Faith - Lesley Pearse [54]
Jackie was right about him refusing to allow Belle to have a child. Stuart heard she got pregnant but Charles made her have an abortion. He’d heard too that there were other women in his life, so maybe that was part of the reason for Belle’s bitterness as well. He thought it quite likely that Charles had one at Brodie Farm right now, and only a complete bastard would conduct an affair in the house of his murdered sister-in-law.
Once back in the lane, Stuart walked along to the house belonging to Angus McFee, the neighbour who had witnessed Laura driving to Brodie Farm on the day of the murder. He hoped he might find a cross-country route back to where he’d left his car, for he didn’t want Charles to see him up there if he should come along the lane.
McFee’s house was at least a quarter of a mile from Brodie Farm, and as Stuart reached it he saw that it did have a first-class view of the lane. If the man had been working on his upstairs window he could probably see almost the whole way to Crail, and several miles the other way which led to Anstruther. Yet when Stuart turned to look back at Brodie Farm, he saw it was impossible to see into the yard of the farmhouse from here. Even more importantly, he couldn’t see the track up to Brodie Farm, at least not the part that went beyond the farm. He knew it did continue –he’d crossed the ruts of it while walking round the back of the property. The track was very narrow, scarcely wider than a car, and it had snaked round the far side of the farm and down the hill. He had no idea where it led to, perhaps only to other isolated cottages, but the chances were it would eventually link up with a proper road. A car could have come to the farm from that direction, and left that way too, and Mr McFee wouldn’t have been able to see it from his house, not unless he was standing on his roof.
‘So much for your evidence, Mr McFee,’ he murmured, and wondered why the advocate defending Laura hadn’t brought up the existence of the lane during the trial.
5
Laura smiled as she read Stuart’s letter. He clearly thought that all letters to prisoners were vetted very carefully, and that maybe she wouldn’t get the letter at all if there was any reference to the crime or people involved in the trial. He mentioned ‘my jaunt around Fife’ as if he was touring around on holiday. But she knew when he said he’d met a blonde barmaid called Gloria that he’d been in Cellardyke, and that the ‘faded rose’ in a guest house had to be Belle.
She was a little puzzled when he mentioned standing by a farm looking at the view, considering where the narrow lane might lead to, but after a few moments she suddenly realized what he was trying to tell her.
She had no idea where that lane led to, she’d never been down it, but clearly Stuart saw it as a possible way for the real killer to have got in and out of the farm without being spotted. He asked too how her writing was coming on, and that he hoped she was finding it cathartic.
She had always sniggered at that word. It made her think of losers sitting around in group therapy discussing their addictions. She had once looked it up in a dictionary in the library and found it actually meant ‘purging’.
Stuart using the word made her laugh out loud. She imagined that writing down her past history would act like a dose of laxative.
Yet she had written about her childhood, and the reasons why she made up a new one for herself. Just yesterday she’d posted it to Stuart. She guiltily wondered how he would react if he knew she nearly didn’t send it as it crossed her mind he could sell it to the newspapers.
She half smiled at herself, thinking that perhaps it had been cathartic after all, for she could now see that the real damage Vincent had done to her was