‘Of course I am. I can’t stay here.’
‘In that case, I’m coming too.’
‘No!I’m not going to ruin your future by you coming with me, you have to stay.’
‘But I don’t want to. Not without you.’
‘Don’t say that, Venetia. One person is easier to stay hidden than two. I need you to stay here and cover for me.’
She decided to humour him, if only in the hope that it would help ease his asthma attack. Agitating him would only make things worse. ‘Tell me what you’re going to do and then I’ll tell you where the tin of money is.’
His face flushed, he considered her offer for a moment. ‘I’m going to set fire to the cottage,’ he said, ‘that way it should look like Terry was drunk and set the place alight by accident.’
‘How are you going to do it?’ she demanded. ‘You’ll have to make it look realistic.’
‘I know that!’ he said with exasperation.
‘So how will you do it?’
‘If you’d shut up and give me a chance to think, I’d tell you!’
Ignoring him because she didn’t trust his ability to come up with anything convincing while he was fighting against a severe asthma attack, she said, ‘This is how I’d do it. I’d get a fire going in the grate, then I’d put the clothes horse with some shirts on it right in front of the fireplace. Next, I’d pour some beer on the hearth rug to make it look like Terry was so drunk he’d knocked the bottle over, making sure to put the empty bottle right by his hand. Then when the fire was really going, I’d push the clothes horse into it. That way it will look like a convincing accident.’
Again, he considered her words, then nodded his agreement.
And that was what they did, and when the fire in the grate was blazing fiercely and lighting up the room with its gruesome scene, Venetia pushed the wooden clothes horse into the fire. In no time, the flames had taken hold, and the shirt and underclothes were burning.
For a short while they stood and watched in fascinated horror before Venetia grabbed Lucien’s arm and yanked him away. ‘We have to get out of here,’ she urged him.
That was when Terry opened his eyes.
Chapter Forty-Five
‘Keith, you have to face this head on. Hilary is seriously unwell. She needs our help. We can’t abandon her.’
‘But as I said before, Nina, I gave her all the help I could. For God’s sake, nobody tried more than I did! How many times did you say yourself that I must have had the patience of Job? Now you’re accusing me of not doing enough, how does that work?’
‘I’m not. But neither of us has truly appreciated just what she was going through and how badly it’s affected the balance of her mind.’
‘That may be so, but if we overlooked anything it was because we were going through the same process ourselves,’ he said with a weary sigh of exasperation. ‘You lost your husband, and I lost my son. We all had shit to deal with, we still do, but for some reason Hilary’s shit is more important than ours!’
Keith was all too aware how defensively angry he was sounding, and he didn’t like it. This wasn’t him.
He’d always been Good ol’ Keith who could be relied upon to lighten the mood.
Good ol’ Keith who could put everyone at ease and smooth over any ruffled feathers.
Good ol’ self-effacing-turn-the-cheek Keith who never had a bad word for anyone.
That’s who he was! And right now, he wished he could bethat man. Because the man he had become while sitting here in Nina’s beautifully ordered apartment and enduring what felt like a personal attack, wanted to shout back at her and say that Hilary was no longer his problem.
Hardening his heart this way was a defence mechanism, he understood that, he wasn’t stupid. It was to protect himself from having to deal with any more misery. He’d borne enough and had done what anyone would probably do in his shoes: he’d walked away for the sake of his own wellbeing.
True he’d only walked away when he’d had somebody to walk to, but again, who wouldn’t when that special somebody didn’t constantly humiliate him or act as though he were to blame for everything?
He had no idea what the future held for him and Diane, but whatever it was, it sure as hell beat living with Hilary these past few years.
The only contact he’d had with Hilary recently was through his solicitor. Except you couldn’t call it contact because she flatly refused to involve herself in the divorce process. He’d chosen to hold fire for now on the legal wranglings, it was a waste of money as it was costing him a pretty penny each time his solicitor fired off a letter or email, only for it to be ignored. He’d assumed she was being stubborn by maintaining radio silence and not responding to any of the communications, either from him or his solicitor, but having listened to what Nina had just said, and he had no reason to doubt it, he had to concede that Hilary’s silence was down to her being mentally unbalanced, quite literally out of her mind.
