“Did the police come and talk to the staff at the West Country News?” asked Kate.
“Yes. We all gave them what little information we had. It was shocking,” said Rita, her face clouding over. “I’ve been honest what I thought about Joanna, but it was a difficult time, when one of your own becomes the story. I wrote most of the copy on the first days of Joanna going missing.”
“Do you know what happened to the photos?” asked Tristan.
Rita shook her head. “No.”
“What do you think happened to her?” asked Kate.
“I think it was either someone who knew her very well or a stranger.”
“Noah Huntley sticks out as a possible suspect because of their history, and the fact that Joanna had this clandestine meeting with him, at night, in a petrol station car park. And she could have had some kind of compromising information about him.”
There was a pause. Rita thought about it for a moment and then shook her head.
“I always thought Noah Huntley was a bit of a buffoon. He came across as disorganized; he drank too much on the campaign trail. Of course, back then, there weren’t any camera phones, and it was easier for him to get away with being drunk. Also, I don’t think Joanna was a good enough journalist to have information on him that was so explosive. His fondness for younger men was an open secret, and he’d already lost his seat, so anything to do with his misuse of parliamentary funds wasn’t a story either. Do you really think Noah was bumping off these guys?”
“It’s a theory,” said Kate.
Rita snorted and shook her head. “Do you have any other leads or suspects? Any clue where her body could be?”
Kate and Tristan looked at each other.
“No,” said Kate.
“I know one thing for sure. Joanna didn’t run away. She was far too ambitious to do that. She wanted fame and glory in her own name,” said Rita.
“Wow. The photos Joanna was having processed, that’s a big lead,” said Tristan when they came off the Skype call.
Kate picked up her coffee cup and saw it was empty. She got up to make herself another. “Jorge says Joanna came to his flat at the end of August 2002. A week later, the day Joanna goes missing, she gets a stack of photos processed. The police can’t have seized them, because there was nothing in the case files. We need to get those photos from Jorge. I’ve already sent him a text about them. I’ll send him another and impress upon him the urgency.” Kate took her phone out and it pinged. With a text message. “It’s from Faye Stubbs,” she said, looking at the screen. “She says to switch on the BBC News channel.”
Tristan grabbed the remote and turned on the small TV in the corner of the office.
“Which is the BBC News channel?” he asked, flicking through. “Ah, here it is.”
A news report was just starting, showing an image of the fallen tree on Dartmoor where Hayden’s body had been found.
BODY ON MOOR LINKED TO FOUR UNSOLVED MURDERS was the headline at the bottom of the screen.
“Police today are appealing for witnesses to help them trace the last movements of Hayden Oakley, a twenty-one-year-old from Torquay. He was last seen on the night of Monday, the eleventh of May, at the Brewer’s Arms pub in the town . . .”
A photo of the pub flashed up on screen, and then three blurred images taken from a security camera in the back of a taxi: Hayden lit from above in the back seat, and then him leaning across to pay the driver, and then him getting out of the cab.
“Police believe the murder is linked to four other unsolved murders: David Lamb, who went missing in June 1999; Gabe Kemp, who vanished in April 2002; and two other, as yet unidentified, young men . . .” The pictures of David and Gabe from the UK missing persons website flashed up on the screen. “Police also think these unsolved murders have a link to the disappearance of Exeter journalist Joanna Duncan in September 2002. A local private detective, Kathy Marshall, got in contact with the police with compelling evidence to show that Joanna Duncan was investigating the disappearance of David Lamb and Gabe Kemp when she went missing. There have been several appeals over the years, and her disappearance was featured in the BBC Crimewatch program in January 2003, but her body has never been found.”
Joanna’s photo flashed up on-screen, and then they showed footage from the Crimewatch reconstruction of an actress who looked like Joanna walking up Exeter High Street to the Deansgate car park. “Devon and Cornwall police have set up a dedicated help line, and they ask for any witnesses to call this number.”
“Kathy Marshall,” said Kate, looking over at Tristan as the help line number flashed up on-screen, but he was looking at a message on his phone.
“Noah Huntley took the bait,” he said with a grin. “He’s agreed to meet us tomorrow.”
35
Tom’s feeling of godlike power had evaporated when Hayden’s body was found. He’d been convinced that the rain and mud would fill the hole left by the tree and that the council would chop up the dead tree, haul it away, and fill in the rest of the hole, entombing Hayden in a muddy grave.
At first, he was relieved to see that the discovery of Hayden’s body had made only a small splash on the local news. He’d been careful to clean away all DNA evidence, and he was sure he’d been alone on the moor. No one had seen him.
Late on Monday afternoon, he was driving down the motorway toward Exeter with the radio on and the windows down, when he heard on the news that the police had linked the death of Hayden with four other bodies that had previously been unidentified. David Lamb and Gabe Kemp were mentioned. He swerved the car, narrowly avoiding a large lorry, and then he pulled off the road into a lay-by.
He sat for a few minutes, sweating, with the engine ticking over in the heat. The news finished, and a song started to play. He switched off the radio and looked on his phone. The story was now on the main BBC News website, and it said that the police believed the deaths of these young men were linked to the Joanna Duncan missing-journalist case from 2002 and that they would be reopening her case. There was a recap of all the details and a hotline number for anyone who wanted to report information to the police.
“Hotline number. Fuck,” he said out loud.
Tom had feared that this could happen. That one day the police would make the link. He took some deep breaths. The bodies of those young men may have been linked, but he was certain that there was no DNA evidence to trace their demise back to him . . .
And Joanna Duncan.
Joanna’s body was tucked away nicely, and he was certain she would never be found. However, the police needed a suspect for their investigations, someone that they could go big and wide with and blame.