Faith - Lesley Pearse [31]
Even under oath, not one witness would admit that Jackie had been drinking heavily for some months before her death or that she had several lovers.
As these witnesses appeared to be honest, upright people, it was hardly surprising that the jury chose to believe Laura was as malicious as they suggested.
It was a unanimous ‘guilty’ verdict. The judge proclaimed Laura ‘An affront to womenkind, for she had not only viciously taken another’s life, but had then sort to malign her character, distressing her victim’s family still further’.
When Laura was brought back to Cornton Vale to begin her life sentence she was beside herself with rage. This was so apparent that she was put on suicide watch, and both prison officers and the other prisoners gave her a wide berth for fear of what she might do to them. She paced the floor of her cell like a caged animal, cursing a legal system that had failed her.
Perhaps because that level of anger was impossible to sustain, she had eventually sunk into complete apathy. She stopped raging at anyone who came near her, barely spoke, and spent hours lying on her bunk staring mindlessly at the ceiling. It was only when it was put to her that she might very well find herself placed in the psychiatric ward if she continued this way that she began to do the work she was given, ate her meals, read books in her spare time and occasionally held brief conversations with other women on her block. But if the officers thought this was a sign she was at last accepting her sentence, they were wrong. She just didn’t care about anything any more.
The letter from Stuart had partially woken her from that apathy, making her notice her bedraggled hair, her ragged nails and the texture of her skin, but not enough to feel hope, excitement or even fear.
Yet she felt all those things now, and she wasn’t sure she liked it, for if all her senses and emotions were completely awakened, how would she be able to stand being in here?
‘I believe you.’ Those three little words meant so much to her. Yet she didn’t dare allow her hopes to be raised for fear of how it would be if Stuart failed her.
‘Have faith,’ he’d said. Like it was so easy just to put all your trust in another person. Trust wasn’t something that had ever come naturally to her.
But she did know that Stuart couldn’t help her unless she helped him. If he believed that raking over her life might give them a clue as to who did kill Jackie, then that was what she must do.
Picking up a notepad and Biro, she thought back to the day she first met Jackie.
It was one of those searingly hot days when the tar on the roads begins to melt and trickle out from under the asphalt. As a small child she could remember all the children in the street searching for lollipop sticks to poke the tar, and they’d compete to see who could make the biggest tar ball by winding the stick round and round. But such hot weather usually came in July or August when the leaves on the trees were lank with dust and soot, the milk went off so fast it had to be kept in a bucket of cold water with a cloth over it, and the butcher stopped displaying meat in his shop window.
But in 1961 the hot weather came in May, when many of the trees were still leafless. Laura met Jackie on the 24th, a date engraved on her memory because it was also Jackie’s seventeenth birthday.
It was the year the Russians succeeded in putting the first man into space. Just that morning Laura was working in the Home and Colonial grocery shop in Crouch End in North London, when she overheard a customer claiming that the reason it was so hot, so early in the year, was because scientists were tampering with nature by firing rockets up through the earth’s atmosphere.
Fortunately it was a Wednesday and early closing. Laura had already decided she would spend the afternoon at the open-air swimming pool just along the road.