Alibi

"P'raps it is complementary?" Marcel suggested with a grin, pulling on his dressing gown, while I pulled the covers up to my chin. I think I assumed that the romantic bugger had ordered it to loosen me up for buggery and, I guess, he must've thought I had ordered the Champagne for us.

It was a shock seeing Bill force the door open and knock down Marcel with his fist as if the bigger Frenchman was nothing more than a bag of deflated wind. Bill was both furious with me and, at the same time, looked like he was about to ball his eyes out.

I will never forget that look on his face and the way he took a deep shuddering breath and calmly told me that, having betrayed the only man I ever loved, my married life was over.

"Looks like your alibi is busted, Alison, and so is our marriage."

Chapter 3: Pick Yourself Up

Bill:

I have gone back up to my grand hotel suite immediately on leaving ... their ... little love nest, because I have nowhere else to go, but now I am here I find I cannot relax. I am wound up like a clock spring and still shaking like a leaf. Tense barely describes how I feel. I keep clenching and unclenching my fists without having any feeling in my hands, my legs my body. I certainly cannot relax enough to sleep, I am far too wired for that. I have no real appetite for food either, even though I haven't eaten anything since breakfast, fourteen hours or so ago.

I am in shock. To see them, Alison in bed, their bed, naked ... her lover in in his robe, bare-legged and almost certainly naked underneath. God! I could smell her betrayal from the end of the bed, her perfume, her arousal.

Seeing them fully dressed in the lobby and restaurant, touching like lovers, I could suspend my speculation of the actual state of Alison's affair. Maybe at that stage I could have stopped the charade, broken whatever hold he ... this lover ... had over her, tried reconciliation. But now? No, we are finished. My family, of Mum, Dad and kids, grandkids, the whole joined-up package, is finished.

The last thing I want to do now is drown my sorrows in the hotel bar, nor do I want company. I am too miserable to share this pain. I prefer to be alone. So I sit at the table in the suite's lounge and pour myself a whisky. I wince grasping the bottle with my right hand, and switch to picking up the bottle and pouring a measure with my left. I swallow the crystal-cut tumblerful of searing spirit down my throat in one mouthful.

I compare my right hand to my left. The right hand has swelled up to almost one and a half times bigger than the other and is much redder in colour, too. I have slightly scuffed two of the knuckles, with a little blood and weeping fluid seeping out. It really hurts like hell, though. I wonder if I have broken a bone or something in my hand. I only hit that cheating Frenchman the once, but it had felt so sweet.

So I pour myself another Scotch to sip and take the pain away. Only it isn't just my hand that hurts. In fact I hardly notice any pain from the hand. How can you mitigate the pain that comes from a broken heart?

I've lost Alison. That much is plain. Or she's lost me. Maybe her plan all along was towards replacing me with a new man in her life. What's the difference? The reasons hardly matter now. She's dead and completely gone to me now. I never want to see her again. Quite honestly, I'm afraid of what I might do to her if I do see her at the moment, I am so angry.

And disappearing with her are all those joyous little things we were looking forward to sharing together: the marriages of two of the kids, the births of their children, the development of our grandchildren; the comfortable retirement we planned for us, visiting all those places we couldn't fit in during our busy working lives. None of that is going to happen, not now. No more family Christmases and birthdays or summer holidays with us all together. There is no "family", any more. We will probably have to alternate our holiday arrangements so that our kids' estranged parents can be prevented from the embarrassment and anger of ever meeting up.

It means separation and divorce, of course. Alison has never worked, from the moment we had our Kelly, so she is entitled to half my pension, up to this point; and I will have to pay her keep for at least a couple of years until she gets herself trained up for full-time employment. After then, though, she's on her own.

What is the point of me even carrying on working? Saving for her retirement? At the moment of my finest professional triumph, Ali has completely undermined me. The sweet taste of success has turned into a brimming mouthful of sand.

How Alison and I first met comes to mind as I pour myself another drink. It's like my life is over and the highlights of it are running in front of my eyes before I sink all alone into oblivion.

