Lee Weeks - Cold as Ice

‘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.