THE HEIR'S REVENGE

chapter 77

Margaret Vane had checked into the Northgate Hotel on Tuesday evening. She paid cash for three nights exactly and made no phone call. No one visited her and she only left the hotel only once, one Wednesday morning.

According to the report. On that Wednesday, he walked to a cafe two streets away and sat for forty minutes before he returned.

She had not met anyone at the café.

She had not contacted any journalist or legal representative or anyone connected to the case. She just carried one piece of hand luggage and one larger bag.

I put the first page down and picked up the second.

This one was different.

Henry had a contact inside the prosecutor's office. He was not a spy, just someone who kept him informed when things were relevant to our case. That contact had made some discreet inquiries through channels that Henry did not fully explain to me and I did not fully ask about.

The second page was a summary of what Margaret Vane was carrying.

I read it once before deciding that it was necessary to read it again.

Then I put it down and looked at Henry.

"She wrote a confession," I said, kind of asking her. I wondered why Margaret had a confession

“I don't know. I'm still trying to figure everything out but I will, soon. All I knew was that it wasn't a legal document but handwritten.” Henry nodded. “Twelve pages.”

"Twelve pages?," I asked.

"Yes."

I looked at the page again.

According to this, Victoria Pierce sat in a secure facility on a monitored phone call and spoke to her sister for four minutes and twenty seconds.

She had said make sure it gets to the right person. And what she had given her sister to deliver was twelve handwritten pages describing what she had done.

She didn't deny it or even try to hide it. She described every little detail making me wonder why she would do such a thing.

"Why would she do that," I said. Not really asking Henry. Just saying it out loud to see how it sounded.

Wasn't she scared of being arrested? Did she have so much power that she believed that no one would actually come for her? Was that it?

“I've been thinking about it too.” He runs said, folding his hands. “Victoria has spent twenty years being careful. She committed so many crimes and those crimes were separated from her so no one would ever catch up with her or accuse her.” He paused. "Now those layers are gone. The trial is starting. The evidence is strong. She knows she is going to be convicted."

"So she writes a confession," I finished, thinking about the same thing too.

"She didn't write it to confess," Henry said. "But to control how people perceive it.’

I looked at him.

He wasn't wrong. In fact he was accurate and I could see where he was coming from.

"Victoria cannot stop the conviction," he said. "She is intelligent enough to know that. What she can do is control how the world understands her after the conviction. She can make sure that when people read about what happened they read her version of it." He said.

I nodded. This was one of the ploys of Victoria to get people to pity her.

"That document doesn't just contain a list of all her crimes. What that document does is to present her as a strong woman. A woman who made tough decisions even though things were not working in her way. She proves herself as a woman who puts first and one who protects family over everything.”

I stared at him.

"She is trying to write her own story," I said. “So she's writing everything herself.”

"Yes," Henry said. "Before the trial, write it for her. So that the story could suit her.”

I sat back in my chair.

Yes. This was the Victoria I had long expected. The Victoria I have predicted I'm the beginning. She was trying to confuse us.

I should have expected this and gotten ready but I guess I was taken by surprise.

Not really.

Just that Victoria o redid herself this time around. This was the kind of moves she always made. It wasn't always desperate or obvious but it was careful, intelligent and well planned.

She was right clumsy with her plots. Just too damn intelligent.

She had probably been writing those twelve pages for weeks. Of course, these things need high concentration and time invested.

While she was in custody? And while the evidence was being assembled against her, she was plotting.

Even when the trial date hasn't been set yet, she still plotted. She was writing her own truth in careful and very elegant handwriting. Nobody watched her and no

She could have handed those letters to someone else but she chose her sister. The person no one knew she existed.

I never heard of Margaret Vane till this scandal happened.

According to what we have here, Margaret is the older sister, who had lived abroad for thirty years and was never connected with any of Victoria's case records.

She was the one who could walk into the hotel of any journalist in the city and hand over a document and be on a plane back to Switzerland before anyone realised what had happened.

I picked up the third page of the folder Henry had handed to me, this one was the summary of all the documents contents

I read it carefully so as to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Victoria talked about my mother's death as a situation that couldn't be handled. She didn't call it poisoning, she said that it was a medical intervention that was only intended to be temporary.

I was already getting so angry reading it but I wanted to see where this would end.

She also talked about Lily's parents in similarly careful language, she said that their deaths was an unfortunate result of the decision she made which was to protect her children.

I stopped.