Erika’s phone rang and she saw it was an unknown number. She answered.
‘Hi. Are you the police officers working on Vicky Clarke’s case?’ asked the woman. She had a quiet voice and seemed painfully shy.
‘Yes,’ said Erika, feeling a soaring triumph as she spoke into the phone. She smiled at the young woman.
‘I’m Kathleen Barber, and this is Becky,’ she said, indicating the other woman. ‘We’re willing to talk to you about Vicky’s podcast.’
52
There was a small table in the corner that was still unoccupied, and Moss made a beeline for it. Kathleen and Becky arrived at the table at the same time. Kathleen’s long hair was poker-straight, and she had a blunt fringe and a nervous tic where she kept flicking the hair out of her eyes. Erika and Moss introduced themselves and they all sat down.
‘I got your message. We weren’t sure about coming,’ said Becky.
‘We didn’t know if you’d received my Facebook messages,’ said Erika.
‘I did, and I told Kathleen,’ said Becky.
Kathleen nodded and glanced around nervously. The group around Cilla, Colin and Ray were taking raucously, and Henrietta and Charles were adjacent to them, talking intensely.
‘How did you find out about Vicky?’ asked Erika.
‘She was going to send us a final version of the podcast before she uploaded it,’ said Kathleen. ‘Just to check that we were still sure we wanted to be included.’
‘When was this?’ asked Erika, taking out her notebook.
‘She said she’d send it by the twelfth of October. Then we would have a few days to listen before she needed to upload it on the seventeenth,’ said Becky.
‘We didn’t hear anything by the twelfth, and then on the eighteen, when it was supposed to be uploaded I was really annoyed, so I phoned her, but her phone was switched off. Vicky had given me Becky’s number. She said hadn’t heard anything either,’ said Kathleen.
‘When did you find out that Vicky was dead?’ asked Erika.
‘Last week. We saw a small piece on the Daily Mail website, where they wrote the story about an actress being found dead, and there was her photo,’ said Kathleen. ‘I phoned Becky and I told you, didn’t I?’ she asked with another flick of her fringe. Becky nodded. They both looked terrified, with their heads down and looking at the table, as if this was taking a huge effort to talk about.
‘All of Vicky’s notes, and her computer hard drive and sound files, have been deleted. We got your names from sound files on a USB stick we found in Vicky’s bag,’ said Moss. ‘How did Vicky even find you?’
‘She said there was a guy who worked at the university who helped her with the sound on the podcast. They’d got to know each other a little, and when he started to listen to the podcasts she’d recorded about the true crimes, he told her about the Jubilee Road student halls and the break-ins and assaults he’d heard about,’ said Kathleen.
‘But how did she find you both? How did she get hold of your names?’ asked Erika.
‘Vicky told us she had to do a lot of digging,’ said Becky. ‘There’s a public website, a police website, Police.uk? She said that if you have an area and a date you can look up the crimes that were reported in that area to the exact address. She said that this guy at the university knew of a vague date of when it happened to me and Kathleen. January and February 2012. So Vicky said she looked up crime data for the Jubilee Road postcode, and she saw the break-ins and assaults that were reported for that time.’
‘She said there were only two cases for eighty-four Jubilee Road,’ added Becky.
‘Then she said she phoned up GDA and concocted some story, saying she was from the British Arts Council, and that they’d selected the school for an article about audition technique, and she wanted to track down people who had auditioned for drama schools. Something hokey like that. Anyway, she got them to give her a list of people who’d auditioned on the day of the assaults, saying she wanted to interview them about auditioning and what it’s like. There were only six guys and six girls on the list. That’s how she tracked us down. We’d both moved house a couple of times, but our mobile phone numbers hadn’t changed.’ Kathleen finished and there was a long silence. Moss looked at Erika and raised an eyebrow. ‘What? Is something wrong?’
‘No. I’m a little bit in awe. That’s good detective work,’ said Erika. Moss nodded.