Faith (41 page)

‘When are you going to realize that having Barney is the luckiest thing in the world?’ Jackie asked.

‘Bollocks!’ Laura shouted at her. ‘You make it sound like motherhood is some kind of privilege. It isn’t, it’s like having a ball and chain around your ankle.’

‘Then I’d give everything I’ve got to have a ball and chain,’ Jackie said.

That evening all Laura had really been aware of was that Jackie was suspicious about her modelling. Laura was on the defensive and what she’d said about motherhood wasn’t how she really felt, just a spur of the moment counter-attack.

But the next morning when she woke and remembered what was said, she suddenly realized Jackie was trying to tell her she was afraid she’d never have a child.

It had never occurred to her before that Jackie and Roger wanted children. She’d always seen them as the couple with everything and imagined that a child would be too much of a tie in their busy lives. But when she thought of how Jackie was with Barney, she realized she was in fact hungry for one of her own.

When she got downstairs Jackie was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. She had already got Barney up and given him his breakfast, and now he was out by the harbour playing tag with the other kids. ‘I’ll make another pot of tea,’ she said to Laura. ‘And maybe you’d like some aspirin too.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Laura said, feeling ashamed of herself. ‘I’m sorry if I was nasty last night. I was a bit depressed.’

‘I’m sorry too if you thought I was being judgmental about the pin-up picture,’ Jackie said. ‘I was just worried you were mixing with dodgy people.’

They agreed to put that tiff behind them, and over a fresh pot of tea they discussed what they would do that day. Jackie had just heard about Brodie Farm being put up for sale and thought they could go up there together and have a look around.

‘Before we do that, I want to know why you are afraid you can’t have a baby,’ Laura said. ‘Have you had any tests?’

‘Dozens,’ Jackie shrugged. ‘And they all say there is nothing wrong with me.’

‘What about Roger?’

Jackie’s face clouded over. ‘He won’t go for any. He gets really indignant at the suggestion it might be him. To be honest, it’s putting our marriage under a lot of strain. If he doesn’t care enough about why I want to get checked out, I don’t want to make love. If we don’t make love I’ve got no chance of getting preggy either. Got any suggestions?’

‘Lie back and think of England?’ Laura said, raising one eyebrow.

Jackie laughed. ‘Or maybe I should get myself a new stud.’

They saw Brodie Farm that day, and despite it being a ruin, Jackie instantly fell in love with it. Laura could see its potential, but she had a sneaky suspicion that its real attraction was that it would be a huge project which Jackie could use as an excuse to stay away from Roger. For the rest of the week she could talk of nothing else, and on several occasions she disappeared, only to come back an hour later saying she’d been up there again. Perhaps it was this preoccupation on her part that made her ask Laura at the end of the week about her job in the dress shop.

‘They can’t be very pleased that you need the whole of the school holidays off,’ she said. ‘And you must need the money?’

‘Well no, they weren’t pleased,’ Laura said. ‘But they had to lump it, I couldn’t take Barney with me. And yes, I could do with the money.’

‘Well, why don’t you go back to work then, and leave Barney with me? I’ve got to stay on through till September to oversee the renovations on that other cottage I bought. And I want to find out more about Brodie Farm. I could bring him back to you the day before he has to return to school.’

Laura felt a surge of excitement at the idea of going back to the city alone. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked. She could ring Don and see if she could get some extra sessions, and she could go out at night with Katy and the other girls.

‘Laura, I’d love to look after Barney.’ Jackie smiled. ‘Goodness knows when I’ll get to see him again! To me it would be bliss.’

Laura had ten days on her own, and she filled every moment of them. Sessions at the studio each day, and out partying in Glasgow by night. She only went home to Edinburgh once to get some more clothes, the rest of the time she slept on one of the other girls’ settees. Not that she slept much, for she was doing coke in the mornings, and took some speed at night to keep going. She hadn’t had so much fun in years, dancing, drinking and flirting with any man who looked as if he had a few bob.

She made a point of phoning Jackie every evening at six to check on Barney, but once that was done she could relax and think about the night ahead.

