‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon.’ He looked into her eyes quite steadily, but he certainly didn’t smile. Noelle did smile. ‘You don’t know where I live,’ she said. ‘I know very well,’ said the man. Obviously, it would have been easy enough for him to have found out from Simon and Mut, whose party it was, but it seemed strange that he should have done so before even meeting Noelle, before setting eyes on her, almost certainly before being told about her. Not until that moment had he implied that he already knew anything at all about her. It would have been absurd for Noelle to ask him how he knew. ‘We can’t just leave it at this,’ said the man, with some urgency. ‘We can’t.’ ‘Perhaps we can,’ said Noelle. ‘I know the district round Woking pretty well,’ said the man. ‘I’ll call for you about three tomorrow and we’ll go for a walk in the woods.’ True enough, where Noelle lived there were woods of a kind in almost every direction; but that applied to so much of residential Surrey.
