Faith (36 page)

‘I really liked Gloria,’ Laura said, smiling as she remembered the many chats they’d had in the past. ‘And she did know Jackie very well – they used to drop in on each other all the time.’

‘She liked you too,’ Stuart said. ‘And just for the record, she’s another firmly on your side.’

Laura beamed. Discovering that two people she cared about were on her side was like striking gold.

‘Is there anyone that might want to stitch you up, Laura?’ David asked.

‘A cast of millions,’ she said ruefully. ‘But it isn’t feasible that any of them could have done it. How could they be sure I’d turn up at the right moment?’

‘On the face of it I agree that it’s not likely,’ Stuart said. ‘But the more I’ve puzzled over it, the more I’m sure whoever did do it knew both of you well enough to gauge your reactions accurately. I’m certain there was an incident at Brodie Farm earlier that morning, and I think it’s very probable that the person involved overheard Jackie call you. Maybe they knew that whatever game they had would be up if the pair of you put your heads together. But they must have had a real grievance against you too, or why would they wait to kill Jackie until you were due to arrive?’

‘To muddy the waters?’ Laura suggested.

‘Possibly, but most murders are done on the spur of the moment out of panic or extreme anger. Most of us would calm down and change our minds if we had to wait. But if you had a grudge against the person who was due to arrive, you could nurse your wrath, knowing it would be killing two birds with one stone. So let’s think who could be mad enough with Jackie to kill her, and hate you enough to want to see you punished for it.’

‘Jackie’s husband, Roger, could fit those criteria,’ David pointed out. ‘I’m not convinced from what you’ve told me about him that his separation from Jackie was as amicable as he claimed. And he had a lot to gain if Jackie died. You also said he flew off the handle about Laura.’

‘But Goldsmith said he was questioned by the police, and that he was proved to be in London at the time,’ Stuart said. ‘Besides, the forensic report stated that the position of the stab wound indicated it was either made by a woman or a man less than five feet nine. Roger is well over six feet tall.’

‘That might be correct if the attacker just struck out wildly, but not if they aimed for her heart with the intention of killing. And people do fake alibis,’ David said sagely. ‘You know him pretty well, Stuart – does he have the kind of friends who would lie for him?’

‘I don’t know about friends,’ Stuart replied. ‘His alibi was that he was seen on his building site on both the day of the murder and the following one. A great many men come and go on a building site in the course of a day; anyone would be hard pressed to remember exactly who was there and who wasn’t. But anyone thinking his job was on the line might say he saw him there.’

‘Then maybe we should find the man who gave him the alibi and question him?’ David suggested.

‘That could prove difficult. Builders come and go, as I said, and even if we could track him down, I doubt he’d tell us anything different,’ Stuart sighed.

‘Roger would cheerfully see me hang just for a parking fine.’ Laura frowned. ‘He’s always disliked me. But I can’t really believe he’d kill Jackie. Things were good between them. Jackie would have told me if there was anything wrong.’

‘Would she?’ Stuart questioned. ‘I’m not so sure about that, Laura, not if it had anything to do with you, like helping you get your shop.’

‘Maybe, but she would have told Belle. There’s no love lost between her and Roger, so if she knew he’d been hassling Jackie she’d have jumped right in and told the police the minute she got the news Jackie was dead.’

Stuart looked disappointed.

‘Okay, let’s put Roger aside for now,’ David suggested. ‘Laura, you implied that there were many people who have a grudge against you. So suppose we narrow that field and you think how many of them also knew Jackie?’

‘There’s Stuart,’ Laura said with a grin. ‘But we can safely rule him out. Charles, Belle’s husband, has never liked me either because I tried to talk her out of marrying him. He referred to me as the cuckoo in the nest. He did have some up-and-downers with Jackie too, the main one being that she influenced Belle in moving to Scotland.’

Stuart told them how he’d seen Charles’s car at Brodie Farm. ‘Could he have been having an affair with Jackie? Or could Jackie have had something on him that she threatened to tell Belle about?’

‘The last is a possibility,’ Laura said thoughtfully. ‘There was a certain tension between them. But we can rule out Jackie having an affair with him. She wouldn’t have touched him with a bargepole, she had always despised him.’

