Note betrays wife’s adultery

It took an anonymous note on his car’s windscreen for a man to discover that the youngest of three children in his household was fathered by a petrol pump attendant with whom his wife had an affair.

The note warned him to “watch out” because “his” three-year-old girl was not the fruit of his marriage but the result of his wife’s affair with a man who worked round the corner from the matrimonial home.

At first, he ignored the message, thinking it was someone trying to stir trouble. But then, in March 2006, he found another note in the boot of his wife’s car. The message, accompanied by two pictures of the pumping station, warned the woman that the attendant was living with another woman and that they would continue to do so.

He linked the two messages and confronted his wife who tried to snatch the evidence from his hands to destroy it.

The story emerged from a judgment of a separation case in which a DNA test was ordered confirming conclusively that the little girl was not his.

The couple were married in 1996. According to the husband, she started changing after suffering from two serious bouts of post-natal depression.

But what really tipped the scales were the notes, the first in May 2005 and the other almost a year later.

After a heated argument, the woman left the house with the children when she was first confronted. She returned the next day pleading with him to take her back, which he did, but it was evident things were not the same.

After some time the woman admitted to the family the third child was not in fact her ­husband’s.

The woman claimed in court her husband used to hit her and referred to two incidents when he became jealous on being told she was going to a “seamstress” who turned out to be a man. She tried explaining to her husband that the tailor was gay but he still went into a fit of rage.

In a second incident, the woman said her husband had run over her foot with his car during an argument.

She said that although he had been of some help during the bouts of depression he used to turn violent in arguments. The court noted the evidence produced showed the woman was principally to blame for the breakup of the marriage even though she was not the sole cause. When the man was convinced she was having an affair, his attitude towards her changed and there might even have been physical aggression too, the judge noted.

Authorising their separation, the court ordered an equal division of assets and granted full custody of their two children to the father.

The names are not being published to protect the identity of the children.