‘All or nothing?’

‘Exactly. Anyway, eventually he said that one of the reasons he’d moved to London – moved his family, his company, uprooted everything – was to be nearer to me, so that we could be together. He said it was our future to be together.’

‘When did he say that?’

‘A few months ago.’

‘And you never told Beth any of this?’

‘How could I? “By the way, Bee, I snogged your husband by accident and he’s obsessed with me and wants to sleep with me and marry me, and in case it wasn’t obvious he doesn’t love you any more?” I wanted to, but I’d never figured out how I could do it without it being a disaster – for everybody.’

‘What a scumbag that man is. I never realised.’

‘Lately it had got to a point though where it couldn’t carry on. It was starting to make me ill, some of the stuff he was saying –’

‘Like what?’

‘Like he would do anything if it meant we could be together. Anything. It was kind of like an escalation of what he’d been saying before and it was starting to worry me.’

‘What do you think “anything” meant?’

She shrugged.

‘That he might split with Beth, or do something to you.’

‘Do something? Like what?’

‘I don’t know, it had just got to the point where I thought he was going to do something stupid. So I asked him to meet me on Thursday after work.’

‘What happened at the hotel?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Clearly something happened,’ I said, ‘otherwise he wouldn’t have tried to deck me in the car park, gone home drunk and disappeared with one of his shotguns.’

She sniffed again, and when she finally spoke, her voice was very small.

‘I told him enough was enough. That it was never going to happen, and if he didn’t back off once and for all, I’d tell Beth and tell you everything. I told him I loved you, you were my husband, that we were soulmates and that was never going to change. Ever.’

‘And he was angry.’

‘Furious.’

‘Basically he’s obsessed with you.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he hates me as a result.’

She nodded, but couldn’t look at me.

‘ “A classic underachiever”: that’s what he says you are.’

I remembered the way Ben had talked to me, looked at me at dinner parties and barbecues. We had never been close, more friends of friends, but there had always been the little ‘jokes’ and asides about money and ambition and success – and the unspoken message: Who has more of all three? Me or you? He’d never tried very hard to disguise it. It didn’t bother me, that sort of thing never had. I’d always assumed he was looking down on me because in his eyes I was just a lowly schoolteacher with a three-bedroom semi in an OK neighbourhood and a ten-year-old car.

But now it seemed there was more to it than that.