“No, I wouldn’t say that. I was good friends with her.” But whether Libby Pearson said that to gain a retrospective association with notoriety, Carole couldn’t judge. There was something about the woman that seemed to try too hard. Carole could visualize her in the playground, unsubtle and ungainly, desperate to be part of the gang.
“Did you ever meet Michael Brewer?” Carole asked. “Oh yes. I certainly did.” Libby Pearson didn’t want to miss out on that bit of reflected evil either. “What did he look like?”
“Tall. Very thin. Very good-looking he was, but quite intense. I remember saying to Janine and Marie that I wouldn’t have liked a boyfriend who was so intense.”
“But you never went out with him?”
“No. We went around in a crowd.” The eternal answer of the teenager who didn’t have a particular partner.
“So how many were you in that crowd?” asked Carole.
“I suppose eight or ten. We used to go to discos.”
“And when you say eight or ten, those were all girls, were they?”
“No, no, there were boys.” Some recollected teenage gaffe embarrassed Libby Pearson, and she turned to check a pan in the bottom left oven of the Aga.
“The boys were regulars?”
“Pretty well. I mean, it varied a bit. People fell in and out of, you know, relationships.”
She turned back to them, seeming to have recovered. The redness of her face could have been caused by the heat of the Aga.
“And Michael Brewer was one of those regulars?” Libby nodded. “Along with Janine Buckley and Marie Coleman?”
“Yes. How did you know about Marie?”
“We’ve already done quite a lot of research,” said Gita efficiently.
“Ah. Well, she and Janine were very close. Best friends. And, though usually with female best friends, there’s a pretty one and an ugly one,” Libby Pearson spoke as if she had had personal experience of this syndrome and had not been the pretty one, “they were both absolutely gorgeous. All the boys wanted to be with them,” she concluded wistfully.
“Were they just gorgeous, or were they lively personalities as well?” asked Carole.
“Oh, incredibly bouncy, both of them. So much energy, always giggling. Full of life and – ”
She stopped short, perhaps aware of the irony of her words in connection with Janine Buckley. But Carole was more struck by the contrast between this description of Marie and the pallid, traumatized woman she had been speaking to the day before on Fethering Beach.
“Which other boys,” she asked, “were regular members of the disco crowd? Apart from Michael Brewer?”
“Ooh, Lord.” Libby Pearson’s brows wrinkled with the effort of recollection. “We are talking a long time ago here. Let me think. I can see some of the faces, but I didn’t know any of them that well, because we weren’t at the same school.”
And I wasn’t very close to any of them. Carole supplied the thought.
But Libby’s memory clicked into action. “Well, there was Marie’s brother Robert, of course.”
“Robert Coleman.”
“Yes. He was always around in the crowd. He was a great friend of Michael Brewer’s.”
“And did Robert have a particular girlfriend in the group?”
“Not so far as I remember.” Thinking back became hard again. “I don’t know. There was a certain amount of couples forming and breaking up, but…Robert…I can’t really remember. I always got the impression that Robert’s main job was to keep an eye on his little sister Marie.”
“Oh?”
“Their parents were very strict Catholics. Her mother was French and wouldn’t have allowed Marie to go out at all in the evenings if Robert hadn’t been there to see she behaved properly.”
“And did he do that? Did she behave properly?”
Carole realized that she was rather hogging the questioning and looked across to see if Gita minded. A flicker from the journalist’s eyes gave her carte blanche to continue.
“I think,” Libby Pearson replied, “that Marie behaved more or less as she wanted to behave. Oh, nothing very bad. But she could twist Robert round her little finger – like she could twist all men round her little finger. She was a bit of a flirt, really. Like Janine Buckley. They both were. They knew the power they had over men, and were just trying to see how far they could go with it.”
Again this image was totally at odds with the Marie of thirty years later.
“And Janine, of course,” Libby Pearson added self-righteously, “went too far.”
“What about Howard Martin?” asked Carole. “Was he a regular in the disco crowd?”
“Howard Martin?” The repetition was one of pure bewilderment.
“The man who Marie married, very soon after Janine Buckley’s death.”
The girl shook her head. “I’ve never heard of him. All I know is that, only a short while after the murder, Marie’s family moved away from Worthing. I never heard what happened to her.”
“So Howard Martin means nothing? Worked as a fishmonger, with Marie’s father?”
Another determined shake of the head. “I certainly never met him.”
There was a silence. Then, smoothly journalistic, Gita Millington came in with a question. “Just before the murder happened, Libby, were you aware of any trouble? Any row between Janine Buckley and Michael Brewer?”
“No. To be quite honest, I didn’t even know they were a couple. I mean, our social lives were very circumscribed. It was just Saturday nights at the disco, really, and for some of us, our parents were waiting outside to pick us up at midnight.” They were left in no doubt that Libby had been among that number. “So what went on, what various couples got up to privately – well, we didn’t really know about that. A lot of gossip, but most of it pure invention.”
“So,” asked Carole, “you didn’t actually see Michael Brewer and Janine Buckley together as a couple?”
“I saw them dancing together, but then everyone danced together. Well, everyone in a certain group danced together.” She had clearly not been part of that group. Libby Pearson had been the eternal wallflower. She turned away awkwardly for some unnecessary banging of Aga doors.
“So there was no one time when you saw them, sort of…kissing or cuddling?”
“Well…” Libby Pearson turned back towards them and was silent. She had a story to tell, and was going to do it at her own pace. “There was one occasion. It was a party, at Marie’s place. Her parents were away, in France I think, visiting some relatives, and Marie invited us all back after the disco. It was very naughty, felt very daring at the time, and we’d got in some more booze, and drank and smoked, and played music and did a bit more dancing. And then we mostly passed out – you know, slept on the floor and helped clear up the next morning, so that Marie’s mum and dad would never know what’d happened. And that’s the only time I saw Janine and Mick together.”
Libby Pearson let the silence ride, before picking up her dramatic narrative. “I was sleeping on a sofa in the sitting room. We were all scattered round the house – well, except for Marie and Robert, who were asleep in their own rooms. Anyway, I woke up in the middle of the night, and was terribly thirsty, and went to the kitchen to get a drink of water, and when I opened the door to the hall…” she allowed another pause “…I saw Janine and Mick going upstairs together.”
Another silence.
“And I’ve thought about that a lot since. They must’ve been going up to Marie’s parents’ bedroom to – you know – and I think the timing would have been about right; I think that was probably the night that Janine got pregnant. And I’ve often wondered if I should have done something. I mean, obviously I had no idea what was going to happen, how it would all turn out so badly, but I’ve wondered if I’d made a noise and they’d seen me, or if I’d said something, come to that, whether they might not have gone on upstairs, and Janine Buckley might still be alive today.”