Faith - Lesley Pearse [125]
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?