Faith (15 page)

His head told him it was wrong to make love to a woman with her small child so close, and he felt too that he ought to know more about her first, but when she began opening the buttons on his shirt and kissing his chest, all he wanted was to possess her.

He’d had about five different girlfriends before, but they paled into insignificance beside Laura. She was like a tigress the first time, clawing at him, devouring him in a way that was both thrilling and frightening. He came far too fast, and collapsed against her breasts feeling a failure, but she lifted his face up and kissed him.

‘We’ve got all night yet,’ she said.

Even now, twenty-three years and scores of other women later, that night was the one Stuart could hold up as the very best in his life. Since then he had made love all over the world, in luxurious hotels, romantic hideaways, in swimming pools, cars, fields and even trains, but nothing could ever top that night on an old stained mattress in a farm outhouse.

It had everything – wild passion, exquisite tenderness and raunchy fun – and Laura taught him more about women and sex that night than most men learn in a lifetime. When dawn came creeping through the window, they were sated, lying entwined and dripping with perspiration. For him it was love, the kind that could only come once in a lifetime. He was ready to lay down his life for her, and he believed then that it was the same for her.

‘On holiday?’

Stuart was startled by the question, and surprised to find it was asked by an attractive blonde with a couple of empty glasses in her hands.

‘You were miles away,’ she laughed, showing large, very white teeth. ‘Perhaps I should have left you there?’

She was curvy and looked as if she’d poured herself into her jeans and slinky, low-necked top. He thought she was probably around the same age as him.

‘Not at all,’ he grinned. ‘I was remembering coming here as a child for holidays. Maybe we played together on the beach?’

‘If I’d played with you I would have remembered,’ she laughed. ‘I’d have stuck you in a lobster pot and waited for you to grow up.’

‘I’m Stuart Macgregor,’ he said holding out his hand, delighted that he’d found someone who’d not only clearly lived here all her life, but had a lively sense of humour.

‘And I’m Gloria White,’ she said as she shook his hand. ‘I know a dozen Stuarts, but I don’t think I’ve met you before. Where do you stay?’

‘I’m from Edinburgh, but I’ve been working away for a long while,’ he replied.

‘So what’s brought you back just now?’ she asked.

‘Hearing an old friend was dead,’ Stuart said. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

‘I’ll have a beer, thank you,’ she said. ‘And would I know your friend?’

‘Maybe. Jackie Davies.’

‘Och, that was a terrible business.’ She winced. ‘I couldnae understand it. I got to know Jackie when she bought her first cottage here. We became good friends, and when Laura came over from Edinburgh we’d all have a drink together. I liked their company, always so much laughing and so much to blether about. They told me they’d been friends since they were wee girls, and I couldnae believe it when people said Laura killed Jackie.’

Stuart told her how he had been out of the country and had come over here to see Belle. ‘Do you know her too?’ he asked.

Gloria nodded. ‘Aye, she and her husband stayed in the village when they were buying the place up at Crail. She’s having a hard time of it now, they say; she’d do better to sell up and go back to London.’

‘Because the guest house isn’t doing so well?’ Stuart asked. ‘I noticed she had no one staying there.’

Gloria shrugged. ‘There’s still a lot of bad feeling around, folk round here don’t like to be put under a spotlight, and they don’t like incomers. The auld ones grumble that they push up the house prices so the young people from here can’t afford them and have to leave.’

Stuart nodded in sympathy. ‘That’s happening everywhere now, but I suppose it’s worse here when there isn’t that much work about either.’

‘I always say that some of them need to get off their backsides and adapt,’ she said with a good-natured grin. ‘Jackie wasn’t born rich. She told me she made her money from property development, and if she could do it, so could others around here. What about you, Stuart? Were you born rich?’

Stuart laughed. ‘Definitely not! I lived in a tenement in Edinburgh and served my time as a joiner. It was Jackie who helped me on to the first rung on the ladder. I worked for her on her properties in London.’

‘Did you know Laura too?’

‘Aye, to my cost,’ he said and laughed lightly. ‘She broke my heart, Gloria, but she was the one who made me go to London, so I learned to forgive her.’

