Faith (2 page)

The sight only depressed her further, for her face reflected her weary and hopeless state of mind, and her hair had the colour and texture of dirty straw. As a child it had been mousey-brown, but for all of her adult life she had coloured it – black, red, dark brown, blonde and even pink once – so it was hard to recall its exact original colour. Yet she could remember precisely how it looked the day she’d found Jackie dead, for she’d been to the hairdresser’s the previous day and had it cut short and bouncy, with blonde highlights.

It was long and straggly now, so she kept it tied back with a rubber band, but when she did brush it out, those highlights amounted to nothing more than orange tips at the ends, the rest an ugly pepper-and-salt grey.

Glamorous, chic, elegant, perfectly groomed, those were the phrases people used to describe her two years ago when she had her shop. Five feet five, a perfect size ten, she still got wolf whistles when she passed a building site, and there was hardly a night out when some man didn’t try to chat her up, for she looked closer to thirty-five than in her late forties.

No man would look at her twice now. She might still be slender, but her skin was as grey as her hair, and her brown eyes, so often described as lustrous, were dull now. Even if she were to be dressed up in a smart suit, with high heels, hair cut and recoloured, and her face made up, she knew she could never look the way she once did, for it was as if a light had been switched off within her.

‘Brannigan!’

Laura turned at her name being called, to see Prison Officer Beadington at the door. She was universally known as Beady, a nickname that suited her perfectly as she was short and stout with beady dark eyes. Laura pulled out her earplugs.

‘A letter was handed in for you,’ Beady said, holding out the sheet of paper. ‘The man came here just now, wanting to visit you. The officers at the gate had to turn him away, but they told him he could write and ask you for a visiting slip.’

Laura’s heart lurched as she saw the familiar handwriting. She might not have seen it for years, but it was unmistakable.

‘It’s not another of those journalists, is it?’ Beady asked. ‘You know how the governor feels about them!’

Laura was too stunned by the letter in her hand to answer immediately. She looked blankly at Beady for a few moments as if she’d spoken in a foreign language.

‘No. No, it’s not,’ she said when she realized she had to reply.

She had sent visiting slips to several journalists just after she was convicted, in the hope they would take up her cause. Almost all of them came, but they cared nothing for her plight; not one believed that she was innocent. All they really wanted was more dirt, about her, and the series of suicides that had taken place in this prison in recent months. They used her as a reason to write sensational articles about the prison and the governor had been very angry that she had unwittingly given them inside information.

‘It’s from a man I knew a long time ago,’ Laura said weakly. ‘It’s a bit of a shock!’

‘They said he was a hunk,’ Beady said with a wide smile.

Laura half smiled. Beady was a decent woman; she had a hard outer shell, and she could come down on anyone like a ton of bricks if they upset her, but that was to protect her soft centre. Laura had seen her comforting girls when their man had dumped them, or their children were being taken into care. Her heart was in the right place.

‘He was always a hunk,’ Laura said sadly. ‘And a good man too, but us women are often guilty of not recognizing a man’s true worth until it’s too late.’

‘He came looking for you,’ Beady said pointedly. ‘So you get a visiting slip off to him pronto.’

Laura shut her cell door and sat down on her bunk to read the letter. ‘
Dear Laura
,’ she read.

I have only just returned to the UK from South America, and was horrified to hear about Jackie’s death. We may not have seen one another for a very long while, but I cannot believe you would have killed her, for I know what you meant to one another. They wouldn’t let me in to see you, they said I needed a slip. Please send me one to my hotel, for I cannot leave Scotland again until I’ve talked to you
.

Stuart

A tear ran down Laura’s cheek unchecked as she stared at his handwriting. Twenty years ago he used to write her notes scribbled in pencil, often embellished with funny little faces. She’d received a beautiful sympathy card too when Barney died, his deep sorrow etched into each word. This one was more formal, written on embossed headed paper from the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, evidence of how far removed he was from her now.

