Faith - Lesley Pearse [144]
‘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