The Crocodile Bird (34 page)

“See you, then.”

She didn’t dare run. Guessing he was watching her, she walked down the drive, through the park, certain his eyes were on her. But when she looked back he was gone. His car passed her almost before she was aware of it and there he was waving to her. She was too confused to wave back.

At the gatehouse she read
Romeo and Juliet.
“Would that I were a glove upon that hand/That I might touch that cheek.” Her future, the loneliness and the sameness, the oddities of Eve, all were forgotten. His was a face “to lose youth for / To occupy age with the dream of …” She turned to poetry, for she had no other comparisons and no other standards.

Talking to Eve, she longed to speak his name but was afraid to. Once she had uttered it, she wanted to talk about him all the time, yet she knew nothing about him.

“Where does Sean live?”

“In a caravan somewhere. What possible interest can it have for you?”

“I wanted to know where Gib lived.” It was true. Let Eve believe that, knowing so few people, she was more interested in those she did know than others who had led different lives might be.

“Where does Sean keep his caravan?” This time she need not have used his name but she did use it.

“How should I know? Oh, yes, he said down by the old station. Have you been talking to him?”

Liza looked at her between the eyes and said, “No.”

This was the place where she had been so frightened. She had come through the station, carefree, enjoying the day, happy in the sunlight, and had seen Bruno sitting there with his painting things, in his lifted hand a brush loaded with gamboge. He had frightened her with his naked hatred.

“You’ve never told me why you came that day,” Sean said. “D’you know, it was seven months ago. We’ve known each other seven months. What made you come?”

“I wanted to see where you lived. The way I felt, you want to know everything about a person, where they live, what they eat and drink, what they like doing, the way they are when they’re alone. You want to see them against different backgrounds.” She thought about it. “Against every possible background. You want to see how they’ll be in the rain and what they do when the sun shines on them. How they comb their hair and fill a kettle and wash their hands and drink a glass of water. You want to see how they go about doing all the ordinary things.”

Sean was nodding earnestly. “That’s right, that’s it. You’re a clever girl, love, you sort of know it all.”

That made her impatient. She waved him away. “I didn’t mean to see you. I certainly didn’t mean you to see me. I just meant to see where you lived and—well, creep away.”

“But I saw you and I come out.”

She said reflectively, as if talking of other people, another couple. “It was love at first sight.”

“Right on. That’s what it was.”

“I wasn’t hard to get. I didn’t keep you guessing. I went into the caravan with you and when you asked if I’d got anyone, I didn’t know what you meant. I said I’d got my mother. You tried again, you said, was I seeing anyone? It was hopeless. You had to ask me if I had a boyfriend. Then you said, would I come for a walk with you, and I knew it was all right because that’s what people said in all those Victorian novels I’d read.”

“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

T
HAT
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 could 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.