The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  Back in the gatehouse she went upstairs. She looked into Eve’s bedroom, neat as a pin, desolate. The jewel case was there in the drawer, but it was empty. No gold wedding ring, of course, she had expected that, but no earrings, either, or jade necklace or brooches. She wondered what had become of them.

  From the cupboard in her own bedroom she took her warm quilted coat, the two skirts Eve had made her, the red-and-blue sweater Eve had knitted.

  The curtains were drawn in here, for no good reason that she could see. She drew them back and looked across the ruined gatehouse garden to the grounds of Shrove. It gave her a little shock to see David Cosby walking across the grass between the young trees. He had a dog with him, a red-and-white spaniel. Once she was sure he wasn’t looking in this direction, she drew the curtains again.

  His walk was taking him nowhere near the little wood. Liza put the metal box and the clothes into the boot of the car and locked it. She wondered if she dared leave it there for the ten minutes it would take her to do what she had to do and decided she must.

  The sun still shone with unseasonable brightness. It was so late in the year that the shadows were long, even at noon. The ground was dry for early December, under her feet softly crackling strata, layer upon layer of them, of fallen leaves. She made her way into the little wood, not wanting to go but aware that she had to. This was as important a mission as the quest for the iron box of money.

  Much of the clearing operations she had witnessed but not this replanting. It was unexpected, an unforeseen act. New trees with the deer and rabbit guards on their thin trunks stood everywhere in carefully planned groups. She took heart from the sight of the two dead larches left to stand as a feeding place for woodpeckers and the broken poplar that had put out new branches.

  The cherry log lay where it had lain from the time of its fall, or she thought it lay like that. How could she be sure? It was deep now in dead leaves, awash with them almost, with a tide of brown beech leaves that hid two-thirds of the log. But all those leaves had fallen since October ….

  She squatted down and began burrowing into the leaves with her hands. The relief at the feel of sacking against her fingers was so great she almost laughed aloud. Wedged beneath the log, the bundle was still in place, winter after winter was burying it deeper. Leaves would turn to leaf mold and leaf mold to earth. One day the log itself would be buried as the level of the ground gradually and very slowly rose, while Bruno slept on, undisturbed.

  There were no policemen standing by the car taking notes, no David Cosby with his young inquisitive dog. She got into the driving seat and drove down the lane, over the bridge, and took the road to the village where Bruno had wanted to take Eve to live. There, in the village shop, she bought a pack of ham sandwiches, a can of Coke, and a Bounty bar for her lunch. It amused her a little that she had found buying these things in this shop so easy, she who had never dared go in there in former days.

  But before that she investigated the contents of the iron box.

  The previous time she had looked into the box, and helped herself from it, she had had very little idea of the value of money, what was a lot and what wasn’t much. It was different now. She had lived a lifetime of experience in three months, had earned money and knew what things cost. Sitting in the driving seat in a secluded spot by the churchyard wall, she opened the box and counted the notes.

  They amounted to something over a thousand pounds: to be precise, a thousand and seventy-five. Liza could hardly believe it. She must have made a mistake. But she counted again and again she reached the figure of a thousand and seventy-five. The money lay heavily on her, not on her hands, but like a burden on her back. She shook herself and tried to see it differently, as a blessing. No longer daring to leave it in the car, she carried the thousand pounds stuffed in her pockets as she went over to the shop. Because there was so much of it she felt she could afford a ham sandwich instead of cheese.

  The car restored to the Superway car park, she wandered about the town, afraid to steal a bath at the Duke’s Head in case she got caught and they found all that money on her. There wasn’t time to go to the cinema. Instead she went to the bookshop, acquiring undreamed-of marvels, among them The Divine Comedy in translation, Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the original and translation, before telling herself she must be careful with the money, she must be prudent. They needed that money, she and Sean.

