The Crocodile Hunter Gerald Seymour (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📖

heel after a momentary glare of contempt, and left the room. He closed the door carefully, did not slam it, did not make a scene. Never heard of him again until the news of where he’d gone. Did not surprise me.”

Tristram said, “Thank you for your time.”

Izzy put away her notepad.

Old Fergie said, “I suppose you are here because he’s back. I doubt he’s changed except that he has probably hardened further. I hazard an opinion: he’ll not roll over. You’ll have to shoot him. I can hardly believe I am saying that. I doubt I am wrong – shoot him dead.”

The Hunters were home.

Trace was in the kitchen, preparing their tea, and Karen was upstairs washing her hair, and Bradley was looking at Royal Navy brochures, still waiting to hear whether he had been accepted for the electronics course, and Dave came down the stairs after changing out of his work suit. The television was on in the front room but nobody was in there so no one was watching. Darkness was gathering. There were not many street lights to illuminate the facades of the houses, the parked cars and the little pocket handkerchiefs of grass by the paths to the front doors. He would always go to the front window, look out and around as if he were some sort of neighbourhood sentry. He’d check there were no vehicles that he could not identify, and no strangers loitering, and his gaze would always linger on the house on the far side and further down, the last in the line.

Dave Hunter felt a soft spot for his neighbour, Sadie Jilkes; they all did. Her curtains weren’t drawn, there were no lights on. He knew it was important to Sadie to keep her bills to the minimum. She walked to a bus-stop that was further from her home than the nearest because it cost her less to board and get off there. He thought they did not do enough for her: did not know what else they could do; social invitations were invariably rebuffed. He dragged the curtains across the window.

The television news had reached the weather forecast, and that part of the south-east would have a decent start to the day tomorrow, and there would be a dry night and light winds . . . fact was that the forecast was pretty much the same as most days. Fact also was that life in their road stayed simple, ordered, and that crises seemed not to happen. An unremarkable street, he would have said if describing it “on a hill, looking down on the city, plenty of fields near us and a cemetery where I’ll probably get parked. Nice place where nothing much happens.” Sadie would be at work somewhere in the city, sweeping and wiping and dusting, emptying waste-paper bins and filling black bags and pushing a vacuum cleaner, and likely she’d have toilets to deal with too. Not his business, that Sadie Jilkes had a son in gaol, had a daughter who was in that cemetery, and another son who was God knows where – if he was still alive.

A wry smile slipped on to the face of Jonas Merrick.

He imagined the reactions of those who worked further down the corridor, because they had not heard him pass their doors at his usual time. The same down in the big front hall where the women sat behind desks and checked out internal staff and external visitors. The same for the police who patrolled the pavement outside. All of them would have said they could set their watch by the time he left. Not that evening.

The traffic was nose to tail and headlights gleamed, and beyond them was the river with slow-moving barges and a single pleasure boat. He now involved himself in the lives of strangers.

It was his skill to insert himself into the existence of people who would have no reason to think they were being examined by a man they knew nothing of. His computer had the power to penetrate their telephone logs, to dig out their mobile numbers, to excavate their bank accounts. Below his picture of the crocodile in the still, dark pool and the photograph of a young man with a pleasant smile, he crouched, frog-like, over his keyboard. Almost caressed the keys, seemed to win favours from it.

He had been, as if with a scalpel, into the life of a one-time girlfriend. Had found her picture, pretty girl, before her wedding. And another with her baby and her husband and her mother-in-law. Had her job references, her bank accounts and her husband’s, had her address.

Had passed on the details, to Tristram and Izzy, told them what he needed.

Had gone on a virtual tour of the street at the top of the hill off the main road to Margate. Had used the computerised attachments to walk him along it and then to stop in front of a semi-detached house, the last in the row, a cemetery behind it. It looked in need of repair. A decent home, but uncared for: the paintwork needed attention and weeds grew in what had once been a small shrub bed. He had a list of neighbours. The property next to that of Mrs Sadie Jilkes was in the name of an Asian couple and he had established that they ran a Post Office franchise. There were others; the process was tedious but he preferred to make his own investigations, then hold to his own decisions . . . There was a family that lived diagonally opposite. The man was an accountant . . . the family seemed unremarkable. And remembered . . .

. . . A year and a half before. After his gong had been pinned, and after the detailed debrief of Winston Gunn, a rule had been broken. What rules were for – Jonas did not believe in the inflexible. Young Winston, failed suicider, had been spirited away to a safe house, and a mobile phone was made available so that he could speak to his mother once