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

“You set out to come to the UK. You are here. You want to stay a lifetime, or a couple of hours? Which?”

“What name did he give?”

It had dawned on Tristram that their debt to this nameless individual, their saviour, was greater than any momentary loyalty towards the country in whose care they now rested. Was clear to Izzy that they felt a love of him and a regard for him – because of where he had led them and what he had brought them through – that outweighed their future advantage. It was a wall of silence, the stuff that the daily rags used to write about, but this was not East London, not Sicily or Naples or the toe of Calabria . . . They were “decent Christian worshippers” and they did not look down at the table or at the wall, but stared back into the faces of Tristram and Izzy. Seemed not to relish their stubborn response, seemed to have no pleasure in their refusal to cooperate.

He murmured in her ear, “Would some rough stuff work with them?”

She answered, “No idea. Never been taught it.”

“Quite rough stuff – slap them around a bit?”

“Don’t know. He’ll think we fucked up, but we have to call him, tell it like it is.”

Tristram, grim, told them: “Your choice. It was all for nothing. What you did, surviving that journey, was just time wasted. You’ll go back to France today. Perhaps you can find another trafficker and do a deal with him. Perhaps you can stay there a month or a year, however long you want – and congratulate yourselves that you made the choice not to say anything about the guy who brought you over. Fair exchange?”

They went out into the corridor.

Izzy said she’d do it, report the failure.

And Jonas remembered.

Thought back to how it had been in the days when he was young, “wet behind the ears”. They were the Irish days.

Men sporting tight tweed jackets, regimental ties and twill trousers had walked the corridors of the building then occupied by the Service. They had done the “Irish scene” while Jonas Merrick was a junior, little more than a clerk, and they would have chuckled at the thought of getting any Irish boy into the darkened corner of a cell and administering a beating. The boy would be from the wastelands of Fermanagh or the hillsides of Tyrone, or the farming fields of Antrim, or might have been lifted out of West Belfast: there had been the men in the Service who could pull on leather gloves and “do the necessary”. And Jonas remembered that photographs marked “for restricted circulation” used to drop by from time to time, pictures of faces with split lips and missing teeth and closed, bruised eyes, and with them there was often a note that no worthwhile information had been extracted. The story was that, in the majority of cases, the men who inflicted shock and awe on prisoners would step out into the corridor of the cell block, sweating from exertion, and frustrated at wasted effort, and would straighten their ties and walk away and have learned very little. They were gone, had used up their life span in the Service. Where might they be now? Maybe running a pub in Devon or a guest-house in the Lakes, maybe a garden centre in the Black Country, or on a short-term security contract in Bahrain or anywhere else down the Gulf where “robust methods” were still practised. They did not exist in the current Service. Thumping men and boys seldom delivered the goods.

He might get around to telling Tristram and Izzy that a thrashing in a dark corner rarely produced worthwhile intelligence. Was once thought to be beneficial to the public good. Was the old way . . . Torture did not work.

Not long after the move into Thames House, a gentle-voiced Russian had addressed them. A subdued man, not seeking celebrity status although he had been a colonel in the old KGB and had done two tours in Chechnya . . . He had talked of torture. Described an assignment in Moscow where he worked against the powerful forces of organised crime. A clan leader was in the cells, refusing to communicate: he had been roughed up, robustly questioned. The colonel had gone into the cell and had sat on the filthy floor, had stayed there for four days, eaten there and slept there, and had won the clan leader’s confidence. All they wished to know had become known. They had all thought the colonel interesting and had regarded him as brave, principled: to his own people he was a traitor and they had successfully poisoned him nineteen months after his address to the Service audience . . . One man’s hero was another man’s scum. Still, a useful insight into torture and other alternatives.

Not a matter of him losing his job, exiting in disgrace: nor of the two youngsters ditching their careers. Simply that fists and boots and falls down the cell block steps did not produce information.

He rummaged in his files. It could have been that his eyes were tired, or might have been that the light through his window was dulled by the low cloud and the fine rain. It was hard for him to see the details of the pictures: a white American, a German with snow-blond hair, a Russian national who had been in their military before switching sides and heading to Syria. And the face of a British boy who had been a student, supposedly studying an aspect of computers, and another who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of long-playing records – then found the one of a fresh-faced lad, pleasant looking, with an open and mischievous face, and he marked that picture “CJ” with an indelible pen, then marked all the others. It was not necessary for him to pinch himself for allowing the thought of it to play in his mind. There was no burden of