Laura put down her Biro and rubbed her eyes. She had only jotted down the major points of those early days with Jackie, barely a whole page. But the meeting with Steven and Roger was an important milestone in both their lives for more reasons than that they became their first lovers, and that much later Jackie would marry Roger.
Laura hadn’t of course known then what was in store for either of them, but that wasn’t the point when she should, and could, have come clean about her background to Jackie.
But she didn’t, and so the lie was spread further and further like a tumour. It was of course benign back then, but she might have known that if she didn’t cut it out it would become malignant.
It was one of the newspapers who exposed it at the start of her trial. She didn’t know who told them the story of her parents being killed while she was still a child, but they obviously checked it out and found it wasn’t true. It didn’t take them long to discover her real father had been a criminal, or for that matter to find plenty of people who were prepared to reveal she had lied to them too.
‘A life built on lies’ was one of the headlines, and Laura could remember thinking that would make an appropriate epitaph for her.
4
Belle got up from her chair as the telephone rang. ‘I’ll just answer that,’ she said, smiling at Stuart. ‘It might be someone wanting to come and stay.’
Stuart was glad of a moment or two alone to consider how he should proceed with Belle. She had been very surprised when he turned up unannounced at the door of Kirkmay House in Crail. In fact she had been almost giddy with excitement until he told her he’d only just heard about her sister’s death as he’d been out of the country, and that he’d come to offer his condolences. He found it rather disquieting that on opening the door to him she didn’t immediately realize that was why he’d come. Had she forgotten what good friends he and Jackie had been when he worked for her?
He gazed reflectively out of the window to Marketgate beyond, thinking what a coincidence it was that Belle’s house was the one he remembered from when he used to come here on holiday as a child. He and his family never stayed in this village; they rented a cottage by the harbour in Cellardyke, a smaller fishing village further back down the coast. But they would walk here sometimes, clambering over rocks along the beach, and his father always used to buy crab to take home for their tea.
Sometimes they came up the steep wynds from the harbour to the main road so his parents could have a drink in the East Neuk Hotel, and he and his brother and sister would go exploring. Once they had slipped into this very garden to pick some apples from a tree, and an old lady had chased them out brandishing a stick. They were sure she was a witch, and that the big old house was haunted; his sister used to have nightmares about it, prompted by stuff he and his brother made up about the place.
It was weird enough that Belle and Charles had uprooted themselves from London to open a guest house here, but even weirder that they’d bought the very house which was imprinted on his memory.
Crail was very quaint and pretty, perhaps the prettiest of all the villages along this stretch of the Fife coast, but it was hardly the kind of place he would expect Belle and Charles to be attracted to. Belle had always been the kind of woman who craved excitement, sophisticated entertainment, smart shops and hordes of people around her. As for Charles, he was the original city slicker, with handmade suits, fast sports cars, and an eye for the ladies. Neither of them had the kind of servile mentality to run a guest house successfully, and as far as he knew they had no great love of Scotland either, not like Jackie.
Jackie had fallen for its charms twenty years ago when she was visiting Laura in Edinburgh. It had been Stuart’s idea to take the girls and Barney over the bridge to Fife to show them around, but he hadn’t expected the elegant and poised Jackie to be so enthusiastic. She had raved about Fife all the way back to Edinburgh, and though he was pleased he had found something to impress Laura’s very worldly friend with, he didn’t realize that she really had lost her heart to the place.
She bought a tiny fisherman’s cottage in Cellardyke soon afterwards and her passion for the area grew with every visit. Then she bought tumbledown Brodie Farm, a few miles inland from Crail. A great many people laughed at her grandiose plans for it, and her claims that she was going to live there permanently once the renovations were complete. But she had done exactly as she said she would, in fact she’d told Stuart once that she felt Fife was her spiritual home and nowhere else made her feel quite so happy.
