My Perfect Wife: An absolutely unputdownable domestic suspense novel

by Clare Boyd

  I swallowed hard. ‘That was good of him.’

  My mother let out a snort. ‘Good?’ She dropped the curtain and stared at me, agog. ‘This was ten years ago, and we’re still paying it off.’

  Clutching at Lucas’s goodness, I asked, ‘Because you only pay back small amounts?’

  ‘Because of interest. That old van out there,’ she said, pointing, ‘has cost us sixty-two thousand pounds.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ I had heard her but I couldn’t absorb it.

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  My mother had never lied to me, and yet here she was, lying to me. ‘You’re saying this to put me off him.’

  ‘I wish that were the case, love.’

  My father appeared in the doorway, tall and forbidding. ‘What are you telling her, Sally?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘She doesn’t need to know.’

  I stood up. ‘Stop talking about me as though I’m not here!’ I yelled.

  ‘We thought we were doing the right thing,’ he said.

  My mother said sharply, ‘Gordon.’ There was warning in it, but he didn’t seem to hear her. His pupils were large. His stare was edgy, trained on me.

  ‘They were supposed to have a good life at the Huxleys’,’ he said.

  Who was ‘they’? I wondered. We were at cross purposes. I looked at my mother, her face ghostly white, her lips hanging open as though she had done something terrible and was waiting for my admonishment. She reverted to what we had been talking about before, leaving my father’s babbling – sleep talk or Nurofen-addled – hanging in the air, waiting for it to dissipate into nothingness.

  ‘Why would he charge so much interest on a loan? He’s totally loaded.’

  My mother answered. ‘That’s the thing. He’s broke. Lord only knows how he’s hidden it from Walter Seacart. We probably have more money than him. Or we would have, if we weren’t paying him half our salary every month.’

  ‘Half your salary?’ I spluttered. I didn’t want it to be true. It couldn’t be true.

  ‘At least we have half,’ my father said, sitting down.

  ‘What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense, Dad,’ I said tearfully.

  That was when he told me another of their tales from the soup kitchen. This time, it involved a young, aspirational Polish couple who had been lured to England by a recruitment firm with promises of good jobs and a better life. Foot soldiers had guarded them in a cramped, overcrowded dwelling in London, where they had been beaten and starved and saddled with debts. It was the story of Agata and Piotr.

  ‘And you helped them?’ I said, wiping my eyes.

  ‘We thought we were helping them,’ my mother said.

  ‘I told Lucas about them and he said he’d give them jobs,’ my father added.

  ‘Which he did,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Dad confirmed. ‘But he won’t give them their weekly pay packets.’

  My mother closed her eyes and turned her face up to the ceiling, as though wanting cool rain to fall on her and wash it all away. She said, ‘On Sunday, Lucas called and asked me to drop round, to see if I could get some information out of Elizabeth about the paintings.’ She sighed. ‘She gave nothing away on that front, but she told me other things. She was distressed, and talking so fast, I could hardly keep up.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She told me that Lucas visits the camper van at night when Piotr is away in London.’

  Acid saliva pooled under my tongue.

  ‘You think that’s true?’

  ‘He’s always had an eye for young pretty girls.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘We’ve seen more than you can imagine over the years.’

  ‘I need …’ I said, tripping over my feet in my haste to get to the toilet, where I found tissues to wipe my mouth as I stared into the eyes that stared back at me from the mirror. A stranger’s eyes.

  When I returned, my parents were both sitting in exactly the same positions. My father was hunched over his knees. My mother was upright, rod-straight, staring ahead of her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, but it’s really hard for me to take in,’ I said. I hovered, unwilling to sit down with them again.

  My father’s words tumbled from him as he looked up at me. ‘We never wanted you back here. We wanted you to stay away from us forever. But when Aunt Maggie fell ill, you were the only one Lucas would accept as a replacement, or he wouldn’t have let your mum go to help your auntie. And we truly believed you could serve your six months and get out without ever finding out what was going on.’

