We don't really know where or when she lost her chequebook. The complete and total incuriosity about this from everyone - the police, documentary makers, workmates, family - persisted until DV came along.
All we really know is that her chequebook and diary turned up at the pub by Monday 28/7. Someone at the pub rang the bank named on the chequebook. The bank had SJL's office number handy. They rang her and told her where the cheque book was. She rang the pub to arrange to collect it.
Those seem to be the facts. Then there's the conjecture.
Conjecturally, she seems to have rung the pub twice. The obvious time to go fetch it was after work, but a viewing request came in for 6pm, meaning she'd need to rearrange this collection if that had been what was agreed. In theory she could have just shown up late, but you can't be sure that someone you're speaking to at 11 in the morning is still going to be there at work at 7 that night or whenever.
We do not know when she lost her stuff at the PoW. In a TV documentary in the late 80s / early 90s, AL claims they went to the pub on Friday and a lovely evening was marred by the loss of her diary. More recently, he has said they never went to the PoW ever, and were in fact at Mossop's, a fairly smart restaurant next door, and it was Sunday. So at least one of those accounts is misremembered, and leaves us wondering about the movements through time and space of SJL's stuff between Friday and Sunday, or between the pub and the restaurant. CV and the landlord are adamant the diary etc were found on Sunday night.
Complicating this is that AL had clearly been chucked while he was on holiday, and that weekend was when he found out. So we don't know whether either of his accounts is to be believed.
DV's hypothesis about the PoW has legs because none of this was checked at the time.
We should remember that DL was so bat54it crazy she tried to get the libel laws changed to protect the reputation of a dead person. What she found out about SJL after her disappearance persuaded DL that her daughter had been - by her own religious lights, I emphasise, and absolutely nobody else's - a right slapper. She had uncomplicatedly slept with various boyfriends - perhaps three or four, perhaps 103 or 104. Either way she was harming nobody. But DL needed this not to be true, or at least not known, and in fact keeping this quiet was more important to her than finding her daughter's killer. Even though AL had been binned the week before, she therefore enlisted him in the charade of presenting SJL as what DL's generation would have called "a good girl", with one nice steady bloke. AL, maybe out of sympathy for a grief-stricken and bereaved woman, just played along. The police shouldn't have done so, and DL's involvement was disastrous for the prospects of success.
I struggle with the idea of Cannan as some sort of
Zelig figure of crime. Supposedly he was an oily lounge lizard who liked to hang around wine bars, but at the same time, he was prepared to drive six miles from the Scrubs hostel to drink in a grotty, old men's pub like the PoW. Really? He was also apparently able to change his appearance - he could go from looking 25 to looking 45, from having a broken nose to not having one, from being pale to being suntanned. He could change a red Sierra into a black BMW. Again, really?
The plod's case against JC appears to rely on snitch accounts years after the fact. What is bizarre is that it occurred to nobody at the time to wonder what sex criminals had recently been released. Had they done so, they might have got to these witnesses sooner, and in time for the snitching to produce hard evidence. To be fair, we also don't know what else DV knows about the PoW that he's not sharing. What he presents in his book is not a case, just a missed line of inquiry from 37 years ago (this week).
For my money SJL is under a house, or maybe a garage floor, somewhere in west London. The movements of the car also strongly suggest to me that two people were involved.
