We don't know this. We don't actually know who spoke to SJL that morning. All we know is that someone at the PoW called SJL's bank and that her bank called SJL at work to tell her where her cheque book was. They would not give her phone number out to a pub, but they would give the pub's number to her. So probably she called the pub. We don't know who she spoke to, but if there was a 'last' person she spoke to, that says there was more than one call, and more than one person. Logically, there would only need to be two calls if one made, and the second changed, an arrangement. The first call was to arrange a pickup after work. The second call was because a viewing had been requested at 6pm, which clashed. She had tennis at 7pm, so those two dates wipe out the evening. If she needs her diary back that day, she has to reschedule. So she calls to cancel the 6pm visit and moves it up to right away.
We don't know who made the second call or who knew what was said.
She could not retrieve them after work; see above.
Cancelling a cheque book was a huge pain. Debit cards did not then exist, so if you needed to pay someone who didn't take credit cards (lots of businesses then did not - M&S didn't accept credit cards until 2000 and John Lewis / Waitrose only accepted their own until about the same time), you had to write a cheque. If it was up to £50, you presented a cheque guarantee card with the cheque, and the sales assistant wrote its number down on the back. You had to keep your cheque book and cheque card separate, so that thieves could not steal both at once, and write themselves cheques for £50 apparently guaranteed by your card.
If you lost your cheque book, you would wait a couple of weeks for a replacement to arrive. Meanwhile you would be constantly going to cashpoints to withdraw and carry around cash.
That's not what would happen, though; CV would not even be in court. If you defame someone, and they sue you for libel, they only have to show one thing, which is that what you said was defamatory i.e. there is a sting to the libel. Saying they murdered someone is defamatory, so they'd get their libel action. The presumption is that they're of good character. They don't have to appear in court or testify or defend themselves or prove you libelled them. You have to prove you didn't.
You have a very limited number of permissible ways to do so. One is that the defamatory statements are true. You have to prove they are. The party you have defamed does not have to prove they aren't.
Another is honest opinion; you're not saying that something is true but that based on a series of true facts (which again you have to prove are true), the canonical "reasonable person" might agree with your opinion. There are others, such as privilege (I am allowed to defame you to my own lawyer), etc but as the law stands none would apply here. So there would be no occasion when DV being sued for libel would get to cross-examine or challenge CV or anyone else.
The case would be impossible to defend without finding her body in or near the pub. This is why DV wants them searched. CV would probably not even need any money to bring it; some law firm would take it on for nothing upfront and a large slice of the inevitable damages. DV is no doubt of limited means but he's got a police pension, so that could be attacked, and then of course there's the publisher.
On the point about timings of DV's work, he is trying to show both that SJL could have gone to the PoW and that she could not have gone to 37SR. If she did the latter she can't have done the former. His meeting with KP, which established how keys were handled, was not until December 2019.
Look at any of Whitehall 1212's (generally fact-free) posts in this thread! Having failed to solve the crime, the police have decided that it fits JC and will not hear of any alternative.
If the case against JC were genuinely compelling, it would be less embarrassing for the police to admit it might be wrong. In fact it is ludicrously flimsy. They think JC is implicated by a sighting of a car he did not own (they just assume he had access to one); they never checked how many other sex offenders had been recently released from Wormwood Scrubs; they did not consider anyone a suspect who was not in Fulham that day, but they also can't place JC in Fulham, or even in London; the only "witness" did not say he saw SJL; the supposed likeness of JC to a pencil sketch was never tested in front of an ID parade; the guy who gave them the description also said he saw and then did not see SJL bundled into a car; the same witness described Mr Kipper as smartly dressed, slim and 25 to 30 then later described a podgy 44-year old as a dead ringer for Mr Kipper; the only witness who knew her and says she saw her is dismissed as wrong because her account doesn't fit the pet theory; and so on.
