Faith (26 page)

Meggie paused. ‘Then Barney was born. Laura didn’t want to give him a name like Barnabas, that was Greg’s choice, just as he had to have a conventional nursery, not the wacky, jolly room full of mobiles and bright pictures that Laura envisaged. She’d had a long and difficult labour, and with the benefit of hindsight I’d say she had postnatal depression. But in those days that wasn’t really recognized, and there she was stuck at home alone with a new baby, without anyone to reassure or help her.

‘Greg was no help, Laura said he looked like he was in pain every time he was forced to hold his son. He got angry when he cried, he took no real interest in his development.’

Stuart frowned. His memories of Barney were so sharp and dear to him that he felt hurt that the little boy’s real father hadn’t felt twice as much love for him.

‘Somehow she staggered through Barney’s first year,’ Meggie said. ‘She once said she felt she was in a black hole scrabbling with her fingertips to climb out. Then just as she was beginning to get her figure back and find herself again, Greg dropped the bombshell that he was going to buy a house in the country. Laura got really scared then, she told me she felt he was going to bury her alive. I advised her, rightly or wrongly, that she should put her foot down and refuse to go.’

‘Which she did?’

‘Yes, and it was at that point everything went pear-shaped. It transpired later that he had a mistress and his family were fanatically opposed to divorce, so I suppose sticking his wife and baby out in the country was plan A. When Laura dug her heels in and refused to go, I guess he had to resort to plan B, killing her off.’

‘Surely not!’ Stuart exclaimed.

‘You are sweetly naive,’ Meggie retorted. ‘One thing I really do know about is men, and believe me, Stuart, some of them can be utterly ruthless. Why else did he suddenly start scoring drugs and bringing them home? Laura had often taken speed when she was doing promotions, lots of the girls did. But Greg always disapproved of that. Yet all at once he was bringing it home, encouraging her back into it. I’ll tell you why, so that he could then slip her something really dangerous, and if she died it would look like it was her own doing.’

She laughed mirthlessly at Stuart’s expression of disbelief. ‘I was there, I saw it,’ she insisted.

Meggie closed her eyes for a moment, thinking back to January of 1972, trying to picture everything so she could describe it in such a way that Stuart would understand how it was not just for Laura, but her and Ivy too.

When she and Ivy had moved into the little two-up, two-down terraced house in Islington, it was little more than a slum. The floorboards were full of dry rot, the wiring was dangerous, and the bathroom was a lean-to at the back with floor-to-ceiling black mould. All the other houses around them were much the same, built cheaply for working-class people at the turn of the century, and a far cry from the big houses nearby built for the wealthy. But however seedy it was, the rent was low, so they painted over the ancient wallpaper, washed the mould off the bathroom walls, and felt they were lucky to have a whole house to themselves.

Meggie had never imagined herself owning her own house then. As a single girl of only twenty-one she would never have got a mortgage. But when she was offered the house for £1,200, a real bargain, and Laura gave her £300 for a deposit, her bank was willing to help her.

Once the house was legally hers she was determined to get tradesmen to come in and do it up. For that she needed cash, so along with her work at night from the club, she also joined a call-girl service to take some extra clients in the afternoons. All through the autumn and the start of the winter, she and Ivy holed up in one bedroom while the kitchen, bathroom and living room were renovated. Day after day they were subjected to hammering and banging, dust and mess. Sometimes there was no electricity and for a time they had no toilet either. With men trooping in and out and the stink of wet plaster and gloss paint it was misery. Sometimes they even began to think they should have accepted the £200 they were offered from the previous owners to give up their tenancy.

Yet by the end of January when at last they had got a pretty pink bathroom, a pale blue kitchen with a brand-new cooker and fridge, and gas central heating, they felt it was all worth it. Nothing had ever been as good as seeing the sage-green carpet laid in the living room, and awaiting the two big comfy sofas that would transform it into their own real home and give them the security they’d never had before.