  My mother let out a sob, and then inhaled, holding it at bay. ‘We wanted to keep you safe.’

  ‘We never thought this would happen. We never dreamt it would happen. But how stupid we were! Look at you! You’re beautiful and full of life, and I’ve been such a terrible father. How could he not fall in love with you?’ Dad spluttered.

  I began to cry. ‘Don’t say that, Dad.’

  ‘You never deserved this,’ he said.

  * * *

  ‘You deserve better,’ Lucas said.

  My wrist was stinging from where my father had twisted it away from my rucksack, packed with my swimsuit and towel. He had told me I wasn’t allowed to go to Amy’s tonight. He had told me he wanted me to stay in for a change. He had said I was too young at fifteen to go out every night.

  Lucas kissed the bracelet of red before touching me between my legs. ‘When you’re old enough, I’ll get you away from him.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, not really wanting to get away from my father, but eager to keep Lucas happy. Confused by the prospect of adulthood, keen that it should remain in the distance. A brain swimming with contradictions. Swimming with Lucas, terrified that he would abandon me if I told him I didn’t want to go so fast, wishing we didn’t have to keep secrets.

  ‘It’ll fly by,’ he said, wrapping his arms around me.

  ‘There are boys at school who like me, you know,’ I said coyly, grinning over his shoulder. I knew he could feel my smile without looking at it. ‘I might not wait,’ I added.

  He laughed and said, ‘If any of them come near you, I’ll kill them.’

  * * *

  It’ll fly by, he had said. But it had not. He had lied. He had never come back, and our summers had spawned a lifetime of secrets.

  ‘He wasn’t just a crush,’ I said.

  My parents looked at each other before they looked at me.

  ‘What did you say?’ my father asked.

  ‘Lucas and I used to meet up.’ The words were so hard to say, and I realised it was why I had never said them before.

  ‘When Elizabeth was out?’

  ‘No. Back when I was a … when I was …’ I began, but my throat constricted.

  ‘When you were still living at home?’ my father rasped.

  I spoke falteringly, through tears that heaved from the depths of me. ‘All those times you thought … All those times I was at Amy’s, I wasn’t … I was next door. I was with … Oh God …’ I was gasping, trying to pull in more air. ‘I was with Lucas. He taught me to swim. He—’

  My mother interrupted. ‘But Amy’s parents moved. She went to sixth form college in Rye. When you were going to Amy’s, you were only …’ She stopped, as though someone had throttled her.

  ‘I was only fifteen,’ I said.

  She let out a terrible wail.

  ‘I’ll kill him,’ my father said, lurching from his chair. ‘He’s gone too far this time!’

  My mother pulled him down by the arm, begging him to stop and think. ‘Please, don’t go over there, Gordon.’

  ‘He’ll pay for what he’s done! Let go of me!’

  ‘And then you’ll go to prison!’

  ‘I’d go to prison happily if I knew he was dead!’ he thundered.

  ‘But then he’s won,’ she cried, clinging to him as he tried to walk with her dragging behind him.

  I watched th
em in stunned silence, as though viewing the scene from above. Through their eyes, I had not been in an equal relationship with Lucas. He had been a twenty-five-year-old man and I had been a child. A child whom he had enticed into having sex.

  ‘Dad. Stop,’ I said.

  And he did. Obeying me for the first time in his life.

  ‘This isn’t helping,’ I told him, which was not entirely true. Seeing his protective rage was gratifying, as though it were the natural order of things, setting everything right inside me, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell them the full story, to tell them that I was to blame too.

  He dropped his large frame into the chair and began to cry. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, over and over.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Dad. I’m the one who’s caused all this.’ I wiped my face with the sleeve of my fleece, trying to stem the tears that kept falling.

  ‘You were a child!’ he said.

  Mum spoke. ‘You were supposed to have got away. We wanted you to find your own way in life.’

  ‘But Dad’s always made me feel guilty for it.’

