The Crocodile Bird Read online

  The Crocodile Bird

  Ruth Rendell

  To Don, Simon, Donna, and Phillip

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  ONE

  THE world began to fall apart at nine in the evening. Not at five when it happened, nor at half past six when the policemen came and Eve said to go into the little castle and not show herself, but at nine when all was quiet again and it was dark outside.

  Liza hoped it was all over. She watched the car go down the lane toward the bridge and then she went back to the gatehouse and upstairs to watch it from her bedroom window, the red lights on its tail as it went over the bridge and its white lights when it faced her again as the road climbed and twisted among the hills. Only when she could see its lights no longer, could see no lights anywhere but a red moon and a handful of stars, did she feel they were saved.

  Downstairs she found Eve, calmly waiting for her. They would talk now, but of course about other things, or read or listen to music. Eve smiled a very little, then composed her face. There was no book in her lap or piece of sewing in her hands. Liza saw that her hands were shaking and this frightened her. The first real fear she felt came from the sight of those small, normally steady hands, faintly trembling.

  Eve said, “I have something very serious to say to you.”

  Liza knew what it was. It was Sean. Eve had found out about Sean and didn’t like it. With a sense of shock she thought about what Eve did to men she didn’t like or who interfered in her plans. An attempt would be made to separate her from Sean and if that failed, what would Eve do? She herself was safe, she always was, she was the bird who pecked at the jaws of death, but Sean was vulnerable and Sean, she saw quite clearly, might be the next candidate. She waited, tense.

  It was about something quite different. “I know it’ll be hard for you, Liza, but you’re going to have to go away from here.”

  Again Liza got it wrong. She thought Eve meant both of them. After all, that particular threat had been hanging over them for days. This was a battle Eve hadn’t been able to win, a conquest she couldn’t make.

  “When will we have to leave?”

  “Not we. You. I’ve told the police you don’t live here. They think you just come sometimes to visit me. I’ve given them your address.” She stared hard at Liza. “Your address in London.”

  The falling apart of things started then, and the real fear. Liza understood that she had never really known what fear was until that moment, a minute or two after nine on an evening in late August. She saw that Eve’s hands had stopped shaking. They lay limp in her lap. She clenched her own.

  “I haven’t got an address in London.”

  “You have now.”

  Liza said in a jerky voice, “I don’t understand.”

  “If they think you live here they’ll ask you about what you saw and what you heard and perhaps—perhaps about the past. It’s not only that I can’t trust you”—Eve offered a grim little smile—“to tell lies as well as I can. It’s for your own protection.”

  If Liza hadn’t been so afraid she would have laughed. Hadn’t Eve told her that saying things were for people’s own protection was one way totalitarians justified secret police and lying propaganda? But she was too frightened, so frightened that she forgot she had been calling Eve by her first name for years and reverted to the childhood usage.

  “I can’t go away alone, Mother.”

  Eve noticed. She noticed everything. She winced as if that name had brought her a twinge of pain. “Yes, you can. You must. You’ll be all right with Heather.”

  So that’s whose address it was. “I can stay here. I can hide if they come back.” Like a child, not someone of nearly seventeen. And then, “They won’t come back.” A sharp indrawing of breath, the voice not hers but a baby’s. “Will they?”

  “I think so. No, I know so. This time they will. In the morning probably.”

  Liza knew Eve wasn’t going to explain anything, and she didn’t want an explanation. She preferred her own knowledge to the horror of naked confession, admission, perhaps excuse. She said again, “I can’t go.”

  “You must. And tonight, preferably.” Eve looked at the dark out there. “Tomorrow morning, first thing.” She closed her eyes for a moment, screwed them up, and made a face of agony. “I know I haven’t brought you up for this, Lizzie. Perhaps I’ve been wrong. I can only say I had the best intentions.”

  Don’t let her say that about my own protection again, Liza prayed. She whispered, “I’m scared to go.”

  “I know—oh, I know.” A voice caressing yet wretched, a voice that somehow yearned, Eve’s large dark eyes full of compassion. “But, listen, it won’t be too hard if you do exactly what I say, and then you’ll be with Heather. You always do what I say, don’t you, Lizzie.”

  I don’t. I used to once. Her fear held her rigid and silent.

  “Heather lives in London. I’ve written the address down, this is the address. You must walk to where the bus stops. You know where that is, on the way to the village, between the bridge and the village, and when the bus comes—the first one comes at seven-thirty—you must get on it and tell the driver where you want to go. It’s written down here. You must hold out your money and say, ‘The station, please.’ The bus will take you to the station, it stops outside the station, and you must go to the place where it says ‘tickets’ and buy a single ticket to London. ‘A single to London,’ is what you say. It’s written down here: Paddington, London.

  “I can’t get in touch with Heather to say you’re coming. If I go to the house to use the phone, Matt will see. Anyway, the police may be there. But Heather works at home, she’ll be at home. At Paddington Station you must go to where it says ‘taxis’ and take a taxi to her house. You can show the taxi driver the piece of paper with her address. You can do all that, Lizzie, can’t you?”

