A Little Variation

Mary laughed: "He said she can hire a carer to sit with her."

"She can always come back with me to our house. After all, as we shared her and Ellery's bed, it's only fair that she gets to share your and my bed, now."

Suddenly the humour had gone from Mary's voice. "What do you mean, you and her sharing her and Ellery's bed?"

"Well, that's what happens when people indulge in wife swapping, Mary, they share."

"Oh, no! Ellery won't like that! Not one bit! That will not do at all! This whole thing wasn't about wife swapping. It was about..." she stopped, suddenly realising she had already said far too much.

"So, it was all about you and Ellery turning me into your cuckold? Well, Chloe and I have turned the tables on the pair of you. I have turned Ellery into my cuckold and Chloe has turned you into her cuckquean."

Mary gave a gasp, cursed up a storm and disconnected the call.

I switched the record function off and shook my head. "Unbelievable! And even now, she can't tell me the fucking truth!"

"What do you mean?" asked Chloe.

"I thought she had rather a lot of luggage for a one week stay in a hotel. And we have the Nest video doorbell system on our house, so I know she didn't go back to the house. She must have taken her passport with her, so they planned the holiday in The Azores all along, the duplicitous bastards!"

However, at least she had some residual decency left over from the Mary I had thought I'd married. Ellery never even sent so much as a text message to Chloe.

Chloe came with me to stay at our house and took with her all the meds that her husband had prescribed for her to treat her Fibro Myalgia, with which he had diagnosed her.

I suddenly got a bad feeling and decided to have her checked out by a Doctor friend of mine at a private clinic. The medical website I ran was a joint effort between the two of us and we shared the income 50/50.

It was then that I began to learn what an utter bastard Ellery Hoylake really was. Doctor Mike spoke to both of us in his surgery. "Well, folks, I have some good news for you, and some potentially not so good news. Chloe, you do not have Fibro Myalgia, at all. You do have fibroids and arthritis that can be helped by some cortisone injections and also, although the NHS don't recognise this, some high dose Co Q10 tablets and some Turmeric capsules. As I'm a Doctor who is independent of the NHS, I don't have to abide by their bizarre edicts!

"And despite what your husband told you, Chloe, your fibroids are treatable with a simple procedure called a myomectomy.

"However, the medications your husband has had you on are contraindicated for both arthritis and Fibro Myalgia, even if you had that condition.

"In fact, in the combination and dosage prescribed for you by your husband, the only impact on your health would have been to promote weight gain and obesity. If we get you off those tablets right away, your weight should begin to drop off fairly rapidly. I don't say that you'll ever be thin, but it'll certainly reduce the strain on your heart and reduced the risk of you developing Type 2 Diabetes in the future."

Chloe began to cry and Doctor Mike handed her a box of tissues as I comforted her.

"To my mind there's no doubt that he prescribed those medicines in a malicious way to cause damage to your health, Chloe. I'm sorry, but that's the only explanation I can come up with. No good Doctor would make that combination of drugs by mistake."

"I'll have the bastard struck off!" I shouted.

"That's another thing I was coming to," said Doctor Mike.

"It'll be bloody hard to have him struck off because the BMA struck him off almost 20 years ago. He is not allowed to practice medicine, so when he signed all the prescriptions for you, Chloe, he was breaking the law."

"Why was he struck off?" asked Chloe.

"Having sex with female patients and certain prescription irregularities. Fraud, in other words.

"One husband caught him with his wife in their bed and in his rush to flee the bedroom, Ellery jumped out of the window and broke his right leg."

"The little shit!" said Chloe. "I noticed he had a limp on his right leg when we started dating. He told me he'd fallen off a horse. But now I learn it was because he'd fallen off a whore!"

We took our leave of Doctor Mike, went back to my house and decided to christen the various rooms with some rampant lovemaking. Well, it was something to do. A bit of revenge fucking.

Our visit to Doctor Mike changed things for Chloe and myself. I think, even when we realised what bastards our spouses had been, we'd both been willing to try to reach an agreement with our respective spouses to allow Chloe and myself and Ellery and Mary to have time together.

