Читать книгу A Coffin for Charley - Gwendoline Butler - Страница 8

In the Arches of the Years

Three people remembered the story of Annie Briggs. She had been Annie Dunne then, but she married young and never dropped entirely from the police’s view.

The most important memory was that of Annie herself, but she had been so young that she sometimes wondered now how much she truly recalled and how much of it was what she had been told. But some pictures were so vivid she knew they were real. Had been real, were real, would burn into eternity. That was what eternity was, she told herself, an endlessly revolving kaleidoscope of horrors.

Lizzie Creeley remembered what Annie had said because she had been the subject of it, in company with a corpse or two and her brother Will, but since his stroke he had no memory.

Coffin had special memories of it all because he had always wondered if they got it right.

He had his own remembrances of this district to contend with as well, some of them peculiar to say the least. He had lived here as a raw young copper with the woman that politely but falsely he had called ‘Mother’. She had asked him to do so. At the time he had understood that she was a distant relation of his father, a cousin, because the old lady who had certainly been his grandmother and the woman who had probably been his aunt and who had superintended what there was of his childhood, had assured him she was and that he should take rooms with her. People did that sort of thing then, now they lived in bedsits. She had been his mother’s dresser, or so she said, and was a bit mad.

She had given him ham for his supper and called it kippers and given him kippers and called it ham. But they had rubbed along all right. Every day he had travelled across to South London where he worked.

After a bit she had moved there to a flat above a shop in the Borough. Soon after this he emancipated himself. But he sat with her when she died in Guy’s Hospital. Died with some pain, still calling herself Mother. He had been the only mourner at her funeral and out of charity he had sent several wreaths in different names.

Never my true mother, but more of a mother than the other one.

He had come back to this district, then part of the Met, called in as a seasoned detective who was working on a similar case across the river, in time to hear Annie’s story and receive Lizzie Creeley’s confession. Where had Stella been then? Not with him, one of their early bitter partings.

His picture differed from both Lizzie’s and Annie’s because he had seen Annie and heard her tale, he had seen Lizzie and listened to what she had to say, while those two had never spoken face to face.

Annie remembered creeping out of the house on a foggy November night to go down the garden to what had been an old privy and now housed some pet rabbits to inspect her favourite Angora whom she suspected of eating her litter.

In the dark she had heard voices and movements. She had crawled to the hedge, kept wild and uncut, to see two people, a man and a woman, dragging out from the house the old couple who lived there. Before her terrified eyes, they were tumbled bloody and perhaps not even dead (so the pathologist had reported later) into a pit and the earth thrown over them.

It had taken her a week to tell what she had seen and longer still to identify Lizzie and Will. She had done so from behind a special window that allowed her to see them while they could not see her. She had been flanked by two social workers. One, a girl whose name she had forgotten, and the other a very young man, Alex Edwards, whose name she had never been able to mislay because he visited her often to this day. Several policemen had been present, one of whom was John Coffin.

Lizzie Creeley remembered hearing Annie’s written testimony read out in court and biting her lower lip till the blood ran. Her counsel hardly bothered to raise a question. She knew she was done for at that point. She wanted to kill him as well, and see that Annie got hers too if she could. She had signalled as much to her father sitting watching.

In court, she had cried out: ‘She’s lying, the little bitch,’ and been reprimanded by the Judge.

Coffin remembered Annie’s pinched and terrified face, and Lizzie’s fox-like fury, and never doubted the child’s truth for a moment.

But as he knew, there are truths and truths.