‘What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve,’ one of her friends had told her when she’d confided in her about it.

So long as it wasn’t in her face, she should just get on with her life and be grateful for the lavish lifestyle he provided her with. But Wendy wasn’t like that. She just couldn’t stop thinking about it and it was eating away at her. Sometimes she saw him talking on his phone out in the garden and she could never be sure now if he was talking business or whether he was talking to his mistress. The paranoia had crept in and it was growing larger by the day, fed by her insecurities, contaminating his every last action.

She knew if she was ever foolish enough to start seeing another man and Rick found out about it, he wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of the man… permanently. She knew enough about her husband to know he possessed a very deep and very dark streak of violence. She’d heard enough about his organisation, just through the mainstream media, to know about all the murders and disappearances it was linked to; it was something she tried not to think about too hard.

She’d thought about trying to work it out with him, but she knew he’d outright reject the possibility of ever going to a marriage counsellor. At any rate, she’d never been able to fathom those couples who stolidly and masochistically worked through the issue of one partner’s infidelities. As far as she was concerned, once that special trust had been broken, the relationship was over for good and there was no point trying to salvage it. What she needed was a clean break and a new start. What she needed was a divorce.

Well, they were married, and she had the law on her side, even if he didn’t have much regard for it. She’d been secretly researching getting a divorce and she knew she was entitled to a big pay-off. She didn’t know how much her husband had exactly, but she knew it was at least in the tens of millions, probably a lot more. So saying, he’d hinted that a fair chunk of that was secreted in stashes of cash buried all over Essex and Kent… and getting hold of that could prove to be complicated. She had the annoying feeling that a divorce settlement would only include those assets of his that were both visible and legal.

She wasn’t quite sure how he would react if she asked for a divorce, but she was expecting the response to be volcanic at the very least. The thought of broaching the subject filled her with a fair amount of trepidation, but she knew she had to be strong and stick to her guns.

The solicitor she’d spoken to had emphasised the importance of having photos or some kind of solid evidence that her husband was having an affair. Apparently it would stand her in good favour in court. So, just as she’d planned, she’d gone ahead and hired a private eye to follow her husband around.