“That happened months before she went missing,” said Fred.
“We’ve been given access to the original police case files. Did you know that Noah Huntley attended a voluntary police interview when Joanna went missing?” asked Kate.
“No. I didn’t know that. When did they arrest him?” asked Fred. His surprise at this information seemed genuine.
“They didn’t arrest him. He wasn’t a suspect. And they spoke to him nine months after Joanna went missing: June fourteenth, 2003,” said Kate. “The police requested to speak to him after some CCTV images surfaced of Joanna and him meeting two weeks before she vanished.”
Fred sat back, surprised. “She’d talked about writing a follow-up story about Noah Huntley, but she never mentioned that she met him.”
“What kind of follow-up story?” asked Kate.
“When she was doing the investigation into the council contracts, she’d also heard some rumors that he liked to meet men, after dark, pick them up in his car.”
“Why didn’t she write about this in her original article?”
“She didn’t have enough evidence. Her editor didn’t want it to distract from the fraud story.”
“Did she discuss her work with you?” asked Tristan.
“She would talk about stuff after the event, but if it was a story she was working on and involved sensitive stuff, she wouldn’t talk about it . . . Hang on, what kind of CCTV video surfaced of them meeting?”
“You’ve got a Texaco petrol station close by, on the main road into Exeter,” said Kate. “It was held up by a gunman with a sawn-off shotgun nine months after Joanna went missing. The police asked for their CCTV tapes, and for some reason, a tape with footage from an evening nine months previously was amongst the footage. The police officer who was logging it recognized Joanna’s number plate. He’d been working on the case, and it had stuck in his mind. Then he saw that the time stamp of the video was just after eight p.m. on the twenty-third of August, 2002.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Fred. “Joanna used to joke she was probably the last person Noah Huntley would want to spit at, let alone speak to, after the story broke.”
“We’ve looked on the map, and this petrol station is on the main road, the A377 to Exeter. Was that the route Joanna took from Upton Pyne to work?”
“Yeah.”
Kate opened the folder and took out four still photos from the CCTV tape and laid them out on the table. In the first photo, Joanna’s car, a blue Ford Sierra, was parked in one of the spots reserved for drivers at the side of the petrol station. It was parked facing the camera, and Joanna could be clearly seen through the front windscreen alone. The second photo showed Noah Huntley, who was tall with dark hair and a pronounced widow’s peak, getting in the passenger side. The third photo showed a freeze-frame of them deep in conversation. The fourth showed Noah Huntley getting out of Joanna’s car. The whole exchange lasted fifteen minutes. Fred stared at the photos, still lost for words.
“What did Noah Huntley say to the police about their meeting?” he asked.
“He told them that he was on the board of the Daily Mail, and he was also an occasional columnist. Joanna was being courted by the Mail to join their team, and she wanted to meet with him and get his assurance that he wouldn’t block her hiring,” said Kate.
Fred shook his head.
“That’s bollocks. She would never go crawling to someone like him.”
“We’ve looked through all of the case files, and the police confirmed that this was true—Joanna had applied for a post at the Daily Mail. There was confusion as to why the petrol station kept the CCTV tape. Usually, they recorded a month’s worth of CCTV, then wiped and reused the tapes,” said Kate. “They say it was a mistake—the tapes were badly organized. Once Noah’s story checked out, the police didn’t pursue it.”
“Can you think of any other reason why Joanna could have met him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Fred. “I thought I knew Joanna, but as more time passes, I don’t think I knew her at all.”
7
“That’s the petrol station,” said Tristan, pointing up ahead at a Texaco sign. After they left their meeting with Fred, Kate wanted to drive the route that Joanna took to get to work in Exeter. It was less than a mile from Upton Pyne to the bypass, and the petrol station was another half mile along the road. Kate slowed the car as they passed. It was in a lonely spot, surrounded by trees and open fields. A woman was filling up her car under the giant flying canopy.
“I don’t buy it that the reason Joanna met with Noah Huntley at the petrol station was to talk about a potential job conflict of interest,” said Kate. “She had a mobile phone, and presumably so did Noah Huntley. Why meet in person, after office hours, for something like that?”
The petrol station was now shrinking in her rearview mirror, and the road wound its way through remote and hilly countryside.
“And presumably, he came out of his way to meet her,” said Tristan. “Noah Huntley moved back to London when he lost his seat in Parliament.”
They drove in silence. Kate was mulling things over in her mind, imagining Joanna driving to work on the morning of September seventh. Was it just an ordinary day?
Five minutes later they left the motorway and drove into Exeter town center. As they turned onto the narrow high street, Kate slowed down so that she could squeeze past a bus, where a line of miserable-looking pensioners waited to board.
A couple of courier bikes zipped between the traffic. Kate stopped at another set of red lights.
“Okay. That was the offices for the West Country News,” said Tristan, indicating a five-story building on the left that was now a John Lewis department store.
“When Joanna left work around five thirty, this street was still quite busy. It was a Saturday evening. The shops would be closing, but the bars and pubs would be filling up,” said Kate, peering up between the traffic at the rows of shops and the four pubs that stretched along the high street. The lights changed to green, and she pulled forward, having to weave between two buses. Kate glanced to the right and left. There were a few side streets leading off the main road. They were quiet in comparison, and some had loading bays for the shops.
“Yeah. There must have been lots of people around, but no one saw what happened to her,” said Tristan, following her gaze.
They sped on and came to a set of traffic lights. To the right of them was a big block of flats with Anchor House Apartments written in curling font on the front.