Mark Ruddington was married and living in Enfield. He had an open Facebook profile so I spent ten minutes stalking through everything he’d posted this year. It seemed more important than ever to find out about my wife, to find out who she really was. To know about the experiences that had made her, the teenage infidelity that she had admitted to under the influence of house party tequila. It seemed that lots of people – Ben included – seemed to know her better than I did.

There was a lot on Mark’s timeline, most of it about his dogs, meals he was eating, pictures of his kids, weirdly repetitive selfies he’d taken at the end of his evening run, hangovers, mother-in-law jokes, random shared links of all kinds. Nothing about Mel or their schooldays together. I sent him a friend request anyway. Maybe a chat on Messenger would get a bit more out of him.

Staring at the phone’s small screen was making my eyes ache – an hour had passed with no sign of Ben. It was time to try something else.

The Delaneys’ home phone rang six times then went to answerphone, Ben’s brief-and-to-the-point message carrying just the faintest trace of his Sunderland accent. A while ago he’d explained to me the difference between Sunderland and Newcastle accents, but I still couldn’t really tell them apart. The second time it went to answerphone again. I hung up without leaving a message. It occurred to me that I could do better than ringing Beth up for a chat. I was a teacher with no one to teach, no homework to mark, no lesson plans to prepare.

Thirty-five minutes later I was parking on a wide, tree-lined street in Hampstead, a slow-curving avenue of high walls and immaculate driveways. It looked exactly like what it was: a street full of multi-millionaires. Immediately opposite me was an imposing Edwardian house that had been tastefully extended several times. Like its widely spaced neighbours, it was elevated slightly from the street at the end of a sloping driveway, so that its considerable size was exaggerated even further to the casual passer-by.

Ben’s house.

He probably wouldn’t be very pleased with me visiting his wife, alone and unannounced, in the middle of the day. Just dropping in out of the blue, asking a few probing questions about our mutually cheating spouses. He wouldn’t be pleased at all. In fact, knowing Ben, he’d probably be mightily pissed off.

Good, I thought. Let him be on the back foot for once. See how he likes it.

Chapter 41

41