Faith - Lesley Pearse [53]
Because there was someone in the house, and he didn’t want them to think he was prying, he made a point of going straight on across the field at the back of the farm before completing the square route back to the lane. But as he turned, with the open farmyard on his left, he glanced in and saw a bright red convertible BMW parked there.
Instinctively he knew it was Charles’s car. He hadn’t been told what car Belle’s husband drove, but it was the kind of flashy motor he’d always gone for. There were two other cars as well, a well-worn Landrover and a green Volvo estate, but they were parked over by the stable rooms, and they were the type of cars he would expect the kind of person who took self-catering holidays in Scotland to drive.
He memorized the car number and walked quickly back to the lane, then jotted it down in a notebook to check on later. Belle had said she handled the letting here, and she’d also said she didn’t know where Charles was today. Why would she say that if he was up here doing some maintenance?
Belle had met Charles Howell just a few weeks after Stuart turned her down. He remembered Jackie didn’t approve of Charles because he was thirty-nine, divorced, with two teenage children, and he was a playboy who was renowned for always having a pretty young blonde on his arm.
‘I don’t like the slimy bastard,’ was what Jackie said, never one to mince her words. ‘And I don’t like the thought of Belle following in my footsteps and going for men with money.’
‘You didn’t marry Roger for his money, did you?’ Stuart asked.
He could see Jackie now. They were in the kitchen of her house in Kensington, a room that Stuart always looked back on fondly, not just because it was the place she comforted him in when he first arrived in London, or because she fed him there so often in the months that followed, but because it reflected her personality so well. It had a passing resemblance to the ‘Country Kitchen’ style that was so in vogue at that time, in as much as the units were real wood and there was a central farmhouse-style table and chairs. But a whole wallful of shelves were filled with bright enamelware, fancy cheese and butter dishes, jugs, plates and bowls. She didn’t care much for real antiques; she bought items for their vivid colours or because they were funny – a cow in a bath, a frog sitting on a toilet. Junk was how she described it, but grouping it en masse made it almost a work of art.
She had an ‘Afro’ perm at the time and it looked like a halo of strawberry-blonde candyfloss. She wore a skin-tight denim catsuit studded with various military badges and her green eyes were full of mischief.
‘Let’s just say that Roger’s money helped me to love him,’ she laughed. ‘But it hasn’t helped to make me pregnant. At least Roger would love it if we had a child. Charles will never want Belle to have one; all he wants is a nubile blonde in his bed.’
Stuart had thought Jackie was a little harsh on Charles then – after all, she hardly knew him – but within a few years he discovered the man was much worse than she thought.
Charles had made his mark during the sixties with a string of record shops and a couple of night clubs. By 1974 he was investing in property, which was how he came to meet Jackie and Belle. Later, Stuart worked on several of these properties, and took an immediate dislike to the man, for he was overbearing, bigoted and dishonest. He was undeniably handsome, with jet-black hair, dark blue eyes and a cleft chin that women seemed to find irresistible. Stuart remembered how he used to police the work being done on his properties, always turning up in a flashy car wearing a hand-tailored suit, and berating the men for taking too long over the job. He skimped on everything, he cared nothing for the safety of his workers, or of those who would live in the properties. On one job he got the plumber, who wasn’t even properly qualified, to put in gas boilers which were sub-standard. Stuart had seen