‘I liked her,’ Gloria said reflectively. ‘I know Jackie used to worry about her and the wee boy, and that maybe Laura was a careless mother, but it’s a tough one being a single mum. I know because I’m one. You have to make a living if you want them to have the things other kids have, you need friends too or you’d go mad with loneliness, but that’s bound to cut down on the time you’ve got to spend with your child.’

Stuart was touched by her sympathy for Laura. ‘People are always very quick to judge,’ he said. ‘But my mother used to say we need to walk a few miles in someone’s boots to know how it is for them.’

Gloria nodded in agreement. ‘It was a terrible thing that wee Barney died in that accident. It changed both Laura and Jackie; neither of them was quite the same again. But whatever passed between them, I’ve never been quite convinced Laura killed Jackie, not in my heart. How about you?’

It was very tempting to admit where he stood, but for all he knew Gloria might be as thick as thieves with Belle and the other witnesses. ‘I can’t believe it of her either,’ he said. ‘She could be wild, treacherous sometimes, but she and Jackie had a very special friendship, and I can’t imagine anything changing that. But then I’ve been away a long time, I can only go on what I’ve been told. Belle’s opinion is pretty damning.’

‘She’s an unhappy woman,’ Gloria said darkly. ‘I dinnae ken what made her and Charles come up here to live, but I know she didn’t want to be here, she’s always trailed her resentment about like a bad smell.’

‘She told me she loved it, and she had friends here!’

‘What friends?’ Gloria scoffed. ‘She’s too high and mighty to mix with most of us. I tried to be her friend at the start, but it was like flogging a dead horse. She doesnae understand friendship, that’s why she was so jealous of Laura.’

‘Was she? But Laura was really fond of Belle, at least she was when I knew her.’

‘Aye, Laura was fond of her, she dinnae see what was in the woman’s heart. But then Laura dinnae pay attention to what folk thought of her.’

Stuart half smiled, for that last remark was very perceptive. Laura had never been one to think about the effect she might have on anyone. He was a fine example, for it never occurred to Laura that a mere lad of twenty-one would be blown away by an experienced older woman, and she couldn’t comprehend his pain and anguish when she’d grown tired of him either.

‘You don’t think Belle did the dirty deed, do you?’ he joked.

Gloria chuckled. ‘And get her pretty manicured hands dirty? I dinnae think so, Stuart. Besides, her car was in the garage that day, and it’s a good long trek out to Brodie Farm for a woman who never even walks to do her messages.’

‘So do you favour anyone else as a suspect?’

She shook her head as if amused at the question.

‘What about the many lovers?’ Stuart prompted.

She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips. ‘That’s all best laid to rest,’ she said firmly. ‘Their families have suffered enough from their foolishness already without me making more of it. And now I must get back to work.’

Stuart left the pub and walked up the hill to the main road to catch the St Andrews bus back to Crail and his car. He felt somewhat justified in his faith in Laura now that he knew Gloria liked her and didn’t believe she was guilty; if nothing else, it proved he wasn’t totally crazy. Her views on Belle were interesting too. She hadn’t shot him down in flames either about Jackie’s lovers, which to him meant they not only existed, but she knew perfectly well who they were. He would bet that they were men she’d known all her life, and that was why she wouldn’t say anything more. He would have to find some other way to discover who they were.

Once back in his car, which was parked by Crail Tolbooth, he sat for a moment, suddenly daunted by just how difficult it was going to be to get at the truth of how Jackie died, two years on. Was he really up to it? He knew nothing about detection or law, and he knew precious little about how Jackie and Laura had lived in the last ten years and what went on between them.

But more than that, why should he care if Laura had been punished for a crime she hadn’t committed? She hadn’t given a damn about him when she played around with the man from the casino.

He could see himself on the London train, squashed between a very large woman who never stopped eating and a Glaswegian drunk who kept offering him a swig from his bottle of whisky. It was January 1975 and bitterly cold. The carriage was full of cigarette smoke which stung his eyes, but every time he closed them he saw Laura’s face, and the pain in his heart was so bad he felt he could easily die from it.

