Faith - Lesley Pearse [78]
‘I wonder what she’s like,’ she mused, snuggling up beside David.
‘Older than him. But I’ve kind of got the idea what she used to be like. Remember when we had that holiday in Providencia?’
‘How could I forget? That was where Abi got started.’ Julia grinned, thinking back to the white sand and hot sun of the Columbian island.
David smiled at the memory too. They hadn’t been married very long and Julia’s parents had been very concerned when she didn’t return to England after the holiday. She got herself a job as health and safety officer with the company and stayed. In fact Abi, their daughter, was actually born in Columbia.
Stuart had been with them in Providencia too. He met Jane there, a willowy brunette with legs that went on for ever. They seemed to be perfect for each other, and for once Stuart looked as if he believed this romance might be for life. But the night Jane returned to England, David had walked along the beach with Stuart in the moonlight. He remembered sensing his friend was sad, and he tried to cheer him up by suggesting he could cover for him so Stuart could shoot off home to be with Jane.
To his surprise Stuart looked almost affronted. ‘I don’t really want to be with her, I was just fooled into thinking I did for a while because she reminded me of an old flame,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong. Jane was quite special. Fun, easy to be with and great in bed too. But I can’t take it any further. Jane deserves to be loved for herself, not as a substitute for someone else I still hanker after.’
‘So I guess Laura was the girl Stuart hankered after,’ David explained.
‘But Jane was lovely,’ Julia mused. ‘A perfect figure, lovely hair and skin. She was so lively and funny too, and clearly swept off her feet by Stuart. How tragic is that! To have your heart broken by a man because you reminded him of someone else.’
‘I agreed I’d help,’ David said hesitantly, afraid Julia would think that was a bad idea.
‘I’m glad of that,’ she said, surprising him. ‘Let’s just hope she deserves having two such lovely men trying to spring her.’
Stuart found it surprisingly easy to track down Laura’s sister. He had gone to the newspaper’s archives the day after seeing Lena and David, and chatted up a young woman in the archives, posing as a childhood friend of Meggie’s. She dug out the story, and finding it was written by a reporter she knew well, she said she would ring Stuart with any information after she’d spoken to him.
Stuart had not seen the newspaper interview with June Wilmslow before, and he took a photocopy of it away with him to study it. He sincerely hoped that Laura didn’t know of its existence either, for her mother had portrayed herself as a woman who had been cruelly done by. Her age was stated as being sixty-eight, but in the photograph she looked far older, and it said she was living in severely reduced circumstances and suffering from emphysema. She claimed that her late husband had taken her and her children to live in his lovely home, and given them everything, but Laura never accepted him and resented that he expected she should do her share of the chores and didn’t allow her out raking the streets. She said Laura had always been trouble and she finally ran away because Vincent admonished her for stealing.
She went on to say that Laura came home again when she heard Vincent was dead because she wanted a share of his money. ‘She didn’t care about me and her brother and sisters, or what we were going to do if Vince’s sons got it all,’ June was quoted as saying. ‘She turned my Meggie and Ivy against me, and later, when I ended up in a couple of rooms, she couldn’t care less. She married a rich man just for his money. Money was all she cared about.’
She then went on to say she wasn’t surprised to hear Laura had lied to everyone about her real family, because she’d liked to make out she was better than anyone else