The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  “She’s an attractive woman.”

  “More attractive than I am?”

  “Don’t be bloody ridiculous. Was you watching all this?”

  “I’d been in the wood with you,” Liza said. “They didn’t see me. I came up through the garden and they were on the grass where the new trees are. Sound carries terrific distances there, you know. Even when people are speaking softly you can hear them. I saw the two of them with just the one gun and I thought she must be telling him not to shoot the pigeons. He was allowed to, you know, because though pheasant shooting doesn’t start till October you can shoot pigeons when you like. Poor things! What did it matter to him, he wasn’t a farmer, they weren’t his cabbages they were eating, and even if they were, the pigeons have got to live, haven’t they?

  “I thought, good for her, she’s going to stop him, but she didn’t. She was out there with him for a shooting lesson. I’d heard her talking about it with him, but I didn’t think she was serious. When I saw them I asked myself, what on earth is she doing? He started showing her things about the gun and she was looking and then he handed it to her.

  “I didn’t want to see the birds killed. I started to go back toward the gatehouse. Then the shot came and immediately afterward this screaming choking noise. So I turned around and ran across the lawn and there she was looking at him where he lay. She wasn’t holding the gun, she’d dropped it, she was looking down at him and all the blood on him.”

  Sean had put up his hand to cover his mouth. His eyes had grown very big. He took his hand away, pushing at his cheek in a curious wiping movement. “What did you do?” he said in a small voice.

  “I didn’t do anything. I went home. She didn’t tell the police and I didn’t, so I think Matt must have. You know Matt?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “He was there, up by the house. Only I don’t think he saw any more than I did. He guessed.”

  “But you said the police had only just come, they were coming when you left—when? A couple of hours ago?”

  “They came last evening. They didn’t see me. You see, they didn’t come to the gatehouse, not then. First of all, cars came and a black van to take away the body. I watched it all from my bedroom window. Eve told me to stay there and not come out, not to let anyone see me. I didn’t want them to see me. She went up to Shrove and I think the policemen talked to her there. They talked to her and they talked to Matt and Matt’s wife.

  “She knew they’d come back, so she said I must go. For my own protection, she said. I ran away to you. That’s it.”

  “That’s all of it?”

  “Not all, Sean. It’ll take me a long time to tell you all of it.”

  “I’ll get the van fixed up to the tow bar,” he said.

  She went outside with him. The day was warm and sultry, two in the afternoon, and the sun a puddle of light in a white sky. Watching him, she picked blackberries off the hedge and ate them by the handful. She was enormously hungry.

  The battered Dolomite shifted the caravan with the slow weary competence of an old carthorse. It groaned a bit and expelled a lot of black exhaust. Liza got into the passenger seat and banged the door. Car and caravan lurched off the grass verge onto the harder surface of the lane.

  “Where shall we go?”

  “We have to go where they’ll let me park the van. Before you come I was thinking of trying Vanner’s. They’re wanting pickers for the Coxes. We could both of us do that.”

  “Coxes won’t be ready till the third week of September,” she said, always glad to show off something she knew and he might not. “Anyway, how far is it?”

  “Twenty-five miles, thirty. Far enough for you?”

  “I don’t know. What else can you do?”

  He laughed. “Electrical work, sort of, put washers on taps, grind knives, I’m halfway to a motor mechanic, wash your car, do your garden—as you should know—clean windows, most things, you name it.”

  “Why apples, then?”

  “Apples make a change. I reckon I always do pick apples in September and cherries in July.”

  “I’m hungry,” she said, “I’m so bloody hungry.”

  “Don’t swear, Liza.”

  “You do. Who d’you think I got it from?”

  “It’s different for me. You’re a woman. I don’t like to hear a woman swear.”

  She lifted her shoulders, the way Eve did. “I’m tremendously hungry. Can we buy some food?”

