Faith - Lesley Pearse [145]
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.
Stuart was no puritan – he’d looked at plenty of porn magazines in his time, and he knew all the girls in them were someone’s sister or girlfriend. But Laura’s letter, and seeing what had become of Katy, had shaken him. It was difficult for him to accept Laura had debased herself in that way. He understood that she didn’t knowingly step on to that path, that it was more of a gradual slide on to it, and once there, earning so much money, she couldn’t turn back.
Yet even more frightening was the knowledge that if Barney hadn’t been killed at the age of eleven, and brought Laura’s ‘career’ to a sudden halt, she might be as raddled, confused and prematurely old as Katy was now.
But setting aside the rights and wrongs of how Laura lived at that time, he found it very odd that none of it had come up during her trial. It was said that she used drugs, and the glamour modelling had been discovered – one tabloid had even printed a photograph of her scantily dressed. Yet there had been no mention of pornography. Stuart would have expected that at least one of the sleazy characters she’d mixed with during that time would have rushed off to the papers in the hopes of making a few quid.
The most likely reason why none of it leaked out had to be that Fielding made certain it didn’t. But why? According to Laura there was no love lost between them; she said he’d once threatened to mark her for life. So it stood to reason he was afraid for himself. That could be simply because his business interests wouldn’t stand up to police scrutiny, but it could also be that he didn’t want his dealings with Jackie made known.
Laura, however, didn’t appear to suspect Fielding of any involvement in Jackie’s murder. It seemed to Stuart that she’d only written at length about her relationship with the man because he was instrumental in getting her into the lifestyle that ultimately led to Barney’s death. Even so, she put no blame on to Fielding for it, only on herself.
‘I had to snort coke to get through what I did, and then I had to have more to be able to live with myself,’ she wrote with touching honesty. ‘I forgot about Barney’s needs, I was dumping him on people, even leaving him alone for long periods. Jackie knew this and that’s why she had him with her so often. If only he hadn’t been with her that day.’
Stuart didn’t want to tell David about any of this part of Laura’s life for fear that he would judge her too harshly. David had never been in a position where his high moral values were tested, and therefore he hadn’t