Chapter 15
Eve woke early the next morning with a headache. She showered and dressed for work, then drank a cup of coffee and ate a banana seated by the kitchen window before going downstairs and out into the garden to unlock her bike.
Joe took up residence in her mind for the rest of the week, but he didn’t contact her.
Eve wondered if Debbie Stroud had had second thoughts and if he’d been recalled back to prison after all, and she badly wanted to know if this was the case.
But the thought of ringing Debbie made her feel weak and desperate; nor did she want to contact Joe in case this gave him false hope that she believed in his innocence, because she honestly didn’t know what to believe.
She also worried that if he had been recalled and was on his way back to prison, then the police might have his phone.
Not that there was any rule to stop her being in touch with him, she didn’t think, not now that Debbie had been made aware of her existence.
In fact, she suspected her name was already in circulation between the police and the probation service and who knew how many other government officials?
How could she contemplate any kind of relationship with Joe now, even one of friendship? How could she?
And what about her colleagues? The head of her department at college – what would he say?
Could her link to Joe threaten her job? It would hardly reflect well on the college to have one of their senior law lecturers hobnobbing with a convicted rapist and murderer.
And what about her family? Her daughter?
Her sister? Her nieces? How would they feel about her ongoing contact with a man who was considered a high risk to women? And could they, too, be in danger?
Debbie Stroud’s remarks crawled around her mind on a loop: ‘If you want my honest opinion, you need to be careful … the man you’re seeing is dangerous.
’ Despite the stance Eve had taken on the phone, she now felt foolish and naive.
While she regretted the part she had played if Joe was sent back to prison, she couldn’t help but suspect that Debbie was right and he was just one more in a long line of guilty offenders who claimed to be innocent, and that to believe otherwise would be wishful thinking on her part.
Monday was a struggle. Exhausted and preoccupied, she dragged herself through the day, finding the gaps between lessons hardest of all.
Tuesday and Wednesday were better. She had a full timetable of lectures on both days and was able to throw herself into her work and gain a little reprieve from her thoughts.
She continued in the same vein for the rest of the week, distracted by classes and lesson planning for stretches at a time, but during the moments in between, as she walked between the lecture halls or to the café, Joe would lurch back into her mind and her heart would skip a beat.
On Friday morning, she congratulated herself on having almost got through the week, but at the same time she dreaded the weekend.
The weather was going to be unseasonably warm and Oxford would be busy.
There would be clear blue skies and picnics, and punts setting off along the river from Magdalen Bridge through the Parks, which would be full of students playing volleyball or strolling along the pathways holding hands.
Everyone would be living their lovely lives and she would be on her own with nothing to do except ruminate over her foolishness.
It was also Rich and Julia’s wedding in just over a week’s time and Rich was bound to call to ask her if she was still coming.
She had said she would go, but her ex-husband’s happiness was now even harder to think about, and she felt herself descending deeper into despondency.
She knew the reason: she had been harbouring a hope that her relationship with Joe might have developed to the point where she could ask him if he’d like to come along as her ‘plus one’.
The idea was, of course, now as mortifying as it was disappointing.
At lunchtime, she decided not to bother going across to the café.
She wasn’t particularly hungry. The milder weather was already here and the blossom was out on the campus, which was buzzing with students and staff enjoying the sunshine.
As she exited the law faculty, she found herself walking up the lane, away from the college grounds and in the opposite direction of the student village, so that no one she knew would see her and try to strike up a conversation.
She took a side street and ended up at a small park in the middle of a housing estate, sitting on a bench and gazing into the distance.
She watched a magpie as it swooped down from a nearby fence, startling a baby squirrel, which darted away into a bush, and she wondered what was wrong with her.
There were other men out there to date. Who on earth would choose a convicted rapist and murderer?
Why take that risk, especially as she’d only known Joe such a short time?
Most women would tell themselves that they’d been lucky, that they’d found out just in time, and would then move on with their lives.
So why was she still thinking about him?
She took out her phone and opened his messages.
You do know me, the last one said. We know each other.
A familiar tightening gripped her abdomen.
It wasn’t just her; he’d felt it, too, this invisible cord between the two of them that was still tugging at her, squeezing her heart and her lungs and her head so that at times she couldn’t think or breathe.
But maybe he was a natural predator, just like the magpie she’d been watching, who had now given up on the squirrel and was casting his eye around for his next prey.
And sure, Joe hadn’t lied to her outright, but he’d lied by omission.
She would never have gone up into the loft with him had he been truthful with her about his past.
She cringed for the hundredth time as she remembered how eager she’d been to go upstairs with him, how naive she’d been to follow him into the remotest part of the house.
And then it hit her right in the gut: she could have spent her final hours there.
She could have been raped on that chipboard floor under those silver insulation boards while the sunlight danced above her, and then she could have been killed.
‘There aren’t any walls up yet,’ she remembered Joe telling her, and a chill ran through her as she imagined him hammering away, a nail in his mouth, the radio playing as he built the frame for the wall inside which he would bury her.
‘I’ll come up here and say goodnight to you before I go to bed.
’ Eve closed her eyes as the words took on a new meaning.
By the time her family missed her, he could have put her inside the wall cavity and boarded her over.
No one would ever know she’d been there.
But he hadn’t done that. He hadn’t hurt her.
Eve forced herself to think about all the reasons why Joe might be telling the truth, the first of which was that she’d been there.
She’d been there in the loft with him and she knew how it had felt to be with him, to talk to him.
He’d been a little reserved and she’d sensed he was holding something back, but there was nothing about him that had set off alarm bells.
Nothing at all. She needed to have faith in her own instincts, the instincts that had told her he was a safe person to be alone with.
And the parole board must have considered him safe to release, mustn’t they?
Most importantly, he’d found an appeal charity that was willing to take on his case.
One of the trustees had given him a place to stay after being told about him by the woman who ran the charity.
That had to mean something, didn’t it? Chas Cauldwell believed in him.
The charity believed in him. They must do.
She held on to this thought for the rest of the afternoon, waiting until she got home and could use her own laptop before looking him up again.
This time, she moved on past the headlines of the first few pages, digging deeper into the history of his case.
He’d lodged two unsuccessful appeals based on inconclusive forensics and weaknesses in the ID evidence, and had served twenty years of a life sentence, although his minimum term had been fifteen.
He could have been out five years sooner had he admitted his crimes.
Eve looked through her search history and found Chas Cauldwell’s name, which in turn led her to the name of the charity Joe had mentioned: Truth for Justice. She wrote down the phone number. It was the weekend now, but she’d call them first thing on Monday and see what else she could find out.