Northern Echo reporter Marjorie McIntyre was staying with a friend in The Grove, Marton, Middlesbrough, on Thursday evening. As she stettled down to a cosy night indoors she had no idea of the terrible events being played out yards away.

THE Grove is an elegant, affluent, quiet, peaceful enclave, populated largely by business and professional residents.

The only sound you regularly hear emanates from the Methodist church during evening choir practice.

It is a quiet road, where until the horrendous happenings of Thursday night, it felt perfectly safe to take a late evening stroll after dark.

I arrived at my friend's house about 7.30pm, just as the street lights were coming on.

Normally, I would turn my car around outside the victim's house, but, because it was raining I decided to drive straight on to my friend's drive. And, because he had gone out to return some keys to his nephew, on the other side of town - and such is the feeling of security in the area - he had left the backdoor open for me.

And for about half an hour I was on my own with the door still unlocked - little knowing that across the road a woman was being subjected to the most horrendous nightmare ordeal, from which she is likely never to recover.

We often take an evening walk along the full length of The Grove, where some families have lived for many years and where most residents belong to the local Neighbourhood Watch scheme.

But the wet weather and an interesting television programme persuaded us otherwise.

At about 10pm, my friend's nephew popped in and the two decided to embark on a three-hour game of chess while I watched the television.

As far as we were concerned, it was just another ordinary evening in The Grove.

But this had been no ordinary night as we were to discover in the morning when to our shock we heard on the local news of an attack on a woman living in The Grove.

When I went outside to get something from my car, I encountered police vehicles outside the house across the road.

The questions flashed through my mind: How could this have happened here? Who could have committed such a horrendous crime?

Later on, I was forced to consider what could have happened had the two men chosen a different property. When such a horrendous crime happens so close it's hard not to feel vulnerable.

Hopefully, the perpetrators will be tracked down and brought to justice.

But for the residents of The Grove life will never be quite the same again.