My Perfect Wife: An absolutely unputdownable domestic suspense novel Read online

  My Perfect Wife

  An absolutely unputdownable domestic suspense novel

  Clare Boyd

  Books by Clare Boyd

  Little Liar

  Three Secrets

  Her Closest Friend

  My Perfect Wife

  Available in Audio

  Little Liar (Available in the UK and the US)

  Three Secrets (Available in the UK and the US)

  Her Closest Friend (Available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Little Liar

  Hear More from Clare

  Books by Clare Boyd

  A Letter from Clare

  Three Secrets

  Her Closest Friend

  Acknowledgements

  There are people who have money and there are people who are rich.

  Coco Chanel

  One

  I had been told that the beat of our hearts slows down when we look out to sea. As I soaked up the view in front of me now, I believed that. There was a shine to the heavy swell, as though it were keeping calm and carrying on today. With a shiver of pleasure, I zipped my fleece right up to my chin and pulled my wet hair into a bun.

  ‘I’m gutted you’re off,’ Jason said, handing me a complimentary custard cream with my cup of tea.

  I jumped up to sit on the counter of his beach kiosk. ‘Thanks.’ I dunked my biscuit. ‘It’ll be okay.’

  The sun slipped behind a bank of clouds and the wind whipped the water into crests of white, sending the waves diagonally into the shore. Cradling my paper cup, I brought my attention back to the seven children in my charge, whose goose-bumped little bodies I had helped re-clothe after our swim. They were hunched at a picnic table on the grass; a raggedy bunch, wolfing down bacon sandwiches from brown paper bags.

  ‘How long d’you expect to be away?’

  ‘Don’t know. Six months? Be back after the summer, I hope.’

  He split his custard cream in two, scraping the filling with his teeth. ‘We’ll go bankrupt round here without your trade,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘More like you’ll be quids in.’

  ‘Nah,’ he replied modestly, unable to accept thanks for the free sandwiches and biscuits he provided for the kids every Saturday. He scratched one of his knees, exposed by the shorts he wore all year round.

  ‘I’ll try to get back one weekend to see them and have a swim, once Dad’s shown me the ropes and I’ve settled in.’

  Jason sighed. ‘If I moved back in with my old man, we’d probably kill each other.’

  ‘Dad and I will be fine. We get on now.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘We still get on, I meant.’

  Both of Jason’s eyebrows rose, but I was saved by a cackle of laughter from the picnic table. I changed the subject, burying my head in my rucksack. ‘Check out the house I’ll be working at.’ The pages of the magazine were now crumpled from water damage, which would infuriate my mother. For two years she had kept it in the cabinet, out of direct sunlight, away from the risk of tea stains. Like a family photograph album, it was brought out only occasionally, mostly to show off to her new friends.

  Jason moved his head closer to the photographs. ‘You are kidding me.’

  ‘Mum and Dad grew that garden from scratch.’

  He pointed to the title of the article. ‘Jekyll and Hyde?’

  ‘I guess they mean it’s got a two-sided personality – the pretty, fluffy borders and the modern hard stuff, like the geometric hedges.’

  ‘Sorry to be funny, but the house looks a bit weird, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t mind. It’s not my house.’ I turned to the second page of the four-page spread. ‘That’s them. Lucas and Elizabeth Huxley.’

  ‘She’s fit.’

  My eyes flicked away from Elizabeth and onto Lucas, whose face I had looked at on these pages more often than I had seen him in the flesh. Lately, anyway.

  ‘I used to sneak through the hedge and swim in their pool when I was a teenager,’ I confessed.

  ‘Like a mermaid,’ he murmured.

  I was tempted to tell him the rest of the story, but it would have set a precedent. There was something comforting about having a secret that only one other person in the whole world knew about. Nursing it had become second nature.

  ‘God, I used to want their life so badly.’

  ‘Before you met me, you mean?’

  I brought the rim of my cup up to his and said, ‘Yes. And cheers to that!’

  ‘Cheers!’ He took a loud slurp. ‘Who needs champagne?’

  Amy emerged from the toilets with one of the children. Her short corkscrew curls had knotted into electrified clumps, just as they had done all those years ago when she’d come over to me in the school canteen queue wearing her skirt rolled too high and non-uniform pop socks. She had asked me to buy her the Wotsits she had been eating.

  ‘Uh oh, it looks like Full Monty’s at it again,’ Jason said under his breath, nudging me.

  My attention snapped back to the table, where Reese had dropped his pants. Before I could reach him, he was shaking his seven-year-old dangly bits at the other children. There was a cry of ‘Gross!’ from a girl in a pink hoodie, probably more out of habit than disgust.

  ‘Come on, Reese, no, no, no, up they come,’ I said, tightening the elastic waistband of his tracksuit. There was the faint whiff of wee.

