The Running Club

by Ali Lowe

Genres: Women's Fiction; Domestic Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

The rules of the running club are the same as they have always been: keep your breath steady, keep your mind sharp, record your laps! Only now there's a new one: don't get killed.

The wealthy community of Esperance is picture-perfect. Big houses, stunning views, beautiful people. A brand new running track for the local club to jog around in the evenings. From the outside, it looks like paradise.

But the women of the town know the truth: you can hide anything - from wrinkles to secrets from your past - if you have enough money.

You could even hide a murder.

THE RUNNING CLUB is the gripping, twisty thriller from the author of THE TRIVIA NIGHT, full of secrets, lies and reveals you won't see coming.

(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: March 14, 2023

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 432

Sample

Prologue

I turn left onto the pavement, always left. Glance down the hill towards Esperance Reserve, stop at the lights to tighten the laces of my brand-new running shoes. The rules of the running club are the same as they have always been: keep your breath steady, keep your mind sharp, record your laps! Only now there’s a new one: don’t get killed.

I slow down as I reach the seafront, turn to admire my slender silhouette in the French window of Esperance’s most extravagant beachside home. A polished red sports car in the driveway just adds to the grandeur, sitting pretty on the verge of the expansive front lawn with a gaudy designer water feature as its centrepiece. Next, a large, white-fronted home with bottle-green Italian-style shutters and out-of-control jasmine creeping up the façade, wily in its efforts. Worth six million dollars, I heard. Every house comes with a hefty price tag in Esperance. You pay for paradise – for neat front lawns and infinity pools; for snaking, flower-lined pathways and white picket fences; for polished bus-stop windows and fancy lattes: soya milk, rice milk, oat milk, goat milk!

You pay a premium.

Perhaps even with your life.

The air is pure today, with a faint waft of sea spray. It is only if you close your eyes you might sense it: the cloying scent of death. It hung heavy in the air after they found the body in the tree-lined clearing that runs parallel to the running track. Eyes open and face set in a smirk. A fingernail neatly lacquered with her favourite shade, Cajun Sunset, standing erect, like a tiny tombstone in the mulch, long hair spread about her like Medusa. And she was like Medusa! She could turn you to stone with just one gaze.

That scream when her body was found was shrill enough to pierce the pendulous, grey clouds and force out the last torrents of warm spring rain. The residents of Esperance heard it as keenly as they heard the secrets that came spurting out like champagne through the neck of a shaken-up bottle in the days that followed.

So many secrets.

So many lies.

So much vengeance.

But could anyone honestly say she didn’t have it coming?

Now, six weeks on, the sun has cleared the charcoal clouds that bathed our beachside town in grey in the days after her death. Esperance has a new aroma: summer. A season where things prosper and grow, where nothing dies.

In this tiny, pristine patch of the world, everyone knows you need to be perfect to survive.

I bend down, touch my toes, my legs ready to pound the pavement alongside the mulch that cushioned the decaying body of a woman who was once just like me. Who was one of us.

I really must stop thinking about it now. Lay it to rest. You can’t dwell on the past, you must move on, just as I have done. I am the butterfly emerged from a cocoon, a chick fleeing the confines of the nest, a phoenix from the ashes!

I’ve been given a second chance at life.

I am alive. She is not.

So traumatic.

So unfair.

So wasteful.

So pleased I got away with it.

Chapter OneCarole

The house is a hive of activity.

I find it easier to dedicate a particular day of the week to tradesmen, since it lessens the general household upheaval. Today the cleaners are here, and the gardener, too. I am very particular about Summerfield’s lawn. I must have the stripes, in alternating shades of green, and Ryan is the only tradesman who knows this. Lottie would flinch at the word ‘tradesman’ – apparently they are ‘tradespeople’ these days – but I don’t have time for any of that.

Ryan has been doing our lawn for a long time. He travels all the way down the peninsula from Shivers Beach (there are no tradespeople living in Esperance, they’re rarer than hens’ teeth here), but the money is worth it. We pay him a lot, because good staff are always worth the extra dollars.