She could picture him that summer’s day in 1972 when she first met him in Castle Douglas. Tall, bare-chested, his cut-down Levi shorts threatening to slide off his slim hips. Chestnut-brown hair in need of a wash tangling on his shoulders, bare feet as brown as new conkers, and the widest, warmest smile she’d ever seen.

He was twenty-one, still an innocent boy full of exuberance and joy. She was twenty-seven, a calculating, wordly woman who should have known better than to run off to a hippy enclave with her two-year-old son. She was clutching at straws of course – anything was better than staying in London and letting people see she’d messed up.

She seduced Stuart that same night on a mattress on the floor of a place that was little more than a shed, and he woke the following morning to tell her he loved her.

Running a finger over the embossed letter heading, Laura could imagine the sophistication of the world he lived in now: king-size beds, sumptuous bathrooms, fast cars and designer clothes. She had had many reports from Jackie over the years about how successful he was, that he was head-hunted by national companies to act as their project manager all over the world. Yet according to Jackie, he’d made that climb from the Edinburgh tenement he’d been brought up in, not by sharp practice and conniving, but with his skill, hard work and total honesty, just the way he’d always claimed he would.

How different her life might have been if she’d only believed in him!

Holding the letter to her heart, she flopped down on to her bed, sobbing.

Nineteen seventy-two was her ‘summer of love’, when for just a few short weeks everything was golden. No other man, before or since, had ever touched her in quite the same way, and what they had was precious and beautiful. But she had destroyed it, just as she had so often before, and after, destroyed so much that was good in her life.

2

Laura lay on her bed holding Stuart’s letter, the delight she’d felt initially on receiving it pushed aside by shame. It wasn’t so much that he had discovered she was in prison, but that by now he would have found out about her real family.

He had worked for Jackie for a few years, and become involved with all her family, and although that was a long time ago, they’d retained some contact with one another. He would’ve been upset enough to hear Jackie had died of natural causes, but once he was informed that she was murdered by Laura, he would have scoured the newspaper archives to find out more.

Every sordid detail about her was there, for the press had been like hyenas after a kill, tearing chunks off her credibility as they unearthed more and more unsavoury facts about her and her background.

She wasn’t concerned about the stuff that she’d been involved in since they split up; he had probably heard about most of that on the grapevine long ago anyway. But what must he have felt when he discovered that she had not been orphaned as she told him? That she had in fact got two living parents and five brothers and sisters she’d airbrushed out of her life?

She could imagine him thinking back to things she’d told him about her fictional childhood and adolescence and asking himself why she’d never told
him
the truth, even if she chose to lie to the rest of the world.

Stuart’s family background was working-class too, and he’d have been quick to admit to any skeletons in the closet. Yet he’d been proud of his origins, and would never have resorted to glitzing it up to climb the social ladder.

There were many times in the two years they were together that she almost told him the truth. She’d known he would have understood then why she lied; indeed, he would probably have loved her even more because he’d been a compassionate man who was always on the side of the underdog. The reason she resisted the temptation was because he would have made her come clean to Jackie, and nagged her into contacting her mother. She was too much of a coward to face that.

Tears welled up in her eyes and she brushed them away impatiently. If she’d known at sixteen what future heartache she was storing up, she wouldn’t have reinvented herself. But back then it was just self-preservation, not intentional deceit.

She was twelve when it really dawned on her that everything was stacked against her. It was October 1957, one of those glorious autumn days when you notice the leaves on the trees have changed to gold, red, russet and yellow, yet the sun is warm enough to fool you into thinking it is still summer.

There were no trees in Thornfield Road, Shepherds Bush, where she lived. Even the narrow strips of soil in front of the decaying three- and four-storey houses that the residents liked to call their ‘front garden’ held nothing but overloaded dustbins, bicycles and junk. But that day Laura had taken herself off to Ravenscroft Park nearby and had marvelled at the festival of colour there, and wished she lived in one of the nice houses surrounding the park.

