Lauren Bolton’s (Cait Fitton) disappearance storyline reached a massive conclusion in Coronation Street this week as Joel Deering (Calum Lill) was confirmed as the person responsible.
But did you know this was pretty much confirmed in his very first scene last year?
Yesterday (May 30), it was revealed in flashback scenes that Joel and Lauren had been having a sexual relationship. At her flat, Joel grabbed a screaming Lauren, threw her to the ground and repeatedly beat her with a blunt instrument in ghastly scenes.
As we enter the next part of this narrative, we’ve been taking a look at old episodes of the ITV soap to see if any clues were dropped about Joel prior to Lauren’s vanishing.
And we’ve found a pretty big one.
In September last year, Dee-Dee Bailey (Channique Sterling-Brown) and Roy Cropper (David Neilson) were seen at the station waiting for a duty solicitor.
We then heard Lauren, and who was she standing with?
Joel.
This was Joel’s first scene for the ITV soap. He told Lauren – who had just smashed up Audrey Roberts’s (Sue Nicholls) salon – to look after herself and then went on his way.
It was a seemingly harmless moment when we watched it a few months ago but now, taking a look at it again, solicitor Joel Deering appears very sinister, doesn’t he?
‘The longer he hides the more chance there is of him making a mistake,’ Calum Lill mused.
‘He’s been good so far in that he’s been engaging in this behaviour as long as we have seen him, and Lauren was attacked in February.
‘No one’s caught him out until now but they don’t actually know they have caught him out.
‘But I think the longer it goes on for, the more chance he’s got of slipping up and I think he knows that.
‘You can see that in him getting more and more anxious that the slightest thing could bring his world crumbling down around him – even just the fact that he slept with Lauren.
‘That’s a breach of trust alone and will be enough to end his career and relationship plus murder on top of that, his life would be over so the stakes couldn’t be higher.’
