Faith - Lesley Pearse [242]
Angie put her hands on her hips and studied her friend closely. ‘You’re disappointed about Stuart, aren’t you?’
Laura shrugged. ‘I don’t know why everyone kept thinking we could be an item again. It wasn’t as if we’d been childhood sweethearts, separated by some cruel stroke of fate. I was unfaithful to him, that’s it and all about it. Some things can’t be mended.’
‘I don’t think that’s the case with you,’ Angie said, shaking her head. ‘No man goes to all the trouble Stuart did for you unless he’s still in love.’
‘You saw him after the court hearing. He hugged me once, told me I looked lovely and kissed me on the cheek when he left. Is that a man in love?’
‘Maybe he was waiting for you to make the first move?’
‘It’s men that have to do that.’
‘That, if you don’t mind me saying, is a quaintly old-fashioned idea.’ Angie sniffed. ‘You’ve got bags of courage, so use some of it. Go to him.’
‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘Well, find out. Someone’s bound to know – his old landlord, Patrick. Use your imagination.’
∗
It had been drizzling in Edinburgh but once Laura had driven over the Forth Bridge the sun came out, and she was acutely reminded of the last time she made this trip. It turned out to be the last time she drove anywhere of course, and it had been May then, a lovely spring day. Now it was the start of October and autumn was on its way, with the leaves beginning to turn yellow and orange on the trees.
But she was determined not to dwell on what happened that day in May. It was over now.
There wasn’t much traffic and she made good time to Crail, drove past Kirkmay House, studiously not looking at it, and parked her car in Marketgate, close to St Mary’s church.
She had brought some potted cyclamen and spring bulbs for Barney’s grave, along with a small fork and trowel in Edinburgh, to avoid having to go into a shop here. As she entered the churchyard she filled up her water bottle from the tap at the gate and hurried over to his grave.
As always in the past, the sight of the small white marble headstone with just Barney’s name, followed by ‘born 1970, died 1981’, brought tears to her eyes. She hadn’t known what to put on the headstone, and the mason had advised her to keep it simple. But it looked so stark, with no hint of what Barney had been like, or even her feelings about him.
It was Good Friday in ’93 when she had last visited the grave. He would have been twenty-three then if he’d lived, and she could remember wondering what sort of career he would have chosen. She’d planted masses of polyanthus that day and tucked some little fluffy chicks among them, because Barney had always loved it when she made chocolate nest cakes for Easter and put miniature eggs and chicks in them.
After she was arrested, she’d worried about his grave being neglected. It wasn’t until Stuart turned up and came out to Crail that she heard it was very well kept. She assumed Belle had been looking after it.
As it was over a month ago that Belle was arrested, Laura had expected it to be overgrown with weeds, but to her surprise it looked lovely – weed-free and planted with red and white geraniums. She wondered who could have done it.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so long coming back,’ she whispered, kneeling down on the grass beside the grave. ‘But I’ve thought about you every day since the last time I came. I shall have to take these lovely geraniums away now because they’ll only die when we get the first frost.’
She dug them out, placing them in a carrier bag, then forked over the whole surface and began planting the cyclamen and the bulbs. It was only as she began clearing up, brushing the soil off the marble surround, that she became aware of a man watching her from about twenty feet away. He was around sixty, of slight build, with white thinning hair and a green corduroy jacket.
She was irritated by his presence, assuming he was someone