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

A betrayed, broken-hearted, sexually famished woman, I want to say, but don’t. In fact, looking at her, all dishevelled, her silken blonde hair tangled and fly away, her cashmere jumper coming unstitched on the shoulder, I feel a knot in my heart. A knot of affection, despite all the things she’s done to me this last year. The prison smells of old cigarette smoke and the worn intimacy of cloth too long against flesh. The odour is only made worse by the overlay of antiseptic, seeping up from the linoleum floors. There are no windows. The room sets me on edge, like a dentist’s waiting room, or the room where you wait before a job interview – for a job you don’t want.

I lean across the rickety table and take her hand. ‘What do you want me to do, love?’

There’s a shrill shriek of an electric bell. I jump. The prison officer ignores it at first, too enthralled in counting her own dandruff flakes, then she begrudgingly stubs out her cigarette before heaving her grey bulk upwards.

‘But,’ I look at my watch, scandalized, ‘I’m supposed to have another half an hour.’

‘Welcome to the wonderful world of Law Enforcement,’ Jazz utters sarcastically, passing me my coat. I think she’s going to help me on with it, but she seizes my arm instead. ‘Cassie.’ Her voice is small and terrified. ‘I’m being framed. You have got to help me. My solicitor rejoices in the name of Quincy Joy.’ She crumples a scrawled address into my hand. ‘Her euphoria comes no doubt from the fact that she is not the one up before the Judge like the thousands of poor saps she represents . . . You must tell her everything. Explain things to her. You know – why I behaved the way I did. How things got so Kafka-esque.’

Wake up and smell the Kafka, I would have said in days gone by, but now just stand there numbly as my best friend of twenty-five years is led to her cell. The last thing I hear her say to the prison wardress is, ‘You can’t stripsearch me on a first date, sweetie. I definitely need dinner and a movie first.’

Dazed, I trudge out into the wintry light. The chill January air nips at my face, and the brick walls of the prison cast long shadows which fall over me like a trap. Free from Persephone’s Holloway underworld, I gulp fresh oxygen and dart over Camden Road to hail a taxi as though fleeing back across the River Styx.

By the time the cab pulls up at the Inner Temple, a cobbled Dickensian lawyers’ enclave by the River Thames, my fine legal brain is saying, Fucking hell! Jazz may have trained as a chef, but only lobster should be in water this hot.

Quincy Joy’s office is furnished with ornate, bow-legged antiques which give the room a ponderous feel. She is blowing on a cup of scalding tea as I enter and introduce myself.

‘I’ve applied for a bail re-hearing.’ Her two-pack-a-day voice is languid with tiredness. ‘The first magistrate weighed up your friend Jasmine’s propensity for sarcasm in one hand and his loathing of me in the other, exactly like a man who is holding your tits. Then he squeezed both. Hard.’

Quincy has red hair, a face constellationed with freckles, and not just bags but baggage beneath her eyes.

‘Can they try someone for murder,’ I ask, bewildered, ‘without a body?’

‘Yep, if there’s reasonable doubt. Corpus Christi, it’s called. There is some rather nasty circumstantial evidence against her. How on earth did a classy woman like Jasmine Jardine ever get involved with a convicted murderer? And what was he doing in Australia? She assures me that you can tell the whole story objectively.’ The woman drums her fingers on the desk impatiently.

‘Me?’ I sit down on the edge of a wrinkled leather chair, facing a painting of two dead ducks and an Irish setter. How to tell the tale in all its complexity? The story of a tripartite friendship: Jazz, the stay-at-home domestic goddess. (To me, any woman who says she gets high on housework has inhaled way too much cleaning fluid.) Hannah, the childless career woman with a couple of venture capital portfolios tucked up each sleeve and her own art gallery, and me, the primary-school-teaching kid-and-career juggler, who keeps dropping everything.

‘Three is a difficult number, don’t you think, Quincy? And three women friends is a particularly difficult equation. Especially when you throw love, sex, kids and toy boys into the mix . . . Crikey. I don’t know where to start.’

‘Just give me a verbal mug shot of you all,’ Quincy says hastily, flinching from her scorching cuppa.

Yes, and then she can wrap us up in Crime Scene Tape and bring on forensic teams to piece together the evidence of our felony – which was to fall out as friends.

‘Since teacher-training college, Jazz, Hannah and I have been part of a kind of girl minestrone, sharing secrets, reporting arguments with our husbands . . . and then arguing about why we argued with them – and about why the secret of a happy marriage is such a well-kept bloody secret! That’s how we would have gone on for ever, if it hadn’t been for a party we all attended at Jasmine’s a year ago. That’s when each of our worlds began to fall apart.’

Quincy glances at her watch, then jerks to her feet. ‘Look, I’ve got an urgent submission to get in,’ she rasps, in a voice that is one pack short of lung cancer. ‘Why don’t you write it all down?’ She prods a yellow notepad across the blotting-papered desktop. ‘And phone me when you’re done. That might be easier.’

Easier? I don’t think she realizes the emotional roller-coaster I’m about to take her on. The woman needs an official warning not to strap herself in if she has neck problems or