“Is it difficult to still live here, in the same house where you lived with Joanna?” asked Tristan.
“I’ve only been back for three years. A year after Joanna went missing, I rented the place out and got a flat in Exeter.”
“Why did you rent it out?” asked Kate.
“I couldn’t afford the mortgage on my own. I had to rent it out. When people go missing, there’s no law in place to say what happens to their assets. We had a joint mortgage, but I couldn’t change it without Joanna’s signature. It wasn’t until eight years later, that we, well, I went to court so Joanna could be ruled as death in absentia. Presumed dead.”
His face looked pained at the memory.
“You said we and then corrected it to I?” asked Kate.
“Bev was against it. She accused me of giving up on Joanna, but in the end, she came around to it. We were able to get a death certificate, have a funeral. My marriage to her was annulled. I bought out what Joanna put into this house. I gave the money to Bev.”
“What did Bill think?”
“Bill tends to think whatever Bev thinks. He’s devoted to her . . . They look after each other. Bev had a bad time when she was with Joanna’s father. He was violent and controlling. Bill is the opposite of that—calm, dependable. But after Joanna’s dad, Bev vowed that she’d never get married or give up her independence to a man. I thought they might be married by now, after all these years. I suppose moving in together is a step in the right direction . . . Bill’s a good guy. He helped me out with money after Joanna went missing. And when they finally ruled Joanna as dead, he bought the plot of land in the cemetery next to Bev’s mum’s grave and paid for a beautiful headstone . . .” His voice trailed off. “We had a lock of Joanna’s hair interred.”
Kate thought back to when they’d met Bev and Bill, how Bev had spoken of Joanna like she still might be alive. She hadn’t mentioned any of this. Fred took a sip of his coffee and went on.
“I met Tameka six months after Joanna was ruled dead in absentia. I proposed six months later, and she fell pregnant. We wanted to live somewhere nice, and this is now a good area with a good school. We had this house completely gutted. New floors, roof. We added this kitchen on and two more rooms upstairs with an en suite bathroom. The garden was landscaped . . . It’s unrecognizable from before. Weirdly, it helped with the neighbors too,” he said.
“How did it help?” asked Kate.
Fred raised an eyebrow.
“As you probably know, the police questioned me, but that’s as far as it went. My alibi came from Famke, a neighbor who I was having an affair with, so a lot of the neighbors still think I bumped Joanna off. When we remodeled, the whole house was ripped apart. Floors pulled up, walls stripped back to the brick. We dug up the garden for a new ground-source heat pump, and the village is now on the main sewage system, so we took out the old septic tank . . . Someone in the village called the police when they saw the tank being craned out of the garden. I don’t know who. The police showed up and asked to look inside before it was taken away. They’d checked it already, three times over the years. It was good to get rid of it and make a new start. I think the rumors that I killed Joanna and stashed her under the floorboards or buried her in the garden have hopefully been put to rest.”
“Are you still in contact with Famke?” asked Tristan.
Fred frowned. “Of course not. No.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“The last I heard, years ago, is that she went back to the Netherlands,” said Fred.
“What did Bev say about your affair?”
“What do you bloody think she said? She was angry at me for a long time, but we found peace . . .” There was a long pause. “We send each other Christmas cards.”
“My bank sends me a Christmas card every year,” said Kate.
“Okay. Yes. We’re no longer close,” said Fred. “But you would expect that. Joanna was the glue that held us together.”
He took a sip of his coffee.
“On the day Joanna went missing, you were here all day. Your neighbor saw you gardening, and in between that you were . . .” Kate hesitated. “Here in the house, with Famke?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t leave the house until just before eight?”
“Yes. When Joanna didn’t come home from work, I tried her mobile, but it was switched off. I phoned Bev around seven, but she didn’t know where Joanna was. Bev phoned Joanna’s friend Marnie; she didn’t know either. Joanna didn’t have a lot of friends, and she didn’t socialize with people from work. She’d been planning to come straight home, so we were concerned . . . Our first thought was that she’d had a car accident. Bev rang the police, but they weren’t much help and told her to ring back after twenty-four hours. Bev asked if I could pick her up, so I drove over to her flat. She wanted to check the two local hospitals, but we went to the Deansgate multistory car park first.”
“Why?” asked Kate.
“That’s where Joanna parked. It was due to be demolished, and not many people were parking there because it attracted a lot of dodgy types, drug addicts. We’d told her to park up by the Corn Exchange, which was more expensive and further away from her office, but she stubbornly refused and carried on parking at Deansgate. When we arrived at the car park, I drove up the levels to check, and that’s when we found Joanna’s car. Her mobile phone was underneath it and switched off, and that’s when things turned very dark, and the police opened a missing persons case.”
“Did Joanna have any enemies?” asked Kate.
“No. She didn’t have a lot of friends, and kept herself to herself, but no one who she hated, or hated her in return,” said Fred.
“Six months before she went missing, Joanna had written an exposé about a local MP, Noah Huntley. Her investigative article triggered a by-election, and he lost his seat,” said Kate.
Fred smiled. “That made me proud. It’s always nice to see a Tory get a good kicking any day of the week, but to know Joanna caught that bastard and held him accountable . . . That was the point where she should have made the leap and gone to work at one of the national tabloids . . .”
“Why didn’t she?” asked Tristan.
Fred paused and rubbed at his face. He slumped back and sat up again.
“This is all a bit much, raking over it again. It was because of me,” he said. He looked down and bit his lip. Kate glanced over at Tristan, and for a moment she thought Fred was going to cry. He let out a deep breath. “I wasn’t in a good place. I was unemployed and feeling disorientated. Joanna wanted to make the move to London, rent out this house, and try applying for one of the tabloids. She’d had interest from one of the national papers. I refused and said I didn’t want to go, which is something I regret, deeply. If we’d gone, she’d probably still be alive.”
Kate took a folder from her bag.
“We asked you about Joanna having enemies. Could Noah Huntley have been classed as an enemy? Joanna’s article ended his career in politics,” she said.