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  This is a big deal as it narrows the time frame right down. Suddenly the prosecution has to show that the murder was done in a much smaller time frame, 12–12.30am if Khalil has to have time to walk to the garage, and that’s problematic because of the dog walker, Jess Phillips.

  Jess lived in one of the houses down the lane and on the night of the murder she took her pet labradoodle, Mazzy, for a quick walk in order for her to do her business. She took her usual route, turned right out of her driveway, walked a hundred and fifty yards down the lane, turned right and, unusually on that night, she walked into the car park of the World’s End. Why do I say this was unusual? Because she would never go in at a weekend if there were cars in the car park; it was just too likely that there would be doggers or kids doing drugs. But not on this evening. On this evening she could see there were no cars in the car park, so she and Mazzy wandered in, Mazzy did her business and then they wandered out again, heading back home where Jess fixed herself a cup of hot chocolate before bed.

  And the time of this walk? Jess is adamant it was at midnight. She was listening to Radio 4 and she set off just after the first headline after the midnight news. She says the walk took her a total of about fifteen to twenty minutes.

  You see the problem for the prosecution? If the murder took place between 12 and 1am but Khalil wasn’t at the scene, and nor was Lauren, between 12 and 12.25, then if Khalil was outside the garage then he couldn’t have been at World’s End after 12.30 (and at an average pace, never mind a stoned kid’s pace, it’s more like 12.10).

  This doesn’t even take into account the fifteen minutes he would have needed to meet her, kill her and then pretty much sprint away before getting to the garage.

  What did the prosecution do? They just said the defence couldn’t prove the figure in the dark coloured hoodie passing the garage was Khalil. It could have been some other kid in a dark hoodie passing this suburban garage right at the time Khalil had said he was there. The image was grainy and even though both sides paid tech experts to clean up the data and blow it up, it remained inconclusive. I’ve seen it and played it back maybe fifty times and I have some sympathy for both sides. There is five seconds of a young man in a dark hooded top and jeans who walks past the low brick wall that marks the boundary between the garage and the pavement. You can’t make out his face, he’s got his hands in his jean pockets and he looks like his head is down. The witnesses who were asked confirmed Khalil was wearing a navy blue hooded top and jeans the night of the party, and the prosecution didn’t challenge this point in their case.

  You can’t conclusively say it’s Khalil but you can’t rule it out either, and what are the chances of a similarly dressed kid passing in front of the garage at this time of the night? I should mention that this garage is on a country road and it gets traffic, sure, but pedestrians? In the thirty minutes either side of the “Khalil” figure appearing, there were only two other pedestrians, walking together: two girls who called in to buy cigarettes. That’s the kind of evidence lawyers sniff at, but hey, I’m not a lawyer, and if it were my money, I’d put it on the figure in the video being him.

  We’ll never know what the jury made of this. All we’ll ever know is that they convicted Khalil after less than four hours’ deliberation.

  So, timings didn’t help Khalil, but timings were also relevant, and to the advantage of Tom Ellis when the police questioned him. His interview was conducted by a much more junior officer than the officer who interviewed Khalil, by the way, a pretty sure sign of how the police viewed things if you ask me.

  Tom said he stayed at the party after Khalil and Lauren left, and he got messed up according to his version of events, and it has to be said there is a lot of supporting evidence to back this up. Five witnesses say they remember Tom being at the party till the bitter end, somewhere around 3.30/4am. Memories of the exact time are, as you may have expected, a bit hazy on this point.

  A bit more geography: the party was held at Shona Cunningham’s house. She was a school friend of Lauren’s. It’s a beautiful new house, think glass frontage, a pool and a view over the River Dee to the dark Clwydian hills of North Wales. Below it is a coastal path that runs the length of the Wirral peninsula, some twenty-six miles. If you walk out of the garden of Shona’s house there is a small earthen path; nothing official, just the route she and her family use to access the coastal path. Once you hit the coastal path, if you turn right and keep walking you’ll get to World’s End.

  If you walked fast, say really fast, about four mph, you would reach the World’s End car park in one hour fifteen minutes. As Khalil left the party at some time before 10.45, at the latest this means he could have walked there and reached the car park in the murder time frame. But it’s also a good reason why Tom was never really considered a suspect by the police. How could he have made it there and back to the party given the witnesses who saw him there during the course of the evening?

  The first of those witnesses was Mark Whatmough, known to the gang as Whatto. I’ve checked with him and he doesn’t mind the description I’m going to give him: he was the go-to man for weed. Apologies to Mark’s mother here; he’s a successful GP now by the way. He recalls having a joint with Tom in the garden at around 11.20. How is he so sure? He had just realised he had run out of booze and papers and Tom suggested they drive to the local off-licence, but Mark got bummed out when he realised it would be shut as it had gone 11. So who said drugs are bad for your short-term memory? Mark turns out to be one of our more precise witnesses.

