Free The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell Page B

name but Hugh she remembered.
    Hugh came from Swansea, was around these parts last July on a walking holiday, but left the B and B he was stopping at without paying for his two nights. The fat man talked a lot more about Hugh and why they were looking for him and what was making them look six months later, but Liza didn’t understand any of it. He described Hugh, which she did understand, she remembered his fair beard, she remembered tufts of it in Rudi’s mouth.
    “We are very quiet down here, Inspector,” Mother said. “We see hardly anyone.”
    “A lonely life.”
    “It depends what suits you.”
    “And you never saw this man?” He showed Mother something in the palm of his hand and Mother looked at it, shaking her head. “You didn’t see him in the lane or walking the footpath?”
    “I’m afraid not.”
    Mother lifted her face and looked deep into the fat man’s eyes when she said this. Although it meant nothing at the time, when she was older, thinking back and comparing her own personal experience, Liza understood how Mother’s look must have affected him. Her full red lips were slightly parted, her eyes large and lustrous, her skin creamy and her expression oh so winsome and trusting. About her shoulders her glorious hair, a rich, dark shining brown, hung like a silk cape. She had one small white finger pressed against her lower lip.
    “It was just a possibility,” the fat man said, unable to take his eyes off her, but having to, having to drag his eyes away and speak to Liza. “I don’t suppose this young lady saw him.”
    She was shown the photograph. Apart from prints on the fronts of Mother’s books, it was the first she had ever seen, but she didn’t say so. She looked at the face which had frightened her and which Heidi and Rudi had ruined with their teeth, looked at it and said, “I don’t know.”
    This made him eager. “So you might have?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Have another look, my love, look closely and try to remember.”
    Liza was growing frightened. She was letting Mother down, she was obeying Mother but letting her down just the same. The man’s face was horrible, the bearded man called Hugh, cruel and sneering, and who knew what he would have done if Mother hadn’t …
    She didn’t have to pretend to cry. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she screamed and burst into tears.
    The fat man went away, apologizing to Mother, shaking hands with her and holding her hand a long time, and when he had gone Mother roared with laughter. She said Liza had been excellent, quite excellent, and she hugged her, laughing into her hair. For all that she loved Liza and cared for her, she hadn’t understood that she had been really frightened, really shy of people, really bewildered.
    It took the driver a long time to get the car started and an even longer time to pull it out of the snow without its wheels spinning. Liza calmed down and began to enjoy herself. She and Mother watched the driver’s struggles from the bedroom window with great interest.
    The snow went away and the spring came. Most of the trees that were coniferous looked just the same, always the same greenish black or light smoky blue, but the larches and the swamp cypresses grew new leaves like clumps of fur of an exquisite pale and delicate green. Mother explained that larches too were deciduous conifers and the only ones native to the British Isles.
    Primroses with sunny round faces appeared under the hedges and clusters of velvety purple violets close by the boles of trees. Wood anemones, that were also called windflowers and had petals like tissue paper, grew in the clearings of the wood. Mother told Liza to be careful never to pronounce them an-en-omies, as so many people did who ought to know better. Liza hardly talked to anyone but Mother, so was unlikely to hear the wrong pronunciation.
    Except the postman, though they didn’t discuss botany. And the milkman, who noticed nothing but the trains