  He pulled them down three more times before I managed to persuade him to sit down again and drink his juice box.

  ‘He’s trouble, that one,’ Jason said.

  ‘Not really,’ I said, remembering the conversation I’d had with Reese in the sea earlier.

  He had nodded at the hazy strip of land in the distance, sculling to stay afloat, and said, ‘You ever swum out to that bit of ground?’

  ‘I haven’t, Reese. But I’d like to. Not sure I’m fit enough yet.’

  ‘My dad said I couldn’t do it neither.’

  His black eyelashes had blinked droplets of seawater down his cheeks. I had looked right into his bloodshot eyes and regurgitated someone else’s words: ‘You can do anything you want to do, Reese. Have anything you want. Anything.’ Then I had told him to straighten his legs when he kicked.

  At the picnic table, Reese swore loudly, bringing me back to reality. I winced at the sound of the four-letter word coming from his young lips.

  ‘Total bloody angel,’ Jason said, winking at me and handing Amy a cup of coffee.

  I laughed. ‘If you met his father, you’d see why he’s like that.’

  ‘You should
meet my old man,’ Jason snorted.

  ‘And you were an angel when you were his age, were you?’ I teased.

  Jason was about to remonstrate when Amy cut in. ‘Jase, you’re wasting your breath, mate. Heather loves all those little shits,’ she said with a smile that suggested she loved them too. The very fact that she came out to the windswept beach to swim with me and the little shits every Saturday, as my unpaid sidekick, was testament to that.

  ‘I do love them,’ I said.

  I was determined not to cry or hug the children when I said goodbye to them, knowing they would laugh at me. There would be no tear-jerking thank-you cards from any of them. Reese had been the only one to express his appreciation, in a drawing he had made. Smudged in places, it was a portrait of me with excessively long limbs and floor-length green hair, ‘’Cos I didn’t have orange.’ I was stretching my legs and arms into a star shape next to the pool that belonged to St Catherine’s School for Girls, which justified its charitable status by offering its facilities to the local sports charity on Saturday mornings. Next to me Reese had drawn seven yellow star-shaped stick children. Lots of stars. That was how I saw all the children I taught, including the St Catherine’s girls, the more privileged of my students, whom I had been teaching full-time on weekdays for the past three years. Their lives had been turned upside by the school’s closure last month, just as mine had.

  I gathered my wetsuit and towel. ‘We’d better go. If I don’t get them home on time, I’ll be late for Dad,’ I said.

  Amy and I said goodbye to Jason and bundled the children into the minivan. On the journey, two of the girls began screaming at each other in the back. It was hard to tell if they were excited or furious. There had been a time when these fights would terrify me, but we had learnt to stay out of it, until blood was drawn.

  ‘I can’t concentrate with that racket going on, you two!’ Amy yelled from the driver’s seat.

  They ignored her and we continued on our route, dropping six out of the seven children home.

  ‘You do think I’m doing the right thing, working with Dad, don’t you, Ames?’ I asked, taking a packet of crisps out of the glove compartment and offering it to Amy. It wasn’t the exact question I had wanted to ask, but it was close enough to represent the doubt that lurked inside me.

  ‘Definitely. Absolutely one hundred per cent. One hundred per cent,’ she insisted, nodding hard. The van swerved a little. ‘Whoops.’ She straightened the wheel and asked, ‘Which is the turn-off to Reese’s again?’

  Reese’s house was last. Always last, poor Reese, I thought.

  I pointed to the next turning on the left. ‘I’ve been wanting a change of scene.’

  ‘And that place you’ll be working at looks awesome,’ she added, referring to the House & Garden article.

  Part of me wished I hadn’t shown the article to anyone. It made my move look glossier than it was.

  We drove in silence until we pulled up outside the row of pebble-dashed terraced houses: one of them was Reese’s, two were boarded up. The curtains were still drawn. I took him to the front door and rang the bell.

  As we waited for the door to open, Reese shoved a Snickers bar into my hand and said, ‘I didn’t nick it.’

  A tear escaped.

  ‘Thank you, Reese,’ I said, bending down to give him a hug he stiffened for. ‘Check around the back to see if your dad’s in the kitchen.’

  He ran off and back again, shaking his head. My heart sank.

  Biting at the red-raw skin under his bottom lip, he said, ‘It’s all right, I’ll climb in the back window and wait.’

  ‘No you will not,’ I said. ‘Come on. Let’s get a cup of hot chocolate at Mirabelle’s like we did last time and wait for him together.’

  He rubbed his hand over his thick loo-brush head of hair, mimicking his father, and shrugged. Reese was a boy of few words, but he had a look on his grey freckled face that suggested he was full of all sorts of words; words that he might spend a lifetime holding back. I understood that face.