  “Why can’t you come with me?”

  Eve was silent for a moment. She wasn’t looking at Liza but at Bruno’s painting on the wall, Shrove at sunset, purple and gold and dark bluish-green. “They told me not to go anywhere. ‘You aren’t planning on going anywhere, I hope,’ is what they said.” She lifted her shoulders in that characteristic way, a tiny shrug. “You have to go alone, Liza. I’m going to give you some money.”

  Liza knew she would get it from the little castle. When Eve had gone she thought of the ordeal before her. It would be impossible. She saw herself lost as she sometimes was in dreams. Those were the kind of dreams she had, of wandering abandoned in a strange place, and weren’t all places strange to her? She would be alone in some gray desolation of concrete and buildings, of empty tunnels and high windowless walls. Her imagination created it out of well-remembered Victorian fiction and half-forgotten monochrome television scenes, a rats’ alley from Dickens or a film studio. But it was impossible. She would die first.

  The money was a hundred pounds in notes and some more in coins. Eve put it into her hands, closing her fingers around it, thinking no doubt that Liza had never touched money before, not knowing that she had done so once when she found the iron box.

  The coins were for the bus, the exact fare. What would she say to the driver? How would she ask? Eve began explaining. She sat beside Liza a
nd went through the instructions she had written down.

  Liza said, “What’s going to happen to you?”

  “Perhaps nothing, and then you can come back and everything will be like it used to be. But we must face it. The chances are they’ll arrest me and I’ll have to appear in the magistrates’ court and then—and then a bigger court. Even then, it may not be too bad, it may only be a year or two. They aren’t like they used to be about these things, not like”—even now she could be reassuring, joky—“in the history books. No torture, Lizzie, no dungeons, no shutting up in a cell forever. But we have to face it, it may be—for a while.”

  “You haven’t taught me to face anything,” Liza said.

  It was as if she had slapped Eve’s face. Eve winced, though Liza had spoken gently, had spoken despairingly.

  “I know. I did it for the best. I never thought it would come to this.”

  “What did you think?” Liza asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer. She went upstairs to her room.

  Eve came in to say good night.

  She was cheerful, as if nothing had happened. She was smiling and at ease. These mood swings made Liza more frightened than ever. She thought it likely Eve would fall asleep at once and sleep soundly. Eve kissed her good night and said to be off in the morning early, to take a few things with her, but not to bother with too much, Heather had cupboards full of clothes. Smiling radiantly, she said it sounded terrible to say it, but in a strange way she felt free at last.

  “The worst has happened, you see, Lizzie, it’s rather liberating.”

  The last thing Liza noticed before her mother left the room was that she was wearing Bruno’s gold earrings.

  She had meant not to sleep at all, but she was young and sleep came. The sound of a train woke her. She sat up in the dark, understanding at once it had been a dream. No train had run along the valley for years, not since she was a child. Without the trains the silence had been deeper than ever.

  Fear came back before the memory of what there was to be afraid of. A vague unformulated terror loomed, a great black cloud, that split into the constituents of her dread, the initial departure, the bus—suppose it didn’t come?—the terrible train, in her mind a hundred times the size of the valley train with its toy engine, and Heather, whom she recalled as tall, strange, remote, and full of secrets to be whispered to Eve behind a guarding hand.

  In all of it Liza had forgotten Sean. How could she let Sean know? The load of bewilderment and despair cast her down among the bedclothes again and she lay there with her face buried and her ears covered. But the birds’ singing wouldn’t let her lie quiet. The birds were sometimes the only things down here to make a sound from morning till night. The dawn chorus broke with a whistling call, then came a single trill and soon a hundred birds were singing in as many trees.

  She sat up fully this time. The gatehouse was silent. Outside all but the birds seemed quiet, for the wind had dropped. The curtains at the window were wide apart as they always were, since the only lights ever to be seen were those of Shrove. She knelt up on the bed in front of the window.

  Some demarcation was visible between the brow of the high wooded hills and the dark but clear and glowing sky. There, in the east, a line of red would appear, a gleaming red sash of light unraveled. Meanwhile, something could be seen, the outline of the house, a single light in the stable block, a dense black shapelessness of woodland.

  Knowledge of what was out there began to give the prospect form, or else the cold glow that comes just before dawn had started to lift the countryside out of darkness into morning twilight. The water meadows showed themselves pale as clouds and the double line of alders on either side of the river seemed to step out of the surrounding dark. Now Liza could see the shape of the high hills beyond, though not yet their greenness, nor the road that banded them halfway up like a white belt.

  She got off the bed, opened the door very quietly, and listened. Eve, who never rested by day, who was always alert, attentive, watchful, uncannily observant, slept by night like the dead. She was going to be arrested today but still she slept. The uneasy feeling came to Liza, as it had come before, that her mother was strange, was odd inside her head, but how would she really know? She had no standard of comparison.

