The wife swap, p.1
The Wife Swap, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Kiara
ONE MONTH LATER
Kiara
Kiara
Elise
Kiara
LAST FRIDAY
Oscar
Felicity
Cole
NOW
Kiara
Elise
Kiara
LAST FRIDAY
Isla
Dom
Clementine
NOW
Kiara
LAST SATURDAY
Oscar
Felicity
Isla
Clementine
Isla
NOW
Kiara
LAST SATURDAY
Dom
Isla
Cole
Clementine
NOW
Elise
LAST SATURDAY
Isla
Felicity
Oscar
NOW
Elise
LAST SUNDAY
Clementine
Isla
Cole
Oscar
Felicity
Clementine
Cole
Oscar
NOW
Elise
Kiara
Elise
LAST SATURDAY
Seb
LAST SUNDAY
Clementine
Cole
Oscar
NOW
Elise
LAST SUNDAY
Oscar
Isla
Oscar
Clementine
NOW
Kiara
Elise
TWO HOURS EARLIER
Felicity
NOW
Kiara
LAST SUNDAY
Isla
Oscar
NOW
Kiara
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About Embla Books
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
Bonnier Books UK Limited
4th Floor, Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square, London, WC1B 4DA
Owned by Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
Copyright © Jack Heath, 2024
First published as an Audible Original under the title Kill Your Husbands in 2023
And originally published in print by Allen & Unwin under the title Kill Your Husbands in 2023
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The right of Jack Heath to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781471417283
This eBook is created using Atomik ePublisher.
Embla Books is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK.
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
For my wife, Venetia
Dear Isla,
I’m leaving—don’t pretend to be surprised. I’ll be seeking full custody of Noah. Please don’t fight me for him. You know full well that any magistrate would side with me if they found out the truth.
Oscar
Evidence item #438. Description: letter, bloodstained
—FELICITY, stand-up comic, married to Dominic (trophy wife?)
—DOMINIC (Dom), finance bro, gave $10K to Cole (gift or loan?)
—COLE, gym owner, married to Clementine (but attracted to Isla?)
—CLEMENTINE, fitness model, Isla’s best friend (find someone who’s done IVF, see if story is credible)
—ISLA, full-time mum, married to Oscar (what ‘truth’ was he referring to?)
—OSCAR, real estate agent (but didn’t rent the house?)
From the notebook of Detective Sergeant Kiara Lui
Prologue
She stumbles downhill through the bush in the pouring rain, dressing-gown flapping, puddles splashing under her slippers. The beam of the torch is thin—she can point it at the trail before her feet or the branches in front of her face, but not both. The terrain is dangerous, sharp sticks and slippery rocks hidden just under the mud. She should have snatched up her walking shoes before she fled, but she hadn’t wanted to stay in that house a second longer. Another mistake to add to the list.
The cold scorches her lungs. Her cheeks are numb. Her toes ache; she can already picture them turning black and popping off. The mountain is 130 kilometres from Warrigal, and most of the journey is dense bushland. If the weather stays this bad, she’ll soon join the dead she’s left behind. The voice in her head, which started as a whisper, has become a scream: what if you’re going around in circles? At any moment, she could break into a clearing and find herself facing the house: those two big windows like glowing eyes, the twin chimneys like horns.
Her thoughts no longer make sense—probably a bad sign. She’s been running downhill this whole time, so she can’t be back at the top of the mountain. Unless you’re in hell already. Running for eternity, ending where you began. She’s never been very religious, but in her delirium, anything seems possible. The house on the mountaintop had felt safe when she was one of six. Then there had been five, and then four, then three. Now it’s just her and God, out here in the dark.
She hears a creak behind her and whirls around. The trees watch her, as silent as jurors.
Has she been followed? She’s left behind a trail of muddy footprints and blood-smeared leaves, but that wouldn’t be obvious in the dark.
She chews her chapped lips. If she moves, she might be spotted; if she doesn’t, she might be caught—
A sound like a gunshot rings out from above. She looks up. A bough has broken off one of the gum trees and is tumbling towards her, crashing through other branches on the way down. She throws herself aside, leaving a slipper behind, as the slab of wood hits the ground with a mighty crash.
That limb probably held on to the trunk for fifty years or more. Was she unlucky to be underneath when it finally snapped, or lucky that it didn’t pulverise her? Is she being punished, or conspicuously forgiven?
