Beryl Wruck hadn’t been swimming. She’d simply been larking about on the jetty after a barbecue. She had a drink in her hand. And a few of her friends were by her. It was low tide and maybe her feet were in an inch or so of river on the bottom steps of the jetty. Then there was a sudden violent agitation of water, though not a sound from the woman, and that was the last anyone saw of her until her fingernails showed up three weeks later.

The shooting began early the very next morning, men arriving from miles around with guns and rifles. Ready to shoot up anything in the river that moved. They called themselves the ‘Daintree vigilantes’. By the time the patrols had finished – and the night-time ones had been especially exciting, full of wild talk and booze – upwards of twenty crocodiles had been accounted for.

The man at the souvenir shop had not been the only one to raise his voice against the slaughter. ‘It divided the town down the middle,’ he said. The old hands against the new. I knew the scenario. I knew how the sides would have fallen out in North Cornwall. ‘There was even talk one night,’ he said, ‘of them lynching me. But that was just drink.’

The drinking would have been going on at the general store that doubled as the bar. It was the owner of the store, David Martin, who had been the boyfriend of Beryl Wruck, and the main instigator of the violence. ‘We still don’t speak. But it doesn’t bother me. We never really mixed with them.’

David Martin himself became something of a national celebrity for a while. A sort of anti-Crocodile Dundee. He appeared on television explaining how he simply liked killing crocodiles. He boasted of his exploits during the building of ‘That Road’, when he attached himself to the police force, free of charge, and spent a week plucking Greenies out of the trees they wanted to save. Returning to the croc killings, he explained to a newspaper that ‘People were screaming for someone to show honesty and guts. We are just little old country boys doing the right thing.’

The rhythm reminded me of something. It was the poem that Rod Drummond had showed me in Derby:

We don’t pay no taxes, we don’t make de goods

Just real little Abos, way back in de woods.

To make the brew even stronger there were now drug trafficking problems in Daintree also. The body found on the Upper Daintree Road with shotgun wounds in its chest and heroin in its pockets was definitely not the victim of a crocodile.

‘Well, this seems a nice sort of place,’ I said to Ros. ‘Why don’t we stay the night?’

As if she could never sup on too many horrors, the woman who ran the caravan park greeted us with a wide-eyed, panting expectation. While she showed us around a couple of on-site vans she frisked us, visually, for guns or microphones. I thought she looked quite disappointed when she found only a notebook in my top pocket.