The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  “And the rest,” said Sean, “like they say, is history.”

  “You must get the newspapers today. I won’t be going in till the afternoon. I’m going to ask Mr. Spurdell to explain it to me. I mean, explain why Trevor Hughes.”

  “And what you going to do if he twigs?”

  “If he guesses, d’you mean? He won’t.”

  Later, when she had finished her work, and she made sure she finished in good time, she went along the passage and tapped on Mr. Spurdell’s study door. He had come in about a half hour before and gone straight up there.

  He was wearing his half-glasses, gold-rimmed, and they made him look older and more scholarly than ever.

  “If you haven’t done my room, you’d better leave it,” he said.

  It angered her rather that he hadn’t even noticed. She had taken particular care over the study, dusting his books and putting them back meticulously in the correct order.

  “May I ask you something?”

  “That rather depends on what it is. What is it?”

  She plunged straight into the middle of things. “If someone murdered three people, A, B, and C, and the police knew about C, why would she—I mean he or she—be accused in court of murdering A only?”

  “Is this some crime thriller you’re reading?”

  Easier to say it was, though she was doubtful as to what he meant. “Yes.”

  He loved explaining, he loved answering questions. She knew he did and that was why she had been so sure he wouldn’t suspect anything. Anyway, he was far more interested in instructing than in her.

  “It seems probable that though the police know about C, they cannot prove he or she murdered him. The same may apply to B. He or she is indicted for the murder of A because they are certain that is something they can prove in such a way as to make a case stand up in court. There, does that help you find whodunit?”

  “Why not accuse—indict—the person with killing A and C?”

  “Ah, well, they don’t do that. You see, if your putative murderer were to be found not guilty by a jury and acquitted, the police could come back with C—or for that matter B—and bring him into court all over again on this different charge. If they charged him with both and he was acquitted, they would have lost all hope of punishing him.”

  It was always “he” and “him,” as if nothing ever happened to women and they did nothing. “I see,” she said, and then, “Where would he—she—be while they were waiting to come into court?”

  He began talking about something called the Criminal Justices Act 1991, a legal measure to do with sentencing and keeping people in prison, but when he got to the point of the Act just being implemented “now, while I speak, Liza,” his phone began to ring. She turned to go but he motioned to her to stay while he picked up the phone.

  “Hallo, Jane, my dear,” she heard him say, “and what can I do for you?”

  The conversation wasn’t a long one. She felt that she would have liked to send some message to Jane Spurdell, something like her good wishes, but of course she couldn’t do that. Replacing the receiver, Mr. Spurdell said, “I thought you might like to borrow another book.” He added rather severely, “Something worthwhile.”

  This was perhaps a reference to what he believed she was reading at the moment. She took her opportunity.

  “How long do they send a murderer to prison for?” Since her introduction to newspapers, she had heard, she thought, of quite short sentences for killing people. “I mean, does it vary according to how they’ve done it or why?”

  “If someone is convicted of murder in this country, the mandatory sentence is imprisonment for life.”

  She grew cold. “Always?” she said, and he thought she didn’t know what “mandatory” meant.

  “The word signifies something of the nature of a command. Something mandatory is something which must be. We don’t have degrees of murder here, though they do in the United States. If it was manslaughter, now, the sentence might be quite short.”

  The term meant nothing to her. It would look suspicious if she kept on questioning him. He had picked two Hardy novels in paperback off his shelves. She hadn’t read them, she thanked him, and went downstairs to get her money.

  NINETEEN

  THAT day Eve had been in the witness box.

  Liza was astonished to read that she admitted killing Trevor Hughes. Yet she had pleaded not guilty. Perhaps you could explain that when you understood her counsel was trying to get the charge changed from murder to that word Mr. Spurdell had used: “manslaughter.” Sean seemed to know all about it.

  Today there was a photograph of Trevor Hughes, a faceless man, his features buried in that thick, fair beard. Eve said she had killed him because he tried to rape her. She was quite alone in the house, there was no one living nearer than a mile away. She got away from him, ran into the house to get her gun, and shot him in self-defense.

  Prosecuting counsel questioned her very closely. You could imagine there was a lot more than appeared in the paper. He asked her why she had a loaded shotgun in the house? Why did she not lock herself in the house and phone for help? She said she had no phone and he made much of a woman being nervous enough to have a loaded gun at hand but no phone. When she knew he was dead, why had she not phoned for help from Shrove House, where there was a phone? Why had she concealed the death by burying the man’s body?

  Before she had given her evidence someone called Matthew Edwards gave his. They didn’t put things in order in the newspaper but arranged them in the most sensational way. It took Liza a moment to realize this was Matt, and reading what he had said took her back to that early morning long ago when she’d looked out of the window and seen him releasing the dogs from the little castle.

  He told the court of the freshly dug earth he had seen and the dogs running about sniffing it and how Eve hadn’t been able to answer when he asked if they’d been burying bones. Liza remembered it all. Eve hadn’t answered, she’d just asked him if he knew what time it was and told him the time in an icy voice, six-thirty in the morning.

