Faith - Lesley Pearse [168]
‘You must have got to know Jackie very well for her to have bored you with tales about her early days in the property business,’ Stuart said lightly.
‘I did,’ Ted said simply, and a look of pain crossed his face. ‘I miss her so much that sometimes I feel I can’t go on. Gloria knows this and that was why she persuaded me to come and meet you. She told me it would make me feel better.’
‘Ted would rather talk to you alone, Stuart,’ Gloria said. Her anxiety was such that her voice quivered. ‘I have already told him what you’re about. He needs assurance that anything he tells you is in strict confidence.’
‘You have that assurance,’ Stuart said, looking Ted straight in the eye. ‘All I want to do is find enough new evidence so Laura can appeal against her sentence, for I know it wasn’t her who killed Jackie. Now, shall we go somewhere where we can talk?’
Gloria took them to her cottage which was in the narrow street which ran from Anstruther to Cellardyke. The cottage was tiny, rather dark, and the wrong side of the road for a sea view, but it was a real home, not too tidy, lots of photographs of her family on the walls, comfortable chairs and a smell of something good cooking in the oven.
She made them a pot of tea, put it down on the coffee table and then said she was going out. ‘Make yourselves at home. I’ll be back about half past five.’
‘I’m a surveyor,’ Ted said awkwardly as the door closed behind Gloria. ‘As you probably know, the first cottage Jackie bought up here was just along the road. That’s how I met her – she called me to survey it. Later, whenever she wanted to buy another place, or was just considering one, she always called me.’
‘I remember her telling me she’d found someone good,’ Stuart said. He didn’t actually remember any such thing, but he could see how nervous Ted was and wanted to put him at his ease.
Ted gave a watery smile. ‘We became good friends, and as I knew the best tradesmen around here I used to give her a bit of advice, call in and check on work in progress, that sort of thing.’
‘So you must have known her almost as long as me,’ Stuart said. ‘She got the idea about buying a place here the first time she visited Laura and me in Edinburgh and I brought her out this way to show it off.’
Ted nodded. ‘Nineteen years. I just wish I could go back to the beginning again and do everything differently.’
Stuart raised an eyebrow questioningly.
‘Well, as you probably realize, I’m married.’ Ted blushed furiously. ‘It was never a happy marriage, and I should have left my wife the moment I knew I was falling in love with Jackie, and taken the chance that she felt the same way about me. But I didn’t think a beautiful and highly intelligent woman like her could possibly want me. Besides, she was married too, and some ten years younger than me.’
There was something very touching about this frank admission and Stuart thought he could understand why Jackie had liked Ted.
‘Were you lovers all that time?’ Stuart asked gently.
‘Dear me no, that came years later.’ Ted looked quite shocked at the suggestion. ‘I called her Mrs Davies and she called me Mr Baxter for a whole year before we even began using Christian names. We’d chat over cups of tea, and I learned about her family, her husband, about Laura and Barney and you too, Stuart. She was so vivacious, so full of ideas, and funny too. Of course all the tradesmen who did jobs for her liked her – she was unique and very special.’
‘Yes, she was,’ Stuart agreed. ‘I never met anyone who worked for her that wasn’t a little bit in love with her. Me included.’
‘I was a bit jealous of you, if truth be told,’ Ted admitted ruefully. ‘You see, she used to talk about you a lot, especially after you left Edinburgh and went down to work for her in London. She was worried about YOU because Laura had broken your heart, but she also liked you a great deal. I thought it was only a matter of time before you were ousting that husband of hers.’
‘There