It was people she met that week that set her off on a new road. Up till then she didn’t have any real friends; she knew women from Barney’s school and the old neighbours in Caledonian Crescent, but they were people she only had the occasional chat with, they weren’t mates. Even Katy and the other girls from the studio had held themselves apart to begin with. To them she was ‘posh’ because she came from London and lived in Edinburgh. People in Glasgow tended to think anyone from Edinburgh was stuck up.

Yet when they saw she liked Glasgow, that she didn’t look down on them for living in tenements or council flats, and could party just like them, all the barriers came down. They saw her as one of them.

Laura smiled wryly as she remembered how good it felt to be accepted back then. The irony of it didn’t escape her. All her adult life she had struggled to erase her true background and climb the social ladder. But there she was at thirty-one, mixing with and loving people who lived and behaved much like the people back in Shepherds Bush. She’d come full circle, except it was a much darker circle, for instead of the women doing office cleaning or working in factories, they were in the sex industry. And the men in Glasgow didn’t work on building sites and go to the pub in their working clothes, they wore sharp suits, drove smart cars, and their work was dealing in drugs, pimping and extortion.

But of course she didn’t see that at the time. All she saw was that these were people who lived life to the full, they were generous and fun. She put down their living in bad housing as part of that curiously Scottish trait of not caring too much about their surroundings. The men went out with wads of money in their pockets, and they spent it carelessly. She felt excited by the hint of underlying aggression, she loved their humour and their warmth. In a way it was like going home.

‘You look so tired,’ Jackie exclaimed when she brought Barney back on the Sunday before he was to start school.

Laura hadn’t been home more than a couple of hours, just enough time to have a bath and change her clothes.

‘I’ve been working extra hours, what with the Edinburgh Festival on,’ she lied. ‘And I did some bar work too at night. But you two look marvellous!’

Barney had run in to greet her shouting at the top of his voice, climbing up her like a little monkey. He was deeply tanned, and Jackie had had his hair cut short ready for school. In a white tee-shirt and little blue shorts he looked good enough to eat.

‘Auntie Jackie let me sit in the front seat and we had the hood down,’ he said excitedly. ‘I’ve got a new pencil box and a real leather satchel. And I can read lots of new words too.’

‘It’s been such a joy being with him,’ Jackie said, looking sad that it was now to end. ‘I wish I could persuade you to come back to live in London, so I could see more of you both.’

Laura knew Jackie was sincere, and part of her loved her for saying it, but the other part felt irritated. ‘If I came back to London I couldn’t afford to live in Kensington, like you,’ she said. ‘I’d be in one room in Hackney or somewhere grim.’

‘It’s high time you went to a solicitor and got a divorce and a settlement from Greg. You could buy your own place then.’

‘I don’t want anything from that bastard,’ Laura snapped. ‘I can keep myself and Edinburgh is my home now. I like it here.’

‘I love Scotland too,’ Jackie said wistfully. She didn’t appear to have noticed her friend’s sharp tone ‘If you won’t come to London, then perhaps I’ll come here to live permanently. I really don’t want to go back.’

‘Stay with us, Auntie Jackie,’ Barney piped up. ‘You can sleep in my bed and I’ll go in with Mummy.’

Jackie looked at Laura, apparently waiting for Laura to endorse Barney’s idea. But Laura said nothing; she wanted to be alone, she was strung out and she intended to take a Mogadon the moment Barney was in bed and catch up on all the sleep she’d missed in the past week.

‘I’d like that, sweetheart.’ Jackie bent to kiss him. ‘But I’ve got things to do in London and Uncle Roger’s waiting for me. I’d better fetch your things out of the car and get going.’

‘But you haven’t even seen my bedroom!’ Barney said indignantly. ‘Don’t go yet!’

Laura pulled herself together enough to help Jackie get his things from the car. He appeared to have twice as much as he’d taken to Fife. ‘I’d ask you to stay for lunch,’ she said as they brought the stuff in. ‘But I haven’t got much in, what with working all hours.’

Jackie looked around the flat, and even put Barney’s clothes away for him. She’d bought him quite a few new shirts and trousers, and even his old things were washed and ironed. If Laura hadn’t felt so strung out she would have hugged and thanked her.

