Faith

Synopsis

1995, Scotland. The prison of Cornton Vale.

Laura Brannigan is in jail for murder. For two years she's been battling for justic - insisting that she didn't kill her best friend, Jackie. Yet with her spirits at their lowest ebb, she receives a letter that takes her back to a different time and memory of an old love ...

Twenty years ago was a heady time for Laura: she'd escaped an abusive home and together with new best friend Jackie she'd made a fresh start. The pair had sworn to be sisters for ever. And Stuart had come into their lives - giving Laura a brilliant summer of love.

So what went wrong in the intervening years? And why is Stuart writing to Laura now? Does he have faith in her innocence? And can he help free Laura from prison - and her past?

LESLEY PEARSE

Faith

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Georgia

Tara

Charity

Ellie

Camellia

Rosie

Charlie

Never Look Back

Trust Me

Father Unknown

Till We Meet Again

Remember Me

Secrets

A Lesser Evil

Hope

To David Stoyle for his outstanding generosity in bidding in an auction of promises to be a character in Faith. I hope, David, that you enjoy being immortalized and that your new role as lawyer/super sleuth amuses you, Julia and your children. If I didn’t make you as ravishingly handsome or brilliant as you’d have liked, I apologize, but the fictional David couldn’t upstage super-hero Stuart. He had to be a thoroughly nice guy and a good sport, as you really are.

1

1995

‘Dried-up auld fuckwit!’ Donna Ferguson said loudly and scathingly as she dolloped broccoli on to Laura Brannigan’s plate.

Laura had always found that particular Scottish insult amusing yet she stifled her laughter as she knew Donna, the eighteen-year-old behind the serving counter, would see that as further evidence of her dementia. But then, as Donna weighed close on twenty stone, she probably thought anyone asking for more broccoli and less mashed potato was seriously barmy.

‘I may be old and dried-up but broccoli keeps my wits sharp and my body slim,’ Laura retorted. ‘Maybe you should try it.’

As she turned away with her tray to find a seat in the dining room, she could sense the charge in the air which always came when her fellow prisoners thought a fight might kick off. But they would be disappointed today, as they had been on so many occasions when someone insulted Laura. It was tough enough to be fifty and serving a life sentence for a crime she hadn’t committed, without looking for trouble. Besides, Laura felt sorry for Donna; she was forced to act tough to make up for looking like a beached whale.

Glancing around the dining hall at the thirty or so women, Laura thought how wrong film-makers got it when they portrayed women prisoners. There were no sexy-looking beauties here, and precious little intelligence. They came in all shapes and sizes, ranging from seventeen to over sixty, but they were unified by the same dull skin, lacklustre hair, and a look of defeat. She saw the same look staring back at her each time she was foolish enough to glance in a mirror.

‘Come and sit by me, Law,’ Maureen Crosby called out. ‘Us auld fuckwits should stick together!’

Laura did smile then for it was uncharacteristic of Maureen to display a sense of humour. She was a rather dour Glaswegian of fifty-two who liked her own company and rarely involved herself in anything which was going on around her.

‘Thanks, Maureen,’ Laura said, taking her up on her offer. ‘Did I commit a cardinal sin by wanting more broccoli?’

Two years earlier, when Laura first arrived on remand in Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only women’s prison, Maureen was one of the few inmates who made no sarcastic remarks about her age, her English accent or her insistence that the police had made a terrible mistake in charging her with murder. This could have been purely because Maureen was a similar age to her, but more likely because she’d been through too much misery in her own life to wish to inflict any on anyone else. There were scars on her cheeks made by a razor and her wrist stuck out awkwardly, the result of a break which had never healed properly. Most of her teeth were broken and she had a recurring back problem.

‘You’re looking very nice today. Expecting a visitor?’ Laura said as she began to eat. Maureen was a big woman and usually slopped around in a black tracksuit which did nothing for her rotund shape or her sallow complexion. But today she was wearing a pair of smart grey trousers and a pale pink shirt. Her grey hair had been washed and blow-dried, and she’d even made up her face.

‘Aye, my Jenny’s coming,’ Maureen replied, her voice lifting from its usual dejected tone.

