‘You were miles away,’ she laughed, showing large, very white teeth. ‘Perhaps I should have left you there?’
She was curvy and looked as if she’d poured herself into her jeans and slinky, low-necked top. He thought she was probably around the same age as him.
‘Not at all,’ he grinned. ‘I was remembering coming here as a child for holidays. Maybe we played together on the beach?’
‘If I’d played with you I would have remembered,’ she laughed. ‘I’d have stuck you in a lobster pot and waited for you to grow up.’
‘I’m Stuart Macgregor,’ he said holding out his hand, delighted that he’d found someone who’d not only clearly lived here all her life, but had a lively sense of humour.
‘And I’m Gloria White,’ she said as she shook his hand. ‘I know a dozen Stuarts, but I don’t think I’ve met you before. Where do you stay?’
‘I’m from Edinburgh, but I’ve been working away for a long while,’ he replied.
‘So what’s brought you back just now?’ she asked.
‘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 I knew her.’
‘Aye, Laura was fond of her, she dinnae see what was in the woman’s heart. But then Laura dinnae pay attention to what folk thought of her.’
Stuart half smiled, for that last remark was very perceptive. Laura had never been one to think about the effect she might have on anyone. He was a fine example, for it never occurred to Laura that a mere lad of twenty-one would be blown away by an experienced older woman, and she couldn’t comprehend his pain and anguish when she’d grown tired of him either.
‘You don’t think Belle did the dirty deed, do you?’ he joked.
Gloria chuckled. ‘And get her pretty manicured hands dirty? I dinnae think so, Stuart. Besides, her car was in the garage that day, and it’s a good long trek out to Brodie Farm for a woman who never even walks to do her messages.’
‘So do you favour anyone else as a suspect?’
She shook her head as if amused at the question.
‘What about the many lovers?’ Stuart prompted.
She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips. ‘That’s all best laid to rest,’ she said firmly. ‘Their families have suffered enough from their foolishness already without me making more of it. And now I must get back to work.’
Stuart left the pub and walked up the hill to the main road to catch the St Andrews bus back to Crail and his car. He felt somewhat justified in his faith in Laura now that he knew Gloria liked her and didn’t believe she was guilty; if nothing else, it proved he wasn’t totally crazy. Her views on Belle were interesting too. She hadn’t shot him down in flames either about Jackie’s lovers, which to him meant they not only existed, but she knew perfectly well who they were. He would bet that they were men she’d known all her life, and that was why she wouldn’t say anything more. He would have to find some other way to discover who they were.
Once back in his car, which was parked by Crail Tolbooth, he sat for a moment, suddenly daunted by just how difficult it was going to be to get at the truth of how Jackie died, two years on. Was he really up to it? He knew nothing about detection or law, and he knew precious little about how Jackie and Laura had lived in the last ten years and what went on between them.
But more than that, why should he care if Laura had been punished for a crime she hadn’t committed? She hadn’t given a damn about him when she played around with the man from the casino.
He could see himself on the London train, squashed between a very large woman who never stopped eating and a Glaswegian drunk who kept offering him a swig from his bottle of whisky. It was January 1975 and bitterly cold. The carriage was full of cigarette smoke which stung his eyes, but every time he closed them he saw Laura’s face, and the pain in his heart was so bad he felt he could easily die from it.
All he had in the world was about £10, a bag full of carpentry tools and a few clothes. He was scared, too, that
Jackie’s offer to give him work might have been just hot air and he wouldn’t be able to find anywhere to live. He’d only met Jackie a few times on her brief visits to Scotland, and although she had seemed to be the dynamic businesswoman Laura had always described her as, he had no real proof of it. London was unknown territory to him too, he had no other contacts to find work, and if he failed to make it there he didn’t know what he was going to do.
‘But you did make it there, thanks to Jackie,’ he murmured to himself, shaking himself out of his reverie. ‘Even if you don’t owe anything to Laura, you do to Jackie. You’ve got to find out the truth for her sake.’
