The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

later—I mean years later—and I think that man had really frightened her. Frightened is probably not the word, she doesn’t get frightened. Let’s say, alerted her to danger.”
    “Yeah, maybe she reckoned she should never have said that about what you see is what you get. I mean, like, you know, not being no one else around for miles.”
    “I expect so.”
    “But he’d gone, hadn’t he?”
    “He came back.”
    It stayed light in the evenings until nearly ten, but Liza was put to bed at seven. She had her tea, always wholemeal bread with an egg or a piece of cheese. Cake and sweets were not allowed, and years passed before she found out what they were. After the bread she had fruit, as much as she wanted, and a glass of milk. The milkman came three times a week, another man with fair hair.
    Mother read her a story when tea was over: Hans Andersen or Charles Kingsley, books borrowed from the library at Shrove. Then came her bath. They had a bath in the kitchen with a wooden lid on it. She wasn’t locked in her bedroom at night, she was never locked in except when Mother went to Shrove or shopping in the town. When Liza couldn’t get to sleep she knew it was useless calling out or crying, for Mother took no notice, and if she came downstairs Mother would shrug at her and give her one of those wordless looks before taking her back up again.
    So all she could do was wander about upstairs, looking out of the windows, hoping to see something, though she hardly ever did. If Mother knew Liza went into her room and played with her things, she gave no sign of it. Mother read books in the evenings, Liza knew that, or listened to music coming into her ears through wires from a little square black box.
    In Mother’s room she opened the cupboard door and examined all the long bright-colored skirts that Mother wore and the other things she never wore, long scarves, a couple of big straw hats, a yellow gown with a flounce around the hem. She looked in her jewel case, which was kept in the dressing table drawer, and could have told anyone precisely what the case held: a long string of green beads, two pairs of earrings, a hair comb made of brown mottled stuff with brilliant shiny bits set in it, a brooch of carved wood and another of mother-of-pearl. Mother had told her that was what it was when she wore the brooch just as she told her the beads were jade and the two pairs of earrings made of gold.
    That evening the green beads and one pair of earrings were missing because Mother was wearing them. Liza closed the box, went back to her own room, and knelt upon the bed, looking out of the window. The gatehouse garden, in which Mother later on grew peas and beans and lettuces, soft fruit on bushes and strawberries under nets, was mostly bare earth at that time. Mother had been working on it that day, digging it over with a fork. There was just one tree, a single cherry tree, growing out of the soft red-brown soil, and two long grass paths.
    Liza shifted her gaze upward, waiting for the last southbound train, which would go through a bit after eight-thirty. She hadn’t known about north and south and eight-thirty then, though Mother was teaching her to tell the time and to understand a map, but she knew the last train would come out from the tunnel while it was still light but after sunset. The sky was red all over, though you couldn’t see where the sun went down from her room. Once it had set, the high hills went gray and the woods changed from green to a soft dark blue.
    The train whistled at the tunnel mouth and came chugging down. Lights were on inside, though there was a lot of light outside still. It would stop at the station, at Ring Valley Halt, but you couldn’t see the station from here. In the distance, the train grew very small, long and wriggling like one of the millipedes that lived near the back door. After it was gone there would be nothing more to be seen from this window. Liza scrambled off the bed and went on