Faith - Lesley Pearse [3]
She got up wearily from her bed to find her earplugs. They didn’t shut out the noise, but at least they muted it. She found them on the wash basin, and as she put them in, caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.
The sight only depressed her further, for her face reflected her weary and hopeless state of mind, and her hair had the colour and texture of dirty straw. As a child it had been mousey-brown, but for all of her adult life she had coloured it – black, red, dark brown, blonde and even pink once – so it was hard to recall its exact original colour. Yet she could remember precisely how it looked the day she’d found Jackie dead, for she’d been to the hairdresser’s the previous day and had it cut short and bouncy, with blonde highlights.
It was long and straggly now, so she kept it tied back with a rubber band, but when she did brush it out, those highlights amounted to nothing more than orange tips at the ends, the rest an ugly pepper-and-salt grey.
Glamorous, chic, elegant, perfectly groomed, those were the phrases people used to describe her two years ago when she had her shop. Five feet five, a perfect size ten, she still got wolf whistles when she passed a building site, and there was hardly a night out when some man didn’t try to chat her up, for she looked closer to thirty-five than in her late forties.
No man would look at her twice now. She might still be slender, but her skin was as grey as her hair, and her brown eyes, so often described as lustrous, were dull now. Even if she were to be dressed up in a smart suit, with high heels, hair cut and recoloured, and her face made up, she knew she could never look the way she once did, for it was as if a light had been switched off within her.
‘Brannigan!’
Laura turned at her name being called, to see Prison Officer Beadington at the door. She was universally known as Beady, a nickname that suited her perfectly as she was short and stout with beady dark eyes. Laura pulled out her earplugs.
‘A letter was handed in for you,’ Beady said, holding out the sheet of paper. ‘The man came here just now, wanting to visit you. The officers at the gate had to turn him away, but they told him he could write and ask you for a visiting slip.’
Laura’s heart lurched as she saw the familiar handwriting. She might not have seen it for years, but it was unmistakable.
‘It’s not another of those journalists, is it?’ Beady asked. ‘You know how the governor feels about them!’
Laura was too stunned by the letter in her hand to answer immediately. She looked blankly at Beady for a few moments as if she’d spoken in a foreign language.
‘No. No, it’s not,’ she said when she realized she had to reply.
She had sent visiting slips to several journalists just after she was convicted, in the hope they would take up her cause. Almost all of them came, but they cared nothing for her plight; not one believed that she was innocent. All they really wanted was more dirt, about her, and the series of suicides that had taken place in this prison in recent months. They used her as a reason to write sensational articles about the prison and the governor had been very angry that she had unwittingly given them inside information.
‘It’s from a man I knew a long time ago,’ Laura said weakly. ‘It’s a bit of a shock!’
‘They said he was a hunk,’ Beady said with a wide smile.
Laura half smiled. Beady was a decent woman; she had a hard outer shell, and she could come down on anyone like a ton of bricks if they upset her, but that was to protect her soft centre. Laura had seen her comforting girls when their man had dumped them, or their children were being taken into care. Her heart was in the right place.
‘He was always a hunk,’ Laura said sadly. ‘And a good man too, but us women are often guilty of not recognizing a man’s true worth until it’s too late.’
‘He came looking for you,’ Beady said pointedly. ‘So you get a visiting slip off to him pronto.’
Laura shut her cell door and sat down on her bunk to read the letter. ‘Dear Laura,’ she