The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour (english novels to improve english txt) 📗

chest. Took a bit of fiddling to loosen it. Then Jonas lifted clear the vest, and heard the nails rattle and the ball-bearings tinkle, and he smelled the explosive and choked on it. Because he had never been out in a siege or stand-off he did not know the weight of a bulletproof vest loaded with Kevlar plates. Unthinking, a natural gesture, he tapped the boy’s frail shoulder, as if he were a pupil who had done well. He stood and walked towards the low embankment wall. He trembled, thought he might faint, raised it, chucked it. He heard the splash, peered over the parapet and saw the disturbed water.

“Come on, Winston, let’s be on our way.”

No children had blessed the marriage of Jonas and Vera Merrick, but he supposed he spoke with the tone and charity that parents used on an errant child. He felt sympathy for the boy. They walked together, the two of them, as if leaving a bad place where neither knew true loyalty. Something a schoolmaster way back had read to the class, the words of a wartime pilot. Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love . . . The boy, in trust, held Jonas’s hand. He did not hate the boy, nor love the revellers on the river. They walked over the sodden grass and reached a pavement and crossed a main road and left the target area behind them, and the loaded weapons of the police, and negotiated a roundabout.

Many evenings on reaching home, he would complain to Vera of the way he was distanced by those he worked with, ignored and seldom praised, and she might cock her head, grimace, and tell him that “The problem is, Jonas, you’re not, never have been, won’t ever be, a team player, and you’re never in before dawn in crisis time, and you catch the 5.49 back regardless of whether the ceiling is collapsing on the streets of London. You don’t give enough back. Always the victim, never to blame, Jonas, but go look in the mirror. They want to be heroes, do something special. And you? Your tea’s ready.” Ahead of them was the facade of Thames House.

He took Winston to a café in a neighbouring street, left him there and went back to his one-time workplace. The atrium was empty but a few empty bottles stood on a table. There was a sealed envelope on his desk: that would be his retirement gift. He called a duty officer, identified himself, and briskly reported an explosive device that could be found on a mud spit at the next low tide, and told of Winston Gunn, alone, frightened, sitting in a nearby café nursing a coffee and needing immediate attention, and kindness . . . A barrage of questions assaulted Jonas, but he put the phone down and went to the side door. His access ID would be electronically shredded when he passed through, like a flame being snuffed, even an Eternal Flame. A hero? He laughed, rare for him, and stepped on to the pavement.

Chapter 1

He stepped out on to his front path.

He passed the rose bed, only three bushes, then walked between the parked car and the caravan, and reached the pavement. He ducked his head without looking back but the gesture would have been enough for Vera to know that he was grateful for the sandwiches she had prepared for him, in a plastic box at the bottom of his briefcase, wedged between paper files. He bent the Thames House rules about taking documents outside the building and bringing them home, but few rules at his place of work seemed now to apply to him. The caravan looked well and had come through the winter in reasonable shape, the paintwork in fair condition. He and Vera had been talking only the previous evening about whether to splash out and buy a new cooker or whether to make do for another year with the current one which had been in use for the last eighteen years . . . If he had retired when it was intended he should, 34 months ago, then a new cooker would have been at the top of their shopping list.

A neighbour was leaving from two doors down: Derbyshire, who sold double glazing for conservatories.

“Morning, Jonas.”

“And a good morning to you.”

He smiled, perfunctory, and walked on. Other front gates along this south London suburban street were clicking open and shut. Jonas Merrick knew most of his neighbours by sight and could exchange banalities: the rising cost of fuel, the number of potholes in the road, the increasingly erratic attendance of the refuse carts, or the weather forecasts for the coming weekend. They knew little, next to nothing, of him. They would have reckoned to have known Vera, been on something better than nodding terms with her, but not been close. Easy to imagine the gossip in the street when Christmas drinks were being served or summer barbecues pitched smoke and fumes over the back fences. “Funny old cove, never know what he’s thinking . . . Perhaps not thinking of anything, perhaps as dull as he looks . . . Never been in his house with him there, no invites, never accepted one from us . . . She’s all right, quiet and decent, but he’s a proper wet rag . . . I feel for her, don’t know why she sticks with him . . . Do you know what he does? No, I don’t – pushes paper in Whitehall, but that’s only a guess . . . God fucking help us if the likes of Jonas Merrick are looking after our pensions or whatever . . .” He remained an enigma to them and supposed they regarded him as a source of mild amusement. It was good that they knew little of him and the nature of his employment, and Vera was always disciplined and coy when other wives pestered her for details of where he worked and what he did. It was that time of year when the gardens in front of the mock-Tudor semi-detached homes