  ‘There was a time when I wanted you to follow in our footsteps,’ he said. ‘But then we found out what Lucas was really like.’ He paused, then added, ‘You must know how proud we’ve been.’ He let out a choked-up laugh, then broke down again.

  Seeing his distress was unbearable.

  My mother began to mutter, wringing her hands. ‘Now you’re trapped in this job.’

  ‘But we can’t go back there!’ I cried.

  ‘If we leave, Dad says Lucas will go to the police about you taking those paintings,’ she said.

  ‘Agata and Piotr are on our side. They’d tell the police the truth,’ I said.

  My father rubbed his face dry and cleared his throat. ‘Piotr believes we recruited them knowing what Lucas would do. They think we’re part of the trafficking ring that brought them to England. They don’t trust anyone except each other. And I don’t blame them.’

  ‘So,’ my mother continued, in a pragmatic tone, ‘if we don’t go to prison for procuring Agata and Piotr, you’d go down for theft.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

  She rose, slowly, and wiped her hands down her trousers.

  ‘You’re going to be late if you don’t leave soon,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you from Aunt Maggie’s.’

  It was only then that the true horror of what we now had to go through dawned on me. My father would have to take orders from a man who’d had sex with his fifteen-year-old daughter. I, too, had my own conflicts. The man I had been secretly in love with for most of my life had been transformed into a man I did not recognise.

  * * *

  ‘What did I do wrong?’ I asked Lucas after a failed tumble-turn. I sculled in the water waiting for his instruction.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I laughed.

  ‘I can’t teach you any more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve got a job.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the City.’

  Illogically, I tried to stand, my toes scrabbling for the bottom. ‘You’re moving to London?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I swam away from him, fast and efficient, my stroke honed after a long, happy summer in the pool, now over. I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘I knew you’d be upset,’ he said, pulling himself out of the water and sitting on the side.

  Upset? I thought I might bleed on the outside from a broken heart. ‘No, it’s cool,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll drop a note through your door when I’m next home.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, my voice quavering, betraying my feelings.

  ‘Promise,’ he said.

  ‘Promise, promise?’ I laughed.

  ‘Cross my heart, hope to die.’

  And he made a sign over his heart, where water rolled down his skin like tears.

  * * *

  My belief that the note would appear had never wavered. The following year, I had pounced on news that I thought explained its absence, convinced it was why he had broken his promise to me. The female head of mergers and acquisitions at the German bank he worked for had faced an employment tribunal following Lucas’s accusations of sexual discrimination and bullying. The story had made the newspapers. His whistle-blowing had uncovered a back catalogue of employment abuses in the firm, and many other victims had come forward. When the story broke, my mother had overheard Mr Huxley Senior talking to his wife – Mum had been weeding by an open window – about how much money Lucas had won in damages and how he was coming home to set up a property investments company. Lucas and I had taken up where we had left off, as though no time had passed between us. We had grabbed moments whenever we could, meeting in secret, swimming together, dropping the pretence of lessons. He called me his ‘stress-buster’ when the teething problems of building his property portfolio threatened to overwhelm him.

  Now, it seemed our summers and weekends and evenings spent by the pool together had been a sham. My parents’ information had capsized him, revealing the barnacled, slimy underbelly that slid beneath the surface. He had played on my naïvety and my hero-worship, pretending the rest didn’t matter. He had used me and lied to me, and I had no idea how I would cope when I saw him later.

  Thirty-Two

  It was 10 a.m. Elizabeth had not seen Lucas since the incident at the lock-up yesterday. He had failed to come home last night, and Gordon and Heather had still not turned up. She should have tried to enjoy the peace, the respite; should have had a leisurely morning. Drunk two coffees at breakfast, read the newspaper online, reclined on the sofa, twiddled her thumbs. Not this morning. This morning she checked her watch too often, prowled the kitchen while Isla and Hugo watched cartoons and ate their breakfast.

