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

on the shift. Was satisfied it was clean. She went out of the cubicle. She stood in front of a mirror, saw her untidy grey hair, no make-up and no jewellery, and tiredness was evident and she could not remember when she had last laughed.

Looked at herself in the mirror and heard herself say, “Of course, no phone call from you. No call. Not even a card. Too busy were you, full-time job killing people – to write or phone? Damn you.”

She started to wash down the basins.

The car turned in from the main road and hurried to do so in the face of oncoming traffic, and went through a big puddle by the kerb, drenching him further. He had been about to cross the top of The Avenue, and its significance had not been in his thoughts – more obsessed with his lack of money, lack of food, lack of sleep . . . but then remembered she used to sneak out of her home, slink up the pavement, using the shrubs in a couple of front gardens for cover: Vicky.

The nearside wheels went through the water and the rising wave hit his trousers up to his waist, and splattered his anorak. Cammy glowered at the car, gave a finger, cursed . . . recognised the driver. No change of hairstyle. Same spectacles on the bridge of her nose. Vicky’s mother. He stood on the pavement, the water dripping off him and the car moved on, then stopped, and began to reverse into a parking space. Cammy checked his watch. Still too early if he were going to walk to Sturry and then go along the Margate road and take the turn-off, and expect his mum to be home . . . assumed that nothing changed. The cathedral had not, nor the choir – a hymn’s music and words played in his mind – Jesus came when the doors were shut. No change in the High Street and none on St Peter’s Street except that the Poundland store was now boarded up, and nothing different at the Miller’s where he and Vicky drank, her usually paying, and nothing seemed to have changed at the Leisure Centre he had been past, or the gardens where the daffodils were in late bloom and the last of the crocuses. The car’s lights were killed, but the security system had kicked in. He had one good view of Vicky’s mother as she paused by her front door to rummage for the key. Opened the door, went in, closed it. And Cammy felt the aloneness. Felt it bad . . . these were the last hours of his life and he reckoned he did not deserve to be alone.

He turned into The Avenue.

Would go to Cindy Piggot’s house, two doors down from Vicky’s mother. She used to have a small dog and Vicky would mind it if she was out for the day and if he was not at work they would use her place. He went to the door and rang Cindy Piggot’s bell. He saw movement behind the opaque glass. He straightened his tie, she’d check him through the spy hole. The door was opened, but was on a chain. Eyes peered at him. He’d manage an educated voice, a believable and trustworthy one . . .

Could do as great a deceit as the time they had, him and the brothers, dressed in uniforms filched off the battlefield dead, and gone in the night to a storage depot behind the lines and had conned a couple of sentries at the gate, then had deceived the sergeant in the guardhouse who was watching streamed football from Europe, had taken the talk. They had seemed to be Hezbollah and in need of supplies, and . . . they had loaded two pick-ups with mortar bombs, and the rest of Mikki’s devices would not have started to detonate until they were a clear mile out of the arsenal and away across the open sand. They had laughed fit to bust, but they had been together . . .

He explained that he had been to Victoria’s old home but her mother was out. It was about renewing a savings policy. Always lied well.

“So sorry to trouble you. We heard she was getting married but the paperwork must have gone astray. Don’t have the new address. It’s the computers, wouldn’t have happened in the old days.”

Might be the last time in his life that he was required to lie . . . Vicky lived in the next street, the one beyond The Avenue, The Close. Cindy Piggot gave him the number. He thanked her warmly, and walked away, retreated into the darkness.

Jonas held tight to his bag as he came off the train. He had talked to his probationers, quiet and guarded, and had repeated what he wanted of them. They had told him of another crocodile, Brutus. Did he need to know? Tristram said that Izzy had found it on the internet. Izzy said that Brutus was over sixteen feet long and weighed two tonnes, lived in Australia, and ate sharks. Tristram said that Brutus hated sharks because one had bitten off the front of his left leg, and he was a big attraction for tourists and . . . He crossed the bridge at the station and was carried along in the flow of passengers ending their journey. He passed the tourist posters outside the toilets and the coffee shop and went through the barriers. The rain had eased. He thought it might turn into a reasonable night . . . Was quite certain in his own mind that, by the time those commuters who had shared the carriage with him were back at the station for their morning train into London, the matter would have been resolved. Was confident also that he would not need to call on “the cavalry” to come cantering on to the scene with reinforcements. He walked out into the forecourt. The rheumatism in his right knee was aggravated by the hour in the train, a longer trip than his usual journey, and he winced but then put