Read Online The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online

with him and what would happen to our dog?
    They don’t like other dogs, they’d attack it. They’d hurt it.”
    Like they hurt the man, Liza felt like saying but she didn’t say it. Instead, she said, “Is he going to come? I’d like him to come because then we’d have his dogs and we wouldn’t have to have our own. Is he going to come?”
    Mother said nothing for a moment. Then she put her arm around Liza and pulled her close against her skirts and said, “I hope so, Lizzie, I hope he will,” but she wasn’t smiling and she gave a heavy sigh.
    Next day was Mother’s day for going shopping. She went once a fortnight to get the things the milkman wouldn’t bring. He brought butter and eggs and porridge oats and orange juice and bread and yogurt as well as milk, but he never brought meat or fish. Until they grew their own, Mother had to buy vegetables. She had to buy fruit and cheese. The bus that went to the shops—to town, that is—ran four times a day and Mother had to walk down the lane and go over the river bridge and a hundred yards along the road to the bus stop. When Mother went to town she never took Liza with her. Liza was locked up in her bedroom.
    She was used to it and she accepted, but not this time. At first she gave in, sat on the bed with the rag book and the pencils, sucked at her orange juice bottle. Mother had given her an apple as well for a treat, a Golden Delicious because there were no English ones in July. She knelt on the bed and watched Mother go along the lane toward the main road. Then she shifted her gaze from the distance to the foreground and saw where the man had been and the dogs and the explosion had happened. She began to scream.
    Probably she couldn’t have screamed for the whole hour and a half Mother was away. Halfway through she may have fallen asleep. But she was screaming when Mother came back. Mother said, “I won’t leave you again,” and she didn’t for a long while but of course she did again one day.
    It might have been that evening or an evening days or weeks later, at any rate it was after the dogs had gone, that Liza was playing her roving-between-the-bedrooms game after bedtime. She tried on Mother’s straw hats, the golden one with the white band and the brown one with the cream scarf tied around it, and she stroked Mother’s suede shoes, that had things inexplicably called trees thrust into them. When she was tired of that she looked inside the jewel case.
    Mother was wearing one set of earrings and the mother-of-pearl brooch, so of course those things weren’t in there. Liza hung the jade beads around her own neck, put the comb with the shiny bits on it into her hair, and admired the result in the mirror. She picked up the wooden brooch and found lying underneath it a gold ring.
    Whose could it be? She had never seen it before, she had never seen any ring on Mother’s hand. Examining it with great interest, she saw that there was some writing on the inside of the ring, but she was only four then and she couldn’t read very well. Nor did she at that time connect the ring with the man with the beard.
    “It was his ring?” said Sean.
    “It must have been. I looked at it again later, when I could read. The writing said: TMH AND EHH, MARCH 3, 1974. I didn’t know what it meant then, but now I think it was his wedding ring. Victoria had a wedding ring. Do men have them?”
    “I reckon there’s some as do.”
    “Those were his initials and his wife’s and that was the date they got married, don’t you think?”
    “She must have took it off him, off his hand,” said Sean, making a face.
    “I don’t know why she did unless she thought she might sell it one day. Or maybe she thought if she buried it with him someone might dig it up.”
    “Why did she do it?”
    “Do what? Shoot that man?”
    “Why didn’t she get an ambulance, have him taken to the hospital? You said he could sit up, he’d have got all right. It wasn’t her fault, no one’d