  On the way to Mirabelle’s with a silent Reese, I held back my fury. Reese’s father was useless and Reese deserved better, but there was nothing I could do about it. Not now. Not now that I was leaving and giving up on him and the other children.

  In the café, he began jumping up and down in his seat. Then he began to climb onto the table. I coaxed him down, scrabbling in my bag for a pen and paper for him to draw with. House & Garden dropped out.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Want to read it?’

  He grabbed the magazine and flicked through the pages, strangely calmed by what must have seemed other-worldly. I winced when he came to the article about the Huxleys. Elizabeth’s beautiful eyes gazed up from the page, smiling benevolently at him from inside her perfect bubble life. I wanted to cover her face with my finger.

  ‘Look at that wanker,’ Reese said, pointing at Lucas. ‘His missus looks proper stuck-up.’

  I held back a chuckle. ‘Mind your language,’ I said, without much conviction.

  He shrugged and sucked his teeth. ‘She does, though.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s very nice,’ I said with a wink. Then I felt guilty for encouraging such unkindness. If Lucas had fallen in love with this Elizabeth woman, she was bound to be lovely inside and out.

  * * *

  My car door creaked with rust as I shut it before running back up the stairs to the flat to grab one last thing. Rob was lying on top of the duvet watching sports clips on his laptop while I packed the car.

  ‘You keep coming back in because you don’t really want to go,’ he said.

  ‘You got me,’ I replied, rushing around searching for my blue goggles.

  ‘Or maybe you just don’t care,’ he said sulkily and clicked on a new clip. Angry rock music blared out. Over the noise, he added, ‘Maybe this is your way of leaving me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  He slammed his laptop shut and chucked the blue goggles in my direction – the goggles I would have little hope of using.

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ he said. ‘It’s only money. We’ll find a way. The takings at the bar will pick up. It’s not too late.’

  I looked at him, at his crown of white-blonde hair, textured like straw from sea salt and too few showers, and his once mischievous blue eyes that were now tired and hung-over. I knew very well – as well as I knew every inch of him – that he did not mean what he had just said. He understood that we had no money left. Since St Catherine’s closure, we had lost our only source of income. My small pot of savings had run out and Rob’s new bar on the high street was months, if not years, away from turning a profit.

  ‘Dad was expecting me two hours ago. I have to go,’ I said, kissing him.

  ‘Stay,’ he whispered, pulling me into his lap.

  I wanted to stay. Momentarily, wilfully, I put aside the fact that I had cried with relief when my father had offered me the job of covering my mother’s leave at Copper Lodge, saving us from rent arrears. But I could not forget about my mother, who was already miles away in Galashiels, caring for her dying sister. When I thought of her, I knew I had nothing to complain about. With a huge effort I said, ‘You know I can’t,’ and pulled myself up. My father needed me as much as I needed him. ‘It’s not just about the money,’ I reminded Rob. ‘Dad can’t keep on top of that garden without Mum.’

  ‘He could employ someone else.’

  ‘The Huxleys are fussy about who works there.’

  ‘Your dad’s fussy, you mean.’

  ‘It’s not his fault Aunt Maggie’s ill.’ I took my goggles and headed for the door.

  ‘He doesn’t deserve your help, if you ask me,’ he mumbled.

  ‘What?’ I stopped in the doorway, wondering if I had heard right.

  He did not repeat it. Instead he said, ‘The lodger had better be tidy.’

  I was on the cusp of telling him how much it hurt my feelings when he criticised my father, but before the words
came out, I noticed a drawing on the fridge. It was Reese’s picture of me and my little stars by the pool. I pulled it out from under the magnet, unzipped my rucksack and slipped it into the pages of House & Garden, which I had sandwiched in between my two horticultural encyclopedias, attempting to flatten out the buckling. I vowed not to look at the photograph of the Huxleys again before starting at Copper Lodge.

  Then there was a traffic jam. Gridlock, engines off on the motorway.

  Unable to think about anything else, I pulled the magazine out of my rucksack and reread the article that accompanied the photographs. In direct contrast to how the sea made me feel, my heartbeat sped up. The journalist, Tara Sandeman-Fitzroy, described the house and garden as ‘a balance of order and rebellion’. She wrote about Elizabeth ‘brushing her hands over the flower heads of the soft borders, talking through a shy smile, seemingly unaware of her ethereal beauty’, while ‘in the house, Lucas seems to command the architectural space with his charm and energy’, and that it was no surprise that ‘an invitation to their annual summer party is the most sought-after in Surrey’s social calendar’.

  I put the magazine back in my rucksack and reminded myself I had been employed at Copper Lodge to do a job. For Dad. That was all. I wasn’t there to flit around the daisies and dream of being invited to the summer party, like Cinderella. Six months. Head down. Pay the rent. In and out. And back to my happy, fulfilling life in Rye with Rob. Simple.