‘You look poorly,’ Jackie said, coming over to her and taking her face in her two hands. ‘I wish I hadn’t suggested you went back to work now, you’ve overdone it. I’ll ring you tomorrow night to see how you are.’

Years later Jackie told her that she thought she was on the verge of a breakdown that day, and that she worried about her all the way home. She said if she’d only insisted on staying that night she thought she would have realized that Laura had been taking drugs, and she would’ve taken steps to stop her. She added that if she’d done that maybe everything would have turned out differently.

‘Perhaps she was right,’ Laura mused aloud.

12

‘Twenty years ago this pub was famous for its nightly punch-ups,’ Stuart said cheerfully as he and David approached The Bear, which Robbie Fielding was reputed to own.

‘I hope it’s not still like that now,’ David grinned. ‘I can feel you getting psyched up to punch the lights out of Fielding, but let’s leave everyone else alone! I don’t fancy spending the night in a police cell.’

David had spent the last two days trawling through both used and unused evidence from the original investigation. Stuart had spent the time seeing people who had some connection with Laura both here in Edinburgh and in Glasgow.

David was now up to speed with the whole case, but Stuart hadn’t turned up anything relevant, which was why they were now going to see Robbie Fielding.

They paused in the doorway of the pub, both a little surprised it was so quiet. There were no more than fifteen people in there, and all of them were young student types, not the kind of rough crowd they’d expected.

‘It was a spit and sawdust kind of boozer before,’ Stuart said somewhat regretfully.

David felt relieved. It was one of those trendy designer places which were so common in London, everything from cobbler’s lasts and old tools to stone bottles arranged artfully along high shelves, scrubbed pine tables and stripped floorboards. But it didn’t have an air of success about it; it looked tired and dusty, and at eight on a Saturday night, a city centre bar should have been much busier.

They ordered a couple of pints from a pretty blonde barmaid and stayed at the bar to drink them.

‘After twenty years and only seeing him once, are you going to recognize him?’ David asked in a low voice, glancing at two lone older men right at the end of the bar.

‘I think so,’ Stuart said, remembering that the man’s face had haunted him for months after he left Edinburgh. ‘Besides, if he’s the kind of man I think he is, when he comes in he’ll be swaggering around letting everyone know he owns the place.’

‘How are we going to play it?’ David asked.

Stuart grinned. ‘Buggered if I know,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping it will just come to me when I see him.’

Two days earlier Stuart had received a letter from Laura in which she had told him about her relationship with Fielding. While it was pleasing to know it was never a love affair, the frank account of the kind of work the man got her into was disturbing. Yet it did explain the gossip that reached Stuart in London. He’d always assumed it was like Chinese whispers, that because she’d been seen in a couple of pin-up magazines everyone who passed on the story embellished it a little more until she became a drugged-up porn queen. But now he knew the gossip was based on truth, he understood why Jackie had often seemed extremely anxious about her friend.

While over in Glasgow he had managed to find Katy, the woman Laura had worked with for Fielding. She looked about sixty, worn down, confused and none too clean, clearly the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking and drugs. The smell that wafted out of her front door when she opened it had almost sent him scurrying away, but he had to bite the bullet and go in to talk to her.

He had never seen anything like her flat. It was so filthy and cluttered he could hardly bear to sit down, and things were made even more poignant when she showed him some photographs of her and Laura taken together in a club in Glasgow. Katy had been beautiful then, with her sharp cheekbones, smooth pale chocolate skin and shapely body. It seemed impossible that she had turned into this lumpy, bleary-eyed old woman in less than fifteen years.

She was so confused that she claimed to have seen Laura a few days earlier. So when she said Robbie Fielding had The Bear in Edinburgh, Stuart thought she’d imagined that too. It was only later that day back in the city, when he ran into a couple of old friends from way back when he was doing his apprenticeship, that he discovered Katy was right. His friends told him there had been some opposition to Fielding being granted a licence because he was rumoured to have been heavily involved in pornography and drugs. They said it was generally thought he got it in the end by greasing palms, but his days as a hard man were over now for he was in his sixties.