Thirty-five minutes later, the doors of the carriage open and we’re led out into northern France. Our passports aren’t checked at this end, and it strikes me that we’re now free to go wherever we want. By road, we can reach almost anywhere: Russia, South Africa, China, India. How far can we get before the manhunt begins?
I look at the clock in my car: 9.20 p.m., UK time, 10.20 p.m. here in France. We’ve got at least twelve hours. I don’t know if I could drive for the next twelve hours solid, but I damn well want to try. I want to get as far away from England as possible. I reckon we could be in Austria, the Czech Republic or Poland by then. Or even Italy. A drive through the Swiss Alps, around Lake Como and down into Milan. It sounds like I’m trying to take a luxury holiday off the back of finding my wife murdered and realising I’ve been framed, but the human brain does strange things in situations like this.
Jessica directs me onto the motorway and in the direction of Dunkirk. That name evokes all sorts of thoughts for British people, and at the moment I’m trying to summon up my own Dunkirk spirit. I know that I need to find out who killed Lisa, why, and what reason they have for trying to frame me for it. Only by proving that I wasn’t involved will I be able to clear my name and live peacefully – wherever that might be. I also know that it’s going to be an almost impossible task, especially once the manhunt begins tomorrow morning. Saying that, though, I need to get as far away from the UK as I possibly can, and I can only do that while no-one is looking for me.
We’ve been on the motorways for something approaching two hours when Jessica tells me to come off. We end up on a long country road, vast fields to either side of us. It’s pitch black and my headlights do next to nothing, even on the main beam. I’ve got about 170 miles left in the tank, but Jessica assures me we’re nearly there. She made a call once we’d got onto the motorway from Calais, speaking in garbled French to what sounded like a man on the other end. I don’t speak French, so couldn’t understand a word. I presume this is the person we’re going to see. I didn’t dare ask. A large part of me didn’t want to know.
We pass through the villages of Orsinval, Villereau and, later, Locquignol, then off up a narrow country lane and past a couple of impressive-looking houses before pulling over onto a gravel lay-by next to a farmhouse. It seems as though it’s all on one level. Like a bungalow, almost. I suppose the French would call it a chalet. It looks a bit big for a chalet, though. A chateau? No, too grand. I’ll stick with farmhouse.
Next to the gravel road is a small grassy area, with a chicken-wire fence running alongside the road, a low wrought-iron gate at one end and a walled courtyard with low wooden gates at the other. There’s a dainty little mailbox just outside the wooden gates and some sort of vine trails across the chicken-wire fence. It looks very French, and my first thought is that it’s a shame I’m not getting to see it during the day with the sun shining.
‘What’s this?’ I ask, noticing that Jessica’s not moving.
‘It’s somewhere I never thought I’d come back to,’ she says, staring straight out through the windscreen in front of her.
‘Bad memories?’
She pauses for a moment. ‘Yes and no.’
I don’t feel I can ask anything more. Whatever the memories are, they’re clearly affecting her or distressing her in some way. For a second, I realise that I’ve become more concerned about her than I have about the fact that my wife’s lying dead in a bathtub in Herne Bay. Never mind the fact that I’m going to become Britain’s most wanted man in just a few hours’ time. Down here in France, all that seems to have been left a million miles and a hundred years away.
Before I can say anything else, she opens the car door and gets out, walking purposefully across the gravel road and pushing open the wooden gate. I follow her.
We make our way under a wooden archway, again covered with vines, and I stop as Jessica knocks on the heavy wooden door, which has been painted an odd shade of turquoise. A few seconds later, I hear the latch unlocking on the door and it swings open, revealing a man who I can only describe as very French. His greying hair is swept back, and he has an Albert Einstein moustache. He holds out his arms and embraces Jessica, with a kiss on each cheek. All he’s missing is a stripy T-shirt and a string of onions. I can see immediately that there’s some sort of untold story between these two. The man steps aside and lets us in.
‘Dan, this is Claude.’
Claude just looks at me. Almost as if he expects me to know who he is, or perhaps he’s waiting to judge my body language before deciding how to engage with me. He seems cautious but friendly.
‘Very nice to meet you, Dan,’ he says in heavily accented English. ‘Please, come through.’
He leads us into his living room, which has beautiful exposed brickwork and beams. It has an airy, open-plan feel. Yet again, I feel incredibly guilty at just how detached I feel about the whole Lisa situation. I wonder if my brain has shut down my emotions and gone into survival mode. They say traumatic experiences can do that – it’s a way of the brain protecting itself. Fleeing so quickly has given me some space, both physically and mentally, to be able to try and process what’s happened – and why. I feel safer, as though I’m a long way away from whoever’s decided to do this to me. I don’t have anyone particular in mind, though people always want revenge for something. But to commit murder in such cold blood and set the scene to look as though I did it?
I can only assume that I’m being set up. If someone just wanted to kill Lisa, why not do it in East Grinstead? Why not cut the brakes on her car or burn the house down? Why lure her seventy miles away to the hotel I’m staying in and make it look as if I killed her? The amount of planning that must have gone into it: getting her there, waiting until I was out of the room, somehow getting her upstairs . . . The only possible conclusion is that someone’s looking to ruin my life as well as end Lisa’s.
I still can’t get my head around that one. Lisa didn’t have enemies. She didn’t need to be the victim in all this. She was always bubbly, lively, true to herself. I can’t understand why someone would want her dead. Nor can I understand why or how that text got onto Lisa’s phone from my number.
Claude pours a bottle of red wine into three large glasses and passes one to me and one to Jessica.
‘Just water, please,’ I say. ‘I’ve got to drive.’