  ‘I’m bored,’ Isla said, ripping off her headphones and discarding her iPad. ‘Me too,’ Hugo said, copying his sister.

  Of all times to get bored on their iPads!

  ‘Neither of you has finished your croissant.’

  The children hadn’t noticed their father’s absence, so disengaged were they from him and his disinterest. But Elizabeth had been awake all night, resisting the urge to call him. His well-being and whereabouts hadn’t bothered her; she had simply wanted to get the exchange done, get Agata and Piotr out. She feared every minute of the delay, wondering what he was plotting, whether there was a loophole she hadn’t considered.

  ‘What are we going to do today?’ Isla whined.

  ‘What about some tennis?’ Elizabeth suggested, knowing they couldn’t leave the house.

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘How about a swim?’

  ‘Agata said she’s too busy.’

  Elizabeth had instructed Agata to start packing up the camper van, to be ready to leave at short notice. Jude would be returning the paintings next Wednesday morning, on the day of the Seacarts’ arrival. At the latest, Wednesday was to be the day their documents would be returned to them, the day of their liberation. Exactly seven days away.

  ‘I’ll go swimming with you,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Really?’ Isla jumped down from her stool and threw herself at her.

  ‘Yeah!’ Hugo cried, shoving the end of his croissant into his mouth.

  * * *

  The weather wasn’t ideal for swimming. A light rain pattered on the water’s surface. Hugo’s blonde curls lifted as he ran at the pool and bombed in, sending half the water onto the side.

  ‘No splashing!’ Elizabeth said, wading in, not wanting to get her hair wet, not wanting to get wet at all.

  Isla slipped in and grabbed her legs.

  ‘Don’t do that! You frightened the life out of me!’ Elizabeth shouted, overreacting, too tense to be playful.

  Gingerly she began to swim breaststroke to the other end. It was warmer inside the pool than outside. Hugo jumped in again, sending a wave of water over her head. A flop of hair covered her eyes and she heard Hugo and Isla burst ou
t laughing. Their mirth untwisted the tension from her heart.

  ‘You rascals!’ she said, bobbing underwater to tug at Hugo’s toes, pretending to be a shark. Instinctively he pulled his knees to his chest. She surfaced to his giggles and he clipped his arms around her neck. His slippery, skinny little body reminded her of when she had held him as a baby in the shallow, tepid baths she had run for him. She remembered how fragile he was, how ill-equipped she had felt to be in charge of him.

  ‘Come here, you,’ she said to Isla. ‘Group hug.’

  Isla hurtled over to them in a splashy front crawl. Goggles on, she wrapped her arms around both of them and sat on Elizabeth’s lap under the water. Her blonde tresses were tangled into brown clumps, and she looked younger somehow.

  ‘I’m going to start doing this with you more often, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Isla said.

  Hugo stroked her hair. ‘You’re so pretty, Mummy.’

  ‘You two are the pretty ones,’ she said, kissing them some more.

  ‘I’m not pretty, I’m a boy!’

  Isla and Elizabeth laughed at him.

  ‘How about some handstands?’ Elizabeth suggested.

  The handstands turned into a synchronised swimming routine that Isla was in charge of. Elizabeth had so much water up her nose and in her ears, she didn’t hear the gate open.

  ‘Room for one more?’ Lucas said, throwing his towel onto a sunlounger.

  ‘Daddy!’ the children cried in unison. ‘Do a bomb!’

  Elizabeth began swimming to the side. ‘Come on, you two. Time to get out. It’s a bit rainy now.’ Her instructions were ignored. Lucas performed a perfect racing dive, skimming the surface, shooting towards the other end like a missile.

  Hugo pulled himself out and tried to copy his father. He dived in too deep and his legs flopped about.

  Isla watched from the side, her feet dangling. ‘I want to dive, but I can’t.’

  ‘I’ll teach you now,’ Lucas said.

  Elizabeth climbed out and covered herself with her towel. The uncontrollable shivers that had broken out across her flesh were not from the cold.