Stuart was still puzzled as to why Belle followed her sister here. He could understand her wanting to be nearer Jackie, and that Charles was lured by the golf in nearby St Andrews. But it would have made far more sense for them to buy a place in Edinburgh where they could still live as they had in London, with all this on their doorstep.
So far he and Belle had only made small talk. He’d admired her house and garden, mentioned his childhood holidays here, and she asked what he had been doing over the past few years and seemed surprised he’d never married. He had expected her to launch into a graphic account of the murder and trial, for as he remembered Belle had been a drama queen, and dramas didn’t get any bigger than your sister’s murder. Yet apart from saying ‘I’ve had a terrible time,’ she hadn’t enlarged on it.
He wanted and needed her to talk about it, to pour it all out so he could see another perspective, but he had to be very careful, because if he let it slip that he’d studied the case, and been to see Laura, she might suspect he had a hidden agenda.
‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked, hoping that might make her open up. ‘Are you thinking of selling up and going back to London? Or will you stay?’
Belle lit up a cigarette. ‘We can’t make our minds up,’ she said somewhat guardedly, blowing the smoke up to the ceiling. ‘I’m sure you can imagine what we’ve been through since Jackie’s death. There have been many times when we’ve just wanted to run away to a place where there are no reminders. But this house and the friends we’ve made here are precious to us.’
Stuart nodded. He thought the last part of the reply sounded insincere and very well rehearsed, for there was something about this beautiful but soulless drawing room which suggested few friends had ever come into it. As a young woman Belle had been a party animal, a vivacious, warm chatterbox who would tell anyone her life story at the drop of a hat. Maybe it was the murder that had changed her, for she was restrained now, and the bubbly personality had become stiff and cool.
But she was still a very beautiful woman. Her natural honey-blonde hair, wide blue eyes and the clarity of her complexion hadn’t changed since they first met two decades ago in London. If he hadn’t been nursing a broken heart at the time, they might well have become much more than friends for they were a similar age and got on very well.
She was as slim as a whippet in those days, her blonde hair so long she could sit on it. He used to call her Rapunzel, for she had the look of a fairytale princess awaiting a prince who would carry her off to some enchanted land. Her hair was shoulder-length now, she’d gained some weight and her blue eyes looked hard and cold, but she made up for that with her glamour. In pale blue slacks and a cream silk shirt left unbuttoned just low enough to give a glimpse of voluptuous cleavage, with long pink talons and gold jewellery, she could have stepped out of an episode of Dynasty.
Kirkmay House suited her image, for it was an impressive, large double-fronted Georgian house with all the grand embellishments of that period. Belle had furnished and decorated it in her own style with sumptuous cream sofas, pale pink carpets, huge gilt-framed mirrors and the kind of curtains, swags and pelmets that must have cost a king’s ransom. It would all have been perfect in a similar town-house in London or Edinburgh, but here in a fishing village it seemed rather overblown and ostentatious. He had been puzzled too when she showed him some of the guest rooms, for none of them appeared to be taken. In June she should have been at least half full.
‘What’s happening with Brodie Farm?’ he asked.
‘We don’t know yet,’ she said, her face tensing. ‘We found the will Jackie made back in the early eighties when she split up with Roger. In that she’d left equal shares of her entire estate, Brodie Farm and the London property to Toby and myself. But Roger claims Jackie made another will, in 1988, leaving the property in London to him.’
Stuart nodded, even though he couldn’t possibly imagine Jackie making one will, let alone two. She’d always claimed she intended to spend everything she had in her own lifetime. But if she had made one, he would have been very surprised if she hadn’t made provision for Roger. They might have been apart for years, but they’d remained very close friends, and Roger had after all funded the first couple of properties she bought.
‘He hasn’t produced this more recent will yet, and I personally doubt it really exists,’ Belle said waspishly. ‘So while the lawyers hang fire, I’m looking after Brodie Farm, handling the lettings and keeping it all together. But I can’t go on like this. It needs to be settled.’
At that point the telephone rang and Belle hurried to answer it.
