Read The Crocodile Bird for Free Online

and he’s Rudi.”
    “Are they nice, friendly dogs?”
    “They’ll be okay with you and the kiddy. They’ll never attack women, they’ve been trained that way. I’d be up the nearest tree myself if someone called out ‘Kill!’ when they’re around.”
    “Really? Mr. Tobias didn’t say.”
    “Thought you might say no to looking after them, I daresay.” He gazed around him, stared at the high hills beyond the valley as if they were the Himalayas. “Bit isolated down here, aren’t you? Not what you’d call much life going on.”
    “It’s what I like.”
    “It takes all sorts, I suppose, though I’d have thought a smashing-looking girl like yourself’d want something a bit more lively. Bright lights, eh, bit of dancing and the movies? You wouldn’t have such a thing as a cup of tea going, I daresay?”
    “No, I wouldn’t,” said Mother and she took the dog leashes in one hand and Liza’s hand in the other, went into the gatehouse, and shut the door. The man outside on the step said something Liza couldn’t catch but which Mother said was a dirty word and never to say it. They heard his van start up with a roar as if it was angry.
    The dogs started licking Liza, they licked her hands, and when she stroked them, they licked her face. Their coats felt like nothing she had ever touched before, shiny as leather, soft as fur, smooth as the crown of her own head when Mother had just washed her hair.
    She said to Mother, “Heidi and Rudi are black lined with brown,” and Mother had laughed and said that was right, that was just how they looked.
    “You can’t remember all those things your mum and him said word for word, can you?” said Sean.
    “Not really. But it was like that. I know all the kinds of things she says and ever could say. I know her so well, you see, it’s as if I know her perfectly because I don’t know anyone else.”
    “How about me? You know me.”
    She could tell she had hurt him and tried to make amends. “I know you now. I didn’t then.”
    “Go on, then. What happened with the dogs?”
    “Eve was looking after them for Mr. Tobias. He had to go away, he went to see his mother in France, and he couldn’t take the dogs for some reason.”
    “Quarantine.”
    “What?”
    “When he come back in he’d have to put the pair of them in quarantine for six months. That means they’d be in like kennels. It’s the law.”
    “I expect that was it.”
    “Why couldn’t this Matt look after them wherever it was he lived?”
    “In the Lake District. He had a job, he was working all day. He couldn’t take them out for exercise—or wouldn’t. Anyway, Eve wanted to do this for Mr. Tobias, she wanted to please him.
    “We were supposed to have them for two or three weeks, I can’t exactly remember. I loved them, I wanted us to have a dog after they’d gone back, but Eve wouldn’t. She said Mr. Tobias wouldn’t like it.”
    “So it wasn’t them she killed?”
    “I told you, it was a person, a man.”
    Liza never knew who he was or what it was he had tried to do. Now that twelve years had passed and she was grown up, doing the thing that grown-ups did herself, she could guess.
    It was she who saw him first. Mother was down at Shrove and she was locked up in her bedroom. Where the dogs were she didn’t know. Probably in the little castle where they slept at night or even at Shrove, for in a sort of way it was their house. It belonged to Mr. Tobias, who owned them.
    Mother had been gone a long time. Who could say now how long those long times actually were? It’s different when you’re four. Half an hour? An hour? Or only ten minutes? She had read the letters in the rag book and made them into words, “dog,” “cat,” “bed,” “cot.” The baby bottle had been sucked dry and the pencil had scribbled over every single sheet of paper.
    She climbed upon the bed and crawled on all fours over to the window. The room had six sides and three windows but was too small for the