Faith (16 page)

Because there was someone in the house, and he didn’t want them to think he was prying, he made a point of going straight on across the field at the back of the farm before completing the square route back to the lane. But as he turned, with the open farmyard on his left, he glanced in and saw a bright red convertible BMW parked there.

Instinctively he knew it was Charles’s car. He hadn’t been told what car Belle’s husband drove, but it was the kind of flashy motor he’d always gone for. There were two other cars as well, a well-worn Landrover and a green Volvo estate, but they were parked over by the stable rooms, and they were the type of cars he would expect the kind of person who took self-catering holidays in Scotland to drive.

He memorized the car number and walked quickly back to the lane, then jotted it down in a notebook to check on later. Belle had said she handled the letting here, and she’d also said she didn’t know where Charles was today. Why would she say that if he was up here doing some maintenance?

Belle had met Charles Howell just a few weeks after Stuart turned her down. He remembered Jackie didn’t approve of Charles because he was thirty-nine, divorced, with two teenage children, and he was a playboy who was renowned for always having a pretty young blonde on his arm.

‘I don’t like the slimy bastard,’ was what Jackie said, never one to mince her words. ‘And I don’t like the thought of Belle following in my footsteps and going for men with money.’

‘You didn’t marry Roger for his money, did you?’ Stuart asked.

He could see Jackie now. They were in the kitchen of her house in Kensington, a room that Stuart always looked back on fondly, not just because it was the place she comforted him in when he first arrived in London, or because she fed him there so often in the months that followed, but because it reflected her personality so well. It had a passing resemblance to the ‘Country Kitchen’ style that was so in vogue at that time, in as much as the units were real wood and there was a central farmhouse-style table and chairs. But a whole wallful of shelves were filled with bright enamelware, fancy cheese and butter dishes, jugs, plates and bowls. She didn’t care much for real antiques; she bought items for their vivid colours or because they were funny – a cow in a bath, a frog sitting on a toilet. Junk was how she described it, but grouping it en masse made it almost a work of art.

She had an ‘Afro’ perm at the time and it looked like a halo of strawberry-blonde candyfloss. She wore a skin-tight denim catsuit studded with various military badges and her green eyes were full of mischief.

‘Let’s just say that Roger’s money helped me to love him,’ she laughed. ‘But it hasn’t helped to make me pregnant. At least Roger would love it if we had a child. Charles will never want Belle to have one; all he wants is a nubile blonde in his bed.’

Stuart had thought Jackie was a little harsh on Charles then – after all, she hardly knew him – but within a few years he discovered the man was much worse than she thought.

Charles had made his mark during the sixties with a string of record shops and a couple of night clubs. By 1974 he was investing in property, which was how he came to meet Jackie and Belle. Later, Stuart worked on several of these properties, and took an immediate dislike to the man, for he was overbearing, bigoted and dishonest. He was undeniably handsome, with jet-black hair, dark blue eyes and a cleft chin that women seemed to find irresistible. Stuart remembered how he used to police the work being done on his properties, always turning up in a flashy car wearing a hand-tailored suit, and berating the men for taking too long over the job. He skimped on everything, he cared nothing for the safety of his workers, or of those who would live in the properties. On one job he got the plumber, who wasn’t even properly qualified, to put in gas boilers which were sub-standard. Stuart had seen electrical work which was potentially dangerous, and plumbing that would be leaking within weeks. By the end of the seventies Charles was involved in building entire estates of housing, but Stuart had long since declined to work for him because he wasn’t prepared to be a party to dangerous and unethical practices.

Jackie was right about him refusing to allow Belle to have a child. Stuart heard she got pregnant but Charles made her have an abortion. He’d heard too that there were other women in his life, so maybe that was part of the reason for Belle’s bitterness as well. He thought it quite likely that Charles had one at Brodie Farm right now, and only a complete bastard would conduct an affair in the house of his murdered sister-in-law.

