How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📗

were getting serviced somewhere else and had you followed.’ He mopped crumbs from his cruel lips. ‘Some rather good snaps too. Especially the ones on that student’s mobile phone, which he “lost” didn’t he – of you being penetrated with a champagne bottle. Very embarrassing when that comes out. I mean, it wasn’t even vintage. Good God, I don’t even think it was French!’ he concluded viperishly, licking the marmalade from his fingers, one at a time.

Jazz looked at her husband in staggered disbelief. If my eyes could shoot out lethal rays like Disney superheroes, I would have vaporized him on the spot.

‘Remember on our wedding day when you said you would die for me, David? Well, I think it’s time you kept your promise!’ Jazz then launched herself with a bestial cry at her husband’s throat. She had raked two deep scratchmarks down his chest before he could push her off him.

‘There is no way you will ever get custody,’ Jazz panted. ‘I clean for you both. Cook every meal for you both. I doubt you even know Josh’s birthday! What makes you think I won’t go to the News of the World myself?’

Studz smiled maliciously, mopping at the faint trickle of blood on his cheek. ‘The blaze of publicity, the door-stopping, the lurid accounts in the papers . . . You just wouldn’t do it to Josh.’

Studz casually cracked open a beer and looked down on his wife with smug impertinence. So much for his image of humane champion of the underdog. Dr Studlands seemed to have the caring compassion of, say, Don Corleone.

‘Josh is seventeen. He gets a say in who he lives with, you know,’ Jazz said. ‘And he’ll want to live with me.’

‘Not when I tell him he has a slut for a mother. And that if he doesn’t choose to live with me, I might just have to prove it in court. Photos and all,’ he stated with bloodless indifference.

The man seemed to have had his remorse nerve extracted.

Jazz fell back against the kitchen counter. I watched in horror as she picked up the six-inch breadknife lying there and lunged. But her husband seized her wrist, squeezed hard, and the knife clattered onto the kitchen tiles, having only grazed his arm.

‘Do you have any idea how easily I could dispose of you? I’m a doctor. I know how to eradicate people so that nobody ever finds out . . . Not a bad idea, actually. I must up your life insurance.’

Studz laughed as he sauntered down the hall. I emerged from hiding in time to see Jazz snatch up the knife and flash after him. Dread sliced into my stomach as I too lurched into the hall. The front door was banging against the wall. I was down the stone steps two at a time, despite the agony in my foot. And there she was, slashing again and again, plunging the knife in up to the hilt.

David’s Jaguar car tyres hissed plaintively, then wheezed a dying breath. And then she sat in the driveway, devastated, wailing with anger at what her husband had done and sobbing with self-loathing for the way she had lost control.

‘Who ever would have thought that I could behave in such a way? A mild-mannered, middle-class mum like me?’ she whimpered into my shoulder.

It was then I found myself agreeing with Jazz. It was time Studz died a slow, wretched death, involving multiple orifices.

20. When Humiliating Things Happen to Desperate Women

There are two inevitable things in life. People die and husbands leave you for younger women. That’s all I could think about as I nuked something vaguely edible in the microwave for the kids, garnished it with the guilt I felt for leaving them yet again, found a babysitter I could bribe at short notice (if only supermarkets stocked a babysitter in a can; simply open and heat up), hunted down Hannah at a Charity Ball for the Serpentine Gallery and persuaded her the situation was urgent enough to abandon the event. In the car to Jazz’s place, I filled her in on the fact that Studz had not been playing with a full deck of credit cards. We finally arrived, with heavy hearts, at Hampstead Heights.

When our two-woman cavalry pounded on her door, Jazz greeted us in an apron, her hair bundled onto her head, flour on her hands, beaming broadly despite the fact that her eyes were puckered into squints from crying – and clutching a syringe.

‘Jazz, what have you got in the needle?’ Hannah coaxed, taking in her wild-eyed demeanour with unease.

‘Oh, something life-threatening.’ Jazz waved the needle around cavalierly. ‘My husband threatened to kill me. Cassie was my witness. Survival of the fastest. That’s my new motto. I’m going to kill the Good Doctor before he kills me. By inducing a heart attack. Easy-peasy really.’

‘Jazz, love, give me the syringe, there’s a good girl,’ I sweet-talked, as though cajoling a child. ‘You know Studz didn’t mean it?’

In the grapple, the needle was discharged. An oozing globule of yellow slime hit the stone step between our feet.

‘Lard! Lard! Lard! From now on, I’m going to inject all my husband’s food with heart-attack-inducing amounts of lard. David has always loved my cooking – I think that’s why he stayed with me, in fact. So, I’m making him dinner.’

I trailed her to the kitchen, where she proceeded to reload then plunge the fat-laden syringe into a pale plump chicken in a roasting pan. ‘But you’re cooking a half-thawed chicken,’ I noted, scraping icicles from the puckered flesh.

‘Oh yes, I know. In fact, I’ve already half cooked it, then frozen it again. Now I’m cooking it again. It’s a new recipe, called Salmonella Chicken.’

‘But Salmonella poisoning can kill.’

‘That’s right. And where there’s a will . . . I want to be in it.’ She was like Blanche Dubois in an amateur production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

‘Jazz, you’re a convent girl! What would the nuns say?’ Hannah remonstrated, appalled.

‘Funny you