This must have been the phone she used to take pictures of herself, the naked selfies she had sent to Ben. It would have been too risky with her iPhone – William played regularly on both our mobiles, and half the apps we’d downloaded were games to keep him occupied in the supermarket or the car or sitting on the bus. He seemed to have an instinctive knowledge for navigating the average mobile phone, and the risk of him accidentally finding a compromising picture was too high.

No. She would have used another phone to keep Ben happy. This phone.

I hit the app marked Album on the home screen.

For the third time, the screen showed: empty

So: no texts, no calls, no pictures. Almost as if it had been wiped. But I knew that was not actually very easy to do, unless you selected factory reset and literally went back to square one. Like an old phone she’d given me when William dropped mine in the paddling pool last year – she thought everything had been deleted but there were still some random selfies that he had taken, saved in an automatic back up file.

It gave me an idea. I found the File Manager app, opened it. A screen full of options. Going more or less at random, I selected Internal Storage and scrolled down the list.

Alarms

Android

Demovideo

Downloads

Edited

Then:

File Back up

That was it. I selected it and saw a couple of file types I didn’t recognise, and one that I did: a JPEG file. A picture. I clicked on it.

An image of Mel, topless, filled the screen.

It was a shot of her in our kitchen, leaning forward with a coy little smile on her face, one arm under her breasts. I had seen the picture before, last Sunday. In the Stratford Arms, when Beth had stormed in and confronted us both with the evidence of my wife’s infidelity. For a moment I stood, staring at the screen. It felt different, seeing it in my own home, a few yards from where the picture had been taken. The shock of novelty, the pure visceral shock of seeing a picture that should never have been taken, had knocked me sideways when I first saw it. But now the shock was blunted, replaced with a kind of grim fascination in knowing that it had been taken in my own house, right under my nose. Without quite knowing why, I selected Options, Messaging, then Text Message. Punched in my number with shaking fingers.

Ben had the picture. I would have it too. She was my wife, after all. Perhaps there was something I could learn from the picture, something that would help me find him.

Message sent

I deleted it from the list of sent items, my own phone bleeping in my pocket as the picture message dropped in.

William spat out toothpaste loudly – blat – in the bathroom.