All he had in the world was about £10, a bag full of carpentry tools and a few clothes. He was scared, too, that Jackie’s offer to give him work might have been just hot air and he wouldn’t be able to find anywhere to live. He’d only met Jackie a few times on her brief visits to Scotland, and although she had seemed to be the dynamic businesswoman Laura had always described her as, he had no real proof of it. London was unknown territory to him too, he had no other contacts to find work, and if he failed to make it there he didn’t know what he was going to do.

‘But you did make it there, thanks to Jackie,’ he murmured to himself, shaking himself out of his reverie. ‘Even if you don’t owe anything to Laura, you do to Jackie. You’ve got to find out the truth for her sake.’

Instead of returning to Edinburgh as he’d intended, Stuart turned off on the lane that led to Brodie Farm, left his car outside the last cottages and began to walk the rest of the way. He had already driven here several times while checking the time it took from Edinburgh, but it was only by walking that he could get the real feel of the area, notice small landmarks and the other houses on the route which he’d hardly taken in while driving.

When Jackie had first bought Brodie Farm Stuart had been puzzled as to why she would buy a place inland. Fife’s attraction to him was the small, quaint coastal villages. He saw the rest of the county as rather flat and bleak, with none of the majesty of the Highlands, or the scenic beauty of the rolling hills and valleys of the Borders.

But as he walked down the lane, the sun on his back, he saw what Jackie must have seen – miles and miles of gently undulating fields, lush and green now with crops, a feeling of immense space. When he turned round to look back towards Crail, the sea was as blue as the sky, and suddenly he understood why Jackie had spoken of the freedom she felt here. For a girl who had grown up in London, hemmed in by houses, surrounded by people, her ears bombarded by traffic noise, it must have been wonderful to stand at her door seeing and hearing only the sounds of nature – the wind blowing the crops, birds wheeling overhead – and watching the colour of the sea change according to the weather. Stuart remembered her saying that being exposed to all the elements made her feel strong, that being able to see for miles and miles gave her power. He had laughed at the time, assuming it was another of her wacky ideas that would be thrown aside when a new one came to her. But though she stopped trying to convince others to embrace the simple life, she remained faithful to it. And now he was here in this wide open, vast space, feeling the wind tugging at his hair, he understood what she loved about it.

Brodie Farm was visible from a long way off because it stood up on slightly higher ground, surrounded by trees. Once Stuart was closer, he climbed on to a farm gate to study it in detail. The two-storey farmhouse and its single-storey outbuildings formed an open-ended square around the yard. When Jackie bought the place there were no windows on the outside walls; in fact, when she had shown him photographs of it, to him it looked like a tumbledown, forbidding fortress. He hadn’t aired his real opinion, that she was crazy to buy it, for by then he knew Jackie well enough to appreciate she had vision.

She had already drawn up tentative plans to convert each of the stables and other outhouses into guest rooms, but it was his suggestion that she put windows in the outside walls to make the rooms lighter, and give her guests the benefit of the extensive views across the countryside.

Stuart had never had the chance to see the place, not before she began the work, or during, or after, its completion. She had asked him if he’d like to manage the project, but he’d turned it down because he’d been offered work in South America, and anyway in those days he had no wish to return to Scotland, not while Laura was up there.

But it pleased him to see she had acted on his suggestion about the windows, and they, and the many trees and shrubs along the boundary of her land had softened the severity of the building. Seen now in bright sunshine, it looked so idyllic and peaceful it didn’t seem possible that a horrific murder had taken place there.

Once again he wondered what had caused Jackie to freak out that morning and phone Laura. She might have been troubled for some time, but in Stuart’s experience there was usually some dramatic incident which suddenly sent people over the edge.

Could someone have dropped in and threatened her? If they had hung around afterwards they might have heard her make the call to Laura, and panicked because they knew Jackie was likely to spill the beans when she arrived. But unless the neighbour who saw Laura and Michael Fenton’s cars was wrong, that would mean the killer had come on foot.

Stuart got down off the gate and continued along the lane, climbed over another gate near to Brodie Farm’s boundary fence and walked up the side of the field to make his way right round the property. To his surprise there was a window open upstairs in the farmhouse, and music from a radio wafted out. He was rather shocked that Belle had let the farmhouse, he had expected that she would only take bookings for the stable rooms, and leave Jackie’s home untouched. But perhaps that was naive of him; if Belle hadn’t got many bookings at her place, she probably needed the extra money.