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

Sick with nerves I wait in the crowded Old Bailey canteen and watch the older women, moulting magnificently from coats and craniums like ailing eagles. Slurping scalding tea and reapplying lipstick, I imagine they are the matriarchs of East End crime families. Then there are their younger counterparts – interchangeable blondes, their short, flimsy frocks held together by face cream. They swear loudly and whine about not being able to smoke, their bare legs impervious to the cold.

Quincy taps me on the shoulder and I trudge, heart in mouth, into the ornate courtroom with its great blaze of chandeliers and lights and sit with her legal team, just as the charges are being read out.

‘. . . The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act gives jurisdiction to the courts of this country to try an English subject for the murder abroad of another English subject. We have other evidence obtained from the police of South Australia, my lord.’

The widow, her buttery hair swept up into a bun, looks frail and frightened in the dock. Although trying to remain dignified, Jazz’s nerves betray her, and she licks her lips with her tongue like a cat. Jazz’s solicitor has briefed a QC who asks eloquently for bail, the defendant meeting the criteria of having a place to reside plus the £20,000 surety.

The Prosecutor for the Crown objects forcibly. ‘This woman intended to profit from her husband’s death, my lord. She is not a woman who would mourn from his passing. On the contrary, she intended to celebrate it.’ The prosecutor, rendered egg-bald by worry, is also no doubt bitter with the world about his acne scars, which give him a complexion like cottage cheese clawed with a fork; an obvious hindrance to any romantic aspirations. This can be the only explanation as to why he now goes on to paint a picture of Jazz as a gold-digger, caught up in the web of the criminal underworld.

‘There is no doubt that a crime has been committed. The happy family holiday was a sham. For months Jasmine Jardine had been in the throes of an acrimonious separation from her husband, battling over assets and custody of their son.’ He then accuses her of setting up the contract murder of her husband, to get the £2 million insurance payout, by luring her lover, Billy Boston, who was also in Australia at the time as the guest of a literary festival, into murdering her husband and throwing his body into the sea. ‘When Billy Boston declined, she obviously sought other means. This highly manipulative woman had two reasons for wanting David Studlands dead – money and sexual freedom.’

Uh-oh, I think, gnawing my nails. And sure enough the loquacious prosecutor now reveals that Jazz has cheated on her husband with over a dozen men in the past year. ‘Shady men; men who could no doubt offer her ample escape routes out of the country. Boasting that she would soon be a rich widow, she embarked on a series of affairs, while her husband was working for the poor of Africa.’

The judge throws in a disparaging harrumph at this point and glares over his spectacles at the Scarlet Woman. I want to call out that it’s actually Jazz who nearly died of an overdose of wedlock and that her husband had been exploiting the poor, but as I’m not even supposed to be here, bite my tongue.

‘My lord.’ Jazz’s lawyer stands and adopts the obsequious pose of a royal footman. ‘This is a missing person’s case. Police in Australia have launched an enquiry to try to find Doctor Studlands. Crimestoppers are now offering a substantial reward. There is no evidence of any crime, only the word of a convicted felon.’

Jazz whimpers and mops at her eyes with a hanky.

The prosecutor, oozing sarcasm, reminds the judge that no one is ever more apparently grief-stricken than the widow. ‘So grief stricken that within hours of his disappearance she was asking about his two million pound life insurance policy and pension death-benefits payouts.’

‘May I speak?’ Jazz asks, though she doesn’t wait for a reply from the Bench. ‘The grief that my husband might have drowned had to be faced so that I could help my son. Josh has to get on with the rest of his life—’

‘Can I remind you of the need to put your defence at the right time?’ The judge tries to silence her, his heavy, rounded vowels raining down on her like blows. ‘And through your counsel,’ he reprimands. But Jazz ignores him. This is a woman who has the courage of her convictions, i.e. that she doesn’t want one.

‘Although I have to learn to accept the unacceptable – the possible death of my soulmate – I will not allow grief to blight the life of my boy. If you keep me in jail, I can’t comfort my child.’

‘Please be quiet! ‘The judge makes a noise like a sea lion in labour and I start to seriously worry about how Jazz will cope with stamping due dates in the prison library for the rest of her natural life. She’d thrown herself on the mercy of the court and gone Splat.

‘There is a real concern that the defendant will interfere with the witness, who is out on bail,’ the prosecutor continues. ‘We have evidence that she once tried to kill her husband by substituting the wrong malaria tablets, thus exposing him to the parasite plasmodium falciparum. She also once mis-sized his bulletproof vest. More evidence of her ruthlessness.’

Once again, my fine legal brain goes ‘Whoops.’

A sob chokes Jazz’s throat. But the only thing that would move this judge are his bowels. He is peering over at Jazz in a cold way, as though she’s nothing more than a specimen beneath a microscope. Fright shivers through me. I have now used up my nails, and am chewing down to my elbows. But just when it seems