Faith - Lesley Pearse [253]
Her sisters, their men and the boys had arrived two days ago for a holiday. The year before, Meggie had come up with James, the policeman she’d met after Robbie Fielding attacked Laura, but the cottage wasn’t finished then and they’d stayed nearby in a guest house. But all the work was completed now, and it was thrilling for Laura to be able to have her family here together. Ivy, Derek and the boys were staying in the caravan that had been Laura and Stuart’s home for over a year, and Meggie and James had the spare room in the cottage.
Derek and James had gone off to buy some beer and a few groceries in the village, and they had a barbecue planned for later in the afternoon. Laura was so happy that she felt she might burst with it.
The last two years hadn’t all been plain sailing for her and Stuart. The two snatched years of her life in prison had made her introspective, insecure and often irrational. She had come back from London to live with Stuart in Oban just a month after she was exonerated, because she couldn’t bear to be apart from him. But though it was wonderful to be together, she hadn’t taken into account the long hours of separation while he was working, the bitter winter weather, or how bored she’d become in the little seaside town without any work or even friends.
They’d had a few very heated arguments when she accused him of caring more about his work than her. But fate stepped in just in time, when she saw an article in a magazine about a drug project in Glasgow that needed volunteers interested in helping young people.
She applied and was accepted, and after a short induction, found herself spending two days a week at a drop-in centre where addicts could go to exchange dirty needles for clean ones, receive some counselling and discuss their problems.
From her first day there, Laura sensed that she had all the right credentials to become a counsellor herself. She knew why people took the first step on the road to addiction, and the forces which kept them there. She recognized her younger self in so many of the younger addicts she met.
In February 1996 Belle stood trial. The charge had been dropped to manslaughter in the case of Jackie’s death, but still held at attempted murder of Stuart. Both Laura and Stuart were witnesses for the prosecution, but once they had given their evidence they left the court, not staying to watch the rest of the trial or hear the guilty verdict.
For Laura it was a trip back to a dark place she wanted to forget she’d ever been in. She could take no pleasure in seeing Belle stripped of her former glamour, gaunt, stringy-haired and with dark-ringed eyes, knowing that even her mother and brother had abandoned her. Toby had made a statement to the police that she had taken full advantage of getting power of attorney over her mother’s finances, and plundered a great deal of the money from the sale of the house in Duke’s Avenue. Toby hadn’t discovered this until Belle was arrested, but as soon as he found out, he came over to England and after making his statement, took Lena back to live with him, his wife and new baby in Australia.
Belle received an eighteen-year prison sentence. People remarked that they thought it was too lenient, but then they didn’t know that eighteen years or life made little difference at Belle’s age. She had even fewer reserves with which to cope with prison life than Laura had; she would spend each day in abject misery, and that was the real punishment.
As for Charles, he received ten years in total for concealing a crime in the case of Jackie, for aiding and abetting the attempted murder of Stuart, and for dangerous driving and failing to stop when he killed Barney.
Laura had mixed feelings about his sentence. It didn’t seem much for the loss of her son, yet he had pleaded guilty to that, and showed real remorse. Stuart, who had seen him in