Faith - Lesley Pearse [196]
‘No, she didn’t,’ Belle said and she reached on to the table for a cigarette and lit it. She took a long drag, then looked hard at him. ‘Well, what’s in it?’
‘She hasn’t left you anything, Belle,’ he said as gently as he could. ‘I’m sorry, that’s why I wanted Charles to be here too.’
Belle’s face seemed to crumple before his eyes, her mouth sagged and her eyes drooped. The high colour she’d had minutes before vanished and now, even with her artful makeup, she looked pale.
‘Nothing?’ she whispered. ‘Nothing at all?’
‘No, not even this house. I believe it belonged to her.’
With one hand she grabbed the back of a chair for support, with the other she drew deeply on her cigarette. Suddenly she looked old and Stuart felt very sorry for her.
He got her to sit down and made her a cup of coffee.
‘Do you know why she did this?’ he asked. ‘Did you do something to her?’
Belle didn’t answer, just carried on smoking, but he could see a muscle twitching in her cheek.
‘Who did she leave it all to then?’ she suddenly roared out.
Stuart backed away a little. ‘Toby has the house in Kensington, Roger gets the rest of the London property, with the exception of a house she left to me.’
‘Oh, you’re all right then,’ she said viciously. ‘She leaves her killer’s old boyfriend a house but nothing for her sister.’
‘It was a big surprise to me,’ he said.
‘So who’s got the farm and all the stuff up here?’ she asked, picking up the vodka bottle and pouring another glass.
‘Laura.’
He expected her to rage, but she just looked up at him silently with eyes as cold and hard as stone. She picked up her glass and drank the neat vodka in one long gulp. Then she suddenly hurled the glass across the room. It hit the wall by the back door, shattered and fell to the floor.
‘That bitch,’ she screamed out, jumping to her feet. ‘She must have forced Jackie to do this. She can’t have the farm, it should be mine.’
A click behind him made Stuart turn to see Charles coming through the front door. David had described how ludicrous he had looked in his golfing gear, and he was right. To Stuart he looked like a character out of an American comedy, and he could hardly credit that a man who had once boasted about his Savile Row suits would allow himself to be seen in Rupert Bear trousers and a bright yellow sweater. But then it was some fifteen years since they last met, and maybe moving to Scotland had changed the man’s idea of style.
More disturbing, though, was to find that a man who had once looked something like Rock Hudson now had a heavily lined face and bags beneath his eyes.
The hall between them was some sixteen feet in length, too long a distance for Stuart to be able to smell if Charles had been drinking, but he didn’t look as if he had. He was completely steady on his feet as he put his car keys on the hall table, looking at Stuart with puzzlement. ‘Stuart, isn’t it? What on earth are you doing here? And what’s going on?’ he asked. ‘I heard Belle yelling.’
Belle leapt up, rushed out to Charles and began pummelling his chest with her fists. ‘It’s all your fault,’ she yelled. ‘Jackie made another will and she’s left us nothing, nothing at all.’
‘Calm down, for God’s sake,’ Charles said irritably, pushing his wife away from him. ‘Hysterics never help anything.’
He came into the kitchen, sat down at the table, folded his arms and looked sharply at Stuart. ‘Why have you come here? And what has Jackie’s will got to do with you anyway?’ he demanded to know.
All at once Stuart realized that it hadn’t been a good move to come here. Belle was drunk and hysterical and Charles was sober and icy calm. Stuart began to explain, in much the same way he had to Belle, but she kept interrupting, and it was difficult to concentrate on how Charles was taking it.
He appeared to be unshaken, but then Stuart remembered he’d always been a cool customer.
‘But how did you get involved enough to discover there was another will?’ Charles asked, narrowing his eyes.
‘Because I’ve been helping Laura to lodge an appeal.