Alison and I got together almost by default really. I had three really good mates in my early twenties, the thought of them now brings a fleeting smile to my lips. We had gone away on holiday together, as just a bunch of mates, for several years in our late teens and early twenties. Then, one year Gordon had fallen head over heels in love with Jennifer, who later became his wife, and he decided he wanted to bring her with us. As a very creditable sweetener to the rest of the boys, Jenny brought along three of her friends.

Us lads were sleeping in the loft of this cheap guest house, while the girls had two slightly grander rooms with sea views on the floor below. All we could see from the loft windows, which were set in the roof, was the sky. The other boys and girls all paired off, leaving me with this girl Alison Ford, both of us too shy to take the lead in our little get togethers. She was quite a nice looking girl, Alison, with short brown hair and soft brown eyes, of average height but a little on the chubby side back then. I was just 21 and recently completed my engineering apprenticeship, and she was 18, working in an office as some sort of clerk.

We only shared a few similar interests, like music, dancing and walking but everything else we were at loggerheads, like politics in particular. But we were able to laugh about and agree to disagree about a whole raft of subjects. She did a lot of sun bathing, which was painful for my sensitive skin, so I preferred to sit in the shade of an umbrella with her, reading a book. Our reading choices differed too, she preferred trashy novels while I indulged almost exclusively in autobiographies.

More than anything else though, that first week of our acquaintance, I found Alison was pleasant company. Mind you, during that week we never managed to get as far as sharing a bed. I think we were the only pair that didn't. We took a lot of long walks while all three bedrooms were otherwise occupied with private activities.

Kids were more reserved back then, or at least we were, and she was the youngest in our little group. I have been proud ever since that we were the only one of the four couples that survived together; I will not be able to boast about that now. At the time we enjoyed our holiday, though, thrown together like we were, so we decided to continue seeing each other at least as friends.

Within a few weeks of our return our friendship became friends with benefits! Eventually this friendship blossomed into a loving relationship and within a couple of years we were engaged and saving up to do the whole marriage and buy a place together thing.

After marriage, along came our children. Kelly 28 arrived first, now married to craftsman boatbuilder Malcolm these last five years; Ali speaks to Kelly more often and for far longer periods than I do, and she confidently expects to hear soon that Kelly will become pregnant with the first of our grandchildren. While feeling happy for Kelly's prospects, I think both Ali and I have been a little apprehensive about becoming grandparents. Martin 26 is our next kid, he's in the RAF training as an artificer, and the lucky bugger is still single. He rarely calls or writes, although we do get postcards from all over the world, most of them with barely a dozen words on the back. Our baby Juliette, 24, moved to China at 18 for a couple of years. Now she is back in the UK, but away at Uni studying oriental languages and wants to move back to China as soon as she finishes her studies.

I carefully compose text messages for Kell and Jules, with an email for Marty. I am simply preparing a way of informing them that their mother and I were having some time away from home trying to sort out some marital issues between us, but it was looking likely that we would be going our separate ways at the end of it. Time for accusations and recriminations can be followed up in a day or two. I want to get those messages off before I get too drunk to do them justice. They are the innocent victims in this.

I take the time to check the credit card transaction details online and find out that Alison has paid for the plane tickets on our joint card. I guess by that transaction that Bruton is paying for their room.

Now, who knew that the credit card company have a manned UK helpline 24/7 and that they have a very nice lady with a rich Scottish accent working the night shift? I didn't know that until now, but me and Marie have a great chat over the phone, her in her utilitarian office and me in the grandeur of my Riviera penthouse suite. The reason this Marie is working the night shift is because her ex-partner had a number of affairs, leaving his bastard kids all over the place and has been impossible to pin down for child maintenance. Marie needs the extra income that the unsociable hours shift brings in to bring her son Tyrone up properly, as they were reduced by circumstances to living back with her mum. Not only did Marie cancel the payments for the tickets, fully reimbursing the account due to "fraudulent use", she made sure the airline would be informed immediately, to ensure the two ticket holders would have a nice surprise at Nice Airport when they try to fly home on Friday afternoon.