‘I’d like it to look like Wimbledon,’ I told him when he first started gardening for us, five years ago. That’s the way the lawn has always been, even before my parents handed this house over to Max and me. Alternating stripes in olive and fern.

‘Wimble-who?’ Ryan had asked.

‘Don,’ Max told him with a smile. ‘My wife likes her lawn nice and tidy.’ He winked at Ryan as if he was making some kind of lewd innuendo. ‘With stripes.’

Ryan hadn’t even tried to hide a look of consternation, but nodded and set about with the mower. The result? Flawless! Alternating hues of green along the length of the front yard, only broken up by the large marble water fountain in the middle of the grass. It’s very tasteful, the fountain, no kissing dolphins or anything like that, just a simple cherub with a spout, but Freya still likes to have a dig when she can.

‘Oh Carole,’ she lamented just last week. ‘The least you could have done was get a chiselled Michelangelo with his cock out.’

So uncouth. But that’s Freya for you. You can take the girl out of Shivers Beach, but can you really take Shivers Beach out of the girl? Although Shivers Beach is only thirty-five kilometres north of Esperance, it may as well be in another state. Esperance sits pretty at the very southern tip of a peninsula that rolls languidly along the coastline, a few kilometres north of the bright lights of Sydney. Shivers Beach sits poverty clad and unkempt at the northern point with its bulbous, ragged headland, separated from its affluent bedpartner by a buffer of coastal enclaves that get progressively rougher as the coastline unfolds: Esperance, Mooney Waters, Nash Lake, Boorie Point and then finally, Shivers Beach. It’s where Freya and Lottie grew up, and my husband, too, although you wouldn’t know it.

My phone pings with a text message. Speak of the devil. What do you mean, it is “mandatory to run in our fluoro vests”? Freya has written. Is this a new government measure I’m unaware of? I didn’t say she wasn’t smart. Sarcastic may be a better description. The kind of person who has an answer to everything. You would have thought a request to ‘stay safe, stay seen’ would be self-explanatory for any responsible member of a running club. But I don’t have the time to get into this with Freya right now – not with tradesmen to organise. She will have to wait.

Today Ryan is topless, pushing the mower down the slight slope of our vast front lawn that leads to the fence that’s almost touching the sand of the north end of Esper­ance beach. From the front garden, I can see the dunes on the other side of the beach. They mostly block the view of the running track, save for the far corner where the water fountain sits on a square of mosaic pavers, a haven for thirsty runners and dogs. From upstairs, you can see the twinkling lights of the city after dark, and even enjoy the New Year’s Eve fireworks over Sydney Harbour. It’s a much more sophisticated spot to observe the festivities than on the ground with the masses. This is prime real estate, and as such, the house needs to be well-kept. I like it to be the most attractive property on the seafront, to ensure it keeps the highest price tag in the row, should we ever decide to sell. Not that I can see that happening, because I grew up in this house and it is as much a part of me as my right arm.

I watch Ryan out of the window, his torso glistening in the stifling heat that’s unexpected in September, the very start of spring. A single drop of sweat trickles between his glorious thirty-something pecs and down towards the elastic waistband of his pants. I chew on my cheek; I’m a sucker for a bit of rough. I married a bit of rough!

Max walks into the kitchen. I turn from the window and throw my arms round his neck. He’s only been in the next room, but I like to be as affectionate as possible as often as possible. I truly believe that if you don’t give your man what he needs, emotionally and sexually, he will stray. And I’m not giving Max up to anyone.

He puts his hands lightly on my waist, kisses me on the forehead and gently extracts me from his torso. I resist the urge to try and snuggle back in, because there has to be a sort of ‘treat them mean’ element to wifely behaviour, wouldn’t you agree?

Max fills a glass of water from the fridge. The chiller churns and gurgles as it spits out cubes of ice. He gulps down half of the glass and exhales loudly.

