White Crocodile Read Online Free

her thick lip was making her slur a little, hating herself for it. ‘Diamonds, maybe?’
    He smiled and stepped towards her and automatically her back went rigid, her pulse rose a few notches. He sensed the change and hurt flashed in his eyes. But the walk had calmed him and he was obviously determined not to spoil the moment; his voice didn’t falter. ‘Close your eyes and hold out your hand.’
    She watched through the crack of her eyelids as something soft fell into the palm of her hand. ‘What is that?’
    ‘A sock. A baby girl’s sock.’
    ‘Where did you get it?’
    ‘I found it on Salisbury Plain. Lying on the ground.’
    ‘And you just picked it up?’
    He shrugged and grinned, relaxing into the moment, conscious now that she was going to let him move on, pretend his outburst an hour ago had never happened.
    ‘It’s a good omen. I know it is. It’s going to happen, soon.’ He smiled, his eyes growing warm again. ‘It’s what I want . . . what we both want, isn’t it?’
    Tess forced a smile of acquiescence, her heart fluttering in her chest. ‘It’s filthy. And you’re nuts,’ she whispered, regretting it immediately.
    ‘Of that,’ Luke said, with a tiny smile, ‘there is no doubt. But you’re crazy too, Tess. That’s why we love each other so much.’
    Tess shivered. ‘I’m throwing it away.’
    But for some reason, she hadn’t. She’d made up some excuse about having to get dinner on, to get away from him, and left it on the hall table. When she had remembered and come back, it had disappeared. He had taken it.
    The next time she had seen the tiny pink sock was in a battered envelope with a Cambodian stamp on it, which had landed on her doormat a month after Luke was dead and buried.
    The address was typed, and there was nothing else on the packet to betray who had sent it, and nothing else inside. She had turned the envelope upside down, and shoved her hand right up inside to make sure. Luke had gone to Cambodia as a single man, knowing their marriage was over, that she had finally found the guts to leave him. Who there knew about her? Who cared?
    And then she had noticed, on the other side of the envelope from its stamp and postmark, a tiny scribble. It had meant nothing to her at the time: a doodle of a reptile, like a pictogram, so small that she couldn’t even tell exactly what it was supposed to be. A gecko? A lizard?
    The sock was here now, on the coffee table in the centre of her room in the boarding house. She bent and curled her fingers around it.
    The room was large and airy, with a small kitchen and white tiled bathroom leading off it, on the first floor of a two-storey new build, set back from the road in a walled garden, and overlooked by a jostling crowd of palms. The walls were white-painted and bare: she had nothing personal to hang up, and the floor, bed and sofa were clear of scattered belongings.
    She had forgotten to close the balcony doors when she had left in the morning. Orange light streamed through the glass, casting twin rectangles on the floorboards. There was a puddle of rainwater on the wooden floor and the bottoms of the white curtains were opaque with damp. Beyond them the sun was sinking.
     
    *
     
    ‘I know I shouldn’t be calling,’ Luke had said, the first time he telephoned from Cambodia. ‘I know we agreed. But I wanted to speak to you. That’s OK, isn’t it? Just sometimes? You know that I don’t have anyone else.’
    She had been on the verge of telling him that he didn’t have her any more either, but now that he was on the line it felt petty, vengeful. She had assumed, after all that he had done to her, that her anger would never subside. That she would be able to close him off – be rational and emotionless in their dealings. But the reality was far less binary. There was history and memory. Love – gone now – but more intense than she had felt for anyone else, ever.
    He had been so self-contained the first time they had met, at a