Free Faith by Lesley Pearse Page A

really forgiven her. What made me sad was that she couldn’t forgive herself.’
    ‘I sensed that too in a couple of letters she sent two or three years afterwards,’ he agreed. ‘I also thought that was maybe why her letters to me tapered off in the past few years. Perhaps putting pen to paper to someone so closely connected to Barney was too difficult? But did you think that last phone call was about that?’
    ‘In as much that I think Barney’s death was often behind her low moments, and there were plenty of those, just as there still are for me,’ Laura said sadly. ‘But she said nothing that morning that would suggest she was brooding on that. She just sounded crazy, like she’d hit some crisis but couldn’t explain it.’
    ‘What did she actually say to you on the phone?’
    ‘She just asked if I could come over right away. I asked what was wrong and she said “Everything”. She was crying, Stuart. She said there was so much she’d kept from me, and that she needed to talk about it. But that was about all that made any sense. I told her it would take me more than an hour to get there, and she began sobbing as if that was too long.’
    ‘Did you feel it was an emergency as in that she was being threatened, frightened or menaced?’
    ‘No, not at all.’ Laura shook her head. ‘If I’d got that idea I would have phoned the police. I thought her problem was a man. For some time I’d suspected there was someone special to her, but she wouldn’t admit it or tell me anything about him. I assumed her problem was that he’d dumped her, or if he was married his wife had found out. She didn’t give me even the vaguest idea that she was in danger.’
    ‘You said at the trial that there were several men; that she was drinking too much and letting her business in London fall apart.’
    ‘That’s right. So she was.’
    ‘But no one else seemed to agree with that.’
    Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’ Laura retorted. ‘Married men aren’t going to come forward and admit they’d been shagging her, nor would Belle want to own up that her big sister was becoming a lush. As for the business in London – well, you know what Roger is like! Their marriage might have ended, but Roger was still involved in her business. He wouldn’t want to admit publicly that it wasn’t in great shape.’
    Stuart just sat and looked at her for a moment or two, his eyes scanning her face as if looking for evidence she was lying.
    ‘Who do you think killed her then?’ he asked eventually.
    ‘Almost everyone she knew could have had some kind of motive,’ Laura sighed. ‘Gain, jealousy, spite, you name it, someone probably felt it, but I can’t pin it on any one of them, because I didn’t know what was troubling Jackie. She’d been less open with me in the last few years, she no longer told me every last thing she’d done or said, like she used to.’
    ‘Why do you think that was?’
    Laura made a ‘don’t know’ gesture with her hands. ‘That we’d grown up enough not to need to divulge everything to each other perhaps? Or maybe she had done something, or had someone in her life she couldn’t tell me about? We were still the very closest of friends, but I was pretty much engrossed in my shop, I wasn’t exactly on her case every five minutes.’
    ‘Right. Let’s get back to suspects,’ Stuart said.
    ‘Well, some of the people in her life can be ruled out because they were too far away,’ Laura went on. ‘But you know what a sucker she was for lame dogs, Stuart! She met all kinds of way-out people and invited them home; any one of them could have been a weirdo who wanted more than she was prepared to give. I said that in my evidence, but Belle denied it was true. Anyway, Jackie might have rung someone other than me and Belle that morning, or they could just have dropped by. All I know is that I was a gift to whoever really did it. Stupid bloody Laura who didn’t have the sense to back out that door and