Your Neighbour's Wife

Tony Parsons

Your Neighbour’s Wife

Contents

About the Author

Tony Parsons is a bestselling novelist and an award-winning journalist. His books have been published in over forty languages and his multi-million selling novel Man and Boy won The Book of The Year prize in 2000. Most recently, he created the Max Wolfe crime series. Tony lives in London with his family.

Also by Tony Parsons

The Murder Bag

The Slaughter Man

The Hanging Club

Die Last

Girl on Fire

Digital Shorts

Dead Time

Fresh Blood

Tell Him He’s Dead

#taken

For Jonny Geller and Selina Walker,

who helped me tell the story

Shopping for Pain

They call it shopping for pain.

My husband leaves the room with our son in his arms and I snatch up the phone that he has left on the coffee table and I start scrolling through all the secret corners of his life.

His text messages. His WhatsApp. His email. I quickly ransack them all. The possibility of pain – real life-wrecking, heartbreaking, how-could-you, tears-of-rage pain – is everywhere. There are so many places now for him to leave the evidence of betrayal. Or the thought of betrayal. Or the flirtatious foreplay of betrayal. Or the sordid sweet nothings of real betrayal. All the damning, undeniable proof of his secret life.

Soft voices crackle on the child monitor. Christian, my husband, is reading Marlon, our five-year-old, his bedtime story.

‘Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog,’ he reads. ‘The whole realm was his …’

The Call of the Wild, I think. Our son loves that book. But a five-year-old is far too young for Jack London. I should go in there right now and tell Christian to read something more age-appropriate. Five years old is the time for The Tiger Who Came to Tea and not The Call of the bloody Wild.

But I don’t. Instead I carry on scrolling through Christian’s phone.

The ball of my right thumb moves faster but it’s thin pickings in the pain market today. Christian’s old texts scream with innocence. The only unread WhatsApp message is a reminder to bring the car into the garage for a service. His inbox contains a dozen unread emails but they are all junk from mailing lists.

Christian gave up work to look after Marlon – although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that work gave up on Christian – and his phone is not stuffed with the urgent pleas for attention that constantly fill my desktop. But then I have the inbox that never sleeps, the inbox of someone with a growing business to run. Christian is spared all of that.

On the child monitor I hear his calm baritone. ‘He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge’s sons. He escorted Mollie and Alice, the Judge’s daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles. On wintry nights he lay at the Judge’s feet before the roaring library fire.’