Suddenly she feels wet tarmac under her feet. She looks around. The trees are gone. She’s reached the road, flanked by paddocks. It’s not midnight anymore—dawn is spreading from the horizon. Shivering, she tries to remember how she got to the bottom of the mountain, but her mind is quicksand, the memories already submerged.
Her phone chimes in her pocket—a sound she hasn’t heard in three days. It keeps chiming as the backlog of messages comes through. She struggles to get her frozen hand into her pocket. When she pulls out the phone, it slips from her fingers, hitting the road with a metallic splink. ‘No!’ She scoops it up, frantically prodding the fractured glass. The lock screen glows, but she can’t type in her PIN. When she tries to swipe up, the image—her husband, smiling crookedly, his arms around her—keeps bouncing back.
Headlights wash over her. She whirls around, holding up a palm against the glare. Tyres squeal against the wet asphalt, drowning out her scream.
Kiara
The body lies in the middle of Victoria Street, knees folded backwards, arms splayed. At first it looks like the victim’s jaw has fallen off, but as Senior Constable Kiara Lui leaps out of the car and sprints over, she sees the jaw has actually been smashed upward, flattened against the palate.
Kiara reaches for her radio, but she’s off-duty, dressed in a denim jacket over a flower-patterned dress: no equipment belt.
The man lying on the road makes eye contact with her.
‘Stay in the car,’ she shouts over her shoulder, not wanting Elise to see.
Undeterred, Elise unfolds her long legs from the passenger seat and jogs over, carrying the first-aid kit from the glove box. Brushing her fringe out of her eyes, she stares down at the dying man. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘we can’t exactly give him mouth-to-mouth.’
It’s the sort of joke Elise has been making a lot. Gallows humour is common among paramedics, but after the trauma Elise endured last year, Kiara is worried the nihilism runs deeper.
Kiara looks around. No pedestrians. No sign of the car that ran this man over. Just a flickering streetlight and a row of shuttered shops—a cafe, a real estate agency, a jeweller’s. Only the King George pub on the corner is still open. The chalkboard out the front says, GET SCHNIT-FACED! CHICKEN SCHNITZEL AND BEER $10.
‘Call an ambulance,’ Kiara says.
Elise is crouched over the man, feeling for a pulse. ‘You better do it.’
Kiara grabs her phone and dials Rafa.
The dying man is in his fifties, white, beanpole-thin, with a sharp widow’s peak and sad grey eyes. Elise starts chest compressions. Blood squirts from the gaping neck onto her silk skirt. She clamps one hand over the wound.
As the phone rings in her ear, Kiara looks down at the ruined fabric. Elise hardly ever gets dressed up. Tonight was supposed to be special—a chance to hit the reset button. Kiara can’t afford to take her partner to a decent restaurant, but she
As usual, things haven’t gone to plan.
Kiara scans the empty street. She can see the whole thing in her mind’s eye: someone walks out the back door of the pub, spinning a car key on one finger, telling themselves they have no choice but to drive. It’s too far to walk, they can’t afford a cab, and anyway, how would they retrieve their car tomorrow? So they get behind the wheel and zoom around the corner, just as this unlucky guy happens to be crossing the road, camouflaged in his grey jumper and black jeans. The driver hits the brakes, but the alcohol has dulled their reaction time. The pedestrian disappears under the vehicle. The driver looks at the body and pronounces him dead, or as good as. Now they ask themselves, what’s the point of sticking around? If they go to jail, their kids will starve, their business will go under, whatever—there’s always some excuse. So they drive home, wipe the blood off the bull bar, and go to bed. Maybe they feel guilty, like that counts for something.
Kiara will do her job. She’ll photograph the tyre tracks. She’ll see if the security camera in front of the pub has finally been fixed, and request the footage if so. She’ll ask the owner who was in tonight, and check if they saw the accident. She’ll tell Bill at the local garage to report any suspicious damage to the front of a vehicle. But in all likelihood, she’ll never find out who did this. Even if she does, and can prove it, a sympathetic magistrate will let the driver out in a year or two—and in the meantime, the bodies will keep piling up. Around here, drink-driving is the rule, not the exception.
Once, Kiara spent all weekend in a patrol car on this very corner, breath-testing people. Some of them said she was ‘cheating’ by doing it so close to the pub.
Rafa finally answers the phone. ‘G’day, Detective.’
‘Got a hit-and-run on the corner of Victoria and Phillip streets,’ Kiara says, without preamble. ‘By the time you get here, I think you’ll be picking up a body.’
