Chapter 23
Eve tried to get an early night. Tomorrow was Saturday, the day of Rich and Julia’s wedding, and although her head was still buzzing from the meeting with Joe and Sarah, she needed to switch off and get some sleep.
All of her friends – all of Rich’s friends and all of his family – would be there, and she had contemplated backing out, but Mackenzie – as chief bridesmaid and choreographer – had been behind much of the planning and Eve wanted to show her daughter how proud she was.
Also, Rich had been a good husband to her and was still a good friend, and he had told her it would mean a lot to him for her to be there.
‘Aww. He wants your blessing,’ Sascha had told Eve on WhatsApp earlier that evening. ‘I think it’s sweet.’
‘He doesn’t need my blessing,’ Eve had replied, feeling cross, although she knew she was mostly just cross about having to go to the wedding.
‘He still feels guilty about leaving you.’
‘Well, he doesn’t need to,’ Eve said. ‘I have my own life now.’
‘Oooh, yes, and I want to hear all about that.’
Eve had closed down her messages then and gone to bed, but this last comment loomed large in her mind.
Sascha had asked about Joe numerous times in the past three weeks since she had persuaded Eve to knock on his door.
Each time, Eve had fobbed her off with ‘It’s complicated’ or ‘I’ll tell you when I see you,’ but she knew she was going to have to come up with something to tell her sister, who was also coming to the wedding and would be picking her up at half past eleven the following morning.
Eve set the alarm and lay in the dark, turning everything over.
She couldn’t tell anyone the truth about Joe.
There was no one she trusted. Sascha would adopt the conventional ‘no smoke without fire’ approach, as, indeed, would Mackenzie, and the wedding wasn’t going to be the time or the place for her to set about convincing them otherwise.
She could already see the fear and alarm on their faces; she could already hear the questions: He’s just come out of prison?
Twenty years? He’s on the sex offenders register?
He did that to a woman? And you believe him?
Are you crazy? Eve was at risk, they would say, as were they through her connection with him, and Eve could understand why they might think that, but if they had been at the meeting that afternoon, they would feel the same way she did, she was sure of it.
Sarah had stayed for three hours. While the trees swayed in the breeze outside the window, the atmosphere in the kitchen at Norham Gardens had been still and calm.
Sarah had finished going through the transcript of Joe’s police interview and had then read out loud from a number of the witness statements she had managed to get, the details of which had been eye-opening for Eve, but no doubt traumatic and triggering for Joe, who had last heard it all twenty years ago from behind a glass cage in a courtroom (and by the way, where was the presumption of innocence in that?).
Nevertheless, he had patiently repeated the account he had given to the police and to the court, which was that there had been consensual sexual activity between him and Christy that same afternoon, hence the forensic link between them.
The eyewitnesses were either mistaken or lying; he didn’t know which.
Sarah said she would apply for funding for some further forensic testing of Christy’s clothes and would also make a disclosure application to the police for the burglary file.
The eyewitness statements raised red flags for her, she said.
There was no evidence that they had colluded, but the accounts of the two neighbours were strikingly similar, and she had doubts as to their claim that they were able to see the colour of Joe’s eyes in the dark.
But the Court of Appeal had already heard and rejected this argument, which meant that Sarah couldn’t use it again without significant new evidence.
Something hugely compelling. Something Jamie’s previous legal team didn’t know about, or spot, or consider important.
What might this be? Eve turned it over and over in her mind.
At two o’clock, she swallowed a sleeping pill.
When she woke, she realised with a jolt that she had slept through the alarm and had only left herself an hour to get ready for the wedding.
She edged out of bed and got into the shower, then opened the bedroom blinds.
The weather was still mild and she dressed in a pale blue top and a flowery Marks & Spencer’s midi-length skirt which Mackenzie had picked out for her.
She dried and straightened her hair, then glanced at the kitchen clock, deciding she just about had time to paint her nails, although she’d need to flap her hands around outside the window or get the hairdryer out.
She rested her fingers on the kitchen counter and began painting, while thinking again about what to tell Sascha about Joe.
We’re playing it cool.
We’re in a relationship and it’s going well, but he couldn’t come.
It didn’t work out.
Eve didn’t fancy that last option. She might not officially be part of a couple, but she didn’t want to be completely single again, not even for her sister’s benefit, and it would be so much nicer to tell all her old friends that she was seeing someone.
Joe didn’t need to be the real Joe, did he?
Why couldn’t he just be a faceless man that she couldn’t bring to the wedding for whatever reason?
He was away on business, or he had a child from a previous relationship and it was their birthday.
She didn’t see the harm. It was her life, after all, and no one else’s business, and Joe wasn’t actually a danger or a threat to anyone.
She was sure of it.