  Other witnesses at the party are sketchy – they remember Tom being there, but try and pin any of them down and it’s like trying to catch air in a fishing net.

  All, that is, except Amy Wilder. She was a friend of Lauren’s, one who coincidentally didn’t help Khalil’s argument that he was a model boyfriend as she testified at the trial that he had frequently rowed with her about the clothes she was wearing, who she was seeing and that theirs, contrary to Khalil’s case, was a tempestuous relationship (I’ll come back to this point). She could place Tom in place and time at the party. What are the two busiest places at a party? It’s always the kitchen and the toilet, and this party was no exception. Now this house had three bathrooms (well, four, but the parents’ master en suite was locked as was the bedroom; parents aren’t all daft when they go away for the weekend).

  A few minutes before midnight, Amy told police she was banging on the door of the downstairs bathroom, having repeated the same desperate banging on two bathrooms upstairs – but on each occasion she got the same answer: go forth and multiply.

  So she did. She walked past the crowd by the pool, now thinning as the night got colder, and she made her way to the bottom of the garden. Down here there was a shed, an old swing and then a hedge, and beyond that the scrubland that ran down to the coastal path.

  She adopted the position and answered the call of nature and was also multitasking, checking her messages on her mobile phone, hence how she was so specific on the time. She was anxious about battery life and checked it, when a voice in the darkness said, “Hi Amy” and that’s when she noticed Tom sitting on the swing smoking a cigarette. She said she got the fright of her life and told him in strong, robust terms what she thought of him scaring her like that. And then she stormed off, leaving Tom sat on the swing. She told the police that this was at exactly 11.56pm.

  And that was that. Her statement was just one of the many reasons why Tom was never considered as a suspect, and why should he have been? Sure, there was the argument in the kitchen with Khalil and Lauren, but so what? There was nothing linking him to the actual murder.

  But Amy has been listening to the show and she has been in touch with me. Yesterday she sent me this email and I’m going to read it out for you. It changes everything:

  “I thought I had to get in touch as I’ve been listening to the podcast and I always thought Khalil did it. I sort of still do but in fairness to him, to his family and to me, I have to mention somethin
g about my statement I gave to police.

  “When I gave my statement to the police it was exactly as I remembered it and was in response to my questions. They wanted to know how I knew what time it was, and I knew as I looked at my phone. They wanted me to be sure it was Tom, and it so was, and they asked me lots of questions to make sure I didn’t make it up to help Tom. I didn’t, I just told it like it is. Except of course that I didn’t tell it exactly like it was. I didn’t tell them that I was wearing black denim jeans and converse pumps, I didn’t tell them that Tom’s voice seemed heavy somehow and I still don’t know exactly what I mean by that but it was. I didn’t tell them that there were no stars in the sky because it was overcast and I didn’t tell them that there was a bike propped up by the shed.”

  A bike.

  You can go, easily, fourteen mph on a bicycle. In that time, for example, you could cycle the five miles to World’s End along a coastal path in less than thirty minutes, say by 12.30am, and then back again in a similar time. If no one saw you leave or arrive at a busy party then it could look like you had never been away.

  Of course, this may never have happened. But no one ever considered whether it was a possibility. And if someone else had the opportunity and if that someone was one of two people who the victim had been involved in a heated discussion with earlier in the evening, then wouldn’t that have to cast some doubt on Khalil being the murderer? Wouldn’t it have at the very least warranted more than the most junior officer on the murder enquiry taking Tom’s witness statement?

  I click the mouse and press the pause icon on the computer screen, stopping the voice recording. What I’m thinking of doing is not illegal, I think, although I’m no lawyer, but it is kind of unethical. I breathe in and then lower my head so my lips are nearly touching the microphone head. I click the record icon.

  “So here’s the deal: the police missed a trick but opportunity is nothing without motive. Next time on ‘World’s End: Pick One’ I am going to give you motive.”

  I stop recording and save the WAV file to the hard drive and then immediately send a copy to Cathy.

  She’s going to be thrilled and the download figures for the next podcast in two weeks are going to be huge. I’ve basically named someone I think is the murderer and will be telling people why he did it. There’s only one problem: I have no idea what Tom’s motivation could have been for killing Lauren Grey.

  5

  Hornets

  I came late to the podcast world. It was Cathy who suggested it, as a way of getting “back into things slowly”, which is how I recall her putting it. This was about three months after the “incident” and I know her and myself well enough to know that she saw that I needed something to work on to keep me sane. This was also around the time people were starting to ask questions about why I never seemed to leave the house.

  Turns out podcasts are tremendously straightforward to do and I was good at them too. Once a broadcaster, always a broadcaster.

