“Did you know Michael Brewer well?” The question was instinctive; only once she’d spoken did Jude realize that her interposition into a family discussion might be out of place. But Grand’mère seemed either not to notice or, if she did, not to mind.
“Oh yes. My husband was very keen on shooting. Mick was a gamekeeper. They would shoot together. Often they would make a night of it, drive round, I think, in Land Rovers with big lights, you know, to shoot rabbits. And then they would go off somewhere to drink. Mick had drink stashed away somewhere on the estate. Always, after my husband went off shooting at night with Mick Brewer, he came back drunk. I did not approve of this.” The asperity in the last line reminded Jude of the old lady’s reputation for strictness on moral matters.
“And I gather Howard would also sometimes shoot with Michael Brewer too?”
“Yes. He was often one of the party. But then, I don’t know, they fell out. Howard I think took advantage, went shooting somewhere without Mick’s permission perhaps.”
That tallied with what Carole had reported from her conversation with Robert Coleman. “And I heard that Howard was shooting the night Janine Buckley was killed. He alerted the police to the burnt-out car.”
The old lady did a small, quintessentially Gallic, shrug. “That is quite possible. I do not know the details. All of that period is a blur of great unhappiness. With my dear husband dying and – I was very ill,” sheadmitted. “For a long time I was very ill. There is much from that time that I have done my best to forget.”
“Grand’mère,” asked Gaby, “if you knew Michael Brewer so well, were you surprised when you discovered that he was a murderer?”
“But of course. You do not expect this from anyone, least of all from a family friend. But I do not claim to understand the workings of evil – what drives someone to do something of that nature. Only the good Lord can give an explanation of such terrible things.”
“But you knew Janine Buckley too, did you?”
“Oh yes. She was a very close friend of Marie. She was often in the house. They were two very lively girls, so high-spirited, so talkative, so naughty.”
“Naughty?” echoed Jude.
“Yes, she was always supposed to be doing her school homework, supposed to be behaving like a good Catholic girl, but her head was only full of thoughts of pop music and of boys.” The disapproval in Grand’mère’s voice was strong. “Fortunately, Marie behaved herself in that respect. She knew what was expected of a good Catholic girl. Sex before marriage is always wrong.”
Gaby’s eyes evaded the stern look that accompanied this. Grand’mère sighed. “If only poor Janine had remembered that. I often think, if Janine’s parents had brought her up as a better Catholic, she would still be here with us today.”
Jude, with Gaby’s tacit approval, continued the questioning. “Given the fact that Marie was so high-spirited and lively, wasn’t it rather a surprise when she suddenly gave up on her A-levels and married Howard?”
“Perhaps, in one way. In another way, it made perfectly good sense. I don’t think you can understand, Jude, what it was like for all of us after the murder of Janine Buckley. A terrible shock. We all felt it. Poor Robert had to be so strong. He was the one who held the family together at that time. My husband died very soon after the murder. I was distraught and had to be hospitalized, but Marie also was totally shattered. It changed her personality entirely. At that age, you think only about having fun, you don’t have a care in the world, you think perhaps that you can have relationships with boys with freedom, with no strings. Even though this is wrong, that is what a lot of young people think.
“And then this thing happens in your life. Suddenly you’re in the real world. It is brought home to you that sex can lead to pregnancy. Even worse, you discover that, in extreme circumstances, pregnancy can lead to murder.”
Had Carole been there, she would have recognized Grand’mère almost echoing Robert Coleman’s words.
“So for Marie,” the old lady went on, “it was a terrible time. She had no security. Her father was dead, her mother in hospital. Everything she had believed in had been proved to be false. And there was Howard, a good man who had been holding a candle for her for a couple of years. He loved her and wanted to marry her. For Marie, he represented security, and a chance to get away from Worthing.”
“Did you approve – and would your husband have approved – of Howard as a husband for your daughter?”
Another little Gallic shrug, with an equally characteristic ‘Phwoof’ noise. “We had always known he was an honest man, and a good Catholic. He had been in the shop working with us for a long time. It was maybe a surprise when Marie said she wanted to marry him, but she was happy about the idea and it seemed a good solution.”
“And do you think it continued to be a good solution?” It was Gaby who asked this question, and, from her lowered voice, Jude got the feeling it was the first time she had talked to her grandmother about the state of her parents’ marriage.
“Howard was a good man and a good Catholic. I think he made your mother as happy as anyone could have done. After Janine died, Marie – well, she shut off so much of her personality. She was never really complete after that.”
Jude heard a discreet cough behind her. A uniformed nurse stood in the doorway. “I am sorry, but I am afraid I must take Madame Coleman now for her bath.”
Gaby’s offer to help her grandmother into the wheelchair was politely rejected. The indignities of age were to be witnessed by professional carers, not by family members.
As they were leaving – with promises that they’d be back the following morning – Gaby noticed a photograph in the array on Grand’mère’s dressing table. She and Stephen smiled out, caught in a relaxed moment at some friend’s wedding. “Ah, I’m glad to see we’ve made it into your gallery.”
“But of course you have. Your fiancé is a fine-looking man. A little serious perhaps, but I think you can be relied on, my dear Pascale, to lighten him up.”
Jude would have been impressed by the accuracy of this assessment, had her attention not been distracted by another framed photograph in the display. This showed a considerably younger Howard and Marie Martin, standing outside an open front door. Howard was less bulky than in later years and almost handsome in his old-fashioned way. Marie looked washed out, but triumphant. In her arms she bore the source of their pride, a tiny, shawl-swaddled baby.
Across the white strip at the bottom of the photograph was handwritten: “Pascale comes home – 27 May 1974.”
Jude, intrigued by the lack of symmetry in the spaces between the ‘27’ and the ‘May’ and the ‘May’ and the ‘1974’, looked more closely.
Thirty-Three
Carole had done a big Sainsbury’s shop that afternoon. On her return to High Tor, Gulliver treated her as though she had been absent for a decade. She told him not to be silly, which rather offended him, because he knew that, as a Labrador, it was his God-given mission in life to be silly.
The answering machine registered a couple of messages, but when Carole played them back, there was just the click of contact and nothing else. She checked 1471 for the last caller. The call had been made from a mobile she did not recognize. Probably a wrong number.
It was unsettling, though.
Jude enjoyed her food. She was not pretentious about it. She could wolf down fish and chips out of the paper or the Crown and Anchor’s dish of the day cottage pie with as much relish as a gastronomic menu, but she was a great believer in trying whatever was on offer. So when Gaby said she knew a rather good restaurant in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Jude was very definitely up for it.