Indeed. If you follow the timeline, SJL was four-timing AL and wanted to offload him. She did this on Friday, but on Sunday he turns up at the beach anyway, perhaps to her deep irritation. She clearly needs to make the message clearer; so to scrape him off properly, after dropping her laundry at her mother's on Sunday, she has a blunt conversation with him. She does this from the payphone outside the PoW. It's on her route home, and she's not doing this from the flat in case Roger the Lodger is at home to eavesdrop. This call is sufficiently distracting that she fails to notice she's dropped her diary.
Next day she notices the loss but is called by her bank to say the stuff's been found at the pub. She arranges to go fetch it at 6, which will leave her time to get home and change for tennis at 7. Then a buyer calls and wants to do a repeat viewing at 6. Repeat viewings mean interest, means bid inbound, means commission. So she agrees to 6pm then calls the pub to bring the visit time forward to now. Then she heads for the pub and she's never seen again.
36 years later AL is instantly irritated by DV because he starts by asking him about the relationship with SJL. He doesn't want to talk about Cannan, or Kipper, or BMW drivers from Bristol; he wants to talk about SJL and how they were getting on. DV asks about the pub and AL says they never went there. Well no, if you're four-timing someone, you don't go to the same place with all of them. You might be with one and bump into one of the others. So they might never have gone there but this doesn't mean she never went there without him.
This conversation with DV is going to lead to questions about what was actually said in that last call. AL risks looking like both what these young people call a cuck but also like an unreliable witness in 1986. What if his misleading account of how it all stood between him and SJL confirmed the police in the wrong track they were on? Or maybe it's going to emerge that he knew about this other life of hers all along, but was prepared to tolerate being one of four because she was such a honey. At this point there's nothing in this conversation for AL, so he cuts it short. After all, after 34 years (or whatever it was then), it's not like with his help they'd have found her; nobody's going to find her now anyway.
It's tempting to look at SJL's remarkably busy personal and sex life, and think that this is so abnormal, it must be from where a mystery killer emerged. But frankly, from what little I know of what the personal and sex lives of exceptionally good-looking women look like, I am not convinced hers was remotely unusual. Before trying to figure who out of literally hundreds of personal contacts might have done this, it just seems simplest to follow the timeline, think about where she was actually going that day....and search the blasted pub.
