For some time I'd had suspicions that my wife had been seeing someone. Too many late nights at conferences with her phone turned off. Too many out of town meetings and clients. She'd always been an ambitious woman and had quite a powerful job in marketing. And I never really fitted in with her work crowd so she did her thing and I did mine and it worked fine. But lately things just didn't always seem right. Sometimes you can't quite put your finger on it but you can't get rid of the feelings either.
I could have just asked her but something told me that I needed to have more than just suspicion and doubt.
So the next time she said she would be very late from another meeting I just skipped work and followed her. I'd even borrowed a car from a friend for the day with some excuse about mine not starting right. Just in case she spotted the car, I didn't want her to recognise it.
All day I sat in my friend's car, parked well out of sight of her offices but cleverly placed so I could see the entrance to the building and her car parked in the car park. Admittedly I had to use binoculars I'd bought just for the occasion but at least I could see.
She would normally finish somewhere around 6pm but it wasn't until nearly 7:15 when she finally came out and got into her car. I followed her from some distance. She started heading towards home but as we got within a mile of where we lived she turned off the usual route and started down streets I was less familiar with into a residential area. Some meeting, I thought!
I nearly lost her twice as she followed the winding streets up into the hills. But each time I managed to either guess right or get lucky and found her and neither time did I have to get close enough to be detected.
And then about 200 yards ahead of me as I followed she signalled and turned into the parking area for an apartment block. I pulled up on the main street outside the entrance to the parking area. As I did so she came back round on foot to the main door. I thought for one frozen moment of fear that she glanced across the street at me. And maybe she did but she never noticed anything but another silver car on street well parked with cars and vans.
She went inside and I could see through the glass of the main doors that she was in a lobby and waiting for an elevator. I got out of the car and locked it, ducking low and keeping on the far side from where she was in case she looked back.
The moment she stepped forward into the elevator I ran across the street, glancing left and right but nobody was about that I could see.
I made it into the lobby just in time to glance at the indicators above the elevator doors to see that she'd gone to the second floor. I found the stairs and with my heart pounding I took them two and three at a time until I reached the second floor. I quietly opened the door from the staircase and glanced through the crack. Nobody was there.
I stepped through and investigated the floor. There were four apartments but there was no way I could possibly know which one she had entered. Assuming, of course that she'd gone into any one of them. I started wondering whether she'd seen me and had somehow tricked me into following her upstairs and all the time she'd ducked back out to her car.
I looked through a window at the end of the landing that faced out to the rear of the building. There was her car. She was here somewhere. And then as I looked I heard her laugh from beyond the wall I leaned against. She was in the apartment to my right.
For a moment or two I was frozen in position. I didn't know whether to run from the building or knock on the door or what to do. I forced myself to breathe deeply for a couple of seconds and with a real sense of purpose and with a calm I had to force upon myself, I counted to ten and just continued to breathe deeply.
Calmer now, I approached the door to the apartment where I'd heard her laugh. I crouched low in case anyone was looking through the spy-hole onto the corridor outside. There was no reason to think they might be but I was in a heightened state and still very nervous despite my calming breathing.
Very quietly I pushed inward the flap on the letter box. If someone from inside heard me or saw the letter box suddenly opening they were bound to come to the door but I decided I needed to know more and had to take that chance. I told myself that if the worst happened I would just confess to my wife my suspicions and my actions and then she would have to explain herself to me. But nobody heard me and as I peered into the apartment, nobody saw me either. But I saw her leaving a room on the right of the hallway I was looking down. She was with two tall, well-built men who followed her into another room at the end of the hallway. They were talking but I couldn't hear what was being said although I could still hear my wife's laughter within their conversation.
It would have been suspicious enough for me to feel almost completely justified in all my actions that day even without the fact that all three of them were completely naked!
I considered trying to bust the door in and just storm the place like some kind of Hollywood hero. But two things occurred to me before I was quite that stupid. Firstly this was not a Hollywood film set so I had more chance of busting myself than the door and secondly she was quite clearly not being held against her will but whatever was going on she was entering into quite freely.
I needed air so I left the building. I took the stairs down, I don't know why but something inside me was making decisions without too much conscious thought now. I was running on a kind of auto-pilot, I guess.
I went back to my friend's car and just sat inside with the window open for about two minutes, letting the evening air calm me down a bit. I glanced at the front passenger seat where I'd left my binoculars earlier and a thought came upon me. I grabbed the binoculars and left the car again. I stood outside the front of the building and though my eyes were open I was looking inside to my mind's eye, retracing the pattern of the building so I could work out the location of the room she'd gone into with the men.
I worked it out to be towards the far right hand rear edge of the building. But before I did anything else I went back in and returned to the second floor and made sure that the position I believed the room to be in was accurate. It was and once I was as sure as I could be I went back out and this time went to the rear of the building looking for a vantage point that might give me sight of a second floor window into the room. And there, no more than 60 yards beyond the edge of the apartment block was an old fire escape on a crumbling building.
A disused block of shut down shops and either storage units or offices above that were all in complete darkness. Maybe not perfect but close enough for me. I made my way around the block until I got to the darkened building and with help from an old supermarket shopping trolley in the alley alongside, I made my way onto the fire escape and up to the second floor.
I looked across at the apartment block and realised I need to go a little higher because of the shape of the surrounding land. I climbed up until I was about halfway between the second and third floors and saw that I was only probably about a foot or two above the level of the windows in the apartment block.
I crouched so I could rest the binoculars on the handrail and I focused them on the window across the way. The curtains, if there were any were open. I guess when you're two floors up curtains don't get shut so often - not in the summertime anyway.