Weird though, why take straighteners but not your bank cards, mobile charger or toothbrush etc? Not sure about the toothbrush but she prolly had an electric given her pride in her appearance.
It has been known for people to forget their bank cards when they are leaving home in a hurry, particularly if they have other things on their mind. She may have had a manual disposable toothbrush in her bag, and as for the charger, well, I don't charge my phone up every night, I can sometimes go a week without plugging it in. It would have been perfectly possible for someone to access the upper rooms of The Winning Post via the external staircase without being seen in the pub. Perhaps the person she was meeting was already booked in as a legitimate B&B guest and was already in the room, waiting.
As to what could have happened, it may not have involved the landlord at all: one could envisage a plot scenario in this novel where the landlord is entirely ignorant of what was going on under his nose, or he may have agreed under duress, not wishing to imperil his livelihood, simply to help move the body off his premises and maybe help get rid of some evidence. Or he didn't find out until the next day, and had nothing to do with the act itself, and may simply have concealed evidence. Or not. In real life, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
As I said in my first post, the easiest way of disposing of the evidence would be to put everything in the rucksack, plus some rocks, and chuck it off Bempton Cliffs or Flamborough Head - or into the Ouse.
Once two or more people have agreed to commit a criminal act it becomes conspiracy to ... whatever, and thus there is even more pressure on those involved not to rat each other out. As the highwaymen gangs used to say in the 18th century, "If we do not hang together, then we shall certainly hang separately"
The fact that Laura Florence had apparently been seeing someone new in recent weeks (the phone located in an unfamiliar place, the change of pubs etc) may indicate a heady, intense, new relationship, in the first throes of infatuation. Having an assignation that is going to leave you with very little sleep on a "school night" when you have to be up at 5.30AM is exactly the sort of thing you do when you first meet somebody like that and you can't get enough of them.
Maybe the relationship became too tempestuous. Maybe the perpetrator had discovered Laura's penchant for seeing more than one person at once, confronted her with it, and when she told him she would do what she damn well liked, he flipped. "If I can't have you, then nobody can have you" has been a familiar refrain in many murder cases. Or it could have been something like strangulation games that just went wrong. I've never tried it myself (*don't try this at home, kids) but there is a large and reliable body of literature that claims the pleasure of sex is enhanced by constricting the throat, and mistakes do occasionally happen (there are a number of well-documented cases of auto-erotic stimulation ending very badly - Michael Hutchence, Stephen Milligan, et al.) Maybe the assignation wasn't with the exciting new lover, but instead one last meeting for old times' sake with
another lover, who took exception to being told it was all over...
Thank you for your encouraging responses to my first post. I should stress that I am talking about a fictional person, Laura Florence, and a fictional pub called The Winning Post, and no relation to any persons currently living, dead, or not feeling very well, is intended or implied. There is not a shred of evidence to support any of these theories and I am not looking to draw any parallels with real life. As a writer, I try and construct plausible plot scenarios and that is all I am doing here.
Plus, in any real life cases, I am sure that the police would already have thought of all these scenarios and more. Returning to Claudia Lawrence briefly, after this massive off-topic diversion, surely the police will have had a printout of her incoming and outgoing calls from the phone company, even if the phone itself was never found?
