Chapter 32
Eve picked up her handbag and walked straight down the hallway and out of her sister’s front door, leaving behind her Tupperware, her icebox and her jacket.
She had planned to stay the night, as she usually did when she came, and was relieved that her instincts had told her that something was wrong and she shouldn’t drink more than one glass of wine.
But her knees were trembling so hard that she could barely drive, and after she started the car, she drove past Kew Bridge to a road that backed onto the Thames, where she parked up and turned off the engine.
It took her half an hour to stop shaking.
A shiver of foreboding ran through her as she turned into the street.
She knew she was overstepping the boundary between them, but if the police were now talking to her family about him, he needed to know that, didn’t he?
Detectives weren’t called detectives for nothing.
They’d have been able to tell by the looks on Mackenzie’s and Sascha’s faces that her relationship with Joe was more involved than he had let on to his probation officer.
She pulled into a bay across the road from number twenty-one and sat still for a few moments, soon feeling glad that she hadn’t rushed in, upsetting Joe and putting even more pressure on him.
Somehow or other, just being back in Oxford, and specifically here in this street, looking at these houses, had made everything return to its normal proportions.
She was worrying about nothing, she decided.
The police had been fishing for information, that’s all, and Sascha and Mackenzie couldn’t have had anything to tell them because they didn’t know anything for sure, did they?
So what could they have said? She would go home and wait for Joe to call her back.
Confused, Eve looked back towards the house, just in time to see Joe close the front door. Her eyes swivelled back to the woman, who was getting into a white Fiat Panda. Eve continued to watch for a moment as the woman pulled out and drove away along Norham Gardens.
And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement in the bushes fronting the house next to her. A figure emerged and got into a car. The engine started and it turned out of the driveway and went quickly in the same direction as the Fiat Panda.
There wasn’t enough time to note much about the car except that it was a Lexus, and it was black, and the windows were tinted so that she couldn’t see who was driving.
But there was no doubt in Eve’s mind that whoever the woman was, she was being followed.