In the background of the call, she can hear several shouted conversations, clinking glasses and the tootling of poker machines. She realises he’s in the pub just behind her. It would have been quicker to walk in and grab him.
‘Be right out,’ Rafa says, and the line goes dead.
Elise is still doing the chest compressions. But the man’s skin has gone grey. His eyes are no longer focused; the pupils dilated. Soon the cloudy film will form over them. He’s gone.
While Elise works, Kiara goes to the other side of the body to search his pockets. Phone, keys and a receipt from the pub: chicken Caesar salad and a Cascade Premium Light, order number thirty-nine. When she flips open the leather phone case, she finds a pair of twenties and a selection of cards: driver’s licence, Medicare, a couple of bank cards. Anton Rabbek, born 3 February 1971, lives at 15/3 Barton Street, banks with Macquarie. Apparently he wears glasses; Kiara spots them a few metres away, an arm bent and a lens cracked. The photo on the driver’s licence is a good match for the corpse, at least from the nose up.
She pushes a button on his car key: no reaction from any of the vehicles nearby. Barton Street is about a kilometre away and perhaps the only area of Warrigal you could describe as ‘upmarket’—a lot of fancy townhouses. The guy was probably doing the right thing and walking home from the pub after his light beer. Another good bloke killed by a bad one who Kiara will try and fail to catch, while the rest of the town keeps drinking itself to death.
She has long since resigned herself to care for this place, however little it cares for her. Her family has been here for tens of thousands of years. She endures the violence, the racism and the homophobia. But Elise has been through so much already. Doesn’t she deserve better?
It’s not the time to discuss this. But it never is. On those rare afternoons when neither of them is working and they’re sharing the hammock under the pergola, Kiara never wants to spoil the present by mentioning the future.
She squeezes Elise’s shoulder. ‘Do you want to get out of here?’
Elise is still doing compressions. ‘Should wait for Rafa,’ she puffs.
‘I mean, we could move.’ Kiara tries to keep the desperation out of her voice. ‘To a different town.’
They can’t afford to go anywhere. But the thought of staying is unbearable.
Elise takes a break, sagging back onto her knees. She wipes some sweat off her brow and looks up. Her grim smile chills Kiara to the bone.
‘What?’ Elise gestures at the pub, the blood-spattered road, the dead man. ‘And leave all this behind?’
ONE MONTH LATER
Kiara
The house has a rustic look, with a weathered brick exterior and dark wood trim. There’s a low-maintenance garden out the front, typical of short-term rentals: no lawn to mow, no veggie patch to water, just rose bushes herding visitors onto the path with their thorns.
The building is two storeys high, which is unusual way out here, where land is plentiful and it’s cheaper to build out than up. Kiara supposes that if you’re going to put a house on a mountaintop, you may as well go a couple of metres higher so the upper windows have a view over the tree canopy. Part of the roof has been damaged, perhaps by hail. A brown tarpaulin covers the hole, billowing in the breeze.
If anyone has been in the upstairs bedroom over the past several minutes, they might have seen the Tactical Response Group driving up the hill. If so, they’ve had some time to prepare for the raid.
Kiara adjusts her stab vest. She’s gained some weight since she was fitted for it, creating gaps in front of her armpits. She’s also very aware that it doesn’t protect her arms or throat.
‘I’m going to knock on the front door,’ she says.
The commander looks at her like that’s the dumbest idea he’s ever heard. He’s dressed more like a soldier than a police officer, with knee and elbow pads, and various tools dangling from a chest rig. Behind the visor of his riot helmet, his nose is crooked and his grey-flecked beard is patchy.
Kiara first met him at a critical incident eight years ago. A terrified teenage girl had called triple zero because her drugged-up boyfriend was threatening her with a samurai sword, which he’d duct-taped to his own hand so he couldn’t be disarmed. When the response group broke into the townhouse, the boy whirled to face them, and the squad commander blasted him with a shotgun. He died, never having to explain his actions or reveal who’d sold him the meth and the sword. The group commander didn’t care about any of that, but Kiara did.
She hasn’t met the rest of the team: three other men and one woman, huddled around the commander. He says, ‘You want to give them even more warning?’
‘I want to give them the chance to surrender peacefully,’ Kiara says.
‘According to your witness, they’re armed and dangerous.’
Early this morning, a woman stumbled down the mountain in a dressing-gown, and was nearly hit by a car on the highway. The driver took her to hospital, where she babbled about knives and killers but also about God and falling branches. She’s still recovering from hypothermia.