Once back in the lane, Stuart walked along to the house belonging to Angus McFee, the neighbour who had witnessed Laura driving to Brodie Farm on the day of the murder. He hoped he might find a cross-country route back to where he’d left his car, for he didn’t want Charles to see him up there if he should come along the lane.

McFee’s house was at least a quarter of a mile from Brodie Farm, and as Stuart reached it he saw that it did have a first-class view of the lane. If the man had been working on his upstairs window he could probably see almost the whole way to Crail, and several miles the other way which led to Anstruther. Yet when Stuart turned to look back at Brodie Farm, he saw it was impossible to see into the yard of the farmhouse from here. Even more importantly, he couldn’t see the track up to Brodie Farm, at least not the part that went beyond the farm. He knew it did continue –he’d crossed the ruts of it while walking round the back of the property. The track was very narrow, scarcely wider than a car, and it had snaked round the far side of the farm and down the hill. He had no idea where it led to, perhaps only to other isolated cottages, but the chances were it would eventually link up with a proper road. A car could have come to the farm from that direction, and left that way too, and Mr McFee wouldn’t have been able to see it from his house, not unless he was standing on his roof.

‘So much for your evidence, Mr McFee,’ he murmured, and wondered why the advocate defending Laura hadn’t brought up the existence of the lane during the trial.

5

Laura smiled as she read Stuart’s letter. He clearly thought that all letters to prisoners were vetted very carefully, and that maybe she wouldn’t get the letter at all if there was any reference to the crime or people involved in the trial. He mentioned ‘my jaunt around Fife’ as if he was touring around on holiday. But she knew when he said he’d met a blonde barmaid called Gloria that he’d been in Cellardyke, and that the ‘faded rose’ in a guest house had to be Belle.

She was a little puzzled when he mentioned standing by a farm looking at the view, considering where the narrow lane might lead to, but after a few moments she suddenly realized what he was trying to tell her.

She had no idea where that lane led to, she’d never been down it, but clearly Stuart saw it as a possible way for the real killer to have got in and out of the farm without being spotted. He asked too how her writing was coming on, and that he hoped she was finding it cathartic.

She had always sniggered at that word. It made her think of losers sitting around in group therapy discussing their addictions. She had once looked it up in a dictionary in the library and found it actually meant ‘purging’.

Stuart using the word made her laugh out loud. She imagined that writing down her past history would act like a dose of laxative.

Yet she had written about her childhood, and the reasons why she made up a new one for herself. Just yesterday she’d posted it to Stuart. She guiltily wondered how he would react if he knew she nearly didn’t send it as it crossed her mind he could sell it to the newspapers.

She half smiled at herself, thinking that perhaps it had been cathartic after all, for she could now see that the real damage Vincent had done to her was leaving her with the inability to trust implicitly.

Yet writing about that part of her life was the easy bit; she was, after all, just a sad kid who tried to rub out the areas of her past which hurt. It was going to be far more difficult and painful to study the adult Laura, for she
had
done things which were inexcusable. But to examine Jackie’s big role in her life, and the forces and reasons they both turned out as they did, she felt she must look back and write it all down. She didn’t have to show it to anyone, and perhaps by being totally honest with herself, she’d find some kind of consolation.

In the New Year of ’62 Roger and Steven drove over to Muswell Hill to take Laura and Jackie out for a drink at Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath. It began to snow heavily as they were on their way to the pub, so the date was cut short as the men were afraid they might not be able to get home later.

As they left they promised they would come over again at the weekend. Laura’s seventeenth birthday was on the Saturday, and Frank and Lena bought her a second-hand record player, something she’d wanted ever since she moved into her bedsitter. But Roger and Steven didn’t phone or turn up, which completely spoiled the day for her.

They didn’t ring until the middle of the following week, just when the girls had given up hope of ever seeing them again. They invited them to a party at their flat on the Saturday evening, and Roger suggested they should stay the night because the party would go on till the early hours.

Both Laura and Jackie were so excited that they couldn’t eat or sleep and they had endless discussions about what they should wear and whether the invitation to stay the night meant the men expected them to sleep with them. Jackie took the view that it was high time she lost her virginity anyway, and as Roger was such a good kisser he’d probably be a good lover too.