  All the same, she postponed telling him about it. Later would do, another day would do. Nor did she show him the new books. She had been to Shrove, she said, she had fetched her clothes. All he was concerned about was her driving the car uninsured and without a license. He was rather angry about that. She hadn’t dreamed, when first she knew him, that he would turn out so law-abiding.

  The first hint of it she’d had was when the man who owned the land beside the old station discovered that the caravan was parked there and told him to move on. Liza, remembering that day when she had stood with the demonstrators and the last train had come down the line, said he need not move more than a dozen yards. If he parked it by the platform he would be on British Rail land and they never came near the place, they wouldn’t find out. Sean wouldn’t do it. He said he knew he was wrong being on that man’s land without permission, he wasn’t sticking his neck out again. He’d move over the bridge and up through the fields and woods to Ring Common, where anyone could be.

  It was four or five miles away. Of course he went on coming to Shrove to do the garden. Liza never spoke to him while he was on the mower or doing the edges or weeding, it amused her to walk past him with a casual “hi” or even a shy “hallo” if Eve was with her, remembering their lovemaking of the previous evening. How had she known that her association with Sean wouldn’t be acceptable to Eve? That Eve and she were Capulets and Sean a Montague? Instinctively, she had known it, and had kept their love an absolute secret.

  At the same time it brought her enormous pleasure to watch him about the grounds of Shrove when he had no idea she was watching him. Observing his handsomeness and his grace, she liked to remember and to anticipate. She even enjoyed the pleasure-pain of needing to go up to him and touch him, kiss him and have him touch her, needing it passionately but still making herself resist.

  One day she saw a man talking to him. It was a shock to realize that the man was Matt. The past couple of times Jonathan had been at Shrove he had brought Matt with him. It was a long time since they had seen Jonathan, she and Eve, though weeks rather than months. The years when he had scarcely come at all were gone by. He had been at Shrove in April and now it was June. Matt was talking to Sean about something or other, pointing at this and that in what seemed to Liza a hectoring way before going back to the house.

  “What was he saying to you that day?” she asked Sean five months later. “Matt. When you had to stop the tractor and take off your visor?”

  “I don’t know. What does it matter? I reckon it was only to boss me about. Maybe it was to cut the tops off the lilacs, prune the lilacs. I never knew you was supposed to do that.”

  “We didn’t know Jonathan was coming. He didn’t warn us, but he often didn’t. I told Eve I’d seen him. I knew she’d want me to do that so that she could get dressed up and wash her hair before he came. That was the evening he first started talking about the money he’d lost. He didn’t mind me being there, he talked about it in front of me. He was what they call a Name at Lloyd’s. D’you know what that means?”

  “Sort of. I saw about it in the papers. They were a sort of insurance company, only very big and sort of important, and something happened so they had to fork out more than they’d got.”

  “It was to do with that Alaskan oil spill, that was the start of it. And they had more claims that they could—I think ‘meet’ is the word. Instead of making money, all the people who were Names found they had to pay money. Jonathan was one. He said he didn’t know how much it would be yet but he thought a lot, and luckily he had the house in France to sell that had been Caroline�
�s. He looked very miserable. But, you know, we didn’t take it very seriously, Eve and I. Or Eve didn’t. I wasn’t interested. She was interested, she was interested in everything that concerned him, but even she didn’t believe he was having a job finding money. She was so used to the Tobiases and the Ellisons having so much of it. They were the kind of people, she said to me, who’d say they were poor when they were down to their last million.”

  Sean shrugged. He put his arm around Liza. “Feeling a bit better, are you, love? About you-know-what?”

  She knew what. The revelation in the paper. Eve’s past life. “I’m all right. Only I’d like to go and see her.”

  “Your mum?”

  “Not yet. Maybe after Christmas. I’ll find out where she is, where they’ve put her, and then I’ll go and see her.”

  “You’re amazing, you really are. After what she done? After she murdered three blokes? After the way she brought you up? She’s bad news, love.”

