Faith Read online

  ‘I believe you.’ Those three little words meant so much to her. Yet she didn’t dare allow her hopes to be raised for fear of how it would be if Stuart failed her.

  ‘Have faith,’ he’d said. Like it was so easy just to put all your trust in another person. Trust wasn’t something that had ever come naturally to her.

  But she did know that Stuart couldn’t help her unless she helped him. If he believed that raking over her life might give them a clue as to who did kill Jackie, then that was what she must do.

  Picking up a notepad and Biro, she thought back to the day she first met Jackie.

  It was one of those searingly hot days when the tar on the roads begins to melt and trickle out from under the asphalt. As a small child she could remember all the children in the street searching for lollipop sticks to poke the tar, and they’d compete to see who could make the biggest tar ball by winding the stick round and round. But such hot weather usually came in July or August when the leaves on the trees were lank with dust and soot, the milk went off so fast it had to be kept in a bucket of cold water with a cloth over it, and the butcher stopped displaying meat in his shop window.

  But in 1961 the hot weather came in May, when many of the trees were still leafless. Laura met Jackie on the 24th, a date engraved on her memory because it was also Jackie’s seventeenth birthday.

  It was the year the Russians succeeded in putting the first man into space. Just that morning Laura was working in the Home and Colonial grocery shop in Crouch End in North London, when she overheard a customer claiming that the reason it was so hot, so early in the year, was because scientists were tampering with nature by firing rockets up through the earth’s atmosphere.

  Fortunately it was a Wednesday and early closing. Laura had already decided she would spend the afternoon at the open-air swimming pool just along the road.

  She had put her clothes in the locker and was just pinning the key to her new blue polka-dotted swimsuit, when a redheaded girl in an emerald-green costume came running through the footbath, tripped and fell, banging her head on the floor.

  Laura ran over to her, concerned because she’d gone down with such a crash.

  ‘Bugger it,’ the girl said as Laura helped her up. ‘I suppose I’ll get a lump on my forehead now. And on my birthday too!’

  She was a bit shaken up, so Laura got a wad of cotton wool from the attendant, soaked it in cold water and held it to the girl’s head.

  ‘I’m Jackie,’ the girl said, wincing at the cold water. ‘Do you think it will make it better or worse if I go back to sit in the sun? I only came here to sunbathe, but I couldn’t resist pushing this fat bloke in the pool and his mate came chasing after me to throw me in too. I didn’t want to get my hair wet because I’m having a party tonight.’

  Laura couldn’t help but smile, for the injured girl was attractive in even way. Her hair was the colour of new pennies, she had a sprinkling of freckles on her nose, green eyes and a perfect figure. Her breathless explanation of what she’d been up to was so warm and friendly that it was as if she already considered Laura a new friend.

  ‘I’m Laura, and happy birthday,’ she said. ‘But I think you should sit down in the shade until you’re sure you’re okay.’

  ‘You sound like my mother,’ Jackie replied, grinning. ‘Are you with anyone?’

  ‘No, I’m on my own,’ Laura said. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been here.’

  ‘Great, that means you can stay with me and chat,’ Jackie said. ‘There are a few people I know out there, but no one I want to spend the afternoon with.’

  Laura never told Jackie how much that friendly invitation meant to her. To have done so would have meant she’d have had to admit how desperately lonely she’d been for the past year.

  She had left the house in Barnes for good in the Easter holidays the previous year, about six weeks after her trouble with Vincent. She’d planned her exit carefully, for she wanted to leave him with the nagging anxiety that she might retaliate at a later date. During those few weeks she’d systematically helped herself to money from his wallet, never enough to alert him to what she was doing, but she managed to get £35. She found her birth certificate too, and her medical card, and she also applied for a National Insurance number so that she was totally prepared to get a job.

