She was right. Terry laughed nastily at Lucien. ‘Listen to you with your fancy I’m-better-than-you-voice! You think you’re so ’igh and mighty, but you ain’t. You’re nothing. You’re not even the dirt on my boots. Now get down on your knees and say sorry for speaking to me the way you did.’
‘Why should I?’ said Lucien defiantly.
Terry raised the gun so it was aimed directly at his head. ‘Well, Lucy-Boy, I’ll give you one good reason.’
‘And what then after you’ve killed me? What comes next? Because as far as I can see, you’ll just get yourself into a load of trouble and you’ll be sent to prison. Or better still, you’ll be hanged. So go ahead, shoot me and do society a favour by being rid of you.’
Venetia wanted so much to be proud of Lucien for his bravery, but she feared it was misplaced. Terry didn’t look or sound like someone who gave a damn about consequences. He looked and sounded like he was mad enough to do anything.
‘You’re a cocky little sod, aren’t you?’ Terry responded with asnort. ‘But how about I blow your girlfriend’s head off instead?’ He swung the gun so it was pointing at Venetia now. ‘Still wanna call my bluff? And I’ll tell you for nothing, Lucy-Boy, pulling the trigger on this shotgun will be the easiest thing in the world for me. I ain’t afraid to kill you both and then I’ll bury your bodies so no one will ever find them.’
‘You’re crazy!’ Venetia shouted, her frightened voice ringing out loud and shrill in the night air. Then grabbing Lucien’s hand, she yelled at him to run. And they did run. They ran as fast as they could, weaving their way around trees, jumping over tree stumps but all the while they could hear Terry bearing down on them.
‘You can’t get away from me,’ he said in a terrifyingly menacing voice. He seemed to know the woods as well as they did and then, just as they had almost reached the outer perimeter of trees, Venetia tripped and cried out as an agonising bolt of pain shot through her ankle.
Lucien stopped running and bent down to help her up. ‘Come on, we haven’t got far to go,’ he said with an urgent wheezy gasp. She recognised the rasp in his voice as the onset of an asthma attack. It was something he’d started suffering from in the last year.
‘It’s no good,’ she said, ‘I can’t—’ She broke off as from behind them Terry pounced out of the darkness.
‘Gotcha!’ he said, grabbing hold of Venetia’s ponytail and yanking it so viciously he lifted her off the ground. Lucien hurled himself at the man, but Terry was stronger than the two of them put together and he shoved the butt of the gun at Lucien’s chest, sending him flying, and then dropped her like she was a puppet whose strings had just been cut. Falling onto the ankle she had just twisted, and recalling the rabbit in the cage and how Terry had enjoyed watching it slowly die, she stifled a cry, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d hurt her.
As though proving he really was as dangerously cruel as Venetia believed him to be, Terry threw back his head and started to laugh, saying he was going to enjoy making their lives a living hell for the rest of the time he worked at Hope Hall.
‘You’ll be looking over your shoulders the whole time just waiting for me to do something to one of you,’ he crowed, ‘or maybe both of you, depending how I feel.’
Venetia thought that for as long as she lived, she would never forget that sickening laugh, and his vile threat.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘You must believe me when I say I’m sorry for what I did,’ Hilary said. ‘I behaved atrociously, and I know that Hugh would have been thoroughly ashamed of me. I’m ashamed of myself. If there’s any way in which I can make it up to you, please tell me.’ She paused, swallowed, then carried on. ‘As misplaced as the hope might be, I want to believe that when you accepted my invitation to come here this evening it was because there was a chance we could put that awful night behind us.’
Throughout the speech, for that was what it felt like to Nina, a very formal and well-rehearsed speech, Hilary wrung her hands and twisted the rings round on the third finger of her left hand, never once actually meeting Nina’s eyes. In place of her customary cool demeanour there was a brittle awkwardness to her manner. She held herself ramrod-straight in her kitchen chair and while her ash-blonde hair bore its usual appearance of being freshly washed and stylishly swept back from her forehead, it revealed a face which, despite the make-up applied more heavily than usual, was drawn and pinched. She had tried to mask the dark shadows beneath her eyes with too much concealer and it had only served to make things worse by caking and enhancing the lines and pouches of lose skin. She had lost weight since the fateful wedding day six weeks ago and dramatically so, thought Nina, if the looseness of her rings with which she was constantlyfiddling was anything to go by. Nina was sure they never used to fit so loosely.
Hilary was clearly suffering and if it had been anyone else, Nina would have felt sorry for the poor woman and comforted her. What held her back from doing that, from reaching across the table and giving a reassuring squeeze to one of Hilary’s hands, was the fear that the gesture might trigger a total collapse in her mother-in-law’s physical and mental state. It seemed to Nina that she was dangerously close to the edge of some sort of breakdown.
In the days immediately after the wedding debacle Nina would have been more than happy to witness her mother-in-law’s downfall, to see her grovel and beg forgiveness, but seeing her now struggling so hard to retain just the flimsiest veneer of self-control brought Nina no satisfaction. She could see that Hilary was broken. She had lost her son and probably her husband, and all semblance of dignity. She had nothing left.
Nina had agreed to come here this Monday evening, not for supper as she had in the past, but for the purpose of the two of them saying what needed to be said. Whatever that might be.
Until last night Nina had resolutely ignored any of Hilary’s attempts to contact her; it was an act of petty revenge on her part which she wasn’t proud of. But we all protect ourselves in any way we can, she thought now as she sipped from the glass of fizzy water Hilary had poured for her.
‘I think we’ve both said and done things which we’re ashamed of,’ she said, placing the glass on the table. ‘And I shouldn’t have ignored your messages or phone calls. That was contrary and unhelpful of me. I’m sorry.’
Hilary pursed her lips and finally looked at Nina. ‘You were perfectly entitled to be as contrary as you wanted. But I must confess to being curious as to why you did answer my call last night.’
‘I was tired of it all. It takes too much mental energy to be angry, or hold a grudge,’ she added, thinking of Cassie. Cassie had always made light of admitting that nobody could hold a grudge like she could, that she had spent nearly two decades harbouring a fierce hatred for the man who had abandoned her when she’d needed him most. ‘And look where it’s got me,’ she’d said the day before Ben had whisked her away for her birthday surprise down in Devon, ‘I’m now looking after his bloody widow and child! That’s what I get for holding a grudge! If I hated Drew before, imagine how I feel now. Honestly, even in death he can screw up my life!’
Poor Cassie, she had sounded so irrational and so consumed with bitterness and it had made Nina realise that she didn’t want to hate Hugh’s mother. It was such a waste of emotional energy.
Not that she was setting herself up to be better than Cassie, she wasn’t. Cassie was full of warmth and fun and was so very big-hearted and engaging, and Nina envied her friend’s emotional openness.
In comparison, Nina was far too controlled. Ironically, much like her mother-in-law. Maybe that’s why they had never truly warmed to each other, they saw themselves in the other and didn’t much care for it. And wasn’t it true that sons are often attracted to women who resemble their mothers? Nina shuddered at the possibility.
‘Are you cold?’ asked Hilary.
‘No, no,’ said Nina, ‘I’m fine. It was just one of those involuntary spasms,’ she lied.
‘We always said it was someone walking over your grave when that happened,’ Hilary said absently, ‘I don’t suppose your generation believes in such nonsense.’