‘This heat’s unbearable. It’s meant to break on Friday.’ He gestures at the laptop screen on the benchtop, where a document emblazoned with the title Your Running Club Needs You! strobes out of the screen. ‘What’s this?’

‘A flyer,’ I tell him. ‘I’m trying to recruit a few more members to the running club. I mean it’s lovely having so many husbands and wives’ – all of them except Shelby – ‘but it would be nice if it gathered some momentum. If we got a few more members, we could raise a little more money for charity.’

‘Are people paying to join now?’ asks Max.

‘No, but the mark-up from the merchandise goes to Meals on Wheels.’

Max smiles. ‘Well done, darling,’ he says. ‘Very worthy.’

I nod. It is worthy! I mean, we all have to do our bit, don’t we?

The running club consists of myself, Lottie and her husband Piers, Freya and Bernard, although I hardly classify what he does as ‘running’ – it’s more of a senior powerwalk. Then there’s Shelby and Tino. The three husbands are a late addition to the club. It started as women-only: myself, Freya, Lottie, and, by default Shelby, because she’s Lottie’s sister, but somewhere along the line Tino joined in and then Piers and Bernard jumped on board (I use the term ‘jumped’ somewhat loosely as Bernard is far too old to mount anything). By all accounts, all three of them love it, and as well they should – it’s the perfect antidote to the stress of their demanding jobs. Tino creates apps for Android, and he’s very kindly made one for the group which enables us to keep track of our kilometres and measures our speed against one another. I don’t care where I come in, as long as it’s before Shelby. A little competition is the best thing for upping anyone’s fitness, in my opinion. Competing pushes you to be better, to test your limits.

The running club officially runs five nights a week at seven o’clock, although annoyingly some members seem to regard the start time as a free-for-all. Of course I run every day, rain or shine, but not everyone is quite as dedicated. Lottie runs three nights – Monday, Wednesday and Thursday – because those are the nights Piers, who is an obstetrician or gynaecologist or whatever you want to call it, is generally home on time and Lottie likes to be there when he arrives with dinner on the table. Fifteen laps of the purpose-built 400-metre running track, Olympic size, that backs onto the same scrubland that nestles the sand dunes at the southern end of Esperance beach. We meet at the water fountain and then we begin, in formation. I am the fastest of the females with a lap record of 119 seconds, so I’m always ahead of the pack. I have to be if I want to feel the burn. The only person who doesn’t seem to have any routine is Shelby. She shows up when, and if she wants to, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. She marches to the beat of her own drum in that arrogant way she has, like the world owes her a giant favour. She will stride out in front, or wait until we’re all half a lap ahead before she starts, so she doesn’t have to talk to anyone. It’s incredibly rude.

‘So is all this talk of recruiting runners a roundabout way of you asking me to join the running club again?’ Max slices through a green apple and offers me an indulgent smile.

‘Well, all the other husbands are involved, as you know,’ I say, coyly. I don’t want to pressure him. ‘But it might be a little low-energy compared to what you normally do.’

‘I might stick to surfing,’ he says and pats my behind. ‘It’s more my scene.’

What’s more Max’s scene is keeping to himself. He finds the husband and wife cliques of Esperance a little too much to bear. ‘We see them for drinks, I don’t want to work out with them too,’ he says.

I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt a little that I’m the only wife who can’t persuade her husband to accompany her on the running track. Still, no matter. If I’m honest, I don’t particularly want Max to see me all beetroot and flushed with sweat patches left, right and centre. It’s not exactly sexy, is it?

‘What have you got on today?’ Max asks as he drops his apple core in the bin, and it feels a little like a change of subject.

‘School drop-off, a bit of admin.’ I look up at him and smile. I need to book more piano lessons for Otto – now he’s in year 3 we feel he may benefit from an extra session a week, and pay Olivia’s extortionate school fees. ‘Keeping an eye on the tradesmen . . .’