She went there most Saturday afternoons, but normally she took her baby brother Freddy in his pram, along with her sisters, Meggie and Ivy, to give her mother a break. But that morning Laura had taken one look at the dark, damp and chaotic basement flat they lived in, and she’d had an overwhelming need to get out and be alone in peaceful surroundings.

She was still in the park, sitting on a bench daydreaming about having a bedroom of her own, a bathroom, and never again having to wear second-hand clothes or having other girls jeering at her in school because her clothes smelled of fried food and mildew, when she suddenly became aware it was late afternoon. The sun had turned bright orange and was sinking down behind the trees, making long shadows, and all at once she was chilly in her cotton dress.

She walked home reluctantly, aware her mother would be furious she’d stayed out all day, and as she turned the corner into Thornfield Road, she saw Janice Potts and Margaret Jones from school, sitting on the wall outside her house.

Her stomach turned over in fright because they’d been bullying her since the start of the new term in September. She knew they had come to pick a fight with her, because, like most of the girls at the grammar school in Holland Park, they lived well away from dingy Shepherds Bush, and had no reason to pass through her street.

Right since her first day at grammar school Laura had felt like an impostor because almost everyone else was posh and glossy. The other girls had tennis and ballet lessons, their fathers had cars and wore suits, and she was absolutely certain no one else had a second-hand uniform or took a bath in the public ones. It didn’t help that she was so skinny and plain – every time she looked in a mirror she winced at her plaited hair which never looked sleek because it was so dull and wispy.

All through her first year there she was aware the other girls whispered about her behind her back, they hid her books and never let her join in any of their games in the playground. But since she’d moved up to the second year, it had become far worse.

On the first day back at school in September, Brenda Marsh had said she didn’t want to sit next to a ‘guttersnipe’. Someone else asked if she got her blazer from the rag-and-bone man. From then on it seemed as if the whole class was out to torment her. They left notes in her desk about her fusty smell. In the PE changing room girls would pick up her blouse or jumper between thumb and forefinger and wince, as though it had some disease on it. She even saw one girl polishing a chair that Laura had been sitting on with a handkerchief. Whispers, nudges and rude gestures went on all the time in class. In the playground and as she left school, girls would shout out cruel remarks and try to trip her up. Now the two ringleaders had discovered where she lived, and Laura was afraid.

‘Hey, Stinky Wilmslow! Had a wash this year yet?’ Janice yelled out.

It was tempting to run into a neighbour’s house to ask for help, but she knew that if she did Janice and Margaret would be on to her again on Monday at school. ‘Go and boil your head,’ she called back defiantly and doggedly walked on towards them.

‘You still got nits?’ Margaret jeered as she got close to them.

That jibe stung for she’d never had nits. She washed every day too, although that didn’t stop the smells from her home attaching themselves to her clothes. But there was no point in protesting, it would just give them an excuse to hurl more insults at her.

‘Probably – and you’ll catch them if you touch me,’ Laura responded. She had a sinking feeling that the sadistic duo were going to start hitting her, and that would mean she’d have to show them that common girls like her also learned to defend themselves from the cradle.

As she reached them, Janice stuck out her foot to trip her up. Laura kept her nose in the air and pretended she hadn’t seen, but quick as a flash, kicked out at Janice’s other leg and made her topple over on to the pavement.

As Janice cried out in shocked surprise, Margaret jumped forward, her fingers hooked, ready to claw at Laura’s face. Laura kneed her in the stomach and Margaret reeled back, clutching herself.

By anyone’s reckoning it was a formidable display of superior wits, speed and guile, and both girls looked suitably stunned and afraid. Laura put her hands on her hips and looked scathingly at them. ‘Have you had enough?’ she asked. ‘Or do you both want a good kicking so you can run crying home to your mummies?’

They turned tail and fled, their short skirts fluttering up to show their white legs and navy-blue knickers. They weren’t even brave enough to call her more names from a distance.