  It was torture staying in the house for those few weeks. She knew Vincent thought her silence about what he’d done meant he was safe, but that also meant he might pounce on her again if an opportunity arose. Whenever she got home and found her mother was out, she went straight back out too. She jammed a chair under the handle of her bedroom door in the evening so he couldn’t walk in. But that still didn’t stop him trying to waylay her as she came out of the bathroom, or sitting watching her as she washed up in the kitchen. Every hour she was in the house with him she felt menaced; she was nervy and found it hard to eat anything at all when he was around.

  She had been looking in the Evening Standard for somewhere to live for some time, and had been to see several bedsitting rooms, but the ones she felt she could afford on low wages were all so dirty and poky that she’d begun to despair. However, on the day after Easter Monday she went to see one in Crouch Hill in Hornsey, and realized this was as good as she was ever going to get.

  Nearby Crouch End was a nice place, though Finsbury Park in the other direction was not so good, and the room on the second floor was small. But it was very clean, the sink and cooker were hidden in a cupboard, and the windows overlooked gardens. The shared bathrooms were all decent enough, and as the landlord told her that all the other tenants were business people, she didn’t think it would be too rough. He was concerned that she was so young, even though she’d said she was seventeen, and that was the point when she invented her big lie.

  ‘My parents died when I was small,’ she said. ‘I was living with an aunt who was my guardian, but she felt I was old enough to fend for myself when she went off to live in France. I’m going to college in September, but until then I’m going to get some secretarial work.’

  Maybe he felt sorry for her, for he agreed she could have the room. But he made her pay a month’s rent in advance and said he’d evict her if she ever got behind with the rent, or had any parties. With that he gave her the keys and her rent book, and the room was hers.

  The next problem was moving out of Barnes. She could only do it when everyone was out, but as it was the Easter holidays her mother expected her to go everywhere with her and the little ones. She had a suitcase packed and ready under her bed, and finally, on the last Friday of the holidays, she resorted to pretending to be violently sick just minutes before they were all about to go to the cinema.

  There was no kiss goodbye, no concerned ‘I hope you feel better soon’, or even an offer to stay home and take care of her. Instead her mother said, ‘This is just like you, Laura. I arrange a treat and you have to spoil it somehow.’

  Laura watched them with tears flowing down her cheeks as they walked along the road to the bus stop. Freddy was holding her mother’s hand, Meggie and Ivy skipping along excitedly in front, and she knew she would never see them again while they still lived under Vincent’s roof. He would malign her as soon as he was told she was gone; she could just imagine him strutting around the house reeling off all the things he had given her, and how ungrateful she’d been.

  She waited half an hour before she left, just in case they came back for something. Then she wrote a brief note to say that she hated school so she was getting a job and somewhere else to live, and placed it on the hall table with her house keys.

  On the bus and tube ride to Finsbury Park she thought how her mother would rage because she’d thrown away the chance of going to university for the short-term pleasure of no more studying. Laura doubted it would ever cross June’s mind that she’d run away from Vincent.

  She found the job in the Home and Colonial shop in Crouch End the very next day. She didn’t want to work in a shop, especially not weighing up chee
se and bacon with her hair under a white net. But as she walked in there to buy some groceries she saw the sign on the window that they had a vacancy and applied there and then, purely because it was so close to her room. She told herself it was just a stop-gap until something better came along.

  She had thought living in fear of what Vincent might do to her was the worst thing that could ever happen to her, and that as soon as she got away everything would be fine. But that wasn’t so. She was frightened, lonely and missed her mother and the little ones so badly she cried if she dared think about them.

  At work she could cope, even though the other staff were mainly older married women and didn’t want to bother with her. But when she got back to her room in the evening the feeling of total isolation was so bad that she would often crawl into bed and cry herself to sleep. For as long as she could remember she’d always had chores to do, the younger ones to take care of, and in later years a lot of homework. She might have felt hard done by sometimes, but now she was experiencing having nothing to do and no one to care for, there was a huge hole in the centre of her life which she had to idea how to fill.

  All through the summer months, she went into parks on Sundays, in the hope she’d meet someone of her own age in a similar plight. She did see many other young girls, but they were never alone. She would watch them walking hand in hand with a boyfriend, or giggling with a friend, and wish desperately that she had someone.

