Give it twenty-four hours, then delete the account. In the meantime, I would stay on it so I could at least see what was being said.

Next I rang my mobile provider to report my phone lost and get a block put on it. I poured a glass of red wine as the call handler told me a replacement should be with me by Saturday morning. My hand, holding the wine bottle, was shaking.

Life had taken another turn for the surreal.

Think. Just think for a minute.

What does it all mean?

Today had been a car crash of a day. But it was slowly dawning on me that the latest turn of events at least – the hijacking of my life on social media – had at least one upside. I didn’t know Ben that well but I knew he was the kind of guy who didn’t like to be challenged, and couldn’t bear to be beaten. In business, at home, driving in traffic, even playing bloody Pictionary, he had to win. More than that – everybody else had to lose. The fact that the messages had been posted using my phone, from the scene of this evening’s altercation, could only mean one thing.

Ben was very much alive – and up to no good.

9

The possibility of Mel lying to me – about anything – had never crossed my mind. It had never troubled me for a second before. But now I couldn’t think about anything else. My wife had lied. Did that mean she had chosen Ben over me? What did he have that I didn’t have? Money, obviously. Plenty of it. A big house. Various expensive cars.

Is that it? Is that what it comes down to?

And now I had found them out, surprised him, got the better of him. Not really a surprise, considering I was that much bigger than him. At school I had been bigger, stronger, faster than most of my classmates without even really trying. I was six feet tall and thirteen stone by the age of thirteen – a man, while most of my peers were still boys – and had a blast for the next five years as everyone else tried to catch up. A lot of them, guys like Ben, never did – at least not physically. And what was his response to being on the losing end of a confrontation? To set me up, get me in trouble. To drop me right in the shit in a very public way.

That was Ben, through and through.

Ben, the technology entrepreneur, the smartphone app developer, the school-geek-turned-millionaire – that would be right up his street. He was the kind of guy who would roll his eyes at people who left their mobiles unlocked or didn’t have the latest iPhone or who used the same password for everything. His favourite trick was picking up your mobile when you weren’t looking and changing the language to Korean, or Arabic, or Russian. Leaving you to navigate the settings in a foreign language to get it back to English. Your fault for leaving it unlocked, he’d say, grinning. User error.