Rebecca Jane - The Real Lady Detective Agency - A True Story

I remember that day so clearly. It was at my parents’ house. Jess and Mum were in the lounge. I was in the hallway on the stairs. We talked and I interrogated James. His master plan was that Paris and I should go out to Spain and live with him. I won’t disclose the expletives that followed. I’ve always been a big believer that swearing doesn’t get your point across any better, but that day the words all flooded out. My short answer to his solution was ‘no’.

The next I knew, Dad was upstairs in the office on the phone to easyJet and he’d booked me on the first flight leaving in the morning.

‘You’re going out there, and you’re going to get him back home and sort this mess out. I’ve already paid for the flight, so you’ve got no choice.’

I tried in vain to put up a fight, but in the morning I was on my way. Paris stayed with Mum and Dad.

It took me three weeks to convince James to come back, and when he did he refused to live in our home town. He wanted a fresh start, and to be honest I thought it would be a good way to help us move forward with our marriage. We didn’t know where we would live exactly, but we packed up the car and set off. First it was Scotland, next was the Lake District. I went into estate agents and told them we were in holiday accommodation, and wouldn’t be leaving until we found somewhere permanent.

At the time I was well into a property development career, so moving wasn’t too difficult for me. I found a barn in the middle of a field and began transforming it bit by bit into a dream house. On the surface, it looked as though I had it all: a reformed husband, an excellent career, the best cars money could buy, a beautiful daughter and everything in between.

But inside I was empty. The thought of death grew more appealing to me with each day that passed. When they visited my family saw straight through the façade and realised I had severe postnatal depression.

I couldn’t cope any more. I knew I needed help, and fast. If I hadn’t got it, it wouldn’t have been long before I did something drastic. I wrote lots of letters to Paris telling her how sorry I was for being her mother. That I’d brought her into such a messed-up life was getting beyond any kind of joke.

I did two things to help myself. First I saw my doctor, who prescribed antidepressants. But when I told James, he threw them out of the window. He didn’t want me taking them, because he believed they would make me worse than I already was. I spoke to the doctor again and told her what happened. She re-prescribed and I started taking the medication.

The second thing I did was a bit more twisted and irrational. Instead of ending my marriage, because I thought failure wasn’t an option, I turned to a man whom I’d adored since I was seventeen. He was a married man called John. We’d had an affair previously but I’d finished it after I met James, and we’d not spoken since.

Eighteen months later, when Paris was still a tiny baby, I picked up my phone and texted him: ‘Fancy meeting up?’

He was surprised to hear from me but said ‘yes’ straight away and the next day I went to meet him. He couldn’t stop smiling, and he soon made me feel desirable again. I’d forgotten what that feeling was like. He wanted to know everything I’d been up to so I told him the basic outline of the story, but I left out my true emotions. I said that James had been cheating on me, and he was sympathetic and understanding. He listened and actually cared about what I was saying. It had been so long since I’d felt listened to by a man that I was instantly, once again, hooked on him.

Not surprisingly, we ended up back in a ‘version’ of a relationship that continued for the next few years. How clever was that? I had a husband who was unreliable and cheated on me, and what solution did I come up with? Yes, clever clogs started cheating on him. When it came to relationships, I still had a lot to learn.

Fast-forward to 2009. My life was a mess. I was still married. I’d stopped looking for clues of James’s infidelity, because sadly I no longer cared. I didn’t want to know. Instead, when James hurt or upset me I turned to John. John listened, he understood, and together we led double lives. I had my life with James, and he had his life, then we had our time together.

For years I pretended that it was a carefree relationship, but the more my marriage deteriorated the more I realised how strong my feelings for John actually were. People may say they detach themselves from affairs, but I don’t believe they do. I knew I had no right to feel like this, since he wasn’t mine. Trying to swallow the hurt and pain of not being able to have him, while staying in a torturous marriage, hurt me even more.

Eventually it became clear that I’d fallen madly in love with John, and didn’t love my husband at all any more. I needed John and couldn’t imagine life without him at the end of the phone. He was the one person I thought I could always count on. Really, I was a mess.

My postnatal depression shifted and I began to love my daughter as I should have from the start, but I felt guilty for the lost time. I had a lot to make up to her.

Next, my career began to suffer with the economic downturn. My speciality was renovating houses worth over £500,000. I was halfway through my latest development – a beautiful Georgian manor house in a village hamlet. The ceilings were high and vaulted and it had real character. I knew every single inch of the development. I spent the whole summer stripping back layers and layers of wallpaper, which is quite an achievement for a girl who wears heels 99 per cent of the time. I researched Georgian colour schemes, and what would have been traditional colours for the different rooms. Red for the lounge. Duck-egg blue for a bedroom. Gold for the dining room, and so on.

My mother was convinced it was haunted. One day she was lighting a candelabra in the dining room to take pictures and the candles kept blowing out. Later that day when she was relaying the story to Dad over dinner, candles blowing out miraculously turned into … ‘Candles blowing out … and then a white lady brushed passed me …’ Bless the mother – so dramatic! (You just have to meet her for half an hour to understand why I turned out so crackers!)

The development house wasn’t my home, but I stayed there when I could. I loved it, with its ghosts and history. When my finance company announced they were going bankrupt, they dealt me a blow I wasn’t expecting. I had twelve weeks to finish the Georgian property, even though it still had no kitchen or bathrooms. Sorting out bedrooms and living rooms had been my priority. That was a big mistake. I had no option but to sell it or they would repossess not only that house, but my home too. James was with me when the news broke and we knew we had a serious task on our hands. His solution to the problem? He ran away and left me to it.

That was it. I was sick of the James saga. During this particular vanishing trip towards the end of 2008, he called with the usual ‘I’m sorry, I won’t do it again’ routine, but this time I’d had enough. Through medication and my love of my daughter and John I’d grown strong. The kind of strong I should have been before my wedding. I told James not to come home. Our marriage was over. It really was that simple.

I filed for divorce and didn’t look back. I wasn’t even upset about it by that stage. People kept expecting me to break down, and I’d hear them whispering about me, worrying that I was bottling it up, but all I felt was huge relief. I didn’t have to walk on eggshells any more. I could be myself and do what I wanted, when I wanted. I looked at my friends who were in relationships and was glad I wasn’t them. I felt nothing but carefree about the loss of my marriage.