‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Nina said, ‘it wasn’t your fault. It really wasn’t.’
‘Why don’t you two take a break for a few minutes?’ Venetia called over to Nina and Cassie. ‘Or at least let me have a go at digging.’
Nina shook her head. ‘We’re okay to keep going, aren’t we, Cassie?’ she said.
‘Absolutely,’ Cassie replied. ‘Another ten minutes and we’ll have it done.’
In fact, they had it done in less time and Nina knew that they were now facing the most difficult part of what they had come here to do. Going over to Venetia, she said, ‘Are you ready, or do you want to wait a bit longer?’
Venetia held the box out for Nina to take from her so she could stand up. Once she was on her feet, she took the box back and went over to the hole. ‘It’s so much bigger than I imagined,’ she said faintly.
‘We thought the deeper the better,’ murmured Nina. She and Cassie were now standing either side of Venetia. ‘Would you like to do this part on your own?’ she asked.
Venetia nodded, her lips tightly compressed as though she couldn’t speak. Tears were pooling in her eyes and giving her the space she needed, Nina and Cassie went and sat on the fallen tree.
Her own eyes filling with tears, Nina could hardly bear to watch Venetia stoop and then get down on her knees to lowerthe wooden box, oh, so carefully, into the hole. Next to Nina, Cassie sniffed then searched her coat pockets for a tissue. Nina had come prepared, and she dug out a small packet of Kleenex from her own coat pocket and passed a tissue to Cassie.
Both dabbing their eyes and trying to blow their noses as discreetly as possible, Nina was drawn back to the day Hugh’s body had been cremated. Hilary had wanted her son to be buried, for everything to be done ‘properly’ as she saw it, but Nina had insisted that Hugh’s wishes were respected. He had made it clear from the day he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and should he not survive it, exactly how he wanted his remains to be dealt with. The service at the crematorium had been efficient and quick, perfunctory even. Hilary had hated it and had told anyone who would listen that it was simply dreadful, and Hugh had deserved better.
A week later and they assembled again, a much smaller group this time, to carry out the final part of Hugh’s wishes, which was to hire a boat from Fen Ditton, and then scatter his ashes on the River Cam. The whole thing had been rather beautiful, tranquil, and moving. The company Nina had used had organised everything, a two-hour trip with a picnic hamper and what they referred to as a water ceremony set; it included a biodegradable water urn for the ashes and flower petals for each member of the party to throw onto the surface of the water. The trip had been timed for when the sun slowly dropped from the sky and, as it set on the distant horizon, that was the exact moment Nina had cast the urn into the water. She had been told it would float for a few minutes and her eyes never once left it until she’d watched it slowly disappear beneath the surface of the water.
For once Hilary could find no fault and went as far as saying that Hugh would have approved. She was also grateful to Nina for allowing her to have some of Hugh’s ashes for her to keep. Nina could have done the same, but she hadn’t wanted to dothat; it felt too morbid. Keith had shared with Nina that Hilary kept the vial of ashes on her bedside table, next to a photograph of Hugh when he’d been a boy, so that it was the last thing she looked at before turning out the light and the first thing she saw when she woke in the morning.
‘We should take over now,’ whispered Cassie.
‘You’re right,’ Nina said, seeing that Venetia had picked up one of the spades and was beginning to shovel the earth they’d dug out back into the hole.
They went over to her. ‘We’ll do that,’ Nina said gently, ‘you go and sit down and open the hamper you put together.’
Venetia handed over the spade to her and left them to it. Together, Nina and Cassie made short work of filling in the hole, tamping the rich earth down with their booted feet, then adding a layer of leaves and twigs. Afterwards, they joined Venetia where she’d opened a bottle of champagne, and they drank a toast to Bon-Bon.
‘To the darlingest of companions,’ Venetia said before dissolving into tears, with Nina and Cassie doing the same.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
There were so many flowers in the apartment, Venetia had run out of places to put them. As kind as everyone had been to express how sorry they were about Bon-Bon, she really would have preferred to be left alone. She had felt the same when her husband, Lawrence, died four years ago.
The steady stream of neighbours calling at her door had begun late that morning. Some of them she had exchanged no more than a few words with since she’d moved in, but they had wanted her to know that they were thinking of her. One or two admitted that they wouldn’t object to a rule change and that people should be allowed to have a well-behaved pet if that’s what they wanted. Their thoughtfulness had been well-meant but just the sheer act of being polite to them had made the day even more emotionally draining than it already was.
After returning from the woods where they’d buried Bon-Bon at first light that morning, Cassie had offered to stay with Venetia, to keep her company, but she had declined the offer because she desperately wanted to be alone. As she had last night when Nina had been so reluctant to leave her. But she saw now that she’d made a mistake, for if Cassie had stayed with her, her friend would have dealt with the neighbours and the weight of their sympathy.
It was the horrible manner in which Bon-Bon died that reallyupset Venetia; it was just too awful. She couldn’t understand why he’d gone into the river; he’d never once been tempted so much as to dip a paw into the water whenever they’d walked along the bank, and in the very same spot where he’d drowned. In fact, he’d hated to be wet. Whenever she had washed him in the bath, he’d looked at her with such sad, reproachful eyes, even though she made sure the water was warm. His body would shake with disapproval at such ignominy. He would only cheer up when she was drying him with a towel and a hairdryer on a lowish setting. For some reason, he’d loved the hairdryer, perhaps because it restored him to his beautifully fluffy state.
The memories were suddenly too much for her, especially combined with the thought of how she’d dried him last night before wrapping his lifeless body in his favourite blanket and putting him in his basket. She had to fight to retain her composure, but it was no use and collapsing into the nearest armchair and covering her face with her hands, she rocked back and forth, the tears flowing. She rocked and cried, rocked and cried until her tears finally gave way to a different emotion: anger.
Anger was something she rarely succumbed to, but whenever she thought of Finlay sneaking out of her apartment with Bon-Bon and literally taking the dog to his death, she wanted to seize that boy by his shoulders and shake the truth out of him, to make him tell her exactly what had happened. Was it simply an accident, or … or had the boy forced Bon-Bon into the water? Had he imagined it would be fun to see if the dog could swim? Could a child of his young age be so sickeningly cruel?
Forcing herself to get a grip on her emotions, Venetia dried her eyes and took a deep inhalation of breath. Tormenting herself with these thoughts wouldn’t help in the slightest, Bon-Bon would still be dead, and her heart would still be broken. She had to accept that she might never know the truth.
Cassie had promised that she would try to get to the bottomof what happened. ‘It might take a bit of time,’ she’d told Venetia in the woods this morning, ‘but I’ll do my best to speak to Finlay when he and his mother have calmed down.’
Venetia found it hard to imagine Rosalyn ever calming down. After Finlay and Bon-Bon had been found, everyone had gathered in the communal hallway. For Rosalyn it should have been a moment to thank her lucky stars that her son was safe, but holding him so tightly he complained that she was hurting him, she had screamed at Emily that if Finlay had drowned as well as the dog, it would have been her fault. The colour had drained from Emily’s face, and she had fled up the stairs, her sobs loud enough for them all to hear.
‘That was unnecessary,’ Cassie had said to Rosalyn. ‘I don’t care how upset you are, you have no right to speak to my daughter that way.’
Perhaps embarrassed and not wanting to witness a scene that might turn nasty, people had drifted away, one or two giving Venetia sympathetic looks as she carried the bedraggled body of Bon-Bon upstairs to her apartment, Nina following closely behind.
The loud ringing of her phone had Venetia glancing around her for it. She eventually located it over by the kettle where she’d made herself a cup of tea but had forgotten to drink it.