  “She never did me a bit of harm,” said Liza. “She’s my mother. You can understand why she killed those men. I can understand it. There was one place in the world she had a sanctuary, there was one kind of life she could live and stay, well, not mad, and they all wanted to take it away from her, one after the other.”

  “Not Trevor Hughes.”

  “Yes, he did. In a way. Jonathan had said she was there to see how she got on, but she knew he meant how it suited him. She was on trial. It wouldn’t have suited him if his dogs had had to be destroyed because she’d set them on someone.

  “And Bruno was going to make her leave unless she sent me away. You can understand why she killed them, she didn’t have a choice. They’d got her in a corner and she acted like an animal would. And now I’ve read what happened to her before I was born, I know she was getting her revenge too, she was taking vengeance on three men for what three men had done to her.”

  “Not the same men,” Sean objected.

  “Oh, of course not. Don’t you understand anything?” Immediately, she was remorseful. “I’m sorry. I’ll tell you about the last one, shall I?”

  He shrugged, then said a rather sullen, “Yes.”

  “I’ll tell you about how she shot him.”

  TWENTY

  THIS would be the last of Scheherazade’s stories, she said. Not a thousand and one nights but nearer a hundred. Three and a half months of nights to tell a life in.

  “When did I run away, Sean?”

  “It was August. No, it wasn’t, it was September the first.”

  She began counting on her fingers. “That was something I never learned. I never learned much arithmetic. I make it a hundred and one nights tomorrow.”

  “Is that right?”

  They were coming home from work on the following day, the hundredth day. Liza had carried the money with her to Aspen Close, she dared not leave it in the caravan. Stopping work at lunchtime, she had walked around the town until she found a shop to sell her a money belt. In the public lavatory in the marketplace she packed all the notes into the belt and put it on over her jeans. She was so slim the belt looked smart, not cumbersome.

  She still hadn’t said anything about the money to Sean and he believed that all she had fetched from the lodge were her clothes. Glad of the quilted coat, she rubbed her cold hands together. The heater in the car worked only fitfully.

  “I’d got to June, hadn’t I?” she said. “It was when Jonathan first started going on about money. He’d brought Matt with him.”

  “He was always coming out in the garden telling me how to do my job,” Sean grumbled.

  “Did he? I didn’t know that. Matt was a builder up in Cumbria but his business had failed. If it wasn’t for him, Eve wouldn’t be in prison. He hated us. I think it was because he’d once thought Eve beautiful but he disgusted her.”

  Sean nodded. “That’d be it. She treated him like dirt.”

  “If it wasn’t for him, the police wouldn’t have suspected anything and Eve would still be at the gatehouse and so would I.”

  “I ought to thank him then, hadn’t I?”

  She smiled. “Jonathan sort of took him under his wing. Matt was getting married or he wanted to get married and Jonathan had some idea of getting him a place to live near Shrove and having him manage the grounds. While he was there he went out every night shooting rabbits by the car headlights. There was all this banging of guns night after night and the lights blazing over the fields. I hated it, I never liked Matt.”

  “Them little devils have to be kept down, love. I never seen so many rabbits as there was last summer. And pigeons, they tear the crops to bits.”

  “When he stayed at Shrove he slept in a room over the coach house. There are seventeen bedrooms at Shrove, but he had to sleep out there. He had to use the outside lavatory behind the stables and wash under the tap that was there for watering the horses.”

  Sean said seriously, “Tobias couldn’t have him in the house, not a servant. Matt wouldn’t have expected it.”

  Liza gave him a look. She shook her head a little at him, but he had his eye on the road. “Jonathan told Eve you were just a temporary measure. Those were his words. He was going to give you the sack at the end of the summer, at Michaelmas—whenever that is—and have Matt and his wife live over the coach house. He said he’d have things done to it to make it possible to live there. Put in one of his famous bathrooms, I expect.”

  “He did give me the sack. Well, he got Matt to do it.”

  “I was in a panic when he first said it. I thought he’d get rid of you and you’d have to go and I’d never see you again.”