And, the next time I was in Edinburgh, if I wanted a hot date with a large fun-loving woman of mixed West Indian and West Lothian heritage, who particularly likes being tickled, I had her phone number. The way my marriage was going, I could see me using it a few months down the line. That was the credit card dealt with.

Now I think more about this M. Bruton fellow. He wasn't getting away lightly with just a gentle tap on the chin. I hoped his face had swelled up as much as my fist had. I examine the photocopy of his biometric "passeport" that I bought from the receptionist. I have his name and date of birth, ah, almost five years older than me, as I had thought earlier. And I have his residence address, which is in a town about thirty miles from where I live. I pull out my laptop to help my research.

I began searching Facebook for him to start with. How many Marcel Brutons do you think are living in my country? Just the one, apparently. Interesting picture popped up on his home page; he's looking twenty years younger there, clean shaven, with the same dark hair but worn longer. Ah, "married", it states in his status. Again, exactly as I had surmised, another sneaky, cheating spouse. I look through his list of friends, he has hundreds. Lots of women friends, including Alison, of course. I rarely look at Facebook, so I wouldn't be up to date with any of her messages or activities. It all seems quite innocent on the face of it, but I should have been more vigilant. Too late now.

I Google him, and find out that he works as a French language teacher, of course, at a private school, about twenty miles from us. So I now know where to find him.

Bruton's wife becomes my next target. Under Facebook Friends for M Bruton there are several female names ending in Bruton, most with faces, but one with an image of flowers. There is Annie, Francine, Geraldine, Josephine, Kitty and Madeleine.

Annie and Geraldine are clearly his children, both in their teens; Josephine looks as though she in her eighties, still living in the South of France, so probably his mother, who likes to keep in contact with her grandchildren. There is a man in his twenties, David, posing with wife and baby, so it looks like Marcel is not only married but a grandfather, too. Anyway, it reduces the possibilities down to his wife being Francine, Kitty or Madeleine.

Francine is an attractive woman in her thirties, not really grandmama material yet, I guess, so I eliminate her from the list.

Madeleine is an attractive woman in her fifties, so I look up her page first. She says she is in a relationship, not saying if married or not, so I look through her photos. She has millions, literally millions of photos. Clearly her hobby is taking photos as she is rarely shown in many of the photographs other than a few obvious selfies. Lots of photos of the same family group of a couple with young children. None of Marcel or David. So Madeleine is an unlikely candidate.

Kitty is an enigma, her picture is of a posy of violets. Her pages are also devoid of information other than admitting being a native of Marcel's current town of residence. Only a handful of photos on her infrequently used timeline, none of Marcel, but, and this is the clincher, includes one of David and his young family. So, I believe therefore that Marcel's wife is Kitty Bruton.

I pour another Scotch, to help me think. I help myself to a bottle of water from the bar, too, as I am parched and worry about hangovers in the morning. Funnily enough, even on an empty stomach the alcohol is having nil effect on me. It must be the adrenalin. Think now, Bill, where can I go from here?

Is 'Kitty' short for Katherine or Catherine? I search the internet for both variations, leading to far too many results to trawl through, especially as I don't even know what she looks like, her occupation, or anything about her at all, except she like violets, maybe.

Surmising that David Bruton is Marcel's son, I search through David's pictures. There is one of Marcel holding the new-born baby in hospital, but lots of different women holding that same baby, including one striking woman, tall, slim, with a full head of curly auburn hair, a wonderful proud smile on her beautiful face. Could be her, of course, but no, it can't possibly be her. Surely, even an old dog like Marcel would think twice about cheating on that beautiful woman. The real Mrs Bruton must surely be one of the stout ugly ladies shown striking up their poses with David's baby.

I ask myself, what was Kitty's maiden name? Assuming David is in his mid to late twenties, he would have been born in the late eighties. I search the UK's online birth records for him and come up with David Arnold Bruton, born in the September quarter of 1986, and there is the clue I seek, listed in his index entry is the maiden surname of his mother, Shilling.

