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

people all around her in raptures when he sang solo. She had seen his face in the gloom of the unlit sitting-room, had noted the sunken eyes and the gaunt cheeks and the thin lips and the blotches on his skin, and his tousled hair . . . Could erase that memory, not the choirboy.

She saw that the cul-de-sac was deserted, quiet, and the Hunters’ front door had been closed . . . Perhaps nothing had happened and no one had visited. She went up the stairs and hoped to grab some sleep before the alarm claimed her.

Tristram led and Izzy kept up a volley of obscenity, complaint and interjected squeals of pain. Had gone across one set of back gardens, and she had tripped on a watering-can – “Who leaves a fucking watering-can in the middle of a fucking path . . .?” He had a good stride and wore lace-up shoes. She had struggled with a short cross-country run in the early stages of induction but had ticked enough boxes for the financially deprived background quota to cancel any failings. They were using the torches on their mobile phones.

He hissed back over his shoulder, “For God’s sake, Izzy, shut up.”

She snapped back at him, “I’m trying! Bloody shoes are a bloody nightmare.”

The phones gave a bouncing light around their feet, they blundered forward. They saw a sign for a cemetery but the gate was along a feeder lane and they had to cross more fences and more back gardens. Tristram hit a poly-tunnel, might have had prize strawberries growing in there, or a first crop of protected lettuces, but was – thank the good Lord – plastic and not glass. He knew she was close behind because he heard her wheezing . . . thought her a great girl, a top girl, and thought . . . They were on the next street down from the cul-de-sac, and he had fucking nearly impaled himself on a kid’s scooter and he had a view of a road in front, the main drag. Paused for that moment, then looked up. Saw him.

Tristram reached back, caught Izzy’s arm and pointed.

“Him, the Tango, see him.”

“Got him. Tommy Tango. I’ll buy that.”

They were 150 yards from the main road. Had seen him because a lorry had come around a corner, monster lights on the front, and would have surprised him. He’d paused on the pavement and had let it pass, then had loped across the width of the road and it had been harder to see him except for the street light further up the hill. There seemed to be an alley between two small terraces of houses, might have led to lock-ups or to back gardens . . . No one, at that time of the morning, the small hours when doctors said old people died, opened a door and looked around, wary. He ran bent head and shoulders, and disappeared. Right height, right build but perhaps thinner, right hair colour but might have been blonder which was what prolonged exposure to the sun did.

Tristram called Jonas. Said where they were and what he had seen . . . had no thanks given him, was told to stay in touch. No fucking appreciation, like praise would have stuck in the old bastard’s throat.

She said, a gasp for breath, “That was just brilliant, to see the shite, bloody brilliant.”

Cammy ran.

The path was a familiar one. Used as the cut into the city when he had no money for a bus, or the way home when the last of the public transport had gone. It would take him down to the river, the minor one that had a separate channel to the Stour, and there was – as he remembered it – a track alongside. It would be slippery, and there was a fair drop into the water, but it would be nothing that taxed him after where he had been – drainage and irrigation ditches, paths that might have been strewn with anti-personnel mines sown by the Russians. He ran well, and had eaten two of the slices of bread that he had stuffed into his pocket.

Too late for regrets. He put the diversion to his mum’s house and to his sister’s grave, and to his own wrecked room, behind him. Like it had never happened. Was done, and in his mind he had moved on, and his breathing was even and he kept up a good pace. On a descending cinder track, he kicked aside fallen branches but who was out that early in the morning to have heard? Maybe a cat, possibly rats, and could have been a fox whose eyes he saw. He focused on his promise, would get his strength from what he had shouted at the skies, and at that brief flicker of light from the undercarriage some 20,000 feet above him.

It should have been the day when, finally, something worked for him and for her, his last brother. Had started well.

They had been intercepted. The group came from their right side emerged from the wreckage of a village that looked to have been pounded by air strikes, and the flies were still thick in the air which meant the killing was recent. There had been the stink of the dead that ran well with the stench of failure. The two of them, Cammy and Ulrike, had been threading their way up what was once a main street and had picked their way past corpses and had shouted at the feral dog pack, and the group had materialised, had challenged them. Seven or eight of them and leaderless, and not knowing where they went, only interested in flight, distance, getting the hell out. And they had some food, and water, but enough to share. Ulrike’s decision. She said he would take them, and under his wing – had made the clucking noise of a chicken and had gained ribald laughter.

They had moved on, and Cammy had been harsh, had insisted on a fast pace although the sun was climbing, but then had started to sing, none