‘That’s great,’ Laura exclaimed. Maureen had confided in her a few weeks earlier that when she was convicted of grievous bodily harm for driving a car at her husband, her eldest daughter had vowed she’d never see her again. ‘What changed her mind?’

Maureen shrugged to imply she didn’t know exactly. ‘I done what you said and wrote and told her how I felt about her. Maybe it was that.’

Laura nodded. Maureen was on the point of leaving her abusive husband when she discovered he’d stolen the stash of money she’d been saving to make good her escape. That same evening he beat her up again, and early the following morning as she was driving home from her office-cleaning job, she spotted him coming out of the house of a woman who she had long suspected he was having an affair with. In a fit of rage she drove the car straight at him, breaking both his legs and causing massive internal injuries, from which he would probably never completely recover.

Jenny had taken her father’s part, refusing to acknowledge the humiliation and brutality he’d put Maureen through over the years. She had even refused to allow her younger siblings to see their mother.

‘I expect your husband has shown his true colours to her too,’ Laura said thoughtfully. ‘And your younger children will probably have told Jenny things they saw and heard him doing to you in the past. She’ll have weighed it all up and realized you were at your wits’ end. Girls need their mothers and I’m sure she’s missed you terribly.’

‘You’re a good woman,’ Maureen said unexpectedly. ‘I didnae believe you was innocent at first, but I do now. You haven’t got it in youse to kill anyone, specially an auld pal like Jackie.’

Laura smiled ruefully. Two years ago such a remark would have filled her with hope; she would have believed the lawyers, police and jury would all see her that way too. But the jury had found her guilty and her lawyer had said they had no grounds for an appeal.

She knew now that everyone involved in the case was totally convinced of her guilt, and that was the hardest thing of all to bear. ‘It means a lot that you believe in me,’ she sighed. ‘But don’t let’s talk about that today. You must be so excited about your visit.’

‘That I am.’ Maureen beamed. ‘Just to look at her pretty wee face again will be enough. She’s thirty now, with a second wean on the way, and I didnae even know I had a grandson.’

‘Try not to mention her father,’ Laura suggested gently. ‘Ask her about your grandson, her pregnancy, home and stuff like that. She’ll be feeling awkward because of how she was with you, but she must want to build bridges or she wouldn’t be coming.’

Maureen looked at Laura speculatively. ‘Why don’t you get visitors, Law?’ she asked. ‘A good woman like you must have had loads of pals.’

‘I wasn’t a good woman,’ Laura said ruefully. ‘I treated people badly and used them. Jackie was the only person whose opinion of me ever counted for anything and I loved her. But now I’ve been convicted of her murder, the few people I liked to think of as friends vanished, and there’s no one left that gives a jot about me.’

When Laura got back to her cell after dinner, she lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. Her fellow prisoners had decorated their cells with pictures and photographs, but apart from a picture of a white rose which she’d cut from a glossy magazine, the walls of her cell were as bare as they were when she was first given it a year ago after she received her sentence.

Back then she’d felt too outraged to consider the idea of making it more homely, for that would have seemed like acceptance of what had happened to her. In her darkest moments she would stare at the grille over the window and contemplate hanging herself from it. Yet suicide seemed more like an apology than a declaration of her innocence.

Leaving the cell bleak and depersonalized was a form of protest. She didn’t mind its small size – she had lived in equally small rooms in the past. She could escape to a certain extent by listening to her radio and by looking at the view of hills from her window. But the constant noise in this place often made her feel she was going mad.

Banging, singing, crying, shouting, talking and raucous laughter were incessant in Bravo Block. She could shut the other women out with her door, she could even avoid the smoke and stink of their cigarettes, but the noise was there all the time, and sometimes she wanted to scream out for silence.

She could remember how much she had loved the Scottish accent when she first came to live in Scotland, but now it grated; even the gentler burr of those from places like Inverness irritated her. She thought she’d give anything to hear a London accent, a Brummie or a Geordie, but even her own voice, after twenty-three years in Scotland, had little trace of its London origins left.

She got up wearily from her bed to find her earplugs. They didn’t shut out the noise, but at least they muted it. She found them on the wash basin, and as she put them in, caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.