  The trial would end next day. That meant this day, today. It would be over by now. Counsel for the Defense made a speech in which he spoke of Eva Beck’s hard life. She had more cause than most women to fear rape, for she had already suffered it.

  Liza stopped reading for a moment. She could feel the thudding of her own heartbeats. Unconsciously, she had covered the paper with her hand as if there was no one behind her, as if Sean wasn’t there, reading it over her shoulder.

  “You’ll have to read it, love,” Sean said gently.

  “I know.”

  “Want me to read it to you? Shall I read it first and then read it to you?”

  She shook her head and forced herself to take her hand away. The uncompromising words seemed blacker than the rest of the account, the paper whiter.

  At the age of twenty-one, returning to Oxford from Heathrow, where she had been seeing a friend off on a flight to Rio, Eve Beck had hitched a lift from a truck driver. Two other men had been in the truck. It was driven to a lay-by where all three men raped her. As a result she had been very ill and had undergone prolonged psychiatric treatment. The rape had made her into a recluse who wanted nothing more from life than to be left alone and do her job as caretaker of the Shrove estate.

  The society of other people she had eschewed and was virtually unknown in the nearby village. She had been living with a grown-up daughter who had since left home.

  Liza sat very still and silent when she had finished reading. All her questions were answered. She could feel Sean’s eyes on her. Presently he laid his hand on her shoulder and, when she didn’t reject him, put his arm around her.

  After a moment or two she said quietly, “Ever since I was about twelve, which was as soon as I could have ideas about it really, I’ve believed I was Jonathan Tobias’s child. I didn’t like it much, I’d stopped liking him much, but at least it meant I had a father.”

  “He still coul
d have been.”

  “No. She never told me all that stuff, that in the paper, but she did say she hadn’t seen Jonathan for two weeks before she went to see him off for South America. One of those men in the truck was my father. There are three men about somewhere, they might be in the town here, or driving a lorry that we’ve passed on the road, and one of them’s my father.” She looked at him and away from him. “I expect I’ll get used to it.”

  She could see Sean didn’t know what to say. She made an effort. “It’s mostly not true, what they said. She killed people because they threatened her living at Shrove. She killed them because they tried to stop her having what she wanted. No one’s said anything about the way she loves Shrove. And as for me, I’m just the grown-up daughter who’s left home.”

  He put his arms around her.

  Grown up. Sean had asked her about that. Not the first time they met at the caravan or the second, but soon. She had gone for a walk with him, as promised, telling Eve she was spending the evening in Shrove library, there were books there she wanted that were too heavy to carry home. After the walk they sat in the caravan. He had a beer and she had a Coke.

  That was when she started telling him how she’d lived, isolated, almost without society, in the little world of Shrove. “How old are you?” he’d asked, admitting she looked a year or two older than she was but still afraid she might say she was only fifteen.

  That first time he didn’t even kiss her. Two evenings later it was too hot to walk far, a close, humid, throbbing dusk, and they had flung themselves down in the long seed-headed grass by the maple hedge. She had looked at his face, six inches from her own, through the pale reedy stems. There was a scent of hay and of dryness. The feathery seedheads scattered brown dusty pollen on his hair. He parted the thin strands of grass and put his mouth on hers and kissed her.

  She couldn’t help herself, she had no control. Her arms were around his neck, she was clutching his hair in her hands, kissing him back with passion, putting everything she had read about love and desire into those kisses. It was he who restrained them, who jumped up and pulled her to her feet and began asking her if she was sure, did she know what she was doing, if they were going “all the way” she must be sure.

  It wasn’t possible for her to think about it. When she tried to think, all that happened was that she saw images of Sean and felt his kisses, growing hot and weak, growing wet in an unanticipated way that no instruction or reading had led her to expect. She tried to think calmly and reason it out but her mind became a screen of Sean pictures, Sean-and-herself-together pictures, her body shuddered with longing, and she got no further about being sure or knowing what she was doing than she had in the meadow. It came down to this: when next she saw him she would do everything and anything he wanted and everything she wanted, but if she never saw him again she would die.

  She read Romeo and Juliet again but it no longer seemed to be about what she was feeling. On Monday evening it was raining, so they met in the caravan and made love as soon as they met, falling upon each other in a breathless joyful ecstasy.

  It seemed a long time ago now.

  Sean switched on the television and they watched the news. For the first time, so far as they knew, it contained something about Eve. They had to wait until almost the last item. The last was about attempts to put an end to bullfighting in Spain, but before that the newscaster announced laconically that Eva Beck, the killer in the Gatehouse Murder case, had been found guilty and sent to prison for life.

  Sean held her, he kept his arm around her all night, hugging her tightly when she awoke whimpering. But still he didn’t understand how she felt. She no longer had any identity. With Eve’s denial—for whatever good purpose—she had ceased to be anyone, and, with the revelations of Eve’s history, had been made worse than fatherless.

  No words could be found to express what she felt. She had nothing to say to Sean, so she spoke about the everyday mundane things, what they would eat for supper, what food items he should bring back from the store. It was clear that he was relieved not to talk about Eve or the trial or Liza’s own new vulnerability, and it pained her, it angered her. Once or twice, during their disturbed night, he had told her she must put “all that” behind her.

