At 2am on Sunday police cars rushed to an apartment in Wollstonecraft, a suburb of the city, after they received reports of a woman screaming hysterically and a man shouting: “I’m going to kill you, you’re dead” as well as the sound of furniture being thrown.

The man answered the door “out of breath and rather flushed”.

An officer said: “Where’s your wife?”

“I don’t have one,” he replied.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” the officer added.

“I don’t have one,” he responded.

“Come on mate, what have you done to her?” the officer asked, unconvinced.

Embarrassed, the man replied: ”It was a spider.

“A really big one.”

However, the officer was still confused, he said: “What about the woman screaming?”

“Yeah sorry, that was me,” the man said.

“I really, really hate spiders.”

Officers found no one was injured apart from the spider.