  They had reached the place where the caravan was. Sean put his arms around Liza and hugged her.

  “You didn’t trust me.”

  “I don’t think I trusted anyone by then, not even Eve.”

  Inside the caravan they lit the gas and the oil heater. The warmth came quickly, though it was a damp, smelly heat. Sean lit a cigarette, making the atmosphere worse, and opened the bottle of wine he had brought from Superway and began unwrapping the samosas and onion bhajis for their supper. Pulling off her coat, Liza hugged herself inside the comfort of the sweater Eve had made. She talked, drinking her wine.

  Eve hadn’t liked that idea of Matt and his wife living at Shrove. Jonathan said it meant she could get rid of Mrs. Cooper, she wouldn’t have to handle the wages and the organization, she’d have nothing to do but be there and, of course, she’d be in authority over them, they’d have to do as she said. Why can’t we go on managing as we are? she wanted to know. It would be easier for her this way, Jonathan said, and besides, he had to find something for Matt, he had a duty to Matt.

  Liza knew what her mother was really feeling. By this time she understood most of Eve’s deeply emotional attitude toward Shrove. Eve didn’t want anyone, anyone at all, coming between her and that house and that land, that domain. She even resented Sean’s being there. Mr. Frost had been there before she came, was there when her own mother was, she accepted him like she did the train and the inevitable weekend guests, but Sean was new. Of course, she said none of this to Jonathan, and that night Jonathan stayed at the gatehouse. Liza felt very strange about that because she was deep in a sexual relationship of her own and she understood what went on beyond the wall dividing their bedrooms.

  The next day she found Eve standing in front of the mirror, peering closely at her face, plucking out a gray hair. She came up behind Eve, not meaning to do this, not meaning to make the contrast. It all happened by chance that her face was reflected behind Eve’s, a yard or so and twenty-two years between.

  Eve turned around and said, “Mater pulchra, filia pulchrior.”

  Liza didn’t know what to say. She could hardly reply that it was true the mother was beautiful but the daughter more so, or pretend not to understand. A lame “I think you look lovely” was all she could manage. But she wondered what the hectic light in Eve’s eye portended and her wild behavior that day and her sudden bursts of too-loud
laughter.

  As it happened, she overheard what Eve said to Jonathan. She’d got in the habit of listening at doors. It was a way of trying to save her life. Sometimes, these days, she felt her whole life was in jeopardy. If Matt came, would Eve stay? If she and Eve went, where could they go? If Sean went, what would she do? She would die. As soon as she sensed Eve or Jonathan or both of them wanted her out of the way, she knew they were going to talk secrets she should have been privy to, because it was she most of all that they threatened.

  That evening she had been at the caravan with Sean. Well, more than the evening. She had been with him from the time he stopped work at four until nine, when he drove her back to Shrove. Home again at the gatehouse, she thought at first that they had gone out somewhere or to Shrove House.

  Jonathan’s jacket was hanging over the back of a chair but that meant nothing. She went to her bedroom and looked out of the open window toward the house, expecting to see them walking in the pale red light of the sunset afterglow. But they were much nearer at hand. They were sitting on a rug spread out on the grass in the garden just below her window. Or Eve was sitting, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, while Jonathan lay on his back, looking up at the thin moon that had appeared in the still-light sky.

  They weren’t speaking but Liza knew that once they did speak she would be able to hear every word. She crouched on the bed with her chin on the windowsill, thinking about Sean, how he had said to her that evening to come and live with him in the caravan. He had asked her, he had said he missed her too much when she wasn’t with him, and what was there to keep her here? She couldn’t answer that. She couldn’t say, I’m frightened to go.

  In a way she wanted to terribly and in another way she didn’t want to at all. Yet it was only a couple of years before that she’d been always asking herself what would become of her and how would she ever get away? The silence down there was oppressive. When she was beginning to think she might as well go down there and join them, Eve spoke.