Darkness Falls (Kate Marshall, #3)(65)

“We spoke to your editor a few days ago, and he said that he’d told Joanna to drop the whole rent-boy angle of the original story?” said Kate.

“Yes. You can’t just ‘out’ people for sport. There was no proof that Noah used his parliamentary expenses account to solicit said cock.”

“He wrote a check to one of the rent boys,” said Tristan.

“Yes, but he could have been paying for freelance research or secretarial admin work. Unlikely, yes, but so many MPs hire secretaries and researchers. That check wouldn’t have stood up in court if the young lad involved had refused to be interviewed.”

“Did you know that Joanna met with Noah Huntley two weeks before she went missing?” asked Kate.

“No. I didn’t know that.”

“Were you working in the office on the day that Joanna went missing?”

“I worked in the morning. I left around lunchtime.”

“Did you notice anything odd about Joanna that day?”

“Define odd.”

“Was she stressed about anything? Acting out of character?”

Rita sat back and thought for a moment.

“God, it was so long ago. I do remember her being nice to me . . .” She chuckled. “Things had been rather frosty between us, but she bought me a coffee; she seemed upbeat, excited even. She’d just got a load of photos back from Boots. You remember that, when we used to get our photos processed?”

“Holiday photos?” asked Kate, sharing a glance with Tristan.

“No, I don’t think so. She asked me for an expense claim form. I remember because it was the last thing she ever said to me,” said Rita.

“What happened next?” asked Kate.

“Nothing. I stayed for another ten minutes or so, and I left to meet my boyfriend for lunch.”

“Was it a lot of photos?” asked Kate.

“I know she had a stack of those envelopes they used to give you back for your processed photos. It wasn’t unusual back then for journalists to work with photos, films, et cetera. We were still a few years away from going digital.”

“Can you remember how many of these photo envelopes she had?” asked Kate.

“It was a long time ago. It was a pile of, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty?”

“If Joanna wanted to use a hard-copy photo in a news story, would she scan it herself?” asked Tristan.

“No. It would have been sent down to the copy room via the picture desk,” said Rita.

“Did you work on laptops or desktop computers at the West Country News?” asked Kate.

“I had a laptop. Most of us had laptops, so we could work at home.”

“Did people leave their laptops at work?”

“No. Joanna never left her laptop at work. She would have taken it with her. She was ferociously competitive. She was a good journalist in the sense that she was out of the office as much as she was in.”

“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.”