What's frustrating about DV's book is that there's nothing in it that explains why SJL would have died at the pub, or why CV isn't just an inarticulate deaf bloke. I actually signed up here to get other people's take on WTF his book was getting at.
I buy that she needed the diary back. But DV infers that as that was the errand she had to run, it must have been a fake appointment. Whoah. Not so fast Mr. Bond. She could have had a genuine appointment at 1.15 and simply sloped off early, to get to the PoW first, then do the appointment. If she comes back at 2pm and MG says "You were a long time" she just says "Yes, he was late / took ages / etc." So why does 37SR have to have been a red herring?
We know DV was expecting arrests. This can only be because 1/ he's a twit, or 2/ he knows something about CV that he can't disclose.
The second seems likelier. Imagine for example that you're digging into an unsolved disappearance - Martin Allen, say, the 15-year-old who disappeared in 1979. Suppose you find out, total bombshell, that he had been on his way to meet Dennis Nilssen. You further find out that Dennis Nilssen had been interviewed about this in 1979, but said the kid never turned up, and the police bought it. At no point in the following decades did anyone remember this or connect it to what Nilssen was up to. Until you turned up, found out who the last person Martin Allen was going to meet was, oh and the place had a basement.
That did not happen of course. Nilssen's now dead. But if you found something like that out about someone at the PoW, and you found out that there was a place to stash a body, you might well expect instant arrests - as DV seems to have done.