Max glances out of the window. ‘He’s a good bloke, Ryan. You really don’t have to worry about him.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t . . .’ I lie.

Max is very touchy about me making generalisations about people from the town he grew up in. ‘We’re not all rough,’ he says.

‘Oh darling,’ I pout. ‘I know that.’

I do, however, have my doubts about the cleaners who also hail from the other end of the peninsula. I still can’t find the diamond bracelet Max bought me for my birthday and I know for a fact that it was on the dresser when Leah was at the house last. Otto said, ‘It’s your fault Mum, you shouldn’t have left it Leah-ing around.’ That’s a private school education for you.

‘Are you still out tomorrow night?’ Max asks.

‘Yes, I’ll be at Lottie’s. Is that okay?’

‘Of course. It’s just I thought I might pop out to look at the car. Perhaps Hannah could stay on for an hour or so?’

My husband throws back the remains of his icy water. His skin is lightly tanned and his stubble fashionably short, with distinguished flecks of white. He is as handsome as he was the day I met him. More so. He still turns heads. I mean, he is so much more than a pretty face – he’s a wonderful father, for starters. Present, I believe that’s the word. Always there for the children.

‘Of course,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll speak to her. Can’t have you missing out on seeing the car!’

Max is almost the proud owner of a Maserati MC20. It’s a nifty little thing. It’s my fifteenth wedding anniversary present to him – a few months early, but when your name rolls around on the waiting list, you have to jump on it. The car was meant to be a surprise, but the morons at the garage ruined it when they called him directly about the window tint (as in, did he want one or not?). I was livid about it at the time, but now I don’t mind a jot because Max is so happy about his impending gift. It’s like watching a child wait for Christmas Day to come around when they know they’ve got exactly what they want.

‘I take it you like your present?’ I say with a girlish pout.

‘Are you kidding?’ my husband asks, but not in the over-excited way he did the first couple of times I asked the same question. ‘It’s incredible. Now I have to think what the hell I can get you for our anniversary. What do you get the woman who has everything?’

Jewellery? Designer bag? Bespoke art? I really don’t mind. But whatever it is, I’ll be paying for it. That’s the unspoken thing between us. The money. I have it in abundance thanks to my father, who has more of the stuff than he knows what to do with, and Max has none. I say ‘none’, but I mean very little, comparatively. He works, of course – the fact it’s for my father’s hedge fund is, for want of a better word, immaterial – but even that generous salary can’t compete with the Parkes family fortune. But surprisingly, Max isn’t insecure. I made it very clear from the very start, even when my parents insisted we sign a pre-nuptial agreement saying he’d get nothing if the marriage didn’t last fifteen years, that what is mine is ours. Every last cent. Unless of course Max runs off and has some sordid affair or something, and then he’ll walk away with nothing apart from the pants he stands in. But Max simply wouldn’t do that to me. He loves me too much. He loves our kids too much.

Olivia skips down the stairs and leans up to kiss her father.

‘How you doing, kiddo?’ Max asks, and for a moment his accent sounds terribly Shivers Beach. I’m grateful for the Botox, otherwise my eyebrows might have knitted together.

‘Fabulous, Papa,’ she says, and turns, en pointe, towards the fridge. My statuesque ballerina. Thirteen and so poised – an Arlingford Ladies College girl, through and through, just like me. So accomplished, unlike Isobel Denton in her class. Poor Lottie has her hands full with that girl. Sometimes I can barely believe she and Olivia grew up together, they’re so vastly different. Different toddlers, different pre-schoolers and now vastly different teenagers. But then you could say the same about myself and Lottie. Or myself and Max, I suppose, if you were being brutally honest. Both of them dragged up at the furthest end of the peninsula, a world away from Esperance.

I cover Olivia’s chicken sandwich in a beeswax wrap. Otto doesn’t like sandwiches, so it’s a case of finding an alternative every single day. Today I have whipped up some miniature veggie quiches, or rather Hannah has. Hannah makes them, and I go through the rigmarole of packing them as if I rolled the pastry myself.