‘A booking for a long weekend,’ she said when she came back. ‘I was tempted to say we were fully booked, it’s such a drag having people here.’
‘A funny thing for a guest-house proprietor to say,’ Stuart remarked lightly.
‘You’d have to run one to find out just how tedious it can be,’ she retorted. ‘Most of the guests are earnest walkers who wear anoraks, and the rest are perishing Americans chasing their Scottish roots. I don’t know which are the most boring.’
She ranted for some minutes about the tedium of changing bed linen, of cooking breakfasts and feeling her home was not her own. ‘Jackie had the right idea, her guests were all self-catering and not in her house,’ she ended up. ‘But then when she left Roger she said she never wanted to share anything with anyone again.’
Stuart smiled. He remembered Jackie saying such things, but she didn’t really mean them. She loved people and was never happier than when she had a houseful.
‘Did they ever get divorced?’ he asked.
Belle shook her head. ‘No, they started proceedings once, then dropped it. Jackie could be very weak about Roger. She couldn’t live with him, but she liked to hold him on a string so she could tweak it in whenever she felt like it.’
Stuart thought that remark was rather spiteful, and it was tempting to reciprocate by pointing out that if Jackie hadn’t divorced Roger, he might well stand to inherit the bulk of the estate, but he thought better of that, fearing he might be shown the door.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she burst out when he made no comment. ‘That I shouldn’t say such things, not now she’s dead. But I get weary of making out she was some kind of saint. Well, she was never that, and she’d have been the first person to say so. But that evil bitch Laura took everything from me, even the right to tell the truth about my own sister.’
Stuart perked up. This was how he remembered Belle – self-centred perhaps, but passionate and with a lot to say.
‘The bitch had already heaped guilt on to Jackie for Barney’s death,’ Belle went on, her cheeks flushing with anger. ‘That was why she funded Laura’s business, but it didn’t stop the cow from pestering her all the time, turning up whenever she felt like it. Even after she’d killed her that wasn’t enough for her, she had to destroy Jackie’s reputation too by claiming she was a promiscuous lush. A life sentence isn’t enough for what she’s done.’
Stuart might have wanted to see some real emotion, but he was shocked by such venom. It was well documented that Belle hadn’t been vindictive towards Laura during the trial, in fact she came across as not believing Laura could have done it. But he supposed that the guilty verdict and her own grief for her sister had altered her view.
‘And your parents and Toby?’ he asked, gently trying to draw her away from further malice. ‘How are they bearing up?’
‘Dad died of a heart attack soon after the murder,’ Belle said. ‘I blame Laura for that too; he was only seventy-five and in good health until then. Mum’s in a nursing home now. As for Toby, well, he’s made a fortune designing stage sets, he’s become quite a celebrity because of the murder. He milked it for all he was worth. Now he’s shot off to Australia without a thought for Mother and me.’
‘I’m so sorry about your parents,’ Stuart said truthfully. He found it odd Belle thought so badly of her brother, for as he recalled they had once been very close. ‘They were very good to me when I first came to London. I feel ashamed I didn’t keep in touch with them over the last ten years. But perhaps I could go and see Lena when I go back to London. I’m sure you know how much she encouraged and supported me. I loved going to the house in Muswell Hill.’
‘That’s gone now of course,’ Belle sighed. ‘But Mum is close by, and mostly she thinks she’s still in Duke’s Avenue. I shouldn’t bother to go and see her though, she probably won’t know you. She hardly knew me last time I visited.’
‘I know it was an open and shut case against Laura,’ Stuart said very cautiously. ‘But I found it hard to believe she could have done such a thing. I mean, Jackie was her best friend, and what could have gone wrong to make her react so violently?’
‘I might have known you wouldn’t believe anything bad of her,’ Belle said with a disdainful toss of her head. ‘You never could see her for what she really was.’