  If she didn’t think about what she was going to do but kept her mind on practical things, if she didn’t think, it wasn’t so bad. These moments had to be lived through, not the future. She went downstairs to the bathroom, came back and dressed. She wasn’t hungry, she thought she would never eat again. The thought of food, of eating a piece of bread, of drinking milk, made her feel sick. She put on the cotton trousers Eve had made, a T-shirt from the reject shop, her trainers, Eve’s old brown parka, the hundred pounds divided between its two pockets.

  Did Eve mean her to say good-bye?

  Opening her mother’s door, she thought how this was the first time she had done so without knocking while Eve was inside since Bruno came, or earlier even, since the first Jonathan days. Eve lay asleep on her back. She wore a decorous white nightdress, high at the neck, and her thick dark brown hair was spread all over the pillows. In her deep sleep she was smiling as if she dreamed of lovely pleasurable things. That smile made Liza shiver and she shut the door quickly.

  It was no longer dark. Clouds were lifting away from the thin red girdle that lay along the tops of trees, dark blue feathers of cloud being drawn away up into a brightening sky. Birdsong filled up past silence with its loud yet strangely remote music. Liza was thinking again, she couldn’t help it. Opening the front door and going outside and closing it behind her was the hardest thing she had ever done. It exhausted her and she leaned on the gate for a moment. Perhaps nothing would seem so hard again. She had taken her key with her, why she couldn’t tell.

  The chill of daybreak touched her face like a cool damp hand. It brought back the feeling of sickness and she breathed deeply. Where would she be this time tomorrow? Better not think of it. She began to walk along the lane, slowly at first, then faster, trying to calculate the time. Neither she nor Eve had ever possessed a watch. It must be somewhere between six-thirty and seven.

  Too light for cars to have their lights on, yet these had, the two of them that she could see in the far distance coming along the winding road toward the bridge. She sensed that they were together because both had lights, one following the other, aiming for a certain goal.

  By now she was in that part of the lane that was the approach to the bridge and where no tall trees grew. She could see the flash the morning light made on the river and see too the tunnel mouth on the other side where once the train had plunged into the hillside. Suddenly the car lights were switched off, both sets. Liza couldn’t even see the cars anymore, but she knew they were coming this way. There was nowhere else for them to go.

  If she got onto the bridge they would have to pass her, only they wouldn’t pass her, they would stop. She climbed up the bank and hid herself among the late-summer tangle of hawthorn and bramble and wayfarer’s tree. The cars glided up silently. One of them had a blue lamp on its roof, but the lamp wasn’t lit.

  Liza had been holding her breath all the time and now she expelled it in a long sigh. They would come back—they would bring Eve back—and in doing so pass the bus stop. She scrambled down the bank and ran onto the bridge. The river was wide and deep and glassy, not gulping at boulders and rippling between them until much farther up. On the bridge Liza did what it was unwise to do, she stopped and turned and looked back.

  It might be that she would never see it again, any of it. She would never return, so she stopped and looked back like the woman in the picture at Shrove had done, the tall sad woman in white draperies who Eve told her was Lot’s wife and her forsaken home the Cities of the Plain. But instead of those desolate and wicked places, she saw between the trees that rose out of the misty water meadows, the alders and the balsams and the Lombardy poplars, the gracious outlines of Shrove House.

  The sun that had ri
sen in a golden dazzlement shed a pale amber light on its stone facade, the central pediment that held a coat of arms of unknown provenance, its broad terrace approached by flights of steps on both sides, its narrow door below and wide, noble door above. This was the garden front, identical to the front that faced the gates in all but that aspect’s gracious portico. All its windows were blanked by this light that lay on them like a skin. The house looked as immovable as the landscape in which it rested, as natural and as serene.

  From nowhere else could you see Shrove as from here. Trees hid it from spectators on the high hills. They knew how to conceal their homes from view, those old builders of great houses, Eve had said. Liza said a silent good-bye to it, ran across the bridge and out onto the road. The place where the bus stopped was a couple of hundred yards up on the left. Whatever Eve might think, she knew it well, she had often walked this way, had seen the bus, a green bus that she had never once been tempted to board.

  What time was it now? A quarter past seven? When would the next bus come if she missed this one? In an hour? Two hours? Insurmountable difficulties once more built themselves up before her. Ramparts of difficulties reared up in her path, impossible to scale. She couldn’t wait for that bus out in the open and risk the police cars passing her.

  For all that, she kept on walking toward the bus stop, shifting the bag onto her other shoulder, now wondering about the train. There might not be another train to London for a long time. The train that had once run along the valley had passed quite seldom, only four times a day in each direction. How would she know if the train she got into was the one for London?

  The sound of a car made her turn, but it wasn’t one of their cars. It was red with a top made of cloth and it rattled. As it passed it left behind a smell she wasn’t used to, metallic, acrid, smoky.

  One other person waited at the stop. An old woman. Liza had no idea who she was or where she came from. There were no houses until the village was reached. She felt vulnerable, exposed, the focus of invisible watching eyes as she came up to the stop. The woman looked at her and quickly looked away as if angry or disgusted.