The Witness at the Wedding

Twenty-Six

Libby Pearson was a large, over-enthusiastic woman in her late forties, and Carole got the feeling she had been a large, over-enthusiastic schoolgirl in her late teens. She entertained them in the large family kitchen of her large family house on the Fedborough side of Fethering. There was a strong smell of meat and herbs in the air, and their conversation was punctuated by clangs, as Libby moved pans from oven to oven of her large double Aga.

“Sorry, cooking. Always cooking. That’s the way it’s bound to be with a husband and two teenage sons.”

She offered them tea or coffee, but they said they’d just had some. This was true; it was not much more than half an hour since Libby Pearson’s name had first been mentioned in the sitting room of High Tor. The alacrity with which she had invited them round had been almost alarming, and in keeping with her all-round heartiness.

She pointed to a metal grille of aromatically steaming biscuits. “Those have just come out of the Aga, so if you fancy one, help yourself.”

She took a casserole out of the bottom right oven, took off the lid and sniffed it. “Bit more rosemary, I think.” Expertly stripping the spines from the stem, she added the herb, replaced the casserole and turned to face them.

“So you’re writing a book about poor Janine?”

Carole wondered why she’d made such a fuss about making contact. Libby Pearson seemed so ready to talk, she probably wouldn’t have needed any reason. And whether Gita or Carole herself was the potential author didn’t seem to worry her either.

Gita fielded the question. “Yes. It’s not just about her, obviously, but about the whole case: the circumstances out of which it arose.”

“The circumstances out of which it arose,” said Libby Pearson ruefully, “were too much drink and teenage sex.”

“Oh?”

“The school we went to was a convent. We were all taught Catholic values, but with people like Janine, they didn’t stick. Which was why she got into trouble.”

“Are you saying,” asked Carole incredulously, “that if she’d been a good Catholic, she wouldn’t have been murdered?”

“Of course I’m saying that. Janine Buckley was murdered because she got pregnant.”

“But you could say she got pregnant because she was a good Catholic. She didn’t use any form of birth control.”

“She shouldn’t have got herself into a situation where she even needed to think about birth control. The ruling of the Catholic Church is quite clear on such matters.”

Carole’s instinct was to continue the argument. But she reminded herself that they weren’t there to discuss Catholicism and morality. They were trying to find out all they could about Michael Brewer.

Smoothly, Gita Millington took up the questioning. “From what you say, it sounds as though you and Janine Buckley weren’t close friends. Are you suggesting that she was part of a kind of – fast set?”

“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.”

The way she concluded her speech left no doubt that it was a party piece, with which she had delighted many listeners over the years when they had askedher if she knew anything about the Janine Buckley murder.

“And did you ever tell that to the police?” asked Carole.

“The police never asked me. I was never interviewed by them.”

There was no reason why she should have been. The same information could have been gleaned from Marie or Robert or any number of other witnesses.

“And they were the only ones – Janine and Mick – the only couple who went upstairs that night?”

A sneer formed instantly across Libby Pearson’s features. “There was another girl – year below us at school – who’d come to the party with her boyfriend, and she kept going on about the way they were always having sex all the time. She took him upstairs earlier in the evening.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“I don’t remember his. Don’t think I ever knew it, actually. But hers…she was a right little madam – wouldn’t forget her in a hurry.” A wave of recollected playground jealousy swept through her. “She was called Diana Milton.”

“Any idea what happened to her?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” came the childlike response.

Carole looked across at Gita Millington, and they silently agreed that the interview was probably at an end. “Thank you so much. You’ve been an enormous help for the book.”

“It was my pleasure. As you see, all I’m doing is cooking. For a husband and two teenage sons.”

She finished this with a laugh, which seemed to emphasize the hollowness of her life. Cooking was more than a necessity for Libby Pearson. It was a validation of her existence in a house full of three men. She was always going to be the galumphing one, running behind the others in the playground, wanting to join in their games and rituals.

And she would talk to anyone about the murder of Janine Buckley, because it was the only time when Libby Pearson, even for a few minutes, could hold centre stage.