Hannah isn’t a housekeeper, or a chef. She’s just a regular mother from down the road in Mooney Waters, who helps out a few times a week with household chores. Whatever I need doing, she does. Last week I got her to label the medicine boxes in the pantry with a labelling machine. On the box with the antacids and Imodium, instead of writing ‘Digestion’ or ‘Stomach’, she typed out a label that read, ‘Diarrhoea etc’. It was most uncouth, and Max and Otto almost died laughing.

I sniff a mini frittata. It smells heavenly. Perhaps I’ll take a couple to Lottie’s tomorrow and pass them off as my own. We gather once a month at one of our houses, after the running club has completed its twilight laps. Max always vacates on the occasions I’m hosting here because he says he finds the noise levels deafening. He calls it ‘Cheese and Whine’.

We haven’t got around to inviting the husbands to this particular extension of the running club yet, and it will stay that way because, after all, they do tend to feature in much of the conversation. Freya will moan about Bernard being an ancient old fart; Lottie will enthuse about how wonderful Piers is and then, when she’s had a couple of drinks, she’ll start crying about how she thinks she’s a terrible housewife; and Shelby will occasionally make some snide comment about Tino, who could not be nicer as it happens, and who, quite frankly, deserves someone way better than her.

Max looks up as Otto walks into the room. He grins as Otto attempts to rugby tackle him and forces our son’s head under his elbow, ruffling his hair frenziedly. Otto laughs and pulls away.

‘Hello darling,’ I say, smoothing Otto’s hair back down into school-worthy smartness. ‘How about I have Hannah whip up some dinner for all of you tomorrow when I’m out?’

Max looks excited by the prospect of Hannah’s culinary efforts as opposed to mine. ‘Great!’ he says and taps his stomach. ‘Wonder if she’ll do that delicious chicken risotto?’ He and Otto look thrilled, which frankly makes me feel rather insignificant.

Max pulls me into his side and kisses my head. ‘But Hannah doesn’t cook as well as Mum, does she, kids?’ He opens up his arms and nods at Olivia, who puts down her phone and comes to slip her arms around my waist.

‘No way,’ Olivia says, more earnest than Cate Blanchett doing Richard III at the Sydney Opera House.

‘No! She sucks!’ Otto says, as though he’s disgusted by Hannah’s edible offerings. Then he turns to Max, eyes sparkling, and says, ‘Maybe she’ll do her bolognese!’

‘Ugh no,’ says Olivia and I feel a glow of warmth in my chest. ‘It’s way too hot for bolognese!’

After I’ve deposited both kids at school, I get my regular weak almond chai from Only Organic and head home to attempt a surface tidy of the benchtop before Leah arrives. I shuffle papers and wipe jam off Otto’s homework book. Underneath is Max’s phone. He’s forgotten it, which is rare for him. I pick it up and walk it over to my bag. If I drop it in to his office, I can have a quick coffee with my father while I’m there.

I’m just clipping shut my handbag when I hear the phone beep. When I pull it out again, I see a message from a number I don’t recognise. It starts, Latto, we need to . . . I can’t read the rest, however much I jab at it with my forefinger, because I don’t have Max’s fingerprints, obviously, and I don’t know his passcode. He changes it frequently because he’s worried about cyber security.

I feel a wave of hot anger shroud me. As far as I know, there’s only one person who calls my husband by his old childhood nickname, and I want to know why the hell she is messaging him. What does it mean ‘we need to . . .’? Need to what? Talk? What could she possibly want to talk to Max about?

I throw the phone back in my bag and march out to the car, knowing full well that I will hand Max his phone with a winning smile and not mention the text. He gets touchy about these things. You see, he’s not to blame. It’s her. She’s the one who won’t leave him alone. Poor Max, he feels so sorry for her. She never got over their break-up, even though they were just high school kids at the time. She just can’t let it rest.

