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.

I called on her, in her office, a little later to see if she had a corkscrew, but she was busy with other guests so her husband dealt with me. Surprised by the business they were doing, off season, I asked if the publicity had increased tourism. ‘First there was the rain forest affair,’ he said, ‘then the croc topped it off.’

Our eyes met briefly over the ghoulishness of human nature. ‘But it’d be a pity if the place got spoiled,’ he said.

I decided not to press on with this. I felt that my curiosity as to the degree of other people’s morbidity was a form of morbidity in itself. I asked him for a corkscrew and when he said he didn’t have one I joked that he didn’t look teetotal. ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m a confirmed alcoholic. The only way I can handle the stuff is to stay away from it altogether.’