  At Christmas she cried nearly all day, imagining her brother and sisters’ joy as they opened their presents. She didn’t have a single Christmas card, let alone a present. When her sixteenth birthday came in January it was just as bad, and by then she’d come to think that this was how it would be for ever.

  Then, out of the blue, along came the chance encounter with Jackie that suddenly transformed her life.

  They stayed by the pool that afternoon chatting as though they’d known each other for years. It was all about records, boys, makeup and clothes, and the party Jackie was having that evening.

  ‘You must come too,’ she said, her green eyes dancing with excitement. ‘Come home with me when we leave here. If you want to change for the party you can borrow something of mine.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ Laura said, astounded at the invitation.

  ‘Yes you can,’ Jackie grinned. ‘I can guess what you’ll do if I don’t make you come home with me. You’ll go on home and then bottle out of coming later. I can’t let that happen, can I?’

  She was right. Laura probably would have been too scared to go to the party alone. Back in her room she would have started to doubt that the tale she’d first told her landlord about her dead parents and her guardian, which she continued to tell anyone who asked, including Jackie, would stand up to more rigorous questioning. She would also be afraid of wearing the wrong clothes or just not sounding right.

  On the way to Jackie’s house she ran into a record shop and bought a copy of ‘Runaway’ by Del Shannon that was currently in the Top Ten. Laura remembered feeling it was a bad omen and that soon she would be exposed as a fraud.

  But it didn’t turn out to be a bad omen, for within an hour or two Laura discovered Jackie didn’t care about people’s backgrounds, how they dressed, spoke or even where they lived. She got that from her parents.

  Frank and Lena Thompson were artists. Frank worked as a cartoonist for the Beano comic, and Lena designed greetings cards, and the only word Laura knew at that time which would describe them was bohemian. Even their own children called them by their Christian names, and they appeared to have no regard for convention. Their house in Duke’s Avenue in Muswell Hill was a large one, with the kind of good-quality but scruffy furniture that could only be inherited.

  Frank had a full, bushy beard, and wore paint-splattered corduroy trousers and a shapeless jumper, while Lena wore a dress which looked suspiciously like a Victorian petticoat. She too had hair the colour of new pennies, but it was long and plaited and she wound the plaits round her head like a crown. Laura had never met people like them before. If she’d passed them in the street she might have taken them for a couple of extras from some weird film.

  Yet from the moment Laura walked into their vast, astoundingly untidy kitchen, she wished she had been born into their family, for there was an all-pervading sense of love and warmth amidst the chaos.

  Toby and Belle, Jackie’s younger brother and sister, twelve and eight respectively, watched by their mother, were icing a birthday cake for Jackie. It reminded Laura of one in a cartoon, large and lopsided, with bright pink icing dripping down the sides. They had smeared and dropped icing everywhere, including their clothes and faces, yet Lena sat casually drinking a cup of tea, unconcerned by the mess.

  ‘We’re going to write “Happy Birthday Jackie” in chocolate icing,’ Belle trilled out.

  Maybe it was because Belle was a similar age to Ivy that Laura felt an instant affection for Jackie’s little sister. She was supremely confident, with her golden hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks, dimples and the cutest little nose, but it was her willingness to accept a complete stranger as a friend that touched Laura the most.

  ‘You’ll have to wait until the pink icing dries,’ she said, smiling at the child.

  ‘We don’t usually worry about such refinements in this household,’ Lena said with a chuckle. ‘But as you seem to know about these things, maybe you could instruct Belle.’

  Jackie explained how they’d met at the swimming pool, and that she’d invited Laura back for the party.

  ‘You’re very welcome, Laura,’ Lena said with the kind of smile that proved she meant what she said. ‘But I hope my birthday girl explained that our parties tend to be rather mad affairs.’

  ∗

  It was a mad sort of party, for there appeared to be no organization about numbers of guests, or even what time it was to start. People arrived in dribs and drabs as early as five o’clock, some bringing plates or bowls of food, others with drink, all of which was plonked unceremoniously around the kitchen. There were children of Belle’s and Toby’s age, a great many adults, and about sixteen or so teenagers who seemed almost as eccentric as the adults.

