How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints), Kathy Lette [books to read to increase intelligence .txt] 📗

of the time. But joking around doesn’t mean I have a licence to kill . . . Good God, I don’t even have a learner’s permit.’

The prison officer snorts. ‘Not what the papers say, chuck.’ She tosses a pile of tatty rags down between us and, despite the No Smoking sign, lights up a fag.

‘The papers? You’re in the newspapers?’ It’s eight in the morning and I have pillow creases on my face, having jumped up from bed and rung a cab the second I got Jasmine’s call. I’m still reeling at hearing from my oldest friend. It’s been over two months since we’ve spoken – since she detonated a grenade in my life, to be precise. We’d all read, of course, of Dr David Studlands’s disappearance three weeks earlier in South Australia from a place called, ominously, Termination Beach, Cape Catastrophe. (Now that’s the place to book a holiday.) We’d seen Jazz in tears on television. I’d tried desperately to reach her, but she hadn’t answered any of my calls. Until the frantic summons this morning, her disappearance from my life had been as abrupt and bewildering as her husband’s.

She flicks the newspapers across the scratched laminate table as though they’re radioactive. Widow Too Merry? questions yesterday’s tabloid above an old photo of Jazz quaffing champagne, to illustrate a report that she was helping police with their enquiries.

‘That was taken years ago.’ Jazz sighs so loudly I mistake it for an asthma attack. ‘Truth is, David and I were trying to get our marriage back together. That’s why we went on holiday to Australia – for the sun, surf, sand, sex. But you know what a tremendous risk-taker Studz is – night scuba-diving, helicopter skiing, driving too fast, going into war zones for Médecins Sans Frontières . . . Late that afternoon, we were skin-diving. I got tired and swam in, but David snorkelled out beyond the headland. When it started to get dark, I went to look for him. I found his clothes and watch on the beach, where he’d left them. Then I knew something was really wrong.’ She wipes away a tear and takes a moment to compose herself.

‘We got boats and searched all night,’ she goes on. ‘People tried to be kind. They kept saying, “You mustn’t give up hope.” So I clung on, which was worse in a way, because I imagined him like a lost child, hurt and alone. For days I grabbed at theories – that he was working for the CIA and had gone undercover; an insurance scam; kidnap by submarine even! I went around in a daze, completely empty inside. Josh says the truth’s staring us in the face – that his dad was swept out to sea. Or worse.’ She shudders. ‘But I refuse to believe it. I won’t believe it.’ She slumps forward.

As I wait for her to recover, I take in my friend’s thick, straight eyebrows framing sea-green eyes with lashes long enough to hike through, her ripe lips, chiselled cheekbones and golden hair – and marvel for the millionth time how her profile, so delicate it belongs in a Botticelli painting, could be so at odds with her smile, which suggests the possibility of anonymous sex in a dark doorway. And then there’s her chin, which juts forward slightly as if to say, ‘You and whose army?’

‘Jazz. . .’ At the sound of my voice she glances up at me with no recognition at all. ‘Then why have they arrested you?’

She snaps back to life with alacrity. ‘Remember Billy – that prison playwright I had a fling with? Well, he’s claiming to the police that I hired him as a hitman. Moi! Can you believe that?’

‘What the hell else did you expect, dating a criminal? Men like that write ransom notes, not thank you notes. What on earth did you see in him anyway?’

She looks at me sadly. ‘Oh, Cass. How long had it been since my husband had made love to me? You know what it’s like when you’re on a diet and even a rice cake looks delicious? Well, Billy and the other men, that’s what they were like. Sexual rice cakes.’

‘Your boyfriend’s gone an’ got ’imself banged up,’ the eavesdropping prison officer puts in, uninvited, ‘for welfare fraud. An’ he’s plea-bargainin’. Which is why the beak’s refusin’ bail.’

‘Is that true, Jazz?’

‘Basically, yes,’ she concedes. ‘The man’s an evil, lying, Olympic-standard scumbag . . . but of course I wish him only the best.’

The enormity of the situation punches into me hard. I’ve been following Jazz’s escapades at a nervous distance for decades, but this latest scenario has me terrified. We are middle-class women in our forties. We wax our bikini lines and shave our Parmesan. We leave notes under the windscreens of cars we’ve bumped. Our record collections are classical not criminal. Jazz has the sort of face which you instantly associate with the comment, ‘I’d like to travel, meet interesting people and help bring about world peace.’ Not the sort of face you’d see on a mug shot.

‘Bloody hell, Jazz,’ I say. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Oh, fake my own death, take a new identity and go and live in a tree with Lord Lucan obviously.’ Rage bubbles up out of her. ‘Life begins at forty, not Life Imprisonment for Killing Your Hubby. What I’m going to do is fight. And until Studz turns up, you are my best weapon, Cassandra O’Carroll.’

‘Meee?’ Jazz’s clipped English vowels make my own Antipodean accent ring coarse and trailer-trashy by comparison.

‘This,’ she gestures indignantly at the papers, ‘is character assassination. Now, who knows me best? You, that’s who. We’ve been bosom buddies ever since college. Literally. We bought our first naughty bras together – lacy and racy, with tassels, do you remember? I want you to talk to my solicitor, Cass. I want you to tell her everything. Okay, Studz betrayed me. He drove me insane. And yes, at times I felt like killing him . . . But he’s the father of my only