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

A bit pathetic, no fight left in them. Switched off the light and groped their way back up the stairs.

Tristram closed the door behind him, and said, “I have never in my short life felt so inadequate, said anything so pitifully pompous. They hate us.”

“We were asleep. Which was dereliction, first degree.”

“I feel inadequate, total.”

“Me too. Inadequate and incompetent.”

Izzy took his hand, held it loosely, could make out the shape of his long, almost delicate fingers. They shared an armchair, had a clear view of the front door of the house they were charged to watch. The house was darkened. “At least, small mercies, we didn’t miss her return . . .”

He kissed her gently on the lips. Thought that both of them would still be asleep, nestled against each other, had it not been for the family’s voices behind the door. They watched the shadows, waited, and somewhere in the house a clock ticked.

He went by the old and trusted route.

Cammy had been the chorister kid. His half-brother had been out on a day/night release scheme, and wearing an electronic ankle bracelet. He would take him down to the city and would sit him outside the pub, would give him shandy and roll-ups. He’d thought the shandy foul and the cigarettes made him cough, but he’d sat there. There was a way up from the centre of Sturry that went north which was the direction of home. Mum would have been at work and his half-brother, on pain of death, was supposed to mind him . . . except that he had learned in HMP Maidstone how to hack into the system of the ankle tags and wipe them out. This was the route by which his half-brother had taken him out and had brought him home. And a few months earlier, when the filth had come sniffing, it was the way that his half-brother had done a runner and been at liberty for four days before being hauled out of a girl’s bed. Anyway . . . it was the way that Cammy approached his home.

Out up the road towards the estuary and Herne Bay. Hugging darkness, and making sure that his back turned when rare headlights lit him. Going fast and tiredness settling in his legs and his chest hurting. And off the main road short of Broad Oak and crossing the fields and skirting the farm, then taking the dog walkers’ track in woodland, doing three sides of the square, the long way around, and every few minutes he would stop and listen. There would be traffic behind him, and sometimes birds would clatter out of a tree and owls would screech. Cammy had no fear of the dark, regarded it as a friend . . . Went around the school’s football pitch and could see a near perfect wall of lights ahead of him, and they led all the way down to the outskirts of Canterbury, except for one gap, like a missing tooth, and it was that section of darkness that he headed for. Would have taken him an extra hour, and would have pushed hard at the limits of his endurance, but he was pulled there. He took a risk but could not escape it. He stopped more often now, listened harder.

When he reached that section, black in the depths of the night and the rain still falling, he would be close to his mum – would not fulfil the promise made to his brothers until he had seen her, taken strength from her love . . . Would be good to see her, have her smile break on her face. Each day that he had been away, in Syria and on his journey back, he had taken a moment, like it was a prayer, to be alone and to fish her photograph out of his money belt, and speak softly to her: the photograph had gone when the smuggler gang had taken his belt, his pistol, his cash and his papers.

Ears pricked, the dog stiffened as it lay on Jonas Merrick’s lap, and a low growl came from somewhere deep in its throat.

The windscreen wipers cleared the view ahead, but not from the side windows or behind them. Jonas had a hand on the dog and was restraining it from leaping at the window. They heard slow steps, seemed to slap reluctantly on the wet pavement. They came up the hill, paused for a moment at the bend. A woman paused, leaned for a moment on the street sign then seemed to suck air into her lungs and straighten her back, and set off again.

Babs whispered, “Is that her?”

Jonas waited until the woman approached a street light. With his sleeve he rubbed a small section of his window. She wore flat shoes, her ankles were wet from the rain – she would have been splashed by passing vehicles as she had trudged up the hill from the bus-stop. She wore an old-fashioned raincoat that reached below her knees, and a headscarf, and on her arm was a shopping bag. He did not think she noticed their car.

“That is her. That is Sadie Jilkes.”

“What do we do?”

“I go and have a brief word with her. We live off hunches and instincts and more often they direct you, me, towards the correct destination. A tide in the affairs of men that taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Anyway, something like that.”

He passed the dog to Babs, opened his door quietly, then leaned back inside.

Jonas said, voice little more than a murmur, “They have excellent capabilities of disguise. They can lie in the water, still as a floating log, only showing a tip of a nostril or glint of an eye. I do not locate it by hiding on the bank. Nor do I find it by wading out and splashing around. Much better to take advantage of the crocodile’s intent. Might be a wildebeest at a water-hole, or a young