Instead of returning to Edinburgh as he’d intended, Stuart turned off on the lane that led to Brodie Farm, left his car outside the last cottages and began to walk the rest of the way. He had already driven here several times while checking the time it took from Edinburgh, but it was only by walking that he could get the real feel of the area, notice small landmarks and the other houses on the route which he’d hardly taken in while driving.
When Jackie had first bought Brodie Farm Stuart had been puzzled as to why she would buy a place inland. Fife’s attraction to him was the small, quaint coastal villages. He saw the rest of the county as rather flat and bleak, with none of the majesty of the Highlands, or the scenic beauty of the rolling hills and valleys of the Borders.
But as he walked down the lane, the sun on his back, he saw what Jackie must have seen – miles and miles of gently undulating fields, lush and green now with crops, a feeling of immense space. When he turned round to look back towards Crail, the sea was as blue as the sky, and suddenly he understood why Jackie had spoken of the freedom she felt here. For a girl who had grown up in London, hemmed in by houses, surrounded by people, her ears bombarded by traffic noise, it must have been wonderful to stand at her door seeing and hearing only the sounds of nature – the wind blowing the crops, birds wheeling overhead – and watching the colour of the sea change according to the weather. Stuart remembered her saying that being exposed to all the elements made her feel strong, that being able to see for miles and miles gave her power. He had laughed at the time, assuming it was another of her wacky ideas that would be thrown aside when a new one came to her. But though she stopped trying to convince others to embrace the simple life, she remained faithful to it. And now he was here in this wide open, vast space, feeling the wind tugging at his hair, he understood what she loved about it.
Brodie Farm was visible from a long way off because it stood up on slightly higher ground, surrounded by trees. Once Stuart was closer, he climbed on to a farm gate to study it in detail. The two-storey farmhouse and its single-storey outbuildings formed an open-ended square around the yard. When Jackie bought the place there were no windows on the outside walls; in fact, when she had shown him photographs of it, to him it looked like a tumbledown, forbidding fortress. He hadn’t aired his real opinion, that she was crazy to buy it, for by then he knew Jackie well enough to appreciate she had vision.
She had already drawn up tentative plans to convert each of the stables and other outhouses into guest rooms, but it was his suggestion that she put windows in the outside walls to make the rooms lighter, and give her guests the benefit of the extensive views across the countryside.
Stuart had never had the chance to see the place, not before she began the work, or during, or after, its completion. She had asked him if he’d like to manage the project, but he’d turned it down because he’d been offered work in South America, and anyway in those days he had no wish to return to Scotland, not while Laura was up there.
But it pleased him to see she had acted on his suggestion about the windows, and they, and the many trees and shrubs along the boundary of her land had softened the severity of the building. Seen now in bright sunshine, it looked so idyllic and peaceful it didn’t seem possible that a horrific murder had taken place there.
Once again he wondered what had caused Jackie to freak out that morning and phone Laura. She might have been troubled for some time, but in Stuart’s experience there was usually some dramatic incident which suddenly sent people over the edge.
Could someone have dropped in and threatened her? If they had hung around afterwards they might have heard her make the call to Laura, and panicked because they knew Jackie was likely to spill the beans when she arrived. But unless the neighbour who saw Laura and Michael Fenton’s cars was wrong, that would mean the killer had come on foot.
Stuart got down off the gate and continued along the lane, climbed over another gate near to Brodie Farm’s boundary fence and walked up the side of the field to make his way right round the property. To his surprise there was a window open upstairs in the farmhouse, and music from a radio wafted out. He was rather shocked that Belle had let the farmhouse, he had expected that she would only take bookings for the stable rooms, and leave Jackie’s home untouched. But perhaps that was naive of him; if Belle hadn’t got many bookings at her place, she probably needed the extra money.
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 ma
de 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 electrical work which was potentially dangerous, and plumbing that would be leaking within weeks. By the end of the seventies Charles was involved in building entire estates of housing, but Stuart had long since declined to work for him because he wasn’t prepared to be a party to dangerous and unethical practices.
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.
Faith Page 12
