A Coffin for Charley Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 visitedher 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.

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