Laura pretended she felt the same but inwardly she was quaking with fear. The memory of Vincent’s erect penis had stayed with her, and the fact that she liked Steven made no difference to her – she was quite sure that sex with any man would be disgusting.

It was bitterly cold on the day of the party and Jackie decided she was going to wear jeans and a jumper rather than a party dress. ‘I doubt anyone will dress up when it’s so cold,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll just look silly and we’ll be miserable if we’re shivering all night.’

Jackie, with her vivid red hair and green eyes, would never be overlooked even if she dressed in a sack, but Laura felt she looked insipid unless she displayed her legs and cleavage. She intended to look sensational in her new slinky red dress with bootlace straps and peep-toe high heels, and despite Jackie’s advice she went ahead and wore it.

As they came out of South Kensington tube station the icy wind tore at her hair. She’d put it up in a beehive the evening she met Steven, but that was an amateurish affair achieved only with endless backcombing and hair lacquer. She’d spent two hours in the hairdresser’s this time and they’d teased fat curls into a work of art, which was now being ruined. Her thin coat was no protection from the cold and her teeth began to chatter.

Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ was blaring out as they arrived at number 220 Cromwell Road. The street door was open and a group of men were carting crates of beer up the stairs.

The flat was on the second floor and to Laura’s disappointment it wasn’t the kind of elegant pied-à-terre she’d imagined, but three rather squalid rooms, and a bathroom shared with other tenants.

From the moment they walked in through the open door of the flat, Laura knew she should have followed her friend’s advice as everyone else was casually dressed in warm clothes. Roger greeted them warmly and as he took Laura’s coat he said she looked lovely, but she felt he only said so out of faint embarrassment.

Steven was busy setting up a bar, and shouted over that Roger would introduce them to everyone. It seemed the only drinks were red wine, beer or cider, none of which Laura liked, but even more worrying was that Steven didn’t come over to her.

Roger gave both girls a glass of cider, and then, taking Jackie’s hand, he led her off to meet the other guests, while Laura tagged along behind. To be fair to Roger, he didn’t leave her out in his introductions, but everyone had posh voices, and the way they looked at Laura made her feel as if she was wearing no clothes at all. It didn’t help that all the light bulbs had been replaced with red ones, she supposed to try to create a more intimate atmosphere, and when she glanced in a mirror she was horrified to see it made her skimpy dress looked even brighter red and gave her bare shoulders and arms a sickly pallor. Worse still, she didn’t look sensational at all, only tarty, and she wished the floor would open up and swallow her.

Jackie was in her element. Not only was she dressed like everyone else, but she was well used to meeting all kinds of people at her parents’ parties. Within minutes she was chatting away to people as if she’d known them all her life.

Laura quickly downed her cider and turned to a blonde girl standing by her.

‘Do you live around here?’ she asked.

‘In the flat upstairs,’ the girl replied. ‘I share with them,’ she added, pointing out two girls who were dancing together. ‘And you?’

There was something about the crisp way the girl spoke which unnerved Laura still further. Despite her jeans and sweater, lack of makeup and hair that looked as if she’d just got out of bed, she was very pretty, with wide blue eyes, long lashes, and a plump, pouty mouth. Laura immediately felt she was’ competition and after Steven.

‘I have a flat in North London,’ she said trying to speak and sound like the other girl. ‘Jackie and I met Steven and Roger in the City after an office party at Christmas.’

‘Steven told me about you,’ the girl said. ‘But I didn’t expect you to be so young.’

Feeling she’d been slighted, Laura didn’t even attempt to carry on a conversation and went back to the bar to find Steven. But he was roaring with laughter at something one of a crowd of men around him was saying, so she just topped up her glass and drank it quickly.

Steven did come over to her several times during the evening, but he kept darting off to pour drinks and change records, and Laura became convinced that he wasn’t really interested in her, and she’d only been invited because Roger didn’t think Jackie would have come without her.