  “Yeah, we can get takeaway.” He looked at her, remembered and explained, “Stuff they’ve cooked for you in a shop, right? Or we’ll find a caff, maybe a Little Chef if there’s one on the A road.”

  She was no longer afraid. Fear might not be canceled, but it was postponed. The prospect of going into a café excited her. And she’d be with Sean. Shops she had been in, one or two over the years, but a real restaurant, if that was the word, that was very different. She remembered what she had taken with her when she left the gatehouse.

  “I’ve got money. I’ve got a hundred pounds.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said.

  “It’s in the van, in my coat.”

  “Did you nick it?” His tone was stern.

  “Of course not. Eve gave it to me.”

  He said nothing. She looked out of the window at the passing countryside, all of it new, all uncharted for her. They drove through a village as the church clock struck three, and ten minutes later they were in a sizable town with parking in the marketplace.

  On either side of the carpark the roads that enclosed it were lined with shops. She had seen something like this before, though not here, the dry cleaner’s, the building society, the estate agent, the Chinese restaurant, the Oxfam shop, the sandwich bar, the building society, the insurance company, the Tandoori House, the bank, the pub, the card shop. An arch, in pink glass and gold metal, led into a deserted hall of shops. Perhaps all towns were like this, all the same inside, perhaps it was a rule.

  Sean’s practiced eye quickly summed up the situation. “The caffs are closed, it’s too late. Pubs are meant to stay open till all hours, but they don’t never seem to. I can go get us pie and chips or whatever.”

  Her hunger was greater than her disappointment. “Whatever you like. Do you want some money?”

  She said it cheerfully, trying to strike the right note, having never said it before. Yet for some reason he was offended. “I hope I’ll never see the day when I’ve got to live off my girlfriend.”

  Once he had gone she got out of the car. She stretched her arms above her head, tasting freedom. It was heady stuff, for something was making her shiver and it couldn’t be the day, which was as warm as high summer. She had never felt like this before, dizzy, faint was perhaps the word, as if she might fall.

  She opened the door of the caravan and clambered up inside. Five minutes’ sitting down and a few deep breaths and she felt better. The bed was stowed away in the wall, the sheets and blankets folded, and the table down, ready for a meal by the time Sean came back. The packages he was carrying had grease seeping through the wrapping paper and gave off a pungent smell of deep frying.

  She had been so hungry and the smell from the chips and Cornish pasties he unwrapped was so enticing, but she couldn’t help herself. Without warning to herself or him she burst into violent tears. He held her in his arms close to him, stroking her hair while she sobbed. Her body shook and her heart was pounding.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right, sweetheart. You’ve had a shock, it’s delayed shock, you’ll be okay. I’ll look after you.”

  He soothed her. He stroked her hair and when she was just crying, not sobbing and shrieking anymore, wiped her eyes with his fingers, as gently as a woman, as gently as Eve when she was being gentle. As she quietened he did something she loved him to do, began combing her hair with his own comb, which had thick blunt teeth. The comb ran smoothly through the length of her long dark hair, from crown to tip, and as he paused she felt his fingers just touch
and then linger on her neck and the lobe of her ear. She shivered, not this time from shock or strangeness.

  “Give us a kiss,” he said.

  It was more enthusiastic than he had bargained for, a deep sensuous kiss full of controlled energy now released. He laughed at her. “Let’s eat. I thought you was hungry.”

  “Oh, I am. I’m starving.”

  “You could’ve fooled me.”

  This was her first Cornish pasty. She had no means of knowing whether it was a good one or passable or bad, but she liked it. In the past she had never been allowed to eat with her fingers. There had been many gently enforced rules and much benevolent constraint.

  “When we get wherever we’re going,” she said, “I’ll tell you the story of my life.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think there’ve been many lives like mine.”

  “You’ve got a long way to go with it yet, like maybe seventy years.”

  “Can I have the last chip? I’ll tell you from back as far as I can remember. That’s when I was four and that’s when she killed the first one.”

