‘The guilt got too much,’ she said. ‘It was like gorging yourself on chocolate cake, and you know you shouldn’t but you just can’t stop. Sooner or later you realise that you have to quit because it’s no way to live your life. It’s fantastic for an hour, or a day, or a week, but you can’t sustain it for a lifetime. Deep down I knew it, even right at the beginning when we first got together. And I couldn’t bear the thought of what it would do to Beth, or the thought of explaining it to William.’

‘And me?’

‘Or explaining it to you.’ She raised her hands. ‘Either of you, but you most of all.’

‘So what happened on Thursday?’

‘I agreed to meet him, not at his house but a neutral venue instead. A hotel.’

‘And did he get the message this time?’

‘Oh yes. I’m pretty sure he got the message.’

A cold feeling crawled down my spine.

‘Why? What was different this time?’

‘I . . . told him some things. Made some things up, about you and me. I said you’d got suspicious about us, you’d found my phone bill and you were asking all kinds of questions.’

I remembered Ben’s hostility on Thursday evening. His anger.

Mel added: ‘And I said that you’d threatened me.’

‘What?’

‘That you’d threatened to hurt me, beat me up, if I was ever unfaithful.’

Her words landed like a punch to the kidneys.

‘Jesus, Mel, I would never hurt you. Never. I’d jump off a cliff before I did that.’

‘I told Ben we had to end it, because I was afraid of what you might do.’

‘Dread to think how that little bombshell went down.’

‘He . . . wasn’t happy.’

I paused to digest this new information. Things were starting to fall into place.

‘That’s why he got drunk on Thursday night. Because you told him you were calling the whole thing off.’

In a small voice she said: ‘I think so, yes.’

‘And that’s why he went off with one of his guns?’

‘You’ve got to understand, I had to have something to stop it dead, right there, something that would shock Ben into staying away for good.’

‘So you told him some lies about me being an abusive husband.’

‘I made up a story.’

‘But Ben still wanted to carry it on?’ I didn’t want to name it, refer to it as an affair. It made it seem more real, more serious, more final somehow.

My wife nodded.