After the play, Narendra Tailor abandoned his wife’s Audi car in the middle of Leicester, with the body of his wife Sheila, 34, in the back seat, where it was not discovered for four weeks, it was alleged. Tailor, 39, and his receptionist, Manjinder Binning, 34, then concocted a story for police to suggest that Mrs Tailor had been having an affair with a drug-dealing boyfriend and had died in a violent sex attack, jurors were told.

Gregory Dickinson, QC, for the prosecution, told Leicester Crown Court that the marriage was unhappy and that Tailor murdered his wife because he was having an affair and did not want to be named in a divorce as an adulterer. He also stood to gain hundreds of thousands of pounds from his wife’s life insurance policies.

Mrs Tailor’s body was found on January 10, a month after her husband reported her missing. Mr Dickinson said: “For all the time he reported her missing he knew exactly where the body was. He had killed her. He had strangled her. Mrs Tailor’s clothes were arranged to make it look as though she had been the victim of a sexual assault, but she had not.

“It was not a spur-of-the-moment, hot-blooded killing, it was a carefully planned, cold-blooded killing. He hatched a plan that was utterly wicked. His intention was that when his wife’s body was found, everybody would come to the wrong conclusion that she had been killed by another man.

“It was Narendra Tailor who killed her, but he received considerable support and assistance from Manjinder Binning, both in the days leading up to the killing and in the immediate aftermath of it.

“He strangled her in the kitchen of her home. With the help of Manjinder Binning they put the body into her car and left the car in the garage when he went to see his children in a Nativity play at school.”

Tailor and his wife owned optician shops in Leicester and Sleaford, Lincs, but had each been having affairs, despite a ten-year-old daughter and son aged seven.

“For Narenda Tailor, divorce carried with it certain risks and repercussions — the loss of his children, the family home and the fact that he would be accused of adultery, which might not go down well at the [Hindu] temple,” Mr Dickinson said. “Her death meant he would not get the disapproval of the community as an adulterer but sympathy of the community.”

He said that Tailor tried to put the “spotlight of suspicion” on another man by inventing a ficititious affair between his wife and a supposed drug dealer. Binning allegedly helped him by making a series of calls between two mobiles to suggest that Mrs Tailor was abducted during a drugs deal.

Tailor, of Oadby, Leicester, and Binning, also of Leicester, deny murder. She admitted a charge of perverting the course of justice. The trial continues.

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