He grabbed his coat and his car keys, and headed for the door.

‘And John? Just so you know. He made me come more times this morning than you have managed in our entire marriage,’ she yelled after him. ‘I was screaming the bloody house down!’

Perry jumped into the car, and screeched off to drive around the estate. If she wanted a war, she’d get one. Just not one of her choosing. He had resources that he could use against this man, whoever he was. He was looking for a black Range Rover, but it was just his luck that he couldn’t find one anywhere. A grey one, yes. A black Freelander, yes. But not the exact vehicle. Fifteen minutes later, Perry parked by the developer’s site office. He now realised that in his fury he had, for the second time, forgotten to pick up the datasticks and would have to go crawling back for them.

Idiot.

He turned off the engine, and, resting his hands on the top of the wheel, placed his chin upon them. He stared out across the bleak treeless entrance, the banners crackling in the wind, a tundra of new build misery laid out before him. He thought it through. Mel’s lover, whoever he was, had been hiding up there in Vanessa’s room as he arrived. Mel manoeuvred him into the sun lounge to discuss their daughter, so that the bastard could slip out of the front door. Of course, that’s why she had kissed him so passionately, her hands holding his face. Over his ears! So he didn’t hear the door. What was most unforgivable was that he hadn’t a bloody clue. Here he was, a detective inspector charged with trying to find the culprits on a couple of murders, and he couldn’t even see that his wife was having an affair under his very nose.

The truth remained that he loved Mel. And he had trusted her.

More fool him.

All that stuff about Vanessa and drugs in her room, Mel might just have made it up. John Perry took a very deep breath, and realised quite why it is that they say that love is blind. He began to recognise in himself something he had been taught about in the training courses on domestic violence. Why is it that women rarely press charges against abusive husbands? It’s because their self-esteem is at rock-bottom and they believe they deserve everything that happens to them. He had found it hard to believe at the time.

Not now.

John Perry certainly felt worthless: five foot seven, not particularly fit, and obviously, really obviously, not very smart. Big debts. Newly corrupt, too. And to top it all, the banner headline news, that not one of his three previous girlfriends, all those decades ago, had ever seen fit to tell him. That he was rubbish in bed. How on earth could he expect to run part of a complex murder inquiry for Surrey Police, when his own life was such a mess?