A Coffin for Charley. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

CHAPTER 3

       The same Monday evening

      The house where Annie Briggs now lived and where she had spent her short married life and from which her husband had left her (not for another woman but for what he called another life) was not far away from her childhood home from whose garden she had witnessed the two Creeleys bury the old man and woman. Looking back, she thought she could remember them striking blows as well. Hitting them on the head. Skulls splitting like eggs. Had she heard that?

      Two deaths it had been, people forgot that, she told herself, when they talk about letting those horrors out. Talk about pity and compassion and people having served their time. Those two cannot serve their time; for what they did such time does not run. I ought to know. I was the one who saw, who heard.

      And who testified.

      She had hoped they would die incarcerated, but remembering.

      Annie certainly intended to do her best to see that they did: on the anniversary of the killing she always sent them letters, one each, describing that night. People said that they did not get the letters, that the letters were intercepted, but she knew better. She knew they got to their destination, not to the heart, those two had not got hearts, but to their liver and guts where fear dwelt. She knew, she sensed it.

      She was always sick herself on that day. It was interesting and might be no coincidence that on that anniversary day in her eleventh year she had started to menstruate and still kept that celebration with blood.

      After hearing the killing in the garden of the two old people, she had been a ‘disturbed child’, a name she still wore like a label round her neck. A disturbed child is a disturbing child. Her parents had discovered that fact almost at once.

      ‘Not that I went in for any of that poltergeist nonsense,’ said Annie to herself. ‘Although I could have done, I could have worked it, but it’s stupid, that sort of thing.’

      She had been anorexic, had tried a little thievery and gone in for a bit of arson. Nothing big, she wasn’t a big person, but certainly ‘disturbing’ if you had to live with it.

      Then someone, a boy, told her she was pretty and she shed all the ‘disturbed’ symptoms overnight and grew up.

      You cannot be a disturbed adult, not if you are looking for sympathy, you are meant to pull yourself together, or they give you pills or electric shocks or put you away, or a combination of all three, and Annie wasn’t having any of that. So she put that portmanteau of disturbance behind her, recognizing that it had been self-induced and not wholly satisfying.

      Marriage she had enjoyed while it lasted. She was sad when it ended, not blaming Jack Briggs or herself, thus proving to her own satisfaction that she was grown up at last.

      The house in Napier Street where Annie and her small daughter and her young sister, Didi, now lived was one of three tall, narrow houses. The top two floors had been formed into a separate flat, while Annie inhabited the bottom two. The top flat had its own front door reached by means of an iron fire escape of solid Victorian construction.

      Miss Royal had rented the flat from Annie about eighteen months ago and had been an object of interest to Annie ever since. To the neighbours as well when they got a chance to view her.

      Miss Royal was blonde, leggy, wore trousers almost all the time, which caused the unkind old neighbours next door, Nancy and Bob Tyrrett, to say she must be a lesbian, and they didn’t mean it as a compliment. The Tyrretts had watched her move in and kept their eyes open since but had not managed more than the odd fleeting glimpse. Miss Royal was a buyer in fashion for a large chain of department stores and not home a lot.

      ‘She has to travel a lot on business,’ Annie had explained to her sister. ‘But she finds it fascinating and loves it.’

      ‘She never says a word to me, just shoots past.’ Not that she had done that lately either. Must have wings, thought sister.

      ‘Well, she does to me. On occasion. When she feels like it.’

      ‘And she’s asked you to call her Caroline?’

      ‘Oh, everyone does that now.’

      ‘Does she call you Annie?’

      ‘Sometimes,’ said Annie, unwilling to admit that Miss Royal never did.

      ‘Does she have a man up there?’

      Annie blinked. ‘Well, I’m her landlady, not her keeper. So what if she does? She’s adult.’

      Didi frowned. ‘Thought I’d ask.’ She drank some coffee. ‘What sort is he?’

      ‘The usual sort, I suppose. Why?’

      ‘He looks,’ she hesitated … ‘different. I saw him once.’

      ‘Keep out of things,’ advised Annie. ‘She lives her life, let us live ours. Laissez-faire.’ A new phrase on Annie’s lips; she had left school too young and was now getting an education as a mature student. She knew who Metternich was, and Lord Palmerston, and had heard of Adam Smith.

      Annie was doing a course at the local university, the new one, upgraded from a polytechnic. She had a small grant which just allowed her to eat while she studied Law and History but the great plus was that Maida, her child, went to the university children’s group daily.

      She had read all about Marianna Manners’s murder even if she did not admit it. How could they think I was not interested in murder, I who know more about it than most.

      ‘I wonder if she’d talk to me if I went up,’ Didi speculated, more to see what Annie said than because she intended to try. ‘I need to talk to someone about fashion if I’m going in for drama. I haven’t got my image right.’

      ‘She told me she specialized in fashion for the older lady,’ said Annie. ‘But you could try.’

      That means don’t bother, assessed Didi. As if I was going to, anyway.

      The front doorbell rang.

      ‘Late,’ said Annie.’ I shan’t answer.’ She began to tremble.

      ‘Not that late. Depends what sort of life you have.’

      The bell rang again.

      ‘I’m going to answer it.’

      ‘Look out of the window first.’

      Didi СКАЧАТЬ