For Chloe to find out that her husband wasn't legally allowed to practice medicine and had, in effect, being poisoning her for years, was devastating. I could not convince myself that Mary could have worked with him for so long and not known the truth about what he was doing. That, and the fact that she'd lied about their holiday to The Azores, was the icing on the cake for our marriage as far as I was concerned.

We didn't have to do anything about the fake doctor issue, as Dr Mike handled that and liaised between the police, the BMA and us. Plus the National Health Service's Counter Fraud Authority, as it appeared that Ellery, with his PA's assistance, had defrauded the NHS and some health charities to the tune of at least £200M.

It was at that point that I finally realised that I had never really known Mary, at all.

Chloe and I both filed for divorce, for unreasonable behaviour and abandonment, whilst the two lovers were in The Azores, and as they didn't bother to return to the UK (having drained the accounts of the company that Ellery owned) our divorces were both granted very quickly.

The great thing was they didn't have to attend court to be divorced, so that was how it went.

European Arrest Warrants were issued for the pair of them for a variety of crimes including fraud, theft and bookkeeping irregularities at the company he owned, and we awaited with mild interest their eventual capture and their subsequent trials. We decided we were going to take popcorn into the public gallery, if we were allowed.

Incidentally, I was able to stop both of them in their attempts to drain our joint accounts by arranging for blocks to be put on foreign withdrawals from the accounts. Cheeky bastards!

It turned out that the villa they had gone to was owned by a dummy corporation they had created, sometime before, so they'd even lied about that. Why? Well, who can understand the minds of people like them? Not me, and certainly not Chloe. Sad, really, as they'd obviously hidden the more negative traits of their personalities from us until they decided to really fuck us over.

We decided to sell both houses and put 50% of the value in holding accounts for them should they ever return to the UK. We decided to do everything legally and above board. No need for us to sink to their level of behaviour.

I was able to get the matter sorted out because one of the websites I ran was a property law website and was co-operated with me by England's top property lawyer, Davina Sawyer.

Chloe and I were soon married and, unlike Mary ever did, Chloe not only showed an interest in my websites, she actually got me to set up a couple of websites for her, which she manages and makes a good bit of income from.

We bought a new detached family-sized house together that we both liked.

So, did sharing work for me? In a roundabout way, I'd have to answer 'yes' to that question. But when I originally told Mary that our marriage would never be the same again, I really had no clue about how correct that prophesy would turn out to be.

Still, it would have been nice to have received some form of an apology from her for her being a cheating, duplicitous bitch. I eventually concluded that she'd been having an affair with Ellery for some time before she mentioned the sharing plan. Prideful, stupid Ellery wanted to ramp it up and turn it into a cuckolding relationship, but the wheels had very rapidly fallen off his plans.

Chloe and I both had some individual counselling sessions and some joint counselling sessions to help us get our shit together after being taken for mugs by the people we had loved most in the world.

With Doctor Mike's help, she did shed a fair amount of excess weight. As he'd predicted, she'd never be thin. And for that, I'm grateful, as I still think she's the most beautiful woman in the world.

We were both puzzled by how we had ended up in bed so soon after we had met. After all, neither of us had set out to "cheat" on our spouses.

We brought this up in one of the joint counselling session and the counsellor, after several moments thought, said that she felt it was a variety of factors, which combined together to create a perfect storm.

We'd both been betrayed, had been pushed together by our cheating spouses, we were both sexually compatible and there was also a few drops of revenge added in for good measure, too.

Oh, yes, one more thing, my thanks to Mary and Ellery for accidentally arranging this happy ending for both Chloe and myself!

As for the cheaters? After being on the run for almost a year they are currently in jail in The Azores in the city of Ponta Delgada under the care of the Ponta Delgada Municipal Police, fighting the European Extradition Warrants issued by the Police in the UK. But it's only a matter of time, Brexit or no Brexit.

We seriously considered sending them a postcard each, but thought better of it. After all, we have to be the better people here. We must set a good example to our children. And yes, we are expecting our first child, the fibroid surgery was a total success, and things are looking good.

