Shining Threads by Audrey Howard Read Free Book Online Page A

sighed from her anguished throat Charlie Greenwood’s sturdy frame had smashed against the door taking it from its
hinges as though it was made of cardboard, sweeping it into the cabin. The chair which had been placed beneath the door-knob went with it.
    The man was still fumbling with his trouser buttons when Charlie fell on him. He was a thin, sallow-hued, round-shouldered little man with a hank of dusty hair who, if something was not done to
stop it, would be snapped in two like a bit of dry stick in Charlie Greenwood’s maddened grasp.
    ‘You rotten bastard . . . you filth . . . you stinking piece of filth . . . I’ll kill you, kill you for this, d’you hear?’ Charlie was yelling, out of his mind, it
appeared, his face white and sweating, his eyes staring at something which surely, thought the overlooker who had followed him in, had really nothing to do with what had been done to the frightened
child. He seemed to be looking at and acting upon images of such horror and obscenity, awakened by the scene in this room, that Edwards knew that if he himself did not act quickly, Charlie
Greenwood would commit murder.
    Nelly Beale stood against the wall, her eyes wide and shocked. She was fully clothed but down the inside of her bare, grubby leg ran a dribble of blood. She was nine years old and almost at the
end of her own six-and-a-half hour shift as her older sister’s ‘piecer’. When it was finished, when she had washed herself in the women’s washroom Kit Chapman had installed
twenty-five years ago, when she had eaten her ‘baggin’ in the dining-room provided for the workers, she would spend the afternoon doing her sums, reading her book from which over the
weekend she had learned by heart a whole passage to ‘say’ to the teacher. She would be a little girl in a normal little girl’s world, singing, playing a tambourine, giggling as
little girls do with others. But now, in a moment of animal lust, her young innocence had been cruelly taken from her.
    Her sister ran to her wordlessly, swift in her need to remove her from the violent destruction which threatened. She put her arms about her and led her from the room where, it seemed to her, not
only rape but murder was to be done today.
    ‘Mr Greenwood, sir . . . Dear God in ’eaven . . . Mr Greenwood . . . leave ’im be . . . Christ man, thee’ll do fer ’im . . .’ Edwards was grunting, his own
considerable strength unable to control Charlie Greenwood’s killing rage. The molester of the child was screaming like a pig with a butcher’s knife to its throat and in the spinning
room women began to cry out, their machines coming to a standstill, threads snapping and children running this way and that for want of direction.
    There was a cracking of bone and the sallow-faced under-tackler went as limp as an old dish-rag in Charlie Greenwood’s grasp and as he slid, like water which can be held in no man’s
hand, to the floor, Charlie regained his senses. Edwards, who had grasped him fiercely from behind about the arms and chest, slowly, carefully, stepped away from him, hardly daring to look at the
crumpled heap on the floor, though it was nowt to him if the man lived or died. The heap stirred and groaned, then was violently sick and Mr Greenwood inched away from him looking as though he
could quite easily be sick himself. The man fumbled his way to his feet holding the arm which Edwards had heard snap, shivering and sweating at the same time, and when Mr Greenwood lifted a hand to
wipe his own sweating face, recoiled away from him.
    ‘Nay, I’ll not touch you again, man,’ Mr Greenwood croaked. ‘I’m only sorry I soiled me hands on you in’t first place. I thought never to see the likes
o’ this again, not in my mill, anyroad, but it seems I was wrong. But you’ll not satisfy your perversions again in this town, no, nor in bloody Lancashire, if I’ve
’owt to do wi’ it.’ In his distress Charlie Greenwood had begun to