  She pulled a length from the toilet roll he kept by the bed to use as tissues and wiped her mouth. When she turned back to him to say she was ready, they could be off as soon as he liked, she saw that he was staring at her and the look on his face was aghast.

  THREE

  ONE of the first things she could remember was the train. It was summer and she and Mother had gone for a walk in the fields when they heard the train whistle. The single track ran down there in the valley between the river and lower slopes of the high hills. It was a small branch line and later on, when she was older, Mother told her it was the most beautiful train journey in the British Isles. Her eyes shone when she said it.

  But on that afternoon when Liza was four there were not many passengers and those there were couldn’t have been looking out to appreciate the view, or else they were all looking out the other side at the high hills, for when Mother waved and she waved no one waved back. The train jogged along not very fast and disappeared into the round black tunnel that pierced the hillside.

  Liza suspected that she and Mother hadn’t been there very long the day she saw her first train. If they had been, she would have seen a train before. It was possible they had been at the gatehouse for only a few days. Where they had come from before that she had had no idea then nor for a long time to come. She could remember nothing from before that day, not a face nor a place, a voice nor a touch.

  There was only Mother.

  There was only the gatehouse where they lived and the arched gateway with the tiny one-roomed house on the other side and Shrove House in the distance. It was half-concealed by tall and beautiful trees, its walls glimpsed mysteriously and enticingly between their trunks. When Mother read stories to her and there was a palace in them, as there often was, she would say, “Like Shrove, that’s what a palace is, a house like Shrove.” But all Liza had seen of the real Shrove until she was nearly five and the leaves had turned brown and blown off the trees, were a dreamy grayness, a sheet of glittering glass, a gleam of sun-touched slate.

  Later on she saw it in its entirety, the stone baluster that crowned it, broken by a crest-filled pediment, the many windows, the soaring steps, and the statues that stood in its alcoves. She was aware even then of the way it seemed to bask, to sit and smile as if pleased with itself, to recline smiling in the sun.

  Nearly every day Mother went up to the house that was like a palace in a fairy tale, sometimes for several hours, sometimes for no more than ten minutes, and when she went she locked Liza up in her bedroom.

  The gatehouse was the lodge of Shrove House. Later on, when Liza was older, Mother told her it was built in the Gothic style and not nearly so old as the house itself. It was supposed to look as if it dated from the Middle Ages and had a turret with crenellations around its top and a tall peaked gable. Out of the side of the gable came the arch, which went over the top of a pair of gates and came down on the other side to join up with the little house that looked like a miniature castle with its slit windows and studded door.

  The gates were of iron, were always kept open, and had SHROVE HOUSE written on them in curly letters. The gatehouse and the arch and the little castle were made of small red bricks, the dark russet color of rosehips. Liza and Mother had two bedrooms upstairs, a living room and a kitchen downstairs, and an outside lavatory. That was all. Liza’s was the bedroom in the turret with a view over their garden and the wood and Shrove park and everything beyond. She disliked being locked in her bedroom, but she wasn’t frightened, and as far as she could remember she didn’t protest.

  Mother gave her things to do. She had started teaching Liza to read, so she gave her rag books with big letters printed on the cloth pages. She also gave her paper and two pencils and a book to rest on. Liza had a baby bottle with orange juice in it because if she had had a glass or a cup she would have spilled the juice on the floor. Sometimes she had two biscuits, just two, or an apple.

  Liza didn’t know then what Mother did in Shrove House, but later on she found out because Mother began taking her too and she was no longer locked in her bedroom—or only when Mother went shopping. But that was more than six months later, after it had all happened and the winter had come, when snow covered the hillsides and the only trees to keep their leaves were the huge blue cedars and the tall black firs.

  Before that, in the summertime, the dogs came. Except in pictures Liza had never seen a dog or a cat or a horse or any animals but wild ones. She thought these two came the day after she and Mother had walked in the fields and seen the first train, but it may have been some other day, a week or even a month later. It wasn’t easy to remember time spans from so far back.