I stride down the pathway to the garage that houses our four cars and pip a key fob. It’s pot luck which car I’ll take today. I look up to see Leah standing in front of me with her gormless sister whose name I don’t know, holding a bucket and a mop and wearing a rucksack that’s actually a vacuum cleaner. She looks like she’s about to collapse from heat exhaustion.

‘Hello, Mrs Latimer,’ Leah smiles, sweat collecting on her brow. ‘Where would you like me to start today?’

‘Bedroom,’ I snap. ‘And don’t touch anything you shouldn’t.’

Chapter Two Lottie

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

‘You’d like to know about me?’ I wriggle on the sweaty plastic chair, collect a snap of static. The office, tucked in the far right-hand corner of the charity shop, smells of wet animal – thanks to the overweight cattle dog asleep in a basket in the corner. The only window to the outside world is closed and the minute hand on the wall clock struts across the face with a sinister click. The room is stifling, despite the blast of cold air from the yellowing air conditioning unit positioned high up on the far side wall. I look up at the exit sign above the large, antique desk in the middle of the room. It’s something I do wherever I am, a habit I can’t break. Just in case I need to get out in a hurry.

Marella, the shop’s manager, wears a smile and a faux-silk blouse which has attracted sweat marks under the armpits on account of the crazy humidity. My dress sticks to the side of my right calf. It’s a long, floral Zimmermann maxi with layers of chiffon – extortionately expensive. Carole persuaded me to buy it, and Carole knows her fashion. ‘Oh for Pete’s sake, Lottie,’ she’d sighed, ‘just buy it. It isn’t like you can’t afford it!’ She was right, of course. Six hundred bucks is a drop in the ocean here in Esperance.

Marella nods in answer to my question, offers a bright smile.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

Sandwich residue lines the gap between her top canine and her lateral incisor, and I try not to stare, but Marella must notice where my pupils keep darting, because she sweeps her top row of teeth with her tongue a couple of times. She isn’t embarrassed, though. She is obviously confident, proud of herself – if her clothes are anything to go by – and of her body, too, even though she’s not slim or toned like the other women I know. She could be though, if she joined the running club and did three sessions a week for a month, under the watchful eye of Carole. Then she’d be right on track. She’d be quite attractive, actually.

I wonder what she thinks of me. I know I look well- put-together and she’ll be able to tell that I’m slim with caramel tones running through my mousy brown, blow-dried hair. She’ll probably think I’m high maintenance but I’m not – really, I’m not. Not on the scale of say, Carole. I don’t slather myself in fake tan twice a week (‘You should,’ says Carole. ‘People must think you’ve got a Vitamin D deficiency!’), but I do try to keep myself nice. I do it for Piers really.

Marella continues to smile and I realise that maybe she’s not judging me at all. Her eyes are kind and she has a familiar face, a generic one. It’s a face that belongs to several other people, the kind you need to see a few times before you remember it and associate it with a name and a personality.

‘What I’d like to know,’ she says, offering me a prompt, ‘is why you would be the right person to do voluntary work here at St Paul’s.’

I don’t tell her that I have to get some kind of charity gig because it’s what you do in this town in lieu of doing actual paid work. You start up some kind of club or society that raises funds in some way, like Carole has, or you get your hands physically dirty in the name of giving. You pull on rubber gloves over your Cartier stacking rings, emerald-cut solitaires and twice-weekly manicured cuticles, because it’s expected of you. Or, if you really want to be seen to be giving back to the community, you do both. Carole does a day of Meals on Wheels in Nash Lake each week (‘Ugh, the hat! It’s like I’m in a fucking operating theatre!’) and Freya works at the Mooney Children’s Trust, which raises funds for the paediatric ward at Mooney Waters Hospital. She isn’t a mother herself because Bernard already has grown-up children of his own and didn’t want to have more when they got married. It’s a shame. I’ve always thought Freya would be a good mum.

Anyway,. . .