Close Your Eyes by Michael Robotham

sick. Hardly ever. She’s the healthy one.
    I feel as though someone has played a tasteless practical joke on me, tricked me into believing that happiness is a possibility before snatching it away. Now I’m sulking, touching at the truth with the barest tips of my thoughts, frightened of what I might find. When was she going to tell me? Did I have to wait until she went into hospital?
    I’m angry at her secrecy, but at the same time I feel guilty. I have wished for something like this to happen – some event that I imagined would send her hurtling back into my arms. Now that it’s transpired I blame myself for contemplating such a terrible thing. Nobody can know.
Please, please let her be OK.
    Just after ten o’clock I pull through the farm gates, splashing through puddles before parking in the cobblestone yard. Monk is waiting. He almost seems to unfold as he gets out of the car and pulls on a rain jacket.
    ‘Could be wetter,’ he says sarcastically, carrying a box to the front door and keying open the padlock. He brushes raindrops from his hair and hands me a USB stick. ‘The statements are on this.’
    ‘What about the post-mortem report?’
    ‘That too.’ He hangs up his jacket. ‘You’ll also find the 3D scan of the farmhouse, maps, timelines, phone records, financial statements and receipts. The statements are colour-coded – red for high priority, then orange, then yellow. The boss thought you might want hard copies of the photographs.’ He points to the box.
    ‘I might also need a printer.’
    ‘Colour?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
    We walk past the open sitting room door. I don’t look inside.
    ‘You going to be OK out here?’ asks Monk, as we reach the kitchen. He opens the curtains.
    ‘I’ll be fine.’
    He tests the lights and turns on a tap, checking that I have water.
    ‘What do you think happened?’ I ask.
    Monk flexes his nostrils and rubs the grained skin of his jaw with one finger. ‘I think Mrs Crowe met some random stranger for sex, or someone watched her having sex, and followed her home.’
    ‘She chose the wrong one.’
    ‘It happens.’ Monk’s face is elongated, almost jug-shaped. ‘I don’t like speaking ill of the dead, but by most accounts Mrs Crowe was the sort of woman who liked all flavours of ice cream except the one she had in the freezer.’
    ‘Care to explain that?’
    ‘You see it often enough – a middle-aged woman goes searching for a little excitement or to recapture her youth – a Mrs Robinson type, who reaches her sexual peak and then sees her beauty starting to fade. I’m not being sexist – men do it as well: buy a Porsche or run off with their secretary. I got a feeling that Mrs Crowe was never going to settle for slippers and a cat.’
    ‘You sound as though you’re speaking from experience.’
    Monk grins sheepishly. ‘I used to have women hitting on me all the time when I was young and single. Some of them wanted to sleep with a black man. Try it once. See if the stories were true.’
    ‘And now?’
    ‘I’m a happily married man,’ he says, ‘and my Trisha would snip Little Monk with garden shears if she caught me bumping nasty with another woman.’
    ‘Tell me about Elizabeth’s ex-husband.’
    ‘Dominic Crowe. Nice guy. Bitter.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘She took him to the cleaners. Hired a head-kicking lawyer from London – the same brief who looked after Nigella Lawson when she split with Charles Saatchi.’
    ‘He lost the house.’
    ‘And his share of the company. You want to know the worst part? Dominic’s best friend and business partner had been shagging Elizabeth Crowe for years.’
    ‘Jeremy Egan?’
    ‘Yeah. Dominic had no idea. Poor schmuck.’
    Monk circles the kitchen counter, running his finger over the bench top.
    ‘What do other people say about Mrs Crowe?’ I ask.
    ‘Depends who you talk to. I interviewed some of the tradesmen who were fitting out the bathrooms. None of them liked her. She