The Three-Year Itch. Liz Fielding

took the ring binders from the shelf and flicked back through the credit card accounts, meticulously filed month by month and paid on the dot. April. The day after she had flown out to Africa. Petrol purchased at a service station just inside the Welsh border. The same date. A trip to a supermarket in Carmarthen. She and Grey had shopped there the last time they had stayed at the cottage.

      May. Where had she been in May? Two days on an oil rig in the north sea. More petrol. Another trip to the supermarket. She wondered what had headed the shopping list. Disposable nappies?

      June. Another trip to Wales. Each entry was a knife wound in her heart.

      The July account had not yet arrived, but the slips were there to prove his lie. On the day he had told her he was working in Manchester he had filled his petrol tank on the M4 near Cardiff. She remembered that he had been wearing jeans the day she’d come home, the scent of woodsmoke clinging to them. For a moment misery threatened to engulf her as she clung to the desk. Then, taking a deep breath, she forced herself to go on. There was no time for misery. Yet.

      She put the file back on the shelf and took down the one containing the statements for Grey’s personal account.

      He hadn’t even bothered to disguise his transactions. Large single payments of exactly the same amount for the last three months. And, remembering the envelope she had seen him pass to Emma, she had presumably witnessed another of those payments today. Tucked into the correspondence pocket of the file was a letter dated two days earlier from the bank, confirming that a trust fund had been set up in the name of Matthew Harper, using the proceeds of the sale of the Degas …

      She had asked him what had happened to the painting. He had told her that it had been sold to help Robert out of a financial jam. And she had believed him.