‘I’m sorry for what happened to your fiancée—’
He snorted his disbelief.
‘Hear me out!’ she insisted, holding up her hand to stall his protest. ‘I don’t care if you don’t believe me, but if you expect me to believe you, you’d better start making some sense. How is Grace supposed to have carried out this so-called “murder”?’
For a few moments he said nothing, continuing to stare across at her with such potent force that she could almost feel the power of his hurt. Could it be true? Could Grace have done something so terribly wrong that a patient had died? She didn’t want to believe it, but at the back of her mind the increased frequency of legal action against her, the numerous settlements, all niggled at her certainty.
No. It couldn’t be true.
‘Well?’ she pressed. ‘You’re making serious accusations against the most famous cosmetic surgeon in the country. Surely you don’t expect me to believe you simply because you’ve managed to engineer me into your bed? You need to give me something concrete. What is it you think happened? What makes you so sure that Grace killed Zoë?’
His eyes glinted as they narrowed, a muscle twitching in his cheek. Then he jammed his fingers into his jeans pockets and turned towards the window, gazing out over the sea. It was some seconds more before he spoke, and when he did his voice was as flat and calm as the moonlit ocean beyond.
‘It was four years ago. We were due to get married in three months. Zoë had never been overweight, but she’d started dieting for the wedding. Everyone—her family and I—thought it was just normal dieting, that she was just trying to look good for the wedding pictures. We didn’t realise how thin she’d become. And still she kept on exercising for hours every day, hardly eating a thing.
‘We were worried she was becoming anorexic. I told her that I couldn’t marry her as she was; she was too fragile and she needed to get help. When she told me she’d booked into a clinic, I thought it was to get treatment for her condition.’
He sighed, pushing back his shoulders and stretching his neck. ‘But instead she’d booked in for liposuction. And your wondrous Dr Della-Bosca made sure she’d never have a weight problem again.’
Chills crawled down her spine. ‘Something went wrong?’
‘You could say that. She was released after the surgery, and she checked herself into a hotel because she couldn’t go home as she was. Progressively, she felt worse and worse. She rang the clinic twice, only to be told each time that the pain was normal. The third time she rang it was Della-Bosca herself who told her to stop wasting her time.’
Breath hissed through Jade’s teeth. Surely Grace would never say such a thing to a client in pain?
‘In desperation,’ Loukas continued, ‘she called her mother. She was out of it for much of the time, but she told her everything. By the time her mother and the paramedics found her, she was dead.’
‘Oh, my God,’ Jade whispered. ‘And you believe that if she’d received attention earlier she might have lived?’
‘I know she would have lived. And I know that it was Della-Bosca who killed her. The liposuction needle apparently pierced her abdominal cavity. It might have been peritonitis on the death certificate, but it was Della-Bosca who was holding that needle. It was Della-Bosca who murdered my Zoë.’
‘It was an accident. A horrible accident.’
He wheeled around. ‘No! It was no accident. She operated on a woman so wasted she could hardly stand up by herself. And instead of helping her, like she should have done, she fed Zoë’s self-doubts and insecurities. She should have turned her away, but there was no way she would turn away Zoë’s money.’
‘I can’t believe it. Grace isn’t like that. You make out like she’s some kind of mercenary. And she would never have operated if she hadn’t thought it was necessary.’ Yet even as Jade said the words she remembered another girl, another batch of operations scheduled, and the twinge in the back of her mind that something wasn’t quite right. What had Grace said? Satisfy her now and you’ll have a client for life. Had that been her reasoning with Zoë? So that even if she’d been anorexic Grace would have agreed to her request for surgery?