Aggie rolled her eyes.
“Now you’ve graduated to robbing me of my birthright. I admire you, Aggie. But I’m going to do some stripping myself. By the time I’m done, there won’t be any skin left on your paws. Or on that tarted-up face of yours.”
She issued an unimpressed sniff. And so I said:
“Let me tell you a couple of horrible secrets. I’ll start by showing you a photograph. This is me, a long time ago. I had a flat chest and protruding ears. If you look closely, you can see that I once had hope in my eyes and fire in my soul. Today, both the hope and the fire are gone.”
I rambled on and on, brandishing a second photo in her face with the words: “I’m going to transform myself so I’ll look exactly like you. I’m going to bleach my hair and get boobs like yours.”
Before finishing with:
“Vengeance would be nice. Especially in view of what you’ve done to me. All the terrible little things you’ve been guilty of over the years. I recall each and every one of them. It’s the sum total of remembered grievances that makes hatred potent. Oh, yes. The act of revenge will be easy. Because no one will remember what I’m going to do to you. Except for me.”
I got up from the divan and walked straight into Aggie’s rock-crystal vase. The hideous gold one, dripping with jewels. Before trotting out of the drawing room to an accompanying gasp of horror.
It proved to be a fruitful little visit. I got exactly what I wanted a couple of minutes before Aggie marched in. I’ll be forever grateful to her housekeeper for pointing out the bitch’s most recent holiday photographs on the mantelpiece. The snapshots had been taken seven weeks earlier, when Aggie was frolicking about in St. Barts. The first photo offered a delightful high-resolution close-up of her face. Right down to the foundation-clogged pores on it. The second featured Aggie in a tacky green bikini, arm draped over the shoulder of her on-again, off-again Italian lover.
I removed the two photos from their ghastly emerald-and-gold frames and slipped them into my handbag before looking around for something else to pinch. Something small and easily removable. A pea-green Gucci clutch bearing the gold monogram A.W. on its clasp lay nearby. I rummaged about inside and decided to liberate Aggie’s driving license from its confines. After all, the card contained a fine specimen of the bitch’s signature. I then wandered to the hallway and studied the items hanging on a coatrack. Black gloves with gold fur trimmings. Hideous green beret. Black Versace scarf. On impulse, I stuffed the three items into my handbag and scampered back to the living room just before Aggie swept in.
Aggie’s Versace scarf (the most tasteful and practical of the lot) has served me well.
Mightily well.
Ah, the joys of DNA testing.
They found her DNA on it, naturally. Mingled with Mark’s.
Her scarf became exhibit A at Mark’s trial. It was handled with appropriate reverence by the prosecutor. I read in the newspapers that the man pulled it out with a flourish, to a flurry of appreciative murmurs from the jury box.
Somehow my instincts told me to wrap Aggie’s scarf around my nose minutes before I sallied forth from my Grantchester cottage that evening. My intuition had said, in a small growly voice: The smell of shit should make you more determined and goal-oriented, my dear Sophia.
My instincts were right.
I went straight to Dr. Patel the morning after I visited Aggie. Because I’d heard good things about the man’s surgical abilities. Including his ability to transform a woman into exactly whom she wished to be.
That sounds good, I thought. That is what I want.
As soon as I got into his consultation room, I opened my handbag and pulled out the two photos I’d pilfered from her living room.
“I want to look like this woman,” I said.
The doctor took the photos into his hand and squinted at them for a few moments with a large frown on his forehead.
“Are you sure, Miss Winchester?” he said, frown deepening as he continued to scrutinize the photos. “Are you aware that this woman has had many procedures in the past? Chest, nose, ear, and chin. Botox, too.”
I gaped at Dr. Patel for several moments. I had long worked out that Aggie had thrived on implants and Botox. From the first day I walked into Dad’s study and discovered with horror that the woman he intended to marry was a year younger than I was and had tits the height of towering conifers. Back then there was already enough Botox on Aggie’s face to give a puffer fish a heart attack. But I hadn’t realized that she had had a nose job too. Then it hit me: I’m cursed with the famous Winchester nose, and I hate the goddamned kink in it.
This made my setup twice as perfect.
Might as well fix those slightly protruding ears while I’m at it.
“How marvelous, Doctor,” I said. “This makes it even better. Can we start tomorrow, please? I’ll pay.”
And I did pay as promised. Yet Dr. Patel will never know that I had to scrape the bottom of my piggy bank to cough up the first two installments before the Swiss paid up. Research, unfortunately, takes lots of fucking time and money.
Especially research on Agnessa Winchester (née Ivanova), Mark Henry Evans, and Claire Evans (née Bushey).
With hindsight, Agnessa proved a much easier subject than the other two. Even though there weren’t any photos of her online. I should thank her chatty little Polish housekeeper again. Aggie had apparently enjoyed flitting between the bright lights of London, Moscow, and Minsk for a few years after Dad died before hanging up her traveling shoes. She’d assembled a stable of boy toys to keep herself amused in all three cities. Twenty-year-old bucking stallions with bulges in all the right places. Paid for with Dad’s money, of course. She eventually fell for a twenty-one-year-old Calvin Klein model who later dumped her for a younger poodle with even more money. That’s why she retreated to Dad’s old country house in Coton to lick her self-inflicted wounds a mere six months before I emerged from St. Augustine’s.
Thank God for that.
Because I would have been seriously screwed if Aggie had not been stoned out of her mind in Coton on the night Mark Evans decided to dump me into the Cam.
Boy, did I make several stupid mistakes that evening. Nearly destroyed myself. Almost self-imploded. My first error was to get into an unprovoked kerfuffle with that detective. As I waited in my Fiat for the right moment to creep into Mark’s study. But I was damned surprised to see the man jog by. Damned furious, too. That supercilious idiot could have scuppered everything. Thanks to him, my judgment was impaired. Which led to my second grave mistake. I was dense enough to break into Mark’s study while he was still having dinner with his Mono wife.
I enjoyed taunting her. Baiting her, even. But I’d never expected her response. When her furious hands connected with my shoulders, everything went black.