The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell Page B

walk about. She had just been terribly frightened. When he was gone she thought he had gone of his own volition. He had mended and got well and walked away.
    It was years afterward when she was much older, piecing memories together and comparing them with similar contemporary events, that she understood he was dead and Eve had killed him with Mr. Tobias’s shotgun. Not only had Eve killed him but had taken his body away.
    Eve was a small woman with a tiny waist and slender elegant legs. She had small hands with long tapering fingers. Her face was wide at the cheekbones and narrow at the chin, her forehead high, her upper lip short, and her mouth full and lovely. Slightly tilted, her pretty nose was a little too small for her face. She had large hazel-green eyes and black eyebrows like Chinese brush-strokes, not unlike Sean’s, and her thick, shiny dark hair reached to the middle of her back. But she was very small, no more than five feet or five feet one at best. Liza didn’t know her weight, they had no scales, but when she was sixteen Eve estimated seven and a half stone for herself and eight stone and a bit for Liza and that was probably right. Yet this tiny woman had somehow moved a man one and a half times her weight and nearly six feet tall.
    And put him where? Somewhere in the wood, Liza decided when she thought about it around that sixteenth birthday. She put the body in the wheelbarrow and took it through the gap in the fence and buried it in the wood. During the night while Liza slept and before she woke up screaming. Or after she had held her and soothed her and she had slept again, Mother had gone down and worked silently in the dark.
    The first thing she saw from the window that morning—even before she saw the man was gone—was Matt opening the door of the little castle and letting the dogs out. He wasn’t due till mid-morning, Mother said, running into the room. She sounded cross and upset. Liza went to the other window. The dogs had made straight for the place where the man had lain and ran about sniffing the grass in a frenzied way and pushing their noses into the earth.
    “There’s something fascinating them,” Matt said when Liza and Mother went outside. “They been burying bones?”
    “Do you know what time it is?” Mother said. “It’s six-thirty in the morning.”
    “So it is. Dear, oh, dear. I’d some business down this way yesterday, so I stopped the night and come over here first thing. Not got you girls out of bed, I hope.”
    Mother ignored this. “Has Mr. Tobias come back from France?”
    “Coming back tonight. He wants his dogs there when he gets home. They’re all the company he’s got, I reckon. It wouldn’t suit me, I like a bit of action myself, but it takes all sorts to make a world.”
    “It certainly does,” said Mother, not very pleasantly.
    “You’d think he’d get himself a girl—well, he does, but nothing permanent.” Matt spoke as if Mother didn’t know it all already. “Of course he’s loaded, got his own place and this here and the London one and there’s girls falling over themselves to get him, but to be perfectly honest with you he’s just not interested.” He winked incomprehensibly at Liza. “Not in settling down, I mean.”
    In spite of what had happened, Liza wasn’t afraid to put her arms around each dog’s neck and place a tender kiss on each glossy black skull. She cried a bit when they had gone. She asked Mother if they could have a dog of their own.
    “No, absolutely not. Don’t ask me.”
    “Why couldn’t we, Mother, why couldn’t we? I do want a dog, I love Heidi and Rudi, I do want one of my own.”
    “Then you must want.” Mother smiled when she said it, she wasn’t angry, and she called Liza Lizzie, which she sometimes did when she was pleased with her or not too disappointed in her. “Listen, Lizzie, suppose Mr. Tobias came to live at Shrove? He might, it’s his house—one of his houses. Then Heidi and Rudi would come