I jokingly suggested to her that we should ask our exes to serve as Godparents, but Chloe told me to perform some rather painful and anatomically implausible act upon myself for that suggestion!

There's another update. I received a very excited call from Doctor Mike. Apparently someone from the Jeremy Kyle Show office had been in touch with him (in his role as co-producer of our medical website) and asked if the site would be prepared to work with them to produce a special episode of the show on medical fraud and the NHS.

He said: "So I immediately thought of the gruesome twosome. Would you and Chloe mind if we got them to cover the story on the show?"

I told him I'd let him know and after discussing it with Chloe, we decided that we would be OK with them being exposed, but only so long as they'd do their best to protect our identifies.

And so it was, a month later, Jeremy Kyle did one of his special programmes, which don't feature cheating lowlifes, but covered a specific topic.

Jeremy Kyle: "This morning, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to do a special Jeremy Kyle on medical fraud. This will be a two-pronged attack, both on people who, for whatever reason, decide to pretend to be a qualified medic such as a nurse, a doctor or, God forbid, a surgeon.

"And people who defraud the NHS and medical charities out of money that you and I as taxpayers and donors have given to the NHS and medical charities by way of taxes and voluntary contributions.

"In the second part of the show we'll be dealing with a man who pretended to be a qualified surgeon for several years before being found out.

"However, in the first part of the show I'll be introducing Doctor Mike Strong who is the publisher of the famous Doctor Mike website. Doctor Mike brings us a story of someone who was practicing medicine without a licence and who also, it is alleged, was behind a medical fraud that cost the NHS and a variety of health charities over £200M."

Mike replied: "Hello, Jeremy. I'm just the public face of our site. I have been co-publishing it for several years with a business partner who, for a number of reasons, I'd prefer not to name at this point."

Jeremy replied: "Doctor Mike, having read through my briefing notes this morning, this case seems utterly bizarre. Could you please take us through it?"

"Certainly. This is how I became involved. One day a friend asked me to undertake a medical examination for a woman he knew because he wasn't convinced that the medical treatment she was receiving from her husband, who claimed to be a Doctor, was correct.

"After I took her medical history and ran some diagnostic tests on her I was able to prove that my friend's hunch was correct. The treatment was totally inappropriate for her and was actually making her health far, far worse. In effect, her husband had been slowly poisoning her. For several years."

"What happened then?" promoted Jeremy.

"Then, when I dug a little deeper, it turned out he'd been struck off by the BMA some 20 years previously so was not legally allowed to practice medicine. The idea of a company working in the field of supplying the NHS and charities with supplies and services being owned and operated by a struck off Doctor really worried me and I contacted friends within the NHS and some medical charities to see what they could find out."

"And the result was?"

"Pretty soon the alleged fraud by "Doctor" Ellery Hoylake and aided and abetted by his Personal Assistant Mary Beattie began to unravel and they drained the accounts of the company whilst having a lover's tryst at a villa in The Azores.

"However, the Portuguese bank accounts they set up have been frozen and they are in custody in Ponta Delgada on The Azores, awaiting extradition. And their assets are being investigated by the Police here for possible confiscation orders."

Jeremy nodded and said: "Thanks for that introduction, Doctor Mike. I'd now like to invite my own show's medical expert Doctor Arun Ghosh and Gillian Kirkham of the newly formed NHS Counter Fraud Authority who can talk on the wider implications of such cases.

"Gillian, if I may, I'd like to start with you. I suspect that many people may not have heard of the NHS Counter Fraud Authority. Can you please explain what it is and what it does?"

"Thanks for the opportunity to come on the show, Jeremy. It's our job to protect the NHS, its staff, patients and honest suppliers from fraudulent activities."

As she continued to talk, Chloe and I watched the programme, anxious, yes, but we were both relieved that those two bastards were beginning to get the justice they so richly deserved.

We were relaxing in bed in our new home, watching the show. It was my turn to make breakfast. I grinned as I thought to myself if Chloe might like some of my special cream on her Crunchy Nut Cornflakes?

When she asked me what I found so funny I told her. She laughed and said: "You'd better watch out for your own Crunchy Nuts, Tim!"

We were still giggling on and off when the show ended.