Excitedly, I look up marriages in the eighties between Marcel Bruton and a Miss Shilling and there he is, March 1980, to Shilling, in our county town, close to where they live now. I click on the corresponding index and find his blushing bride was Catherine Marianne Eva Shilling. Searching the births, leads me to her entry in 1959, again registered in our county. So now I know that she's my age, maybe four or five years younger than Bruton. She could still be stout, though.

This calls for another drink. A search of the divorce registers comes up blank, however, they could have separated or divorced to recently for it to appear in the registers. Back in the births index I find the birthdays of Annie and Geraldine, just to complete my notes.

Now I search for Miss Shilling on Google. Half a bottle of scotch later, I have a full dossier on one of the foremost family lawyers in the country; for family lawyers read divorce lawyers. The mystery why she kept her maiden name professionally, emerges because her father is Lord Justice Shilling, a famous judge. When he was a QC he was head of the Chambers that Kitty later joined from law school and is still with. There are loads of news items, pictures and video clips of the beautiful, brilliant titian haired goddess I saw holding her son David's precious bundle on Facebook.

Irony doesn't escape me. Either the divorce lawyer has an open marriage, or Bruton is a complete cock-driven idiot. I incline to think the latter. I shake my head, it must be that Bruton loves Alison. Maybe Kitty is the cheater and Marcel has given up on his wife, rather like I have.

Sod it, I determine. I check out my snapshots from the restaurant earlier, on my mobile. I am delighted, they are surprisingly sharp, considering the quality of the light. I bundle them together in an email, including the minimum of text explanation, giving the hotel address, their room number, showing that they are booked in the names of M & Mde M Bruton. I send the emails off to both Lord Justice Shilling and Miss Shilling at their chambers. It takes me four different name combinations before Lord Shillings' is sent, but only the second try is successful for the beautiful Miss Shilling.

A celebratory snifter's in order I think. I relax. Finally I can relax and I feel tired all of a sudden.

Once I finish the bottle of Glennfiddick, I start to feel a little drunk, giddy and enormously depressed all at once. Too tired to shower or even get undressed. I go to the bedroom, lie down and rest; the room spins round. I want to sleep, if I can only stop these dreams, these nightmares. Sleep, deep dreamless sleep, is all I want now.

Chapter 4: Dust Yourself Off

Alison:

I go to the hospital in the ambulance with Marcel. He's concussed and has completely bitten through his tongue as well as lost four teeth, two up and two down I expect, but the doctors do not enlighten me.

I gather from what little I can make out from what the doctor is saying, that Marcel has to have an operation to have the tip of his tongue sewn back on. The wine waiter who brought the champagne to the room had the presence of mind to pop the tip of his tongue into the ice bucket, which was handed on to the ambulance crew. At least Marcel didn't swallow it. I think the doctor says he had swallowed a couple of his teeth but cannot be sure if I understand correctly. I did French at school but nothing since, perhaps I should take a course, the thought of which makes me feel worse.

The paramedics have big grins on their faces as the hotel doctor explains his thoughts to me with the delivery of a Gatling gun. They all look at me without pity, knowing full well that I have been caught by my husband with my lover.

I don't know where to look. This is not me, I tell myself, not really me. I want to be thought of as a loyal wife, because I never wanted Bill to find out. But why am I here and not with my husband? I know in reality that I am exactly what they think I am, a filthy whore.

No police are involved in questioning me about the assault, which surprises me. Perhaps the hotel want to keep it quiet. The hotel doctor only stays a minute to hand over his patient to the hospital staff, then leaves. I hang about for ninety minutes or so. The hospital doctor tells me there is no point in my waiting any longer at the hospital as Marcel will not wake up again until the morning.

So I go back to the hotel using a cab.

Damn, Bill has been so darn quick with his realigning of our finances, that he has closed our joint credit card account. Neither my credit card or the bank debit card works, so I have to hand over most of my euro notes to the cabbie for my fare and his tip.

Our hotel room is a mess, blood splattered over the sheets, our clothes thrown everywhere. The champagne has gone, I notice. It is just after midnight now, so I quickly pack my belongings in my case and carry-on bag and go down to the Reception desk to find out where my husband is staying. If he is not in this hotel and just came here on the off-chance of catching me out, then I am screwed.