“If Bill wasn’t at Teybridge House between four forty-five and eight forty p.m. on the evening of September seventh, what did he do for almost four hours?”
Bill stared at them, both hands on the gun. His stare reminded Kate of a dog—a scared dog deciding if it was going to attack or run away. Her hand was sweaty on the can of Mace inside her bag.
“Joanna was trying to get dirt on Noah Huntley, wasn’t she? Trying to dig up any dirt she could about Noah hiring rent boys and cheating on his wife,” said Kate. “She heard through one of these young guys that Noah Huntley liked to visit Max Jesper’s commune on Walpole Street. What she didn’t know is that you, Nick Lacey, also liked to visit the commune. Did Max always know you as Nick?”
“Shut up! I told you, he has nothing to do . . .” Bill stopped himself and carried on staring at them. Kate saw Tristan inching closer to Bill, his eyes on the gun.
“The phone call you got at four p.m.—it wasn’t from work, was it? It was from Joanna. We think that’s when she made the discovery that you and Nick were the same person. And Nick had killed those young men.”
Bill gripped the gun, taking deep breaths. “You can’t prove any of this. There’s no body. No car,” he said, almost chanting it like a mantra. “Bev’s car got nicked from outside her flat. You can’t prove otherwise.”
“Then how did Nick’s BMW end up outside Bev’s flat that night?”
“I’d parked on the road already,” said Bill with a triumphant smile.
“Why? On the morning of Saturday, September seventh, Bev picked you up from your flat on the other side of Exeter.”
“Okay, I’d parked it there the day before. There was no CCTV on that road,” he said.
“You got the call from Joanna. She’d worked out you were Bill and Nick . . .”
“You’re fishing. You can’t prove it!” he shouted.
“This photo proves it, Bill,” said Kate, holding up the photo taken in the commune. “We got this photo from Jorge Tomassini. Joanna had interviewed him about David Lamb, and he’d shown her some photos of the commune. And she’d taken the negatives without asking him. On the day Joanna went missing, one of her colleagues at the newspaper, Rita Hocking, said Joanna picked up some photos that she’d had developed that day, from negatives she’d stolen from Jorge Tomassini. This photo was amongst the photos that were developed. Jorge said that you had a thing about having your photo taken. This was the only photo in the pack where someone caught you by surprise and managed to get a photo of your face.”
“It was Joanna who phoned you that afternoon, wasn’t it?” said Tristan. “We know from Raj Bilal that the Teybridge House construction site was closed that day. Joanna saw this photo, worked it out, and phoned you. You asked to meet her, to try and explain yourself before she called the police. After you parted ways with Bev at Teybridge House, you drove to Exeter to meet Joanna at the Deansgate multistory car park. You knew it would be deserted. That’s where you grabbed Joanna and killed her, and you used Bev’s car to dump her body.”
Bill laughed and lifted the gun again.
“I say bollocks. And that’s what a jury will say too.”
“You were close to Joanna, weren’t you?” said Kate.
Bill’s face softened a little.
“Of course . . . I wouldn’t have hurt one hair on her head!” he said, raising his voice. He slammed the gun down on the table.
“That’s why it must have been tough to kill her,” said Kate.
“I did not! I did not kill her! You fucking shut your mouth!”
“You did. You abducted her and killed her because she had information about you and your double life. She knew you were responsible for the deaths of David Lamb, Gabe Kemp, and other young men,” said Kate. “You put her in Bev’s car and drove her here, didn’t you, Bill? You drove her up to this house. No one who knew Bill knew of this place. We’ve spoken to people who came to your summer parties, and we’ve spoken to your neighbor. They’ve all talked about Nick’s fear of people going down there on the sand when the tide’s out. We thought, at first, that you were a Good Samaritan, so scared of people drowning that you have a hovercraft to go patrolling the sand when the tide is low. But that’s not the case, is it? You’re scared that one day the tide will shift the sand and it will uncover where you’ve hidden Joanna’s body. You drove up here in Bev’s car with Joanna’s body in the back. You waited until it was dark, and you drove the car far out onto the mudflats, further than most people dare to go out, where you knew it would sink down and hide her body and the car. Afterward, you needed to get back to Exeter and meet Bev, so you drove Nick’s BMW back and parked it outside the Moor Side Estate. Bev’s car was never stolen. It never made it back that night because it’s buried out there in the sand with Joanna’s body inside.”