Emmerdale has aired an unsettling discovery for Kim Tate as she resolved to spy on Joe.
As Joe had been working for her at Home Farm, Kim thought it’d be best to be sure of where his loyalty stood.
In scenes airing today, she planted a recording device in Joe’s room, determined to find out whether he had ulterior motives for returning to the Dales.
Earlier in the episode, Dawn Fletcher found Joe slumped at the wheel in his car parked on the side of the road.
Thinking Joe had been drinking, Dawn offered him a lift but was stunned to find a half-empty bottle of painkillers.
“You’re completely out of it,” she called him out. “Do you know how stupid it is to drive like this?”
At Home Farm, Joe explained he had a painkiller addiction. He shared he was still affected by the injuries he sustained in an attack at the hands of Cain Dingle a few years prior.
“I’m still living with the souvenirs,” he said, adding that he got crushing headaches as a result.
“You need proper help,” Dawn replied, saying she didn’t want any more drugs around in the house, regardless of what they were used for. She hinted she would speak to Kim about Joe’s pills, causing him to retaliate and threaten to expose their affair.
Dawn said she wouldn’t let him push her in a corner, and said she would talk to her husband Billy herself.
She tried to tell Billy about her one-night stand with Joe, but couldn’t go ahead when he apologised for being distant and told her he was proud of her.
At the Woolpack, Kim witnessed an argument between Charity Dingle and her son Noah over his friendship with Joe.
Kim advocated for Joe being “a changed man”, but Charity insisted Joe was still a wolf in sheep’s clothes.
Later on, Joe made a phone call to an unknown person from his room, unaware Kim was keeping tabs on him. He told the person on the other end that he was struggling to keep his secret as it was becoming more obvious.
“The thing that I didn’t want to happen… it happened,” he said on the phone.
It is unclear whether he was referring to being caught out over his painkiller addiction or there was something else he’d been keeping from Kim.
As for the Home Farm matriarch, she later listened to the audio, shocked to hear the shady content of Joe’s phone call.
