A Coffin for Charley. Gwendoline Butler

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      ‘Not as bad as you might think. It was very mucky, the tenants not having been as careful as might be, but the young one, grandson Eddie, has been painting and gardening. He’s on his own at the moment although the odd cousin has been to stay.’

      ‘How do you know all this?’

      ‘Community policing,’ said Young. ‘The local officer managed to insert himself in the house for a look round. He had a word with Eddie about car parking, Eddie Creeley has three old bangers parked outside and the neighbours were complaining. Eddie’s a car mechanic as hobby but he’s working in a hospital. Our man reported favourably on him. I think he liked him.’

      ‘I didn’t think you could like a Creeley.’

      ‘The old lady’s gone, of course. But her spirit lives on. Anyone who does a Creeley down gets it back in spades. They’ve never forgiven Annie, that’s the story. Or you, for that matter.’

      ‘They won’t do anything now. It’s too late, too long ago. Oh, writing on her front door, dog dirt through the letter-box …’

      ‘They did all of that in the past, but not lately, not since the shift back from New Zealand. Perhaps Eddie’s different, who knows?’

      ‘I know old Mrs Creeley said one or other of them would kill Annie in the end. They never took that back. Never did much about it, either.’

      ‘She still sees it coming.’

      ‘She’s lived a long while with that on her mind. How long is it now? Over twenty years? We can’t watch all the time.’

      ‘I’ve been told that Lizzie Creeley is being given parole. The brother’s had a stroke, he’ll get out too but go straight to hospital,’ said Young. ‘I dare say Annie has heard the news.’

      ‘How old is she now?’

      ‘She was about eight then. Thirty-odd now. A daughter of her own. The sister lives with her. She wasn’t born then.’

      Twenty-odd years ago when John Coffin, even then a controversial figure with friends and enemies, had been called across the river from his own area to consult on a case which seemed to have a parallel with a murder he was dealing with. Whether the death of old Addie Scott had a connection with the Creeleys had never been established, but the Creeleys had gone down anyway for another crime. Coffin knew this area of old, because as a raw young constable he had lived here in what was in those days a working-class district of the great metropolis. Lodged with ‘Mother’. She had not been his mother, of course; nobody’s mother, certainly not his.

      A child, Annie Dunne, hiding in the garden of her home one foggy night had heard strange noises, she had crawled through the next-door hedge to watch and had seen two people burying an old man, and his wife.

      Coffin had been the man who persuaded her to talk.

      The killers were a brother and sister, Will and Lizzie Creeley. Without Annie’s testimony the bodies might never have been found nor the two convicted. The Creeley family swore to get her.

      Annie had grown up, had married, and had a child herself. But for some time the Creeleys had still lived three streets away. Bad years for Annie, until the family had emigrated, but one by one they had drifted back. Eddie was the latest. Creeleys had lived in Swinehouse for many generations and were embedded in the district like weeds.

      ‘She wasn’t believed at first, you know, when she told her story.’

      Archie Young nodded.

      ‘But I believed her … And then, of course, the rumour went round that there were other bodies buried in the garden. As if it was a kind of cottage industry that the Creeleys had there: killing for money. But there were only the two, as if that wasn’t enough … I suppose Annie’s heard about this murder?

      ‘I don’t suppose she thinks Marianna was murdered instead of her.’

      ‘She did live two streets away.’ Marianna had a tiny flat in the Alexandra Wharf block, and Napier Street, where Annie Briggs lived was only a few yards away.

      ‘They didn’t know each other. Not as far as we know.’

      ‘I bet she hopes that if the Creeley boy did it we get him for it fast.’

      ‘Doesn’t look like a Creeley crime, they were strictly business as far as we know, and there was no profit in Marianna. Straight sex there, I reckon.’ Young added wistfully: ‘If I had to choose between getting Job Titus or a Creeley for Marianna I don’t know which I’d go for.’

      ‘Hard choice,’ said Coffin.

      ‘But poor Annie. I mean, she’s a nuisance, always popping in with crisis calls, but you can see why.’ He looked at the wall. ‘She’s got in a private investigator.’

      ‘My God, who?’

      ‘The Tash Agency,’ said Young, still not meeting Coffin’s eyes.

      ‘Tom Ashworth. My wife used him on her divorce.’ Stella had claimed her divorce was amiable on both sides, Coffin had only learnt later that this was not quite true.

      Young, who knew this, he made it his job to know everything about his boss that he could, kept silent.

      Then he said: ‘Annie says she liked him, trusts him … Whatever that means.’

      Stella had said the same. ‘I think it means he’s attractive,’ said Coffin.

      He had discovered that where Stella was concerned he was capable of quick and ready jealousy. He kept quiet about it and hoped she had not noticed, but it was there. To his surprise, jealousy was cold, not hot, and penetrated everywhere like a gas.

      Stella was naturally flirtatious, and meeting desirable men all the time. She said there had to be chemistry, it was all part of the job. Very likely it was.

      ‘There aren’t so many people Annie Briggs trusts. Her husband left her, couldn’t stand it.’ Young kept in touch with his world. ‘She’s got a social worker who calls in, the sister gave them a bit of trouble once. Can’t blame her, it’s hardly been a normal life.’

      Coffin said: ‘She is on my mind and on my conscience all the time. I’ll go and see her.’

      He knew what was lined up for him in his diary, so it wouldn’t be today or tomorrow, but sometime. Soon. Might get Stella to help, unofficially, of course. She was good with women.

      At the door, Archie Young paused. ‘Supposing the man that Job Titus was seen drinking with was the Creeley boy? Sounded like him. May be nothing in it.’

      Driving home that night Coffin thought: Supposing Job Titus got a Creeley to do Marianna in, and then Titus promised to help the Creeleys get Annie somehow?

      It was an interesting idea. He could feel sorry for Titus if he let the Creeleys get a hook in him. He might be a smart political operator but the Creeleys had millennia of criminality behind them. A Creeley man or woman, the women being fully as bad, had probably conned a Roman centurion and then slit his СКАЧАТЬ