I never did.
Memory makes you fixate. All I could think about for seventeen years were three people: Mark, Claire, and you.
I’m merely retrieving what’s rightfully mine.
Yet I’m also doing her a freaking massive favor. If her life is filled with absinthe and coke, she might as well join her late husband in that great void in the sky. Knowing her, she’ll start a strip club there at the first opportunity.
I yank off my wet clothes. Before stripping her bare. Her garments are in varying shades of green. What an ex-slut with no taste would wear. Tapering velour trousers with a gnome-colored see-through top. Ghastly, exaggerated sleeves. The fabric reeks of stale cigarettes and pickled gherkins.
But at least her clothes are dry.
They even fit me. More or less. Her bra is on the large side. Dr. Patel had underestimated things a little.
I kneel down again to dress her with the wet clothes I’d peeled off minutes earlier.
Only to struggle.
And struggle.
What a fucking pain. Never realized it’s so difficult to put soggy clothes onto a limp body. The trench coat’s easy, though. Thankfully, a few black and white pebbles remain in its pockets.
I should take a few of those lovely peroxided hairs, just in case I need to plant a few DNA-rich follicles somewhere.
I grab a pair of kitchen scissors and snip a lock off.
There’s something else I need to do. Ah, yes. Lipstick and nail varnish, straight from the handbag at the back of my Fiat. I stoop down to paint her lips and fingernails a scintillating shade of scarlet.
Not bad, Sophia.
She goes into the boot. Just about fits.
I turn on the engine and race down the dark, winding road again.
The parking lot of the Paradise nature reserve, a couple of minutes after midnight. No one at all. No lovers. No campers. No nudists, either. I’m damned lucky the rain came down like a battering ram earlier that morning. Swamping the footpaths in the reserve. Turning them into a veritable bog. An unappetizing quagmire. Sending all riverside stragglers home before midnight.
I tip Aggie into the River Cam, pressing her body down with a firm hand.
Is she struggling? Or am I imagining it? Does exhaustion play tricks on the mind?
I count to a hundred before releasing my hand.
I repark the Fiat at the end of Grantchester Meadows and wipe the car clean.
I walk back to Coton. All three miles. On foot. I collapse onto Aggie’s four-poster bed. Even though it reeks of Dior’s Poison and boasts lurid green sheets the color of mold. When one is knackered, even Aggie-related shit doesn’t stink as much.
It all goes black again.
It’s amazing how seemingly useless skills become useful. When shit happens.
Like being able to hold my breath under water. Learned during those endless childhood swimming lessons in Dad’s pool in Bermuda. That definitely helped me in the Cam. Or the basic Russian I picked up from the classes I took during my first year at Cambridge. Thanks to Dad, who insisted that I learn the language after he decided to marry that Belarusan stripper. He’d hoped that I would understand my new stepmother better (fortunately for me, and most unfortunately for her, I never did). That certainly helped when Mr. Inquisitive-Yet-Pathetic Detective rang Aggie’s mobile phone to inform her of my untimely departure. I certainly had fun chatting with him that Saturday afternoon from behind the blinds of my rightful home (hope I didn’t overdo the Russian accent).
I also dealt with several other things on the day he called. I put fifteen vials of coke into the garbage bin. I fed five liters of absinthe to a gnarled potted plant in a corner. I threw all Aggie’s paper-and-ink diaries into the fireplace. I took a kitchen hammer to her iDiary. Even bought a Persian cat online. A fluffy white feline that was a dead ringer for Catapult. Like me, the new cat got used to grumpy Khrushchev. And little Catatonic also got used to her name.
Unlike me.
I hate my new name. I particularly detest signing “Agnessa” on the dotted line. Even now that I’ve perfected the signature (after months of practice). The name’s worse than Sophia Alyssa. Definitely much worse than Anna May. But I’ll have to get used to it, I suppose. There’s even a delicious irony to being called Agnessa. Because the name means “pure and holy.”
If anyone’s fucking pure and holy, it’s me.
I knew that three people dropped by Aggie’s home in Coton, either occasionally or regularly. Her Italian lover, her chatty Polish housekeeper, and her green-thumb Hungarian gardener.
I began by texting the Italian lover. Using Aggie’s mobile phone, of course.
My message was short and sweet:
“Fuck you,” it said. “We’re over.”
It worked. Because I never heard from him again. I also sent text messages to her housekeeper and gardener telling them that their services were no longer required.
I kept Aggie’s Ferrari (even though I much prefer BMWs). I kept her gilded furniture. I kept her garments. Even wore them each day. Needed to be on the safe side. After all, people might begin smelling a rat if Agnessa suddenly started going around in a slinky scarlet Elie Saab dress. Instead of the gaudy green ghastliness she normally wore. Imagine a nosy Mono neighbor musing about the new “Agnessa” in her diary: Blimey. I saw her earlier today. She was flouncing about in a tasteful red dress. Shock! Horror! What’s happened to her predilection for lurid green? Something’s not right. Someone must have taken over her identity. I should phone that pompous gray-haired policeman to report my suspicions. The newly promoted detective superintendent who keeps winning awards for solving crimes as soon as they happen.
That wouldn’t do at all.
Detective Superintendent Richardson deserves more than a few punches, by the way. I’m still convinced that he—and Mark—hammered the final nails into my St. Augustine’s coffin. But I should nevertheless thank my lucky stars that he’s a rubbish investigator. I should sort him out someday.
I lay low for a long time.
Long enough for most of the dust to settle.
On the subject of dust, I made sure they incinerated Aggie’s body with due care after I got it back from the morgue a week later. I also paid Perfect Cremation Solutions to turn her ashes into an artificial diamond. It is now tethered to a platinum ring around my little finger. Aggie should be grateful I’m so magnanimous with her remains. She doesn’t deserve to be a diamond. But there’s some poetic justice in turning her into one. She did, after all, deny me Mum’s diamonds for years.
I bought a first-class ticket to Bora-Bora soon after I called Aggie’s asset manager. He told me that Aggie’s estate was worth ￡37 million, which included ownership of three strip clubs and shares in Playboy Magazine. I gasped when he recited the sum. I thought I’d inherited only ￡31 million. Then I realized that Aggie had married a Grosvenor before divorcing him six months later to marry Dad.
It never hurts to marry a rich man.