Louise Mangos - Her Husband’s Secrets

LOUISE MANGOSwrites novels, short stories and flash fiction, which have won prizes, been placed on shortlists and read out on BBC radio. Her Husband's Secrets is her second novel. Her debut novel, Strangers on a Bridge , was a finalist in the Exeter Novel Prize and long-listed for the Bath Novel Award. You can connect with Louise on Facebookand Twitter @LouiseMangos, or visit her website, www.louisemangos.com, where there are links to some of her short fiction. She lives on a Swiss Alp with her Kiwi husband and two sons.

Strangers on a Bridge

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Originally published as The Art of Deceptio n

Copyright © Louise Mangos 2019

Louise Mangos asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008287955

Version: 2019-01-17

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Louise Mangos

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

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

Acknowledgements

Extract

Dear Reader …

Keep Reading

About the Publisher

For Max and Finn, the greatest of my creations

The vice of his fingers tightened on my wrist, and tendons crunched as they slid over each other inside my forearm. As he twisted harder, I turned my body in the direction of his grip to try and relieve the pain. His other hand appeared from behind him and the heel of his palm hit the side of my head. As it made contact with my ear, a siren rang in my brain, blocking all other sound.

I kicked out, my foot slamming into his shins. His forward momentum increased as he was caught off balance, and his upper body folded. His shoulder glanced off the picture frame on the wall and it fell to the floor with a clatter. The rebound flung him away from me. As he let go of my arm, we fell apart like a tree struck down the middle by lightning. I staggered backwards, calves ramming against the coffee table, pushing it towards the sofa.

Terror now ruling my fear, I grabbed the ceramic vase toppling from the table. I swung it ineffectually at his head. I was briefly surprised it didn’t break, and the resistance of the vase meeting something solid tipped me further backwards. I let it go and it shattered at our feet. As I fell, my hips and back splintered the glass table top with a rifle-like explosion. Wedged into the frame of the table, head thrown back against the seat of the sofa, I stared at the ceiling in a moment of silence.

‘Stop! Stop it!’ I yell, with my hands pressed over my ears.

My voice rasps in my throat and fills my head. The thudding on the wall ceases abruptly, and I take my palms slowly away. The ensuing roar of silence is tuned perfectly to the blood pumping through my veins.

My gaze is fixed on a pencil-drawn sketch taped to the mottled plaster, a child’s portrayal of a chalet. The house is perched on top of a mountain with stick people skiing down one side of the hill. As my concentration wavers, I blink away a tear of frustration, and rub my temple. I was expecting to see the picture tremble with the thumping. But these partitions are solid brick; raging fists will not move them.

The subsequent stillness is painful, and I try to imagine Fatima in her two-by-four-metre space on the other side of the wall. The expectation of what might replace her anger increases the tension like the static of an impending lightning strike.

They have taken away her son, and won’t let her see him even briefly for a feed. One of the female guards simply marched in and picked the little thing up from his crib, right in front of Fatima’s eyes. We all came out to the corridor to watch in horror as the head security officer gathered Fatima’s flailing arms and held her while the guard walked away with the baby. Then they locked her in. Who knows how long they’ll keep the baby this time. An hour. A morning. A day? I suck in the musty air of my cell. Annoyance has prevailed over my sympathy. I want to scream and shout too.

Someone has also taken away my son, but I have to keep a lid on my emotions or it may backfire. Losing control would do me no favours in this place, especially as my son is far away, and I don’t know when we will be together again.

I hope they don’t keep Fatima’s baby for long. She stole three packets of Zigis from the new Polish girl who came in last week. The one whose name no one can pronounce. Lots of z’s and c’s. Who the hell risks solitary for a handful of cigarettes? I guess the nicotine-deprived are desperate. They haven’t seen fresh Marlboros for weeks. I don’t even think Fatima intended to smoke them herself. She merely wanted something to trade. The theft led to a fight in the canteen, a messy affair resulting in tufts of hair on the floor and bite marks on various limbs.

I can’t believe Fatima was caught so easily, especially after all the other stuff she helped steal, the stuff she didn’t get nabbed for in her previous life. It turns out she was only the driver when she was arrested.

We all have previous lives. I still find it hard to talk about mine, so I choose to silently observe everyone else’s.

That fight clinched Fatima’s punishment. No solitary, simply take the little boy.

Her baby is called Adnan, and he’s a sweet little thing. The guards periodically use him as a bribe to try to control her anger, but I think it makes her worse. How can they take this woman’s child away? There’s an irony to it, with the tainted history of this place. All they’re doing is building a seething resentment that will eventually rise like the stopper on the top of a pressure cooker. Fatima is close to breaking point.

I know how she feels.

Adnan reminds me of Jean-Philippe, or JP as we called him within days of his birth. Maybe Adnan’s Balkan roots have a vague link to JP’s part-Russian ones. The same penetrating Slavic eyes, a strong squarish head, an almost simian brow. My baby is much older than Adnan, and no longer an infant. But I still think of him as a baby. The name JP stuck when he started l’école maternelle last year. His friends at school even adopted the soft ‘Shay-Pee’ in French.