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husband for a one-off payment, no strings attached. He would leave it for a few days for her to cool down. As he plucked a tissue from the box and picked up her empty glass left on the table, he reflected that people’s marriages never ceased to amaze him; she was such an attractive woman, beautifully dressed, very classy, unlike her husband. He had to admit Marcus Fulford was a good-looking man, but there was something seedy about him, and to have worn the dark sunglasses throughout the meeting proved to Henshaw that he was probably afraid to look his wife in the eyes. Maybe that was at the root of their marital problem – he was scared of her, or perhaps he had been in awe to begin with and it had gradually been chipped away by his own failures. At some point he had gained enough strength to walk out.
    Henshaw, a wily old man, guessed there would be another woman at the root of it, but neither had brought up a third party as a reason for the divorce. A weak man like Marcus Fulford, he was certain, had someone, and it had to be someone very close to Lena to have passed on such personal details. Gone were the days of extramarital affairs affecting the results of divorce proceedings – they no longer had any bearing on the outcome. It was now immaterial whether one’s spouse had been unfaithful; all the court needed was evidence of the breakdown of the marriage. It had been so much easier in those days!

Chapter 2
    A gnes Moors had left a message that she was going to collect the dry-cleaning and then do the grocery shopping so would not be back until after lunch. She had made sure the kitchen was spotless and gleaming – in fact the whole house was always polished to within an inch of its life. She had a mild obsessive-compulsive disorder that Lena put up with, simply because she was such a methodical and good housekeeper. Irritating little things, such as her obsession with straight lines, the way she organized the cushions on the sofa, the bed, and even the decorative pillows were an anathema to Lena – everything had to be too neat and precisely lined up. The curtains had to be exactly symmetrical, each drawn across the same distance, no showing of the silk lining that Lena rather liked, so it was a ritual that Agnes would hang the curtains dead straight and Lena would flick them around and tie the coiled loops more loosely.
    Agnes was about sixty, square-shouldered, thickset, with an oval-shaped and age-lined face, and small unblinking piercing brown eyes. She wore reading glasses when she worked so that she could see every speck of dust or finger mark. She used over-the-counter hair dye, and it was hard to detect her original colour, as her hair was now reddish brown with darker almost black streaks and a quarter inch of grey growth at her roots, which were very obvious as she had a prominent widow’s peak.
    Lena, still seething, had uncorked a bottle of wine and sat fuming about the meeting. She opened a bag of Kettle Chips and munched one after the other, unable to think about anything other than the fact she felt as if she was being harassed and for no reason but Marcus’s greed. It took a while for her to eventually calm down; she had a shower and dressed in her towelling robe and then returned to the kitchen. She’d forgotten that she had switched off her mobile at the morning’s meeting and switching it on now she saw that there were now fifteen unanswered calls, and numerous text messages about a new delivery of fabric from India. Simply scrolling through them made her head ache. She realized that she had not heard from Amy, and there was no message or text from her. However, there were two from her school requesting Lena make contact regarding Amy’s attendance. She rang Amy but it went straight to voicemail, and checking the time was after three, she decided she’d wait until classes ended at four before calling the school matron. She was not unduly concerned – often, if Amy had been on a sleepover,