Muggers don’t carry umbrellas. Murderers don’t carry briefcases. Kidnappers don’t carry Tesco bags. These are the sorts of utterly illogical things I have been known to tell myself on a ten-minute walk home from the Tube station in the dark (past well-lit houses, on familiar roads, in a ‘nice’ part of London) as I try to stop my heart pounding quite so violently when someone happens to be following me down an otherwise empty street.
Once I shut my front door behind me, I let go of these thoughts, along with the breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. And I think no more of it, until the next time. I had always assumed this was unique to me and my overactive imagination. But the way women everywhere have responded to the Sarah Everard case has shown that I was wrong.
The 33-year-old’s disappearance as she walked home in Clapham last week – and the subsequent arrest of a Metropolitan Police officer on suspicion of her kidnap and murder – has deeply affected every woman I know.
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