By then Ivy was nineteen and she had got her secretarial diploma and landed a job as a secretary with a firm of accountants. She also began a night-school course in bookkeeping. Fortunately she was still naive enough to believe it cost very little to get all the work done, and she happily swallowed her sister’s story that she spent her afternoons at the club doing paperwork and ordering drinks for her boss.

But Meggie was all too aware that Ivy wouldn’t stay naive for much longer, and if she ever did work out what her older sister did for a living, she might very well walk away from her. It was bad enough having Laura separated from them because she had to keep her family secret, but Ivy wasn’t just a sister, she was Meggie’s only real friend and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

Physically they were very alike – the same height, slim build and dark eyes, though Ivy’s hair was mousey as Laura’s had once been – but Ivy was unscarred, easygoing, warmhearted and confident in her own abilities.

She didn’t agonize over anything. If a boyfriend didn’t ring when he said he would, she just shrugged. If someone was unkind to her at work she found a reason for it. She never complained at being alone in the house every evening; she was happy to watch television, read a book or do the washing and the ironing for both of them.

Ivy made friends easily too, yet whoever she was friends with, or whatever boyfriend she currently had, she always kept Sundays free to spend with Meggie. The only sadness in her was because of Laura. She worried that as Barney grew older Laura might be forced to keep him away from her and Meggie in case he inadvertently spoke of them to his father.

It was on one of those stay-at-home Sundays that Laura turned up unexpectedly at the door with Barney. Coincidentally, Ivy and Meggie had just been discussing the possibility of getting Laura to invent some new story to Greg. The one they favoured was that she and Ivy were the fictitious Aunt Mabel’s nieces. Meggie thought that maybe she could write a letter to Laura saying that they hadn’t known of her existence until Mabel died, and they’d traced her through the records at Somerset House.

When the doorbell rang and there was Laura, they couldn’t wait to launch into their plan. But Laura was in no state to have a serious discussion about anything. The moment Meggie looked at her she knew she was high as a kite on speed. She knew the signs well as many of the girls she worked with took it to keep going, and Meggie had taken it herself occasionally.

Laura’s pupils were dilated until there was virtually no iris left. She began gabbling away about nothing the moment she came in, pacing up and down the room and firing questions at her sisters, yet not listening to the reply. Even more distressing was the way she treated Barney like a performing monkey. She kept ordering him to sing nursery rhymes, then she’d peal with laughter, pick him up and throw him up in the air. Barney looked anxious and confused, and several times hid from her behind the sofa, but that made Laura mad, and she’d haul him out and command him to do something else.

Barney was eighteen months old then, a stocky little dark-haired toddler who happily went to anyone, and it horrified Meggie that Laura had been driving her car with him in it while she was in such a state.

She had lost far too much weight, her face looked gaunt, and she was so thin that Meggie could see her hipbones jutting out beneath her skin-tight jeans. As soon as she could get Laura into the kitchen away from Ivy, she asked her what she thought she was doing.

‘Having fun,’ Laura said. ‘You should try it, you always were a worry guts even when you were little, but now you’re turning into a grumpy old maid who disapproves of everything.’

‘But you’ll get ill,’ Meggie argued. ‘And you could easily have an accident in your car if you’re so spaced out.’

When Laura realized she was going to get lectures rather than admiration, she soon left, but Ivy kept asking what had been wrong with her, and the day was ruined by fear of her guessing it was drugs, and wondering if Laura got home in one piece.

The following morning just after Ivy left for work, Laura telephoned, begging Meggie to come over to Chelsea because she had the most terrible pain in her stomach and couldn’t lift Barney to dress or change him.

Meggie arrived there fired up to give her sister a piece of her mind, and found Laura in bed, doubled up with pain, with a grey-green tinge on her face. Barney was still in his pyjamas, his nappy stinking.

‘I had this last week, only not so bad,’ Laura said weakly. ‘I feel like I’m going to die.’

‘It’s the speed,’ Meggie told her none too gently. ‘It serves you right. You can only abuse your body so long before it protests.’

She tried to make her drink water, but Laura was immediately sick, and because she was in such obvious pain Meggie called the doctor.