‘Why did he agree to move near her then?’ David asked.

‘I never really got to the bottom of that.’ Laura frowned. ‘I was pretty preoccupied at the time, but I got the idea Charles had a few business problems and had to liquidate his assets back in London. Property up here was much cheaper, and I assumed at the time he was going to do some developing. But they hadn’t been in Crail very long when Barney was killed. After that I was so out of it for a long time that I didn’t take any interest in what he or Belle was doing.’

‘He couldn’t have killed Jackie anyway because he was playing golf at St Andrews at the time of her death,’ David pointed out. ‘The police had to phone the bar there to get him to come home when they broke the news to Belle.’

‘That alibi is as fuzzy as Roger’s,’ Stuart retorted. ‘The golf course is huge, he could have come and gone several times during the day without anyone noticing. Just because he was in the bar when the police called doesn’t mean he was there all day.’

‘Then we’ll investigate him,’ David said. ‘Anyone else, Laura?’

‘There is Robbie Fielding,’ she said tentatively, looking at Stuart to see if he remembered that name.

Stuart gave her a long, cool look. ‘Casino Man?’ he said.

Laura nodded, wishing she didn’t have to remind him of her betrayal.

‘He was once my boss, David,’ she said, avoiding looking at Stuart. ‘First in the casino, and later I did some modelling for him. I pulled a fast one on him and started my own company. At the time he put the word out that he was going to mark me for life.’

David was looking at her with keen interest. ‘Did he know Jackie?’

‘Yes, very well. He was instrumental in her getting Brodie Farm.’

‘In what way?’

‘I don’t know exactly, but she was after it and couldn’t get it. At the time I was still on friendly terms with Robbie, and I introduced them to each other. I think he must have leaned on someone, because the next thing the farm was hers at a very low price. I was a bit worried about that because I knew he was a slimy bastard and I warned Jackie that he never did anything for nothing. It is quite possible that he came back to her, calling in his debt.’

The two men exchanged glances, and Laura blushed. Even after everything she’d been through over the years, the period between Stuart leaving her and Barney’s death was the part of her life she would most like to erase. Stuart knew about the glamour modelling – Jackie had told her that he’d seen her in a magazine and shown it to her. But he probably hadn’t known that it was Robbie Fielding who got her into it. Or what it led to.

‘Did the police investigate him?’ David asked.

Laura shook her head.

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t ever tell them about him because it didn’t occur to me then that he could be a suspect. Things were quite bad enough for me without my having to admit the kind of work I’d done for him.’

‘Is he still in Edinburgh?’ David asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Laura said. ‘The last time I saw him he was driving through Morningside, but that was over three years ago. It panicked me a bit, I got the idea he could be keeping tabs on me. I asked around about him and I was told he owned a pub somewhere around the Grassmarket. But as I say, that was three years ago, he might not be there now.’

Stuart had said nothing during her interchange with David, but suddenly he leaned towards Laura across the table. ‘You’d better tell us about you and him.’

Laura licked her lips nervously. ‘Must I?’

Stuart nodded. ‘We can’t investigate him without knowing what went on between you.’

‘There isn’t time before the bell goes, and anyway –’ She stopped, reluctant to admit that she was too ashamed to talk about it to them.

‘Could you write it down?’ David asked, perhaps understanding her reluctance. ‘You probably need time on your own to get it all straight anyway.’

Laura shot him a grateful glance. ‘Yes, that might be better,’ she said. ‘I blanked out so much of the past when Barney was killed.’

Stuart had a distant look in his eyes. She wondered whether that was because he was thinking back to the events in the Caledonian Hotel.

But she decided she was wrong when he suddenly suggested David should book into Belle’s guest house for a couple of nights. ‘I think you could gain her confidence, get her to talk about Charles and have a snoop round.’

‘Will I be safe with her?’ David grinned. ‘You said she was something of a maneater!’

‘Belle!’ Laura exclaimed. ‘Of course she isn’t!’ Stuart chuckled. ‘Sometimes those closest to people can’t see them clearly,’ he said. ‘But you’ll be all right, David, just bang on about Julia and the kids, that should put her off.’

