And she’d found absolutely nothing that gave her any further insight into Mister Snigiss.

Bailey blew her hair out of her face with a huff of frustration. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been too surprised. After all, her father had probably done much the same thing some years previously and he hadn’t found anything apart from that one picture that she now carried in her purse.

She looked around at the mess she’d created. She supposed she should try and clear it back up. But then she doubted her father would be coming back here to check. And her mother wouldn’t care. In fact, maybe her mother would finally actually get rid of it all when her father passed. It would probably be the best thing for her mental health.

As she sat there among the piles of clutter, Bailey assessed her remaining options. If there weren’t any clues to Mister Snigiss here… well, that left one other place she definitely had to check.

32

Wendy Molloy sat at one end of the long oak dining table in the living room of their palatial Essex mansion and watched her husband over the top of a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape as he wordlessly ate his dinner.

Cheating bastard, she thought, taking a sip of the expensive red wine.

‘How was your day, darling?’ she asked in a tone of fake bouncy enthusiasm.

Rick grunted dismissively, barely even bothering to make eye contact with her, and took another mouthful of the eye-wateringly expensive Kobe beef steak she had meticulously prepared for him that evening.

It wasn’t anything new, this paucity of small talk. She sometimes wondered if it was because he was partially autistic or something; she’d read an article about it a few months earlier in one of the lifestyle magazines she kept in her beauty salon. Either that or he just couldn’t be bothered.

He cut two generous chunks of meat off his steak and tossed them onto the polished mahogany floor. Seconds later, two huge Neapolitan Mastiffs bounded out of the neighbouring room and eagerly gobbled them up. He petted them both, rumbling affectionate words into their ears.

Her face soured. ‘You know, you talk to those two dogs more than you do to me.’

He looked up at her, his face dropping. ‘Okay,’ he growled. ‘So what do you want to talk about?’

It almost popped out. The accusation of infidelity. It was there on the edge of her tongue. But somehow she couldn’t quite bring herself to articulate it.

‘I was thinking that perhaps we could have some of the neighbours round for dinner or something,’ she said brightly.

‘What’s the point?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘To be sociable. Remember I have a life to live too.’

Wendy spent much of her social time mixing with neighbouring housewives whose husbands worked mostly in finance.

Rick stared at her silently with his emotionless black eyes.

‘You need to make more effort with people,’ she said. ‘If it’s not about business, then you’re just not interested.’