The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

of them do. And the likelihood of the mistake comes when he is angry. An interesting cliché but valid: Revenge is best served cold. With me? Anger means the dish is piping hot. The act will not be thought through, will be hurried, his mind will be clouded, and that is the ladder to a mistake.”

His phone beeped.

He read Tristram’s message.

He might have lulled them in the front and they might not have realised that he’d stopped speaking because his small screen had lit up with text.

Babs said, “You did not finish, Mr Merrick. All about a mistake. What was . . .?”

“Be quiet, can’t you. Quiet.”

He had just received the words to activate him. She flinched. He saw Dominic’s face harden . . . and cared not a damn.

He spoke to them in the front room of the house overlooking the end of the cul-de-sac, found it difficult to get a coherent description out of them. Thought their response was poor. He told them what they should do. Jonas heard Tristram’s voice in the background: “For fuck’s sake, do we have to do that?” Repeated the instruction, not loudly but with an edge in his voice. Izzy sounded subdued, frightened even. He rang off. He gave Dominic’s shoulder a nudge, said what he wanted on the screen . . . their position, the estate, the clear ground of the cemetery, the road running down the hill. Said what speed they should go, and all lights killed. She drove.

Jonas said, “I never apologise and I never explain, which is why I am quite generally disliked. You were asking what was the mistake? Obvious . . . along with the heat of anger goes loneliness on an intense scale. The mistake? Came to see his mother. Has been fighting someone else’s war. A mercenary where he and the rest of gang of misfits were the useful idiots. Gets angry because of failure and offers up a promise, which is a hostage to fortune, and it will kill him, he hopes. To get over that hurdle he needs some loving support. Instead he’ll find his mother was a snitch. Going to see his mother was the mistake.”

The car was turning in the dimly lit road.

Babs said, “A mistake that will kill him?”

“I hope not, sincerely I do.”

They edged down the hill towards the Margate road and loitered in the shadows, out of the light thrown down from the street lamps.

She did it a second time.

A confirmation from Sadie Jilkes that she was happy to betray her son. No love left for him. She pressed the switch by the front door, and the patch of garden in front of her house bathed in thin light.

She left the light on, counted through a half-minute, then switched if off. Street lamps down the cul-de-sac were sparse. But there was a security light under the eaves of the Hunters’ house which came on when there was movement on their front path. Within seconds of her switching on her own light the Hunters’ door had burst open and a young man and a young woman had run out, each carrying a coat and going too fast to shrug into it. Sadie had turned on the light within half a minute of Cameron leaving by the back door. He’d opened the fridge but could only have taken sliced bread and might have swigged from the milk carton. She had seen his shadow move over the grass that had needed a run with the mower, pass the rose bush that she loved, and launch at the fence, the divide between her property and the hedge ringing the cemetery. He had called from the kitchen door, “You’ll miss me . . . You’ll curse yourself for not caring about me . . . Can’t wind back the clock but you’ll wish you could . . . You’ll read about me, then wish you’d loved me.” She had not responded, and a gust of cool air had come into the sitting-room from the open door, and he’d been gone. The shadow cleared the fence and would have pitched down into the bramble and scrub in the cemetery.

They’d left the Hunters’ front door open. They’d cut across the neck of the cul-de-sac and the woman had slipped on the kerb and almost fallen and Sadie had heard her swear, before they both disappeared.

Sadie thought she would sit a little longer, then would go back upstairs. Well after midnight now and she would be off out of her home in four hours. Go back up to her bedroom and take off her clothes and lie on her bed, best to get under the duvet, and make sure that the alarm was set. She hoped she would sleep. It was hard to do the early cleaning work if she did not sleep. She hoped that he had left sufficient bread in the fridge for her to make some toast before she went off to catch the bus into the city, the early one where each passenger looked half-dead. And hoped there would be enough milk for her to have a mug of tea. Wondered whether the state of his room, the shrine she had left to the collateral of what he had inflicted on her, had marked him. Did not really matter. What is done is done and cannot be undone, and she thought someone famous had said those words, but did not know who . . .

What would happen to him? She assumed that armed police would shoot him. What he deserved? Probably and . . . and would she be happy to have helped the armed police kill her son?

Which was the implication of what she had done when she had switched on her front light, given the signal as had been asked of her by the man who had approached her. A pleasant-spoken man, and with a kindness in his voice, but she had not seen his eyes. Could not forget her child as a chorister. Scrubbed and clean-faced, with tidy hair and in laundered robes, and singing to the great heights of the cathedral roof, and