Eleanor Neale

I mean, at least prior to this case, I myself would likely have gone with him too, because we are taught to trust the police, trust that they know the rules even better than us, trust that they are acting in good faith.

Even just walking past the police in the street can make you feel like you've done something wrong, even when you know full well that you haven't.

I think it's quite a natural response to fawn when faced with that level of authority.

And so it doesn't seem like Sarah put up a huge fight when Wayne Cousins proceeded to take the cuffs off his belt and restrain her in them.

Which realistically, if this had been a genuine arrest on the grounds of violating the COVID regulations, then handcuffs wouldn't be at all necessary.

Police don't use them a lot of the time when they're making a relatively calm arrest like this,

But the reason we know that Sarah was handcuffed by Wayne before he led her into the car is actually due to a witness that had driven by this interaction taking place.

This woman in her car didn't think too much of it at the time.

She just saw a woman on the side of the road being handcuffed by a plain clothes officer.

And she remembered actually remarking to her partner that she thought that that was quite unusual because police don't tend to handcuff women very often.

She just assumed that it was some sort of undercover operation.

Little did she know, she was actually witnessing the abduction of Sarah Everard.

And now that Sarah was restrained, Cousins led Sarah into his hire car and drove her away, presumably under the pretense that he was taking her to the police station.

But in actuality, he began the 75 mile journey down to Dover, almost two hours away in a car.

And we don't know at what point during that journey, Sarah realized that something wasn't right.

But after a certain amount of time, you'd be wondering why it's taking so long to get to the station, why he's taking motorways and not turning off.

Of course, we don't know if there was any level of communication going on in the car between Wayne and Sarah.

Maybe she realised very early on that this man wasn't genuine and this hadn't been a legitimate arrest.

But this is one part of the case that I always think about, even now, years out, how scared she must have been on that car journey.

after having worked out that they weren't going to the police station and no one knew where she was or who she was with.