The doctor examined Laura very carefully and asked a great many questions about what she had eaten in the last twenty-four hours. He seemed very worried, and said he thought it was some kind of poisoning and that he wanted to admit her to hospital immediately.

Meggie still thought it was purely the speed, but didn’t like to admit that was what Laura had taken for fear of getting her into serious trouble. She volunteered to take care of Barney as Greg was away on business.

Laura was allowed out of hospital two days later as the cramps had gone, but although she’d had various tests, the doctors hadn’t been able to find a definite cause for them.

Meggie made her sister a light meal and waited until she had eaten it, but just as she was about to leave she saw Laura go to a drawer in the kitchen and take out a tiny pill bottle.

‘Don’t even think of taking any more of those!’ Meggie shouted, rushing forward to grab them.

‘I wasn’t going to, I just wanted to check them,’ Laura said. ‘You see, I had two of these on the morning of the day I came over to your house, and I was fine then. I took another two after I got home because I was going to go out again later. It must have been them, the pains began a couple of hours afterwards and I didn’t get the buzz I usually get with speed. I thought maybe some of these are something else.’

She tipped the remains of the bottle on to the work surface and together they looked at the small black capsules. But they were all the same, absolutely identical to the black bombers both of them had seen countless times.

‘You’ve just poisoned yourself by taking too many.’ Meggie felt irritated that Laura was trying to find another reason for her pain. ‘Let that be a lesson to you, for goodness’ sake.’

‘Laura promised me she wasn’t going to take them ever again,’ Meggie told Stuart. ‘And I think she did stick to it for a while. But then about a month later, it happened again, and that time she was dangerously ill. I didn’t know about it for some time as Greg was home – he got her to hospital and took care of Barney. Laura only phoned me as she began to recover. She said she had been close to death, and the doctor had told her she had all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. He apparently asked Greg if she’d had any contact with rat poison.’

‘Surely he wasn’t lacing her with that?’ Stuart didn’t feel he could believe that of anyone.

‘I’m a hundred per cent certain that’s exactly what he did,’ Meggie insisted. ‘I think he opened up some of the black bombers and replaced the speed with rat poison. I doubt he did them all, I think he probably did about half in the bottle, so it was a bit like playing Russian roulette. She might get three tampered ones at once, or none, but whatever happened to her he would be in the clear as he’d just say he had always disapproved of her taking speed and she was at the mercy of her supplier. You know how straight people were about drug-taking back then – who would have had any sympathy?’ Meggie paused for a moment to drink some wine.

‘Laura didn’t even dare admit her fears to the doctor at the hospital,’ she went on. ‘Greg had thrown out the bottle by the time she got home, and when she confronted him he blew his top and said she was going mad. I just wished I’d taken some of them away the first time, that way we could have had proof.’

‘Even then it would be impossible to prove he was responsible,’ Stuart said. ‘It could have been the dealer, or anyone along the chain from the manufacturer. Anyway, Laura shouldn’t have been taking drugs with Barney around. And what right-minded person would carry on taking them after a scare like that? I don’t believe it was Greg!’

‘You would if you’d seen what came after that,’ Meggie said darkly. ‘He was vile to her. He stopped hiding his mistress, he stayed out at nights, refused to allow Laura any money, told lies about her all round Chelsea. He hit her lots of times too. In the end she had no choice but to leave. All she took was her car and her clothes, and she flogged the odd bits of jewellery Greg had given her and ran off with Barney. She couldn’t get a place of her own without a job, and she couldn’t work unless she got Barney into a nursery. So in the end she went to Scotland, which is where you came in.’

‘So why didn’t she tell me all this?’ Stuart asked in bewilderment.

‘Maybe she was scared that she’d look too needy and frighten you off,’ Meggie suggested. ‘I got a letter from her soon after she met you. She said that you were wonderful, but she was afraid it would fall apart because you were so young and innocent. But you must ask her about that. I can only guess at what was going on in her mind.’

Stuart drank some more wine, silently mulling over what Meggie had told him. ‘I’m going to make a start on your summer house,’ he said after a few moments. ‘I think better with tools in my hands.’