Faith - Lesley Pearse [173]
He supposed there must have been some more information about Jackie and that the police had arrested someone because he remembered Peggie questioning him.
‘Isn’t that the woman you’ve surveyed properties for?’ she asked. ‘I always thought there was something fishy about a Londoner wanting to come and live there. And she was the woman driving the car when a boy was killed! She had it coming to her. I bet she made her money from drugs.’
‘Shut your mouth, you stupid cow, you know nothing about her!’ Ted yelled at her, then jumping up from the table he ran into the bathroom where he was violently sick.
Over the next couple of days, as he waited for the whole story of what had happened to filter down to him, he was so distraught that he contemplated taking his car out into a remote place and killing himself with the exhaust fumes. He didn’t care what would become of Peggie, he didn’t even care if the whole world found out about his affair with Jackie. If he couldn’t have her in his life, he didn’t want to live.
But reason prevailed. He knew Robert and Joan would never understand his committing suicide and leaving their mother alone. Whilst he thought he ought to go to the police and tell them about his relationship with Jackie just in case he could help them in any way with their investigation, if Peggie found out she’d be impossible.
He had only managed to stay and care for her all these years because of the few hours of happiness he had with Jackie each week. Griefstricken and without that respite, he knew he couldn’t cope with Peggie raging and ranting at him all day about Jackie on top of everything else. And that was what she would do, for if she saw a chink in anyone’s armour, she liked nothing better than sliding the knife in. Ted knew he might snap and attack her, and he couldn’t put himself in that position.
From what he heard at the time it was an open and shut case that Laura had killed her anyway. He had never met Laura and all he could tell the police about her relationship with Jackie was hearsay. Belle and Charles knew everything about her, so he would leave it to them to pass it on.
‘So that’s why,’ Ted said with a shrug, when he’d finished saying his piece. ‘I dare say that makes me look cowardly, but at the time I felt it was the best course for everyone. I suppose too that I was so blinded by my own grief that it never occurred to me Laura might be innocent.’
‘You must have followed the trial very closely?’
‘Yes, I read all the accounts in the papers and watched the news.’
‘Did anyone ever say anything you knew to be untrue?’
‘Yes, it was brought up, I think by Roger, Jackie’s husband, that Laura owed Jackie a lot of money. I know for a fact that wasn’t true. Jackie gave Laura the start-up money for the shop. It was a gift.’
‘Really?’ Stuart exclaimed. ‘Are you absolutely sure of that?’
‘Totally. I was with Jackie the night she wrote the cheque. I actually posted the letter to Laura on my way home. She told me that she’d gone with Laura to see the shop in Morningside, and that over lunch the pair of them had costed out what she would need – the lease money, legal fees, rails, decorations and some advertisements to attract women to bring their clothes in. Laura was intending to go to the bank for a loan, but Jackie was afraid they would make the repayments larger than that kind of business could stand. Her exact words were ‘Bugger it, I’m going to give it to her. After all she’s been through she deserves it.’
‘You’re sure she didn’t ask for it back later?’
‘Did you ever know Jackie to go back on a deal?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Stuart smiled. ‘But tell me, Ted, how did you feel about Laura claiming Jackie had several lovers and drank too much?’
Ted didn’t answer for a while; he just sat there looking down at his hands. ‘I was hurt,’ he said eventually. ‘But I couldn’t blame her for it as she was speaking the truth, Stuart! I might have been the man she loved, but there were other