Free The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell Page A

light, of how radiantly light the house was everywhere inside. There wasn’t a dark corner or a dim passage. Even when the sun wasn’t shining, as it wasn’t that day, a clear pearly light lit every room and the things inside the rooms gleamed, the glass and the porcelain, the silver and brass and the gilt on the moldings and cornices. The biggest staircase had flowers and fruit carved on the wood on each side of it and the carving gleamed with a deep rich glow, but all she could think of then was how much she would like to slide down the polished banister.
    They left at four o’clock, in time to get home for Liza’s reading lesson.
    “Doesn’t Mr. Tobias ever live there?” she asked, taking Mother’s hand.
    “He never has. His mother did for a while and his grandfather lived there all the time, it was his only home.” She gave Liza a thoughtful glance, as if she was pondering whether the time had come to tell her. “My mother, who was your grandmother, was his housekeeper. And then his nurse. We lived in the gatehouse ourselves, my mother, my father, and I.” Mother squeezed Liza’s hand. “You’re too young for this, Lizzie. Look up in the ash tree, see the green woodpecker? On the trunk, picking insects out with his beak?”
    So if the day the man with the beard came was called the Day of the Kingfisher, this was the Day of the Woodpecker, the day of the first visit to Shrove.
    After that Liza always went with Mother to Shrove and now, when Mother went to town on the bus, instead of locking Liza in her bedroom in the cottage, she put her in one of the Shrove bedrooms. Mostly it was the one called the Venetian Room because the four-poster bed had its posts made out of the poles used by gondoliers in Venice, Mother said. Liza could read quite well by the time she was five and had a real book in the room with her. She wasn’t in the least frightened of being shut up in the Venetian Room at Shrove, she wouldn’t have been frightened of being in her own room anymore, but she did ask Mother why Shrove and not at home.
    “Because Shrove has central heating and we don’t. I can be sure you’re warm enough. They have to keep the heating on all winter because of the damp, even though no one lives there. If it was allowed to get damp the furniture might be spoiled.”
    “Why is the little room next to the morning room always locked up?”
    “Is it?” said Mother. “I seem to have mislaid the key.”
    Shrove was to become her library and her picture gallery. More than that, for the paintings were a guide to her and a catalog of people’s faces. To them she ran when she needed to identify a new person or when confirmation was required. They were her standard of comparison and her secondhand portrait of the outside world. This was how other people looked, this what they wore, these the chairs they sat on, the other countries they lived in, the things their eyes saw.
    In the cold depths of winter, a very cold one when the river froze over and the water meadows disappeared under snow for a whole month, a black car with chains on its tires slid slowly down the lane and parked in the deep snow outside the gatehouse. There were two men inside. One stayed in the car and the other one came to the front door and rang the bell. He was a fat man with no hair at all but for a fairish fringe surrounding the great shiny pale egg that was his head.
    By chance, Liza and Mother had been sitting side by side at Mother’s bedroom window, watching the birds feeding from the nut feeders they had hung on the branches of the balsam tree. They saw the car come and the man come to the door.
    “If he talks to you you are not to say anything but ‘I don’t know,’” said Mother, “and you can cry a bit if you like. You might like that, it might amuse you.”
    Liza never found out who the man was. Of course she guessed later on. He said he was looking for a missing person, a man called Hugh something. She had forgotten his other