Faith - Lesley Pearse [50]
‘Hearing an old friend was dead,’ Stuart said. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘I’ll have a beer, thank you,’ she said. ‘And would I know your friend?’
‘Maybe. Jackie Davies.’
‘Och, that was a terrible business.’ She winced. ‘I couldnae understand it. I got to know Jackie when she bought her first cottage here. We became good friends, and when Laura came over from Edinburgh we’d all have a drink together. I liked their company, always so much laughing and so much to blether about. They told me they’d been friends since they were wee girls, and I couldnae believe it when people said Laura killed Jackie.’
Stuart told her how he had been out of the country and had come over here to see Belle. ‘Do you know her too?’ he asked.
Gloria nodded. ‘Aye, she and her husband stayed in the village when they were buying the place up at Crail. She’s having a hard time of it now, they say; she’d do better to sell up and go back to London.’
‘Because the guest house isn’t doing so well?’ Stuart asked. ‘I noticed she had no one staying there.’
Gloria shrugged. ‘There’s still a lot of bad feeling around, folk round here don’t like to be put under a spotlight, and they don’t like incomers. The auld ones grumble that they push up the house prices so the young people from here can’t afford them and have to leave.’
Stuart nodded in sympathy. ‘That’s happening everywhere now, but I suppose it’s worse here when there isn’t that much work about either.’
‘I always say that some of them need to get off their backsides and adapt,’ she said with a good-natured grin. ‘Jackie wasn’t born rich. She told me she made her money from property development, and if she could do it, so could others around here. What about you, Stuart? Were you born rich?’
Stuart laughed. ‘Definitely not! I lived in a tenement in Edinburgh and served my time as a joiner. It was Jackie who helped me on to the first rung on the ladder. I worked for her on her properties in London.’
‘Did you know Laura too?’
‘Aye, to my cost,’ he said and laughed lightly. ‘She broke my heart, Gloria, but she was the one who made me go to London, so I learned to forgive her.’
‘I liked her,’ Gloria said reflectively. ‘I know Jackie used to worry about her and the wee boy, and that maybe Laura was a careless mother, but it’s a tough one being a single mum. I know because I’m one. You have to make a living if you want them to have the things other kids have, you need friends too or you’d go mad with loneliness, but that’s bound to cut down on the time you’ve got to spend with your child.’
Stuart was touched by her sympathy for Laura. ‘People are always very quick to judge,’ he said. ‘But my mother used to say we need to walk a few miles in someone’s boots to know how it is for them.’
Gloria nodded in agreement. ‘It was a terrible thing that wee Barney died in that accident. It changed both Laura and Jackie; neither of them was quite the same again. But whatever passed between them, I’ve never been quite convinced Laura killed Jackie, not in my heart. How about you?’
It was very tempting to admit where he stood, but for all he knew Gloria might be as thick as thieves with Belle and the other witnesses. ‘I can’t believe it of her either,’ he said. ‘She could be wild, treacherous sometimes, but she and Jackie had a very special friendship, and I can’t imagine anything changing that. But then I’ve been away a long time, I can only go on what I’ve been told. Belle’s opinion is pretty damning.’
‘She’s an unhappy woman,’ Gloria said darkly. ‘I dinnae ken what made her and Charles come up here to live, but I know she didn’t want to be here, she’s always trailed her resentment about like a bad smell.’
‘She told me she loved it, and she had friends here!’
‘What friends?’ Gloria scoffed. ‘She’s too high and mighty to mix with most of us. I tried to be her friend at the start, but it was like flogging a dead horse. She doesnae understand friendship, that’s why she was so jealous of Laura.’
‘Was she? But Laura was really fond of Belle, at least she was when