The chef accused of murdering his wife and putting her body in a freezer for three years before dumping it in a wheelie bin outside their Cobham home, has taken the stand at the Old Bailey.

Peter Wallner admitted killing his wife Melanie Wallner and putting her in the freezer but denied murder, saying she attacked him with a rolling pin and a griddle pan.

He grabbed the pan off her during a fight on the bedroom mattress at their home in Hamilton Avenue on August 27, 2006, before he hit her, causing her to fall back on the bed and die, he claimed during questioning by defence lawyer Mr Griffiths today.

He could not explain why, in his account to police after his arrest last year, he told detectives it all happened on one day, rather than two.

He told the jury he did not remember sleeping with Woodlands Park Hotel colleague Emma Harrison the day after the fight, but said if she said it was true, it must be.

He told the court he could not remember how an eye-mask and a Tesco carrier bag came to be on Melanie’s head when she was discovered in the wheelie bin three years later.

Prosecutors have suggested he wanted his wife out of the way to clear the path for an affair with Ms Harrison and that he killed his wife while she was asleep.

Asked about the cover-up after her death, he said: “I don’t know why, and that’s the most inexcusable part of it.

“I have been thinking about those five minutes for five years now, pretty much every day, and I still can’t work it out.”

He told the jury: “I didn’t expect anything apart from winning a week or a month.

“Every day at that point in my life I had been well organised, well managed, everything had its routine.

“In those 15 seconds everything ended. What I did there in those weeks and following weeks is not only completely inexcusable but I can’t even explain it to myself and that’s the hardest bit of it.

“Yes in the end it caught up with me, but to have the balls, or whatever you call it, to be this disgusting, to phone up with a fake story and to have caused that and added 10,000 to the pain afterwards.

“This is not worth a shrug of the shoulders.

“If you behave like the scum of the earth for three or four years and don’t think about anybody else it doesn’t make it go away or explain it.

“There was parts of those years where I had actually believed what I had told people.

“I didn’t believe I had the body in the shed for certain amounts of time.”

Asked about his affair with wedding planner Emma Harrison, who lived nearby, he said: “To this day I have to believe because it is probably true.”

And queried about the eye-mask he admitted she could not have had it over her eyes during the row, but said she may have had it resting higher up on her head.

The trial continues.