Faith - Lesley Pearse [4]
I have only just returned to the UK from South America, and was horrified to hear about Jackie’s death. We may not have seen one another for a very long while, but I cannot believe you would have killed her, for I know what you meant to one another. They wouldn’t let me in to see you, they said I needed a slip. Please send me one to my hotel, for I cannot leave Scotland again until I’ve talked to you.
Stuart
A tear ran down Laura’s cheek unchecked as she stared at his handwriting. Twenty years ago he used to write her notes scribbled in pencil, often embellished with funny little faces. She’d received a beautiful sympathy card too when Barney died, his deep sorrow etched into each word. This one was more formal, written on embossed headed paper from the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, evidence of how far removed he was from her now.
She could picture him that summer’s day in 1972 when she first met him in Castle Douglas. Tall, bare-chested, his cut-down Levi shorts threatening to slide off his slim hips. Chestnut-brown hair in need of a wash tangling on his shoulders, bare feet as brown as new conkers, and the widest, warmest smile she’d ever seen.
He was twenty-one, still an innocent boy full of exuberance and joy. She was twenty-seven, a calculating, wordly woman who should have known better than to run off to a hippy enclave with her two-year-old son. She was clutching at straws of course – anything was better than staying in London and letting people see she’d messed up.
She seduced Stuart that same night on a mattress on the floor of a place that was little more than a shed, and he woke the following morning to tell her he loved her.
Running a finger over the embossed letter heading, Laura could imagine the sophistication of the world he lived in now: king-size beds, sumptuous bathrooms, fast cars and designer clothes. She had had many reports from Jackie over the years about how successful he was, that he was head-hunted by national companies to act as their project manager all over the world. Yet according to Jackie, he’d made that climb from the Edinburgh tenement he’d been brought up in, not by sharp practice and conniving, but with his skill, hard work and total honesty, just the way he’d always claimed he would.
How different her life might have been if she’d only believed in him!
Holding the letter to her heart, she flopped down on to her bed, sobbing.
Nineteen seventy-two was her ‘summer of love’, when for just a few short weeks everything was golden. No other man, before or since, had ever touched her in quite the same way, and what they had was precious and beautiful. But she had destroyed it, just as she had so often before, and after, destroyed so much that was good in her life.
2
Laura lay on her bed holding Stuart’s letter, the delight she’d felt initially on receiving it pushed aside by shame. It wasn’t so much that he had discovered she was in prison, but that by now he would have found out about her real family.
He had worked for Jackie for a few years, and become involved with all her family, and although that was a long time ago, they’d retained some contact with one another. He would’ve been upset enough to hear Jackie had died of natural causes, but once he was informed that she was murdered by Laura, he would have scoured the newspaper archives to find out more.
Every sordid detail about her was there, for the press had been like hyenas after a kill, tearing chunks off her credibility as they unearthed more and more unsavoury facts about her and her background.
She wasn’t concerned about the stuff that she’d been involved in since they split up; he had probably heard about most of that on the grapevine long ago anyway. But what must he have felt when he discovered that she had not been orphaned as she told him? That she had in fact got two living parents and five brothers and sisters she’d airbrushed out of her life?
She could imagine him thinking back to things she’d told him about her fictional childhood and adolescence and asking himself why she’d never told him the truth,