  The dogs belonged to Mr. Tobias. It wasn’t he who brought them but another man. Liza had never seen Mr. Tobias but only heard about him, and she wasn’t to see him for a long, long time. The man who brought the dogs came in a kind of small truck with a barrier like a white wire fence across the back inside to keep the dogs off the front seats. His name was Matt. He was a short, squarish man with big shoulders who looked very strong and his hair grew up from his broad red forehead like the bristles on a brush.

  “They are Doberman pinschers,” Mother said. She always explained everything slowly and carefully. “In Germany, which is another country a long way away, they used to be trained as police dogs. But these are pets.” She said to Matt, who was staring at her in a strange way, “What are their names?”

  “This one’s Heidi and he’s Rudi.”

  “Are they nice, friendly dogs?”

  “They’ll be okay with you and the kiddy. They’ll never attack women, they’ve been trained that way. I’d be up the nearest tree myself if someone called out ‘Kill!’ when they’re around.”

  “Really? Mr. Tobias didn’t say.”

  “Thought you might say no to looking after them, I daresay.” He gazed around him, stared at the high hills beyond the valley as if they were the Himalayas. “Bit isolated down here, aren’t you? Not what you’d call much life going on.”

  “It’s what I like.”

  “It takes all sorts, I suppose, though I’d have thought a smashing-looking girl like yourself’d want something a bit more lively. Bright lights, eh, bit of dancing and the movies? You wouldn’t have such a thing as a cup of tea going, I daresay?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” said Mother and she took the dog leashes in one hand and Liza’s hand in the other, went into the gatehouse, and shut the door. The man outside on the step said something Liza couldn’t catch but which Mother said was a dirty word and never to say it. They heard his van start up with a roar as if it was angry.

  The dogs started licking Liza, they licked her hands, and when she stroked them, they licked her face. Their coats felt like nothing she had ever touched before, shiny as leather, soft as fur, smooth as the crown of her own head when Mother had just washed her hair.

&nbs
p; She said to Mother, “Heidi and Rudi are black lined with brown,” and Mother had laughed and said that was right, that was just how they looked.

  “You can’t remember all those things your mum and him said word for word, can you?” said Sean.

  “Not really. But it was like that. I know all the kinds of things she says and ever could say. I know her so well, you see, it’s as if I know her perfectly because I don’t know anyone else.”

  “How about me? You know me.”

  She could tell she had hurt him and tried to make amends. “I know you now. I didn’t then.”

  “Go on, then. What happened with the dogs?”

  “Eve was looking after them for Mr. Tobias. He had to go away, he went to see his mother in France, and he couldn’t take the dogs for some reason.”

  “Quarantine.”

  “What?”

  “When he come back in he’d have to put the pair of them in quarantine for six months. That means they’d be in like kennels. It’s the law.”

  “I expect that was it.”

  “Why couldn’t this Matt look after them wherever it was he lived?”

  “In the Lake District. He had a job, he was working all day. He couldn’t take them out for exercise—or wouldn’t. Anyway, Eve wanted to do this for Mr. Tobias, she wanted to please him.

  “We were supposed to have them for two or three weeks, I can’t exactly remember. I loved them, I wanted us to have a dog after they’d gone back, but Eve wouldn’t. She said Mr. Tobias wouldn’t like it.”

  “So it wasn’t them she killed?”

  “I told you, it was a person, a man.”

  Liza never knew who he was or what it was he had tried to do. Now that twelve years had passed and she was grown up, doing the thing that grown-ups did herself, she could guess.

  It was she who saw him first. Mother was down at Shrove and she was locked up in her bedroom. Where the dogs were she didn’t know. Probably in the little castle where they slept at night or even at Shrove, for in a sort of way it was their house. It belonged to Mr. Tobias, who owned them.