied down to the bottom, to the place where we’d agreed to rendezvous if we lost each other.’ She shrugged. ‘But he never showed up. And that evening...’ She again raised the tissue to her eyes, hoping she wasn’t overdoing it.

‘What happened that evening?’ Cale asked, gently again.

‘A police officer told me he had been found at the bottom of a sheer drop.’

‘You were engaged to be married,’ Batchelor said. ‘Did you know that Walt Klein had written you into his will?’

‘No comment,’ her solicitor said.

‘It’s OK,’ she said to him, then turned to Batchelor. ‘He was worried, he’d had some heart issues. He didn’t get on that well with his two children, he said they were spongers and hardly ever bothered to contact him or come and see him. It was his idea — he wanted to stop them getting every cent when he died.’