Faith - Lesley Pearse [28]
‘I was hurt you didn’t feel able to tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t a total surprise as I always suspected there was something you had hidden. I once broached the subject with Jackie, and she agreed with me. She said there was a sadness in you, a lack of the silly little tales we all dig out about our childhoods. But we haven’t got time to talk about that now. Why don’t you write it all down for me? I’ve often found it’s the easiest way to deal with hurtful things, and I know it must have been very painful for you to hide it so well.’
Laura gulped to get rid of the lump in her throat. ‘I don’t deserve you being so understanding. And I’d like you to know the whole truth. The way the papers reported on it made it sound like I was a confidence trickster. I wasn’t ever that. I will write it all out and send it to you.’
He took her hand and squeezed it, his way of showing his understanding. ‘While you are dredging up the past, think hard about all you know of Jackie’s life and the people who came into it too. The bond between you was so strong I’ve no doubt it was forged though some kind of adversity when you were both very young. Jackie often mentioned your flat-sharing days; I got the idea there were quite a few men in both your lives then. I want to know about them.’
‘Do you think that her killer was from way back then?’
‘Perhaps. It wouldn’t hurt to explore the possibility.’
The bell rang and people started to move.
‘Just tell me, Stuart, why are you doing this?’ she asked.
He stood up and smiled, moving towards her to embrace her. His arms went round her in a bear hug, and he smelled of something akin to cinnamon. ‘For first love,’ he murmured against her neck. ‘For Barney. For inadvertently pushing me on to the road to success. Take your pick.’
∗
Back in her cell, the many questions she’d had fired at her from the other women about her visitor still ringing in her ears, Laura felt very strange. It was almost as if she’d been slipped a mild hallucinogenic drug. The light seemed brighter, the normal prison noises louder, and she was even more aware of the smell of the place: that strange mixture of cleaning fluids, cigarettes, cheap scent and stale food.
When she first arrived at Cornton Vale it was the terrible smell of body odours in the reception area that she noticed above all else. She wasn’t all that fresh herself, for she’d been in police custody for some thirty-six hours, including the brief court appearance that day, with no opportunity to wash and no clean clothes to change into. But some of the women brought in that day had been sleeping rough for weeks; there were drug addicts and those who had no idea of personal hygiene anyway. She found it appalling, after all she’d been through already, that she was treated the same as these women and was forced to strip off in a tiny cubicle before being driven into a shower as if she too was lousy.
It made her feel like ‘Stinky Wilmslow’ again, alone, unloved and bullied.
Yet if she had retained everything she had been and known at the age of twelve, the months she spent on Romeo, the remand block, might not have been such a shock to her system. The women there were very much like those she’d grown up with in Shepherds Bush – rough, uneducated, loud and often violent. They called her Lady Muck or The Duchess, and claimed she was a snob. Hardly a day passed without someone trying to pick a fight with her.
When the police came to question her, or Patrick Goldsmith, her lawyer, visited, all she managed to convey to them was her rage and indignation that she’d been charged with murder. She couldn’t find the right words to explain her grief.
Yet it was the all-consuming grief which was the very worst thing. Jackie was her dearest and closest friend, the only entirely true friend she had in the world. Even if she had been miles away when Jackie died, with no connection to her death, she would still have felt the same. She had loved Jackie for her entire adult life and they were