A Coffin for Charley Read Online Free PDF

Creeleys,whom she regarded as harmless relics of the past. The younger Creeleys were different and of considerable interest to her. Especially Eddie Creeley.
    â€˜Lots of faces you’d know, Annie.’
    â€˜Don’t tell me,’ said Annie, trying as ever to shut out what she could not bear, past, present and future.
    Didi drank the coffee that her sister had poured for her and ate a sandwich. Then swallowed what she was eating. ‘Don’t worry about the Creeleys, love. They’re nothing now. The old ones were stinkers but the young lot are all right. I like Eddie.’ She took her sister’s hand and gave it a little pat. ‘You’ve got Caroline in the flat upstairs.’ It was true that Caroline seemed to her more of an absence than presence. ‘You said yourself she helped.’
    â€˜She does,’ Annie admitted. The flat at the top of the old house, with its own entrance up a metal fire escape, was let to C. Royal, it said so on a printed card. ‘But she has a job. She’s away a lot.’
    â€˜They were talking about the murder.’ Didi had finished her sandwich. ‘Marianna Manners. I wonder if we ever saw her? In the supermarket or getting on the Tube at Spinnergate maybe, but without knowing.’
    She knew it was better to bring the subject of murder out into the open. ‘Don’t let her hide from the world,’ the social worker had said. ‘She can face it, she can do it, never you mind.’ He was an Alex C. Edwards. Wonder what the C stands for, Didi had thought? He said he had to use it to distinguish himself from another A. Edwards, but Didi thought he liked it. Carolus, Cornell, or what?
    He was a nice man, Alex C. Edwards, too nice really for this world. He’s in love with Annie, of course. This ingenuous comment being her way of recording sexual attraction.

CHAPTER 2
    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 theyhad 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