  The way it works is like this. I record the podcast on a Wednesday and send it to my producer, Jane, on the same day. At this stage it’s just a rough recording, me, my notes and a microphone, pretty much. I record directly onto my computer. I initially started with scripts, just reading them out, but it came across as stilted so now I just jot down the main points I wish to get out onto a legal pad and then start talking. The conversational style is key to making the listener feel as though you are talking directly to them.

  Jane is a producer who I first met back when I was working at Radio Oxford. She now freelances, and she cleans the sound up, adds music and some effects and sends it back to me to check I’m happy. This is within twenty-four hours of me sending her the file with my recording on it. It’s invariably great, and even if I have to make some slight tweaks, the final version is with Jane by Friday at the latest. She sends it to Bulldog Productions, a start-up trying to franchise a US model, and they add the ads and get it online by Saturday at six o’clock.

  Saturdays are a busy day for Henry and Finn. There is Tae Kwondo in the morning, then Spanish lessons and usually a party or two to fit in before dinner so, I can often find myself alone for the whole day, sometimes longer.

  The Saturday the “Timings” podcast goes out is one of those days.

  Henry and Finn are at a party. I say party, but it’s a Harry Potter themed garden event and Henry has already texted me saying we will have to take out a loan if we ever plan to hold a party for Finn’s upcoming sixth birthday. The costume we hired for Finn cost £50 alone and the gift, an Xbox One educational game involving zombies and algebra, appeared on a suggested present list we received by email three weeks before the party. Not that I was thinking of the cost when I saw Henry’s texts, but rather the fact that I can’t foresee Finn having a party here anytime soon and the guilt made me hate Henry a little more for being insensitive in this text, which I know is entirely unreasonable of me, which has the effect of heightening that anger. Poor Henry – he never will realise life is unfair. It’s the product of an expensive public-school education, a sense of invincibility and, although I mock him for it, there’s no doubt part of me is envious of that confidence overcoat that shields him from life’s more bitter truths.

  As they won’t be back till eightish, I settle down on the sofa with a glass of Pinot Grigio and my iPad. Lil’Bitch wanders into the room and joins me, flopping down and then snuggling up against my thigh where she purrs as though powered by the warmth of my body.

  After the podcast drops I like to check out the social media reaction. When I started the podcasts there was some initial interest based upon who I used to be, and the fact I’d been out of the public eye for a year without any explanation but for my press release at the time, stating that I wanted to spend more time with my family. But the initial download figures were nothing spectacular. What changed that was the power of social media. People began to get hold of the idea that Khalil was the victim of a miscarriage of justice and this small group were tweeters. The more they tweeted the more traffic flowed to the podcast website, and I called in a favour from some of my old BBC colleagues and did a couple of Skype interviews on the phenomena of podcasts and real-life crime cases. After that it became a snowball travelling downhill.

  With the attention, of course, came some that was unwanted. The majority of emails, tweets, and even old-fashioned letters I get are supportive of the podcast and what I’m trying to do with it, but there is the darker side: people who are convinced of Khalil’s guilt, either because of the facts as they see them, or worse because of who he is, a young Muslim man who was dating a pretty white girl.

  I can deal with this though; it’s a small price to pay for doing my job and frankly I have experience of real-world violence, so its puny online cousin can’t even kick sand in my face as far as I’m concerned.

  I hit Twitter and start browsing the podcast series #worldsendpickone. I called it that after something Mohammed had told me when he asked one of the police officers who arrested his brother about the reasons he had been arrested and his answer was “pick one”.

  Straight away I can see the number of tweets this episode has generated are substantially up from the usual amount. People are talking about the timings, swapping stories of how quick they can cycle five miles, and lots of them are saying they could easily, even if drunk, do the distance quicker than I estimated and that Tom is definitely in the frame.

  There is a small and regular group of tweeters, the #fitups, who think the police framed Khalil and they are going crazy about the police not asking Amy whether there was a bike there at the time. Some think this is evidence of a deliberate omission, and the non-fitups think that this proves the incompetence of the police, and there is a lively debate going back and forth.

  A third group think Amy has made the whole thing up because she was having a thing with Tom, or maybe he rejected her. This group are arguing with another group who think Tom set up the row in the kitchen in order to get Khalil to leave
the party so he could try and make a move on Lauren. I won’t lie, I love this speculation and the power of social media to get people thinking and talking. The thing most people are talking about is what I know about Tom’s motivation and what the big reveal in my next podcast will be in a week’s time. I’ve taken a risk and the thought of that is intoxicating. I would never have been allowed to do that in the mainstream media. Why did I do it? Maybe it was Frenchie’s taunting emails or perhaps it was Mo’s faith in me flushing something out, but at the moment I don’t really care why. I gulp down my wine and replenish it with more from the bottle on the coffee table, and the more I drink the less I worry about what I am going to say and the more excited I feel about the success of this podcast.