  Music blared out from the large sitting room at the front of the house. ‘Runaway’ was played over and over again, along with Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers, but every now and then an adult would come in and put on Frank Sinatra or something equally old-fashioned. The younger children chased around the house, the adults moved on out into the overgrown garden for more serious drinking, while Jackie and her friends took over the kitchen.

  Laura didn’t bother to change out of her pink and white spotted sheath dress when she saw that Jackie intended to wear a pair of boy’s jeans and a plain white cotton shirt which she tied in a knot at her waist. ‘I like myself in jeans,’ she said when Laura looked at her in surprise. ‘You are the frilly type. I’m not.’

  That evening everything Laura had hitherto imagined about what went on in middle-class homes was turned upside down. She saw adult women getting drunk and dancing like teenagers and grown men playing with small children. No one seemed the least concerned about mess, noise or what the younger people were getting up to, yet strangely enough it was these friends of Jackie’s who seemed to be the most sensible. One girl in four-inch stiletto winklepickers and a beehive hairdo took it upon herself to wash up. And a Teddy boy in a pink drape jacket swept up a broken glass from the kitchen floor.

  Yet to Laura the most wonderful thing of all was that she was totally accepted by everyone. No one asked her awkward questions about where she came from; they didn’t appear to notice that she wasn’t as well spoken as they were. She almost felt that she could announce her father was in prison, her mother living in sin with an old man who’d wanted to have sex with her, and that she worked in the Home and Colonial, and they wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.

  Laura tucked Belle into bed around ten that night when she was almost keeling over with tiredness and Lena slung her arm
around her drunkenly as she came out of the child’s bedroom and declared that she was ‘a poppet’. Later a boy called Dave asked her to dance with him, and as he held her tightly to ‘It’s Now or Never’ by Elvis Presley, he asked her if he could take her to the pictures the following evening.

  By midnight the party had dwindled to just a dozen or so of the older people and Jackie insisted that Laura stay the night. ‘You can go to work from here,’ she said with a grin. ‘I’ll lend you a clean pair of knickers.’

  It must have been after two when Laura finally got into the spare twin bed in her friend’s room, and in the darkness she heard Jackie murmur sleepily, ‘You know, I think you are going to be my best friend for ever.’

  Looking back with an adult perspective, and a great deal more knowledge about Jackie’s early years, Laura felt she understood now why she came to that conclusion, although she’d made it rather prematurely. Jackie had floated through her childhood with boundless love and encouragement and had never had a moment of feeling insecure or worthless. She’d had nothing to rage against, nothing to fight for, and while not spoiled in a material way, for her parents were not rich, she’d been given boundless freedom to mix with whoever she liked, go wherever she wanted.

  Jackie saw Laura as being intrepid, worldly, practical and independent, all because she lived alone. She marvelled that Laura could cook a meal in her bedsitter, do her own washing and get herself to work on time. But the clincher was almost certainly that at only sixteen Laura was all alone in the world. Her parents were the kind who welcomed waifs and strays joyfully, and Jackie was just following suit.

  From that day on, Laura almost became a member of the Thompson family. Lena often remarked how good she was with her younger children, and she liked the way Laura thought nothing of doing a pile of ironing or cleaning her kitchen for her. Frank often said she was an answer to his and Lena’s prayers because she’d made Jackie more appreciative of them.

  Lena did eventually ask her more about her parents’ death and Aunt Mabel who had become her guardian. By then Laura had the story off pat: she said her parents died in a car accident when she was only four so she remembered very little about them, but her father had been a vet. As for her Aunt Mabel, she embellished her into a kindly but scatty spinster who had done her best as her guardian for years, but felt Laura was old enough to look after herself now. Lena tutted with disapproval, saying she thought it very irresponsible of her to clear off abroad while Laura was still so young, but that she admired Laura for her lack of bitterness and ability to cope alone.