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The boyfriend of murdered schoolgirl Dinah McNicol told a jury today of their last moments together.
David Tremlett said the 18-year-old wrote down her phone number and passed it to him so they could keep in touch.
They had been hitchhiking together on their way home from a pop festival in Liphook, Hampshire, in August 1991. He last saw her when he was dropped at Junction 8 of the M25 and she drove off alone with the driver of the car that had given them a lift.
The court has heard that Mr Tremlett was the last person Dinah knew to see her alive. He tried repeatedly but in vain to phone her but received no reply.
Eighteen years later Dinah's body was found in the garden of handyman Peter Tobin at his home in Margate close to a second body of 15-year-old Vicky Hamilton who had disappeared in Edinburgh six months before Dinah.
Dinah had been drugged, bound and gagged and her body wrapped in garden rubbish sacks. Mr Tremlett told Chelmsford Crown Court that he had travelled to the Liphook Festival with friends in a converted caravan. He had met Dinah at the site and they stayed the night together under canvas.
The following day they packed up and set off with Dinah intending to go to her home in Essex. After getting a lift which took them in the wrong direction they were picked up for a third time by a driver on the A3 near the Devil's Punchbowl pub.
Mr Tremlett described the driver as about 5ft 9in tall with dark blond hair and aged in the late thirties to late forties. "I sat in the back seat, Dinah was in the front passenger seat," he told the court.
"I found it very difficult to hear what the driver was saying in the front because we were travelling at a fair speed and the windows were open because it was a warm day.
"There was discussion about music and the driver said that the Cambridge Folk Music Festival was more his style.
"Mr Tremlett asked to be dropped on the M25 so he could go to his mother's house in Redhill.
"When I was dropped off Dinah was still in the front passenger seat with the driver," he said.
She wrote down her phone number and passed it to me at that point so I could keep in touch with her.
I tried to phone that number later a good few times but there was no answer."It was not until the following May when the police came to take a statement that he realised that Dinah was missing.
Tobin has already been convicted of the murder of Vicky and has been sentenced to live imprisonment, the court has heard. Dinah had been drugged with Amitriptyline before she was attacked and probably sexually assaulted, the court has heard.
Tobin had also used the same drug to sexually assault two 14-year-old girls and was convicted of those attacks in 1994, the jury has heard. The case continues.
