“No. She was happier than I’d ever seen her.”
“And you saw her a lot?”
“A few times a week. We’d talk on the phone most days, more than once. She’d just bought a house in Upton Pyne, a small village on the outskirts of Exeter, with her husband, Fred.”
“What did you think of Fred?”
“Fred was—is—a lovely guy. He didn’t do it,” said Bev instantly. “He was home all day. And there were so many witnesses. He was painting their house, and up a ladder . . . Lots of people saw him in the village and gave him an alibi.”
“Did anything unusual happen in the run-up to her going missing?” asked Kate.
“No.”
“What was she working on? I read that she was an investigative journalist.”
“She was working on lots of stories,” said Bev, looking at Bill.
“But nothing that would have got her killed or abducted,” he said.
“She went to work on Saturday, September seventh, and then left at five thirty. It was only a short walk to her car, but somewhere along the way, she vanished. Me and Bill had been out that day at Killerton House, about an hour’s drive. We came back in the afternoon. Bill stopped in at the office block his company was remodeling in Exeter; I went home. Then, around seven, I got a call from Fred that Jo hadn’t come home. We called round; no one knew where she was. In the end, Fred drove over and picked me up, and we started looking for her. The police wouldn’t treat her as a missing person for the first twenty-four hours, so we drove round the local hospitals, and we checked the car park near her office, and her car was still there. We found her mobile phone underneath the car, switched off. There was no fingerprints on it. Not even hers, which made the police think that whoever took her switched it off and wiped their prints off it.”
“It was the Deansgate car park, and it was demolished a few months later, in 2003?” asked Tristan.
“Yes. There’s flats there now,” said Bev.
“Joanna, Jo, was an investigative journalist involved in exposing a local MP, Noah Huntley, of fraud. This was back in March 2002, six months before she went missing?” said Kate.
“Yes, Jo’s story was picked up by the national newspapers, it triggered a by-election, and Noah Huntley lost his seat, but that was in May, four months before Joanna went missing.”
“And after he lost his seat, he landed a load of private-sector work, which paid him much more than he ever got as an MP,” said Bill, shaking his head in disgust.
“Was Joanna working on any other story which might have put her in danger?” asked Kate.
“No, we don’t think so,” said Bev, looking to Bill. He shook his head. Bev went on. “Jo didn’t talk much about stories she was working on, but there was nothing that her boss, her editor, was concerned about . . . The police talked to that Noah Huntley; I think they were getting desperate because they had no other suspects, but there was no motive for him to do anything to Jo after the article was published, and he had an alibi.”
“Were there many witnesses who saw Jo before she went missing?” asked Kate.
“A couple of people came forward to say they’d seen her come out of the newspaper office. Another old lady remembers her passing the bus stop up to Deansgate. The police got hold of a CCTV image from a camera on the high street, which she passed around twenty to six that evening, but it was facing the other direction from the car park. No one knows what happened after that. It’s like she vanished.”
There was a long silence, and Kate noticed for the first time a clock ticking in the background. Bill put his cup down on the table.
“Listen. Bev means everything to me,” he said. “I’ve watched her suffer for too long. I can’t do anything to replace Jo, but if Jo was murdered, I want to help find her so Bev can put her to rest . . .” Bev looked down at the tissue she was twisting in her lap, tears running down her crumpled cheeks. “If I hire you, I know your investigation isn’t going to take just a few hours. I’m prepared to pay for your time, but I won’t just sign off on a blank check. Is that understood?”
“Of course,” said Kate. “We never make false promises, but every case we’ve taken, we’ve solved.”
Bill nodded for a moment and then got up. “If you come with me, there’s something I want to show you.”
4
Past the stark-white kitchen was a wide corridor with five doors leading off it. The doors were all closed, and the hallway was dimly lit.