Free A Murder in Tuscany by Christobel Kent

though there was a great weight on him, bearing down. Months of tension; months of waiting for it to lift, when they got the all-clear, but then there was always something else. Another test in eighteen months, then two years. Had he thought it would bind them, this fear? It hadn’t.
    ‘Sandro,’ said Giuli, ‘what’s this all about?’
    He raised his face to hers, saw the worry in her eyes and out it came.
    ‘New York?’ said Giuli, incredulously. ‘Luisa, in New York? You never said.’
    ‘I didn’t know,’ said Sandro, then hurriedly, ‘I guess it was lastminute. Maybe – someone else dropped out.’
    ‘Look,’ said Giuli, and he could see in her eyes she knew what he was thinking. Or did she know something else? ‘I can handle this. You need to go home and talk to Luisa.’ She stared at him, glanced over at Carlotta in the corner. ‘I can handle this. You know I can. She’s going Sunday night? You’d better sort this out, Sandro.’
    He gazed at her, knowing when he was beaten.
    ‘Go home.’

Chapter Six
    S HE SAW THEM COMING up through the woods in the fading light; at first she didn’t know who she was looking at, just the slow-moving outline of something denser than the leafless trees.
    It was an unfamiliar angle, the view down the hill through the woods; Cate might have been in the little room behind the gatehouse once or twice, but she wouldn’t have had time to stand at the window gazing. In the summer, the leaf canopy would have made the dense woodland impenetrable and you might come right up to the castle unnoticed. On a winter evening the effect was no less spooky, though; the screen of spindly, leafless limbs made Cate’s eyes ache the longer she stared at it.
    The room was smaller than she remembered it, and the woods were closer. Its smell was a layering of wood, red cotto wax and disinfectant; an anonymous smell. She’d make it her own; it wouldn’t be the first time.
    Mauro had taken the long and ugly route to Pozzo, using the dual carriageway. Cate only realized later, when they came the usual way, that he’d been avoiding the crash site. There were plenty of things that weren’t occurring to Cate today; she felt slightly stunned, on autopilot.
    It hadn’t taken her long to clean out her bedsit over the biker bar; half a dozen books, some clothes, a couple of pots. Her radio, which
doubled as a speaker for her iPod. She shouldn’t have been surprised by how little affection she felt for the place; it was so easy to say goodbye. But then that was Cate all over, her mother would say. Drifter. She knew she should speak to Vincenzo; she could have called in on him at the supermarket, only Mauro was waiting for her. That was her excuse, anyway; she’d call him – later. When she’d got back to where she’d left him and the pick-up, she’d found it empty but unlocked, and started loading alone. When Mauro had reappeared, close to ten minutes later, she’d been on her knees in the back, sorting stuff, and hadn’t seen what direction he’d come from. He’d looked flushed.
    ‘Where’ve you been then?’ Cate had said, never one to mince her words. He might have nipped off for a quick coffee, but his general air of shamefacedness had told a different story. ‘One for the road?’
    He’d drawn himself up stiffly. Mauro was a countryman, through and through, and old-fashioned: he didn’t like lip from girls.
    ‘You done?’ was all he’d said, roughly.
    Once back with him in the stifling cab of the pick-up, though, breathing in sweat and stale cigarettes, Cate had kept quiet. She didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Mauro, particularly not when he was at the wheel. She’d been driven by him on several occasions, and his style was forceful and headlong, rarely braking on roads he must have known his whole life. And now the light had been leaching out of the sky, the sun close to the horizon and the road ahead of them grey and indistinct, especially in the