David told Laura that his wife and children were flying up to Scotland for a holiday in Oban in a fortnight’s time when school broke up for the summer, but until then he was at Stuart’s disposal.

‘I’ve rented a flat,’ Stuart said. ‘That’s near the Grassmarket too, so we might run into Fielding.’

‘We’ve got a lot of ground to cover to find something to base your appeal on, Laura,’ David said quickly, glancing at Stuart as if afraid he was about to take the law into his own hands. ‘But I’m hopeful. Just from what I know already it seems clear to me that the police didn’t investigate very thoroughly, and your solicitor didn’t build up much of a defence.’

Stuart took out a card and pen and wrote down his address for her. ‘Write to me here about Casino Man,’ he said. ‘We are going to try and get permission for another visit in two weeks’ time. It shouldn’t be a problem, they make special arrangements for people who have to come a long way to get here. In the meantime keep your chin up, I’ll ring Meggie tonight and tell her I’ve seen you. Is there any message that you’d like me to pass on?’

‘Just that I think about her and Ivy all the time,’ she said. ‘And that her letter made me very happy.’

After Stuart and David had left, Laura went back to her block. She smiled as some of the other women made saucy remarks about her two male visitors, but she didn’t stop to talk to anyone.

Back in her cell, she lay down on the bed. She knew she must trawl through the years between Stuart leaving and Barney’s death, but she was reluctant to for she knew how painful it was going to be.

She had never had much time for people who used the excuse ‘I had no choice’ for doing something they knew to be wrong. In her experience there was always an alternative; it was just that mostly the honourable, honest or legal route was harder or less lucrative.

That was exactly how it was for her, and the only excuse she could offer up for that first step on a road she knew to be the wrong one was that she already felt so bad about herself, it didn’t seem to matter.

Everything came crashing down around her after Stuart left. She was devastated, unable to believe that through her own stupidity she’d lost the man she loved. Barney kept crying for him and asking when he was coming home, and every day she felt as if she was sinking further and further into a black hole.

With no one to babysit Barney she had to ring the casino and say she couldn’t come back to work, and while she was trapped in the flat, day after day, night after night, the memories of Stuart pressed in on her. He had filled the place with his warm presence; even when he was at work the essence of him remained, his smell, his voice, his laughter. But once his father had removed his belongings, there was a void which nothing could fill.

The cupboards and shelves he’d built so lovingly were a constant reproach, not only bringing back memories of him sawing and sanding, a pencil tucked behind his ear, but evidence of how much he wanted to create a stable home for them all.

For a while she could still smell him on the bedding, finding an odd sock or work shirt would bring on a wave of grief, and at night she would remain sleepless, the cold, empty space beside her a constant reminder of her infidelity.

Fleeing back to London seemed the answer to everything in the first few days, but when Jackie wrote to say Stuart was there, working for her, that door slammed in her face. Jackie obviously knew exactly what had happened. ‘
He’s a good man, Laura, he deserved better than that
,’ was her comment, and in the absence of any questions as to how she was managing, or even asking for her side of the story, Laura knew she could expect no sympathy or help.

After two weeks she knew that she would have to go cap in hand to the Assistance for help. She couldn’t find a job which would fit in with Barney’s school hours and the rent was due. She toyed with the idea of selling her car – she couldn’t afford to drive it after all – but she was reluctant to do that, for if a job did turn up, then she might need it.

The Assistance was now called Social Security, but to her there was still the same stigma as when she went to them with her mother as a child. The Edinburgh office had the same nicotine-impregnated walls and ceiling, and the same stale smell she remembered from London. The officials were marginally less curt and unsympathetic, but the wait was every bit as long, and her fellow claimants made her shudder. Many were drunks and down-and-outs, with filthy clothes, stinking to high heaven, and they lurched around the waiting room muttering and swearing. There were slovenly young girls with babies in their arms who looked malevolently at Laura’s smart clothes. Chain-smoking, cocky young men talked loudly about their misfortunes, peppering their speech with swear words. The handful of people who were neatly dressed like her avoided eye contact with anyone, perhaps afraid of being contaminated.