“I don’t buy it that the reason Joanna met with Noah Huntley at the petrol station was to talk about a potential job conflict of interest,” said Kate. “She had a mobile phone, and presumably so did Noah Huntley. Why meet in person, after office hours, for something like that?”
The petrol station was now shrinking in her rearview mirror, and the road wound its way through remote and hilly countryside.
“And presumably, he came out of his way to meet her,” said Tristan. “Noah Huntley moved back to London when he lost his seat in Parliament.”
They drove in silence. Kate was mulling things over in her mind, imagining Joanna driving to work on the morning of September seventh. Was it just an ordinary day?
Five minutes later they left the motorway and drove into Exeter town center. As they turned onto the narrow high street, Kate slowed down so that she could squeeze past a bus, where a line of miserable-looking pensioners waited to board.
A couple of courier bikes zipped between the traffic. Kate stopped at another set of red lights.
“Okay. That was the offices for the West Country News,” said Tristan, indicating a five-story building on the left that was now a John Lewis department store.
“When Joanna left work around five thirty, this street was still quite busy. It was a Saturday evening. The shops would be closing, but the bars and pubs would be filling up,” said Kate, peering up between the traffic at the rows of shops and the four pubs that stretched along the high street. The lights changed to green, and she pulled forward, having to weave between two buses. Kate glanced to the right and left. There were a few side streets leading off the main road. They were quiet in comparison, and some had loading bays for the shops.
“Yeah. There must have been lots of people around, but no one saw what happened to her,” said Tristan, following her gaze.
They sped on and came to a set of traffic lights. To the right of them was a big block of flats with Anchor House Apartments written in curling font on the front.
“And that’s where the old Deansgate multistory car park stood,” said Kate, their view blocked as a blur of people crossed in front. “Jesus, that’s hardly any distance at all from the newspaper offices.”
Tristan took the folder that was poking out of Kate’s bag and found one of the photos from the case file. It was taken from a CCTV camera a little way down from the crossing where they waited. It was the last known photo taken of Joanna. She wore a long black coat and a pair of brown leather cowboy boots. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was wavy and parted in the middle. The pavement was empty, and a couple were a little way behind her on the street, with their backs to the camera, huddled down, sharing an umbrella.
“She looked stressed out,” said Tristan, holding up the photo. Joanna’s brow was furrowed, and both hands were clutching the handle of her bag hooked over her shoulder. It looked like she was deep in concentration.
“She would have crossed right here,” said Kate, keeping one eye on the road as the last couple of pedestrians hurried across. “What was the multistory car park like? Was there an entrance on foot, here on the road?”
“Yeah, there was a car entrance in the middle, just further up,” said Tristan, indicating what was now the center of the apartment block. “And to the right of that was a poky little door for pedestrians.”
The lights turned green, and Kate drove past the Anchor apartment block. Tristan went on, “The car park was nasty, concrete, constantly damp. I used to get very scared the few times my mum parked there. Druggies hung around in the stairwell, and it was creepy if you had to go back to your car after dark. There were no windows, just holes in the concrete sides at intervals. It was six stories high, and over the years quite a few people jumped off and committed suicide on the road here. By the time they demolished it, most people were using the NCP multistory car park on the other side of the one-way system—we’ll go past it in a sec. Or they used the Guildhall Shopping Centre down the other end of the high street.”
“If Joanna got as far as crossing the road back there in that photo, then logically, she could have been grabbed or attacked by someone using the cover of the multistory car park. The traffic is so loud on the high street, it could have drowned out any sounds of screaming when she was inside,” said Kate, glancing back down at the CCTV photo in Tristan’s lap. It made her shiver to think that Joanna could have been moments away from her fate in this picture.
They reached the top of the high street, where there was a small park. The cathedral appeared to rise out of the ground as the one-way system curved around to the right onto Market Street, past the NCP car park and the Corn Exchange theatre.