‘I think I did, Belle,’ he retorted. ‘She hurt me very badly, and one doesn’t come through that without seeing the truth about a person. I just can’t imagine her stabbing Jackie.’
‘She was always mad with jealousy and spite because she could never be the hotshot she wanted to be,’ Belle spat out. ‘She was devious, manipulative and greedy. She cocked everything up, used people and trampled on their feelings. She watched Jackie succeeding at everything she touched, and she couldn’t bear it. At the trial Laura’s advocate tried to make out that she loved Jackie, and held no grudge against her for Barney’s death, but that wasn’t true. She brought it up every time she saw Jackie and she didn’t care how miserable it made her. She who was such a terrible mother! We all did more for that poor kid than Laura ever did.’
Stuart couldn’t ask why, if this was true, she hadn’t said so in court. Admitting he knew what had been said there would alert her to his true motive in coming here today. But it was hard not to say what he felt, for though Belle was right about Laura in some areas, she was very wrong in others.
‘Maybe. But we’re all flawed, Belle. Few people’s lives stand up to close scrutiny, I know mine doesn’t.’
‘You, who used to think you were so perfect!’ she retorted with heavy sarcasm.
Stuart blushed. He knew she was referring to words they’d had years ago. She’d had something of a crush on him when he first arrived in London after splitting up with Laura. He did take her out several times, but it was a mistake on his part. Belle was lovely, but he was too bruised to embark on a sexual relationship, and although he had told her this, she wouldn’t give up trying for it. It ended badly and embarrassingly, and Belle had chosen to believe he was some kind of pompous puritan.
‘I was hurting then, Belle,’ he said reproachfully. ‘And I had the image in my head that you were like Laura’s little sister. She used to talk about you a lot when we were together. Besides, I’d have been all wrong for you – beautiful Belle was a go-getter, a girl aiming for the stars, you’d have only got the gutter with me.’
He saw a little smirk playing at the corners of her mouth and was relieved she seemed pleased with his explanation.
‘Have you seen your folks yet?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got no one left here now, that’s why I didn’t get to hear about Jackie,’ Stuart said. ‘Mum went out to live in Australia with my sister when my father died. My brother is in Canada. Scots always seem to go to the ends of the earth, don’t they? But I intend to stay awhile, visit some old friends
, maybe look for some new project to get into. Edinburgh is a happening place these days. I’m staying at the Caledonian at the moment, but I’m going to get a flat on a short lease. If you and Charles fancy coming into town sometime I’ll buy you a slap-up dinner.’
He instinctively knew Belle wasn’t going to tell him anything more about Jackie, but Charles might have something to say. Stuart had never liked the arrogant know-all, but if he could get him on his own and ply him with drink, who knows what he might reveal?
‘By the way, where is Charles today?’ he asked. ‘Playing golf?’
‘Who cares?’ she said with a sullen shrug.
‘You haven’t had a tiff?’ As Stuart recalled, they were always falling out.
‘Not exactly. Let’s say we don’t always see eye to eye. This business of the will is getting us both down. We can’t go off anywhere, not now I’ve got to keep my eye on Brodie Farm. We can’t make any plans about anything, we are tied. But I’m always quite relieved when he takes off, at least then he’s not under my feet.’
‘Well, here’s my hotel number.’ Stuart quickly wrote it down on a business card, then stood up. ‘If you want him out from under your feet for an evening, tell him to come and have a drink with me. I will be moving on, but they’ll pass on the new number, and wherever I’m staying he’ll be able to crash out there.’
‘And does the same apply to me?’ she said flirtatiously. ‘I could do with a day of shopping, a nice meal and a handsome escort.’
‘Yes, of course it does,’ he said gallantly, but hoping she wouldn’t take him up on it. ‘That is, if Charles doesn’t mind.’
‘I don’t much care what he minds about any more,’ she said blithely. ‘It was good to see you again, Stuart, do feel free to call again if you have reason to come out this way. I’ll always have a bed here for you.’
Faith Page 10
