A Coffin for Charley (4 page)

‘Did she say why?'

‘I am too dominating, too successful, she needs to lose me.'

‘I see.' He wondered if he did. It was a fair description of Letty: successful, bossy. But were daughters supposed to mind that?

‘But really, I think, she is our mother's descendant. Every so often she must shake herself free and depart.'

‘You are taking it very well.'

‘No, I'm not. I'm trembling with fear inside. Which is
why I have engaged a private detective to find her. Just locate her … Stella recommended one.'

‘Did I?' Stella was surprised.

‘Well, you talked of him. Tash. You probably know of him?' She turned to her brother.

‘He's known,' said Coffin tersely. The Tash Agency had been around for some time.

‘He's seems efficient and to have a good reputation. I inquired around. And he's attractive. I like him for that. Lovely fair hair with bright brown eyes, and well groomed. I didn't want a seedy, backroom sort of man.'

‘Certainly not that,' said Coffin. ‘But he's pretty much a one man band. Can he cover the field?'

‘I think he can do it; he has some help. I'm convinced she's still in London. He thinks not.'

Coffin still looked doubtful. In his opinion London was no place for a girl of eighteen to roam around in. Was she on drugs? Did she have a boyfriend? He considered asking Letty but decided now was not the moment. ‘You can always call on me.'

Letty smiled at him and nodded. ‘So now you know why I am taking the state of near-bankruptcy and the decline in the theatre with relative calm.'

Stella put her hand gently on Letty's arm. ‘I too have a daughter.'

‘But you know where she is?'

‘Yes, she's putting together a play for the Edinburgh Fringe. She's in the family business, I'm afraid. I had a card from Fife. She was there last week.'

A small crowd was leaving the precincts of the Theatre Workshop as they came home. Most of them were young people and they were talking loudly and cheerfully.

Coffin raised an eyebrow. ‘What's this?'

‘The Friends of St Luke's Theatre are auditioning for their summer play. They're throwing it open to all this year because we're using it as preparation for the Drama School. See who comes in, sniff out talent, get local interest.' Money, she meant.

The Friends, a redoubtable group of local ladies, would
be one of the great supports of the new Drama School if she was lucky.

‘What are they doing?'

‘Oh, an Agatha Christie mystery. It usually is.'

In bed that night Stella turned to her husband. ‘It's nice on the top of the tower like this. I think I prefer it to my place.'

Both the animals had come up with them, Bob on the bed and the cat watching from the window through which he would shortly depart on to a lower roof.

‘Open the window for Tiddles.'

Coffin, who was making a neat pile of his possessions on his bed table, coins stacked, clean handkerchief beside the pile, keys by a pad of paper with a pencil, obliged.

‘Funny business about Letty and the daughter,' said Stella. ‘I don't always understand her.'

‘Who does?'

Letty was his much younger sister, child of his errant mother and an American serviceman. There was a third sibling called William, issue of yet another father, who was a successful lawyer in Edinburgh. The one thing you could say about his disappearing mother (who must be presumed dead) was that her offspring were surprisingly different and surprisingly successful. He himself had lived in ignorance for years of his true parenthood and of the existence of Letty and William. Even now, he found it hard to believe in them. Well, not Letty. She was around so much. But he still felt surprise sometimes when she walked through the door.

‘Did you believe what she said?'

‘Well, you can never tell with Letty … No, not altogether.'

‘What's this private detective like?'

‘You know him,' Coffin said tersely. He did not like to be reminded.

‘I met him once and I paid his bill, that's all. Is he honest?'

‘As far as I know.'

Stella settled back against the pillows. Without any
conscious effort, she had turned what had been a bachelor's masculine bedroom into a feminine boudoir. The fourposter bed, an early extravagance of Coffin's, had been piled with pillows and silk cushions. She had brought in an embroidered bedcover and there was always a scent of rose geranium.

Coffin liked it but sometimes felt like a member of an alien species.

‘John …?'

‘Yes?'

‘Why did Job Titus say that about Marianna coming to the Theatre?'

‘He just wanted to vomit in my backyard,' said Coffin with some bitterness.

There was silence for a moment.

‘I don't like this stalker,' she said softly. ‘Charley frightens me.'

He drew her down towards him. ‘Don't worry, I'll look after you.'

And Letty, and Letty's child, and Annie Briggs and all the people in my command.

But he knew that whatever he said he could not offer total protection. The lunatic always got through.

Annie Briggs, formerly Dunne, was pleased to see her younger sister home. ‘How did the audition go?'

‘I think I'm in. Just a small part, one of the policewomen in
Witness for the Prosecution,
was a man originally but they have more women auditioning. I've got some good lines.'

‘I am glad, dear.' And glad you are home, I am always nervous when you are out late.

‘I'm in the second company.' Anxious to take in as many young amateurs as possible, the ruling body, the Friends, had decided to have two casts who would appear alternately throughout the run of two weeks.

‘You'd be surprised at the people who turned up. Even one of those Creeleys.'

‘Ah.'

Didi did not share her sister's terror of the Creeleys,
whom she regarded as harmless relics of the past. The younger Creeleys were different and of considerable interest to her. Especially Eddie Creeley.

‘Lots of faces you'd know, Annie.'

‘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.'

‘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.'

‘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.

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.

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.