“Uh-uh.” He was still relaxed, but a little more guarded.
“Howard talked about someone ‘coming back’.”
“I remember.”
“And he said he had arranged to talk to that person.”
“Yes.” Now Robert was very alert, hanging on what she was going to say next.
“I was just wondering…”
“Hm?”
“…whether seeing that person, or a connectionwith that person might have had anything to do with Howard’s murder?”
“Well, this is all a bit vague, isn’t it? ‘That person’ – Do you know who you’re talking about?”
“No, I don’t,” Carole admitted. “But I just wondered if it might be Michael Brewer?”
As at the engagement party when she had mentioned Gaby’s burglary, the casualness instantly left Robert Coleman’s face. He sank back heavily into his armchair and asked, “What do you know about Michael Brewer?”
“Gaby mentioned his name to me. I think Inspector Pollard had asked her if she knew anything about him.”
“And did she?”
“No.” He seemed relieved by this news. Then Carole said, “On the other hand, I know quite a lot about him.”
“What? How?”
She didn’t want to mention Gita’s work as a research assistant; that might sound too calculating. “His name came up in conversation. Someone was talking about the Janine Buckley murder case because it was local.”
Robert Coleman didn’t appear to be worried about the coincidence. “Did you know that Janine Buckley was at school with Marie?”
“Yes, Gaby mentioned it,” she replied, truthfully this time. “So presumably you knew her?” He nodded. “And Michael Brewer too?”
“I knew him. We used to see quite a lot of each other in those days. Mick and I were in our early twenties. We’d been at school together too. And having a younger sister could be quite useful for young men in search of female company.”
“Were you already in the police force?”
“No, I was working locally round Worthing – crap jobs, driving delivery vans, that kind of thing. I was thinking I needed something more like a proper career, and my ambitions were moving towards the police, but I hadn’t started then.” His lower lip hardened into a straight line. “What happened with Mick was one of the factors that made my mind up for me. Perhaps I felt guilty for not having been able to protect Janine, and wanted to save other people from…” He looked troubled. “Locking the stable door after the horse had gone.”
“It must have been a terrible shock to you, when the murder happened,” Carole prompted.
“That’s an understatement. Mick was one of a bunch of us that went round together. Met up in pubs, went to discos – you know. All that music of the time: T-Rex, Slade, Donny Osmond, Gary Glitter. Some of it still stands up even now. But then we were – well, you know how carefree you feel when you’re in your early twenties?”
Carole nodded. She didn’t think it was the moment to say that she’d never felt carefree in her life.
“And OK, there was a bit of sex going on, you’re going to be experimenting at that age, aren’t you? No drugs, though. Certainly I didn’t do any, and I don’t think any of the rest of the crowd did. There was a kind of innocence about the whole thing. Looking back, that’s the way it seems to me. And then – this shock. Suddenly we’re in the real world. Sex can lead to pregnancy. Pregnancy can lead to murder. And it’s been committed by someone you thought of as a mate, someone you thought you knew.” He shuddered. “Still gets to me. Still, after thirty-odd years.”
“Did it get to Marie too?”
“And how. Sounds a bit dramatic, but I don’t think she ever really recovered from what happened. Certainly her personality changed. Seeing her now, it’d be impossible for you to imagine what Marie was like at seventeen. Really bubbly…you know, like Gabs, but even more so. And very beautiful. And unafraid of everything. You wouldn’t believe that, the way she is now, would you?”
“She must’ve married Howard fairly soon afterwards, mustn’t she?”
“Not long after. Before Michael Brewer came up for trial certainly.”
“But surely Howard wasn’t part of your disco crowd, was he?”
“No, he was a lot older. Worked in the business with our dad – fishmonger’s.” So Carole had finally found out the dead man’s profession. “But you may have heard Dad died soon after Janine Buckley’s murder.”
“I did hear that, yes.”
“Heart attack. Whether it had anything to do with the stress, you know, the state Maman was in – I just don’t know. Anyway, that meant poor Marie was even more stressed. Howard had always had a thing for my sister, really fancied her, but none of us thought he was in with a prayer. Then suddenly Marie announces she’s going to marry him. I couldn’t believe it. It was like – don’t take this wrong, because I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. I liked Howard. He was a good man, an honest man. But it was as though, when Marie married him, she had given up all ambition. I mean, she left school, didn’t finish her A level course, suddenly no more talk of university. It was as if, for her, Howard represented safety. He would protect her from the wicked world that had just betrayed her. They married quietly in the Register Office, and moved away. Dad’s business was sold off, and Howard didn’t want to stay with the new owner. So he got a job with a fishmonger in Worcester first off; it seemed he and Marie wanted to put as much distance between themselves and Worthing as possible. And then the kids came along, and they moved from place to place, and I suppose they found a kind of happiness – the only kind of happiness they could find – but my sister’s life had been totally destroyed by what Mick Brewer did.”
The sadness of this statement seemed almost to wind Robert Coleman. He sat back breathing deeply, like a man recovering from a punch.
“And has he come back?”
He looked at Carole, as though he did not understand her question. The brown eyes had lost their sparkle, and were dull with memories.
“Is it Michael Brewer who has come back? Was it him Howard was talking about at the engagement party?”
There was a new caution in his voice as he answered, “I don’t know. Certainly Inspector Pollardwas interested in the history of Marie’s connection with the case. That’s often how you start an investigation, when you’ve got nothing to go on. You’ve got to start from somewhere, so you ask: have any of the principal characters got any connection with another crime, even one that happened thirty years before? And, of course, in this case, maybe they found other parallels.”
“The modus operandi,” Carole suggested. “A strangling in a car that was then burnt out?”
Robert Coleman gave her a dry look. “You have been doing your research, haven’t you? What is your interest in all this, Carole?”
“Simply that I care about Gaby. I don’t want her to be hurt.”
He assessed this answer for a moment, then nodded. “Fair enough. As good a reason as any other.”
Carole felt emboldened to ask a more specific question. “And have the police found anything that links Michael Brewer to the death of Howard?”
Robert opened his hands wide in self-defence. “Look, I’m not part of the investigation. I’m not a serving police officer, and when I was I didn’t do murder cases. Because we were once in the same profession, Inspector Pollard occasionally shares a little titbit of information with me, but I don’t get hourly bulletins of how the investigation’s going. All I know is what I told you – that Pollard is seeing if he can find a connection between the murders of Howard and Janine Buckley. I think they’re still running forensic tests on the car and the crime scene. Maybe those will reveal something. But if they do, I think the likelihood is against Inspector Pollard immediately notifying me of their findings.”