The Sarah Everard case has shown how frightened women really are

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.