  Just as he was leaving she surprised him by saying she was coming too.

  “It’s not your day for Mrs. S., is it?”

  She shook her head. He must think she was coming into town because she didn’t want to pass this day alone in the caravan. She sat beside him, saying how nice the weather was, a wonderful sunny day for the start of December. In just over a month’s time she would be seventeen, but he didn’t know when her birthday was, though he might have guessed. When they were first together they hadn’t talked much. It had been all lovemaking and the aftermath of lovemaking and its renewal.

  Anxious as ever not to be one minute late, he hurried into the store. The car keys were in his pocket, but she had brought the spare set. A map he never used, his sense of direction was so good, was tucked into the back of the glove compartment. She studied it, left it lying unfolded on the passenger seat.

  They couldn’t do much to her if they caught her driving without a license or insurance. The way she was feeling today she didn’t much care what anyone did to her. It no longer mattered if they caught her and found out who she was, because she was no one, she had no identity. She was just the grown-up daughter who had since left home.

  She drove past where the caravan was and out onto the big road. The world seemed entirely different here and had seemed so for the past three months, but for all that it was only about twenty miles from where she was going. Passing a garage, she glanced at the gas gauge. It was all right. The tank was nearly full. She began to wonder how she would feel when she came to the bridge and saw the river with the water meadows beyond and the house floating, as it seemed, above the white mists that lay low on the flat land, when she saw the domain that was the only place she had ever known until a mere ninety days ago.

  But when the time came she experienced no startling reaction. It was a brisk breezy day without mist. The sun shone with a sharp winter brightness. Shrove House had never appeared so brilliantly unveiled. From halfway across the bridge, half a mile distant, she could pick out the dark spindly etching the clematis made on the rear walls and the features on the faces of the stone women in the alcoves.

  The sun flashed sharply off the window from which she had watched Sean the second time she had seen him. She drove up the lane. Someone had been hedging along here, had mercilessly ripped back the high hawthorns. The gatehouse appeared suddenly, as it always did when the bend was passed. It looked the same as ever and the gateway to Shrove was the same except that the gates, for the first time that she could remember, were shut. The gates that, except on the day after the storm, had always stood folded back like permanently open shutters at a window were so firmly closed that the park could only be seen through their elaborate iron scrollwork and the curlicued letters: SHROVE HOUSE.

  She walked up the garden path to the gatehouse. Her key she had always kept. She pushed it into the lock and opened the front door. Inside it was icy cold and smelling of damp. The smell was the stench of hollows in the roots of trees where fungus rotted.

  The kitchen was dim and dark because the blind was pulled down. Raising it a little, she looked out, and then she let the string go and the blind spring up to its roller with a crack, she was so shocked by what she saw. The back garden, which had been neat with Eve’s vegetable beds and flower borders, with the new tree planted to replace the fallen cherry, the small lawn, all of it was a wilderness of thin straggly weeds. These had not sprung up among the untended cultivated plants but were weeds growing on dug earth. The whole garden had been turned over with spades.

  For a moment she couldn’t imagine what had happened. Had someone else lived here temporarily, dug the garden and then departed? Had some new and zealous gardener taken over and left again?

  Th
en she remembered what the paper had said about Eve burying the body of Trevor Hughes. Somewhere out there it must be that she had buried him, where Matt said the dogs had sniffed the earth. The police had excavated here, looking for more perhaps, looking for a graveyard. Their spades had made this wilderness. She thought of the numberless times they had sat out in the garden under the cherry tree, the work Eve had done, hoeing, planting, harvesting, but it affected her very little. It troubled her no more than walking in a cemetery.

  She pulled the blind down once more and turned her attention to the interior of the gatehouse. Having been away from it for so long, she saw these rooms with new eyes, eyes educated enough by variety to find them strange: the vaulted ceilings, the pointed Gothic windows, the dark woodwork. It seemed remarkable now that she had lived here all her life, or as long as she could remember.

  This room, the living room, was not as it had been when she left it. Of course, she couldn’t tell how soon Eve had gone after her own departure. But she wouldn’t have left it like this, the pictures crooked, the ornaments on the mantelpiece in the wrong order, the hearth rug out of alignment. It struck Liza that she had no idea who owned this furniture. Was it Eve’s or did it belong in the lodge? Had it been there when Eve and she first came? The sofa had never stood quite like that, pushed flat against the wall. Someone had searched this room. The police had searched it. She had seen this sort of thing in a detective serial on television.

  There was something missing from the room. A picture. A pale rectangle on the wall showed where it had once hung, her own portrait, the picture Bruno had painted of her.

  It had never, in her opinion, looked much like her. The colors were too strong and her features too big. But Eve had liked it. Perhaps Eve had been allowed to take it with her, had it with her now, would keep it through those long years. The idea was comforting.

  Had the police also searched the little castle?

  The green studded door was still unlocked. If they had searched, surely they would have locked it after them. Liza loosened the brick at the foot of the wall between the lancet windows, pulled it out and found the iron box. The money was still there. She took the box with its contents.