“Why don’t you tell us about Joanna?” said Kate. “What was she like?”
“I always called her Jo,” said Bev, sounding surprised at being asked such a simple question. “She was a wonderful baby. I had an easy pregnancy. A quick birth, and she was so good and quiet. Her dad was an older guy I dated for a bit. He was twenty-six to my seventeen. He died when Jo was two. Heart attack, unusual for such a young bloke. He had a heart defect he never knew about. We never married, and he was never really in the picture, so I brought Jo up on my own. We were very close. More friends, really, especially when she was older.”
“What job did you do?” asked Kate.
“I was a cleaner for Reed, the company who rent out offices. They had two big spaces in Exeter and Exmouth . . . I had a council flat for years, on the Moor Side Estate. Then I rented a flat a bit closer to town. I only moved in here two months ago. My landlord gave me notice he was selling up. This is all Bill’s.”
Bill looked up and smiled at her. “This is your home now, girl, as much as mine.”
Bev nodded and pulled a ratty piece of tissue from her sleeve and wiped her eyes.
“How long have you two been together?” asked Tristan.
“Gawd. On and off for, what? Thirty years? We never married. We liked having our own space,” said Bev. Bill nodded. She blushed again, and Kate thought how hollow it sounded. Like a practiced line.
“Did Jo always want to be a journalist?” asked Kate.
“Yes. When Joanna was eleven years old, there was this kiddies’ typewriter. The Petite 990. It worked like a proper typewriter. Do you remember the advert? There was this young girl dressed up like Dolly Parton typing away, and the song ‘9 to 5’ played.”
“I remember,” said Kate. “When was that?”
“1985.”
Kate did a quick calculation. If Joanna was eleven in 1985, she’d been born in 1974. That meant she had been twenty-eight when she went missing in 2002.
“In 1985, I was still four years off being born,” said Tristan, putting up his hand. They all laughed, and the tension in the room eased a little.
“As soon as Jo saw that advert, she wanted that typewriter for Christmas, but back then, it cost an arm and a leg—thirty quid! I said to ’er, ‘What are you going to use a typewriter for? It’ll just end up in the cupboard on Boxing Day, collecting dust.’ And Jo said, ‘I can be a news reporter.’ I scraped together the thirty quid, begged and borrowed, mainly from Bill . . .”
Bill chuckled at the memory, nodding.
“And I got Jo the typewriter for Christmas. And she kept her word. Every week, she’d type out a newsletter, silly stuff about what had happened to us, or at school. She never stopped writing and asking questions . . . She was clever. Passed the eleven-plus and got into the grammar school. Jo went on to study journalism at Exeter University and worked as a reporter at the West Country News. Back then, it sold half a million copies a day . . . She’d been applying for jobs up in London at one of the national newspapers, and she even got an interview . . .” Bev’s voice trailed off. “And then, she went missing.”
“In the months or weeks leading up to Joanna going missing, did her behavior change? Was she depressed or worried about anything?”
“No. She was happier than I’d ever seen her.”
“And you saw her a lot?”
“A few times a week. We’d talk on the phone most days, more than once. She’d just bought a house in Upton Pyne, a small village on the outskirts of Exeter, with her husband, Fred.”
“What did you think of Fred?”
“Fred was—is—a lovely guy. He didn’t do it,” said Bev instantly. “He was home all day. And there were so many witnesses. He was painting their house, and up a ladder . . . Lots of people saw him in the village and gave him an alibi.”
“Did anything unusual happen in the run-up to her going missing?” asked Kate.
“No.”
“What was she working on? I read that she was an investigative journalist.”
“She was working on lots of stories,” said Bev, looking at Bill.
“But nothing that would have got her killed or abducted,” he said.
“She went to work on Saturday, September seventh, and then left at five thirty. It was only a short walk to her car, but somewhere along the way, she vanished. Me and Bill had been out that day at Killerton House, about an hour’s drive. We came back in the afternoon. Bill stopped in at the office block his company was remodeling in Exeter; I went home. Then, around seven, I got a call from Fred that Jo hadn’t come home. We called round; no one knew where she was. In the end, Fred drove over and picked me up, and we started looking for her. The police wouldn’t treat her as a missing person for the first twenty-four hours, so we drove round the local hospitals, and we checked the car park near her office, and her car was still there. We found her mobile phone underneath the car, switched off. There was no fingerprints on it. Not even hers, which made the police think that whoever took her switched it off and wiped their prints off it.”
“It was the Deansgate car park, and it was demolished a few months later, in 2003?” asked Tristan.
“Yes. There’s flats there now,” said Bev.
“Joanna, Jo, was an investigative journalist involved in exposing a local MP, Noah Huntley, of fraud. This was back in March 2002, six months before she went missing?” said Kate.
“Yes, Jo’s story was picked up by the national newspapers, it triggered a by-election, and Noah Huntley lost his seat, but that was in May, four months before Joanna went missing.”
“And after he lost his seat, he landed a load of private-sector work, which paid him much more than he ever got as an MP,” said Bill, shaking his head in disgust.
“Was Joanna working on any other story which might have put her in danger?” asked Kate.
“No, we don’t think so,” said Bev, looking to Bill. He shook his head. Bev went on. “Jo didn’t talk much about stories she was working on, but there was nothing that her boss, her editor, was concerned about . . . The police talked to that Noah Huntley; I think they were getting desperate because they had no other suspects, but there was no motive for him to do anything to Jo after the article was published, and he had an alibi.”
“Were there many witnesses who saw Jo before she went missing?” asked Kate.
“A couple of people came forward to say they’d seen her come out of the newspaper office. Another old lady remembers her passing the bus stop up to Deansgate. The police got hold of a CCTV image from a camera on the high street, which she passed around twenty to six that evening, but it was facing the other direction from the car park. No one knows what happened after that. It’s like she vanished.”