A SENIOR policeman accused of an arson attack told his estranged wife he believed a group of gypsies had set fire to his car.

Chief Superintendent Jim Trotman told his wife that he had been at a pub with friends and had parked his car in a nearby lane when it was attacked by arsonists.

The 45-year-old is also accused of claiming almost £20,000 in insurance on the burned out family car, which he used to buy an Audi convertible.

The father-of-two, a former head of Oxford police, is alleged to have doused the gold coloured Citroen Picasso in petrol and torched it as he visited his lover, Karin Gray, at her home in Boars Hill in October.

Prosecuters claim he then tried to blame the blaze on his lover’s husband, Ian Gray, a partner at the leading city law firm Eversheds, who was actually in Dublin on business at the time.

Hours before the arson attack Trotman had told colleague Detective Superintendent Ashley Smith, that he was having a 20-month affair with a married woman and he had received some threatening emails about it.

On the second day of Trotman’s trial, wife Charlotte Trotman told how she had received a call from her estranged husband the morning after the fire.

She said: “He said that after watching my daughter in a play he had gone to a pub with some friends.

“He said that somebody at the scene of the fire had mentioned that a caravan had been burned out on the same night and that it possibly might have been gypsies.”

Trotman also told the mother of his two children, Emma and Euan, that his police uniform was visible in the back of car and could of been the reason it was torched. Mrs Trotman told the jury at Swindon Crown Court that her husband had previously told her that he had received a number of worrying anonymous emails.

She said: “I was married to him for a long time and he was a very senior police officer. I was really quite scared being home alone with the children.”

The couple met in 1990 when Trotman was still a serving Royal Marine, married five years later, but separated in June 2009.

Lawyer Ian Gray, the husband of Trotman’s lover and the man he accused of setting the fire, told the jury that he was in Dublin on business when the car blaze took place near his home in Boars Hill, Oxford.

The top solicitor, who had been married to Karin for 12-and-a-half years, said that before returning from the trip he had never heard the name James Trotman nor was he aware that his wife was having an affair.

Police arrested him on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson on the evening of October 21.

Mr Gray, who had his computers and his Blackberry phone seized, was taken to the police station and locked up for up to three hours before being questioned.

He was later released on bail before being told that police would not be taking any further action against him in late December 2009.

Trotman, who now lives in Abingdon, denies one count of arson, one count of perverting the course of justice and two counts of fraud. The trial continues.