Free A Murder in Tuscany by Christobel Kent Page A

valleys.
    They’d come past the bend, and he’d slowed, kept to the centre of the road. Cate’s head had turned despite herself: the truck was gone, the car too. Just some churned mud and a flash of tape to show where they’d been. Without even looking Mauro had spoken contemptuously. ‘She’s not the first to take that bend too fast,’ he’d said, his jaw set as he ground the gears. ‘She won’t be the last. That’s what I said to the police.’
    ‘They talked to you?’ Cate had simultaneously tried to absorb the viciousness in his voice and to process the possibility that Mauro had been interviewed by the police. She’d doubted that they would have found the experience rewarding.

    He’d grunted. ‘Ginevra made them coffee in the kitchen so, of course, we had a chat. I’ve known Commissario Grasso since he was a boy, and the other one too.’
    Very cosy. But when Cate had arrived, they’d all pretended they didn’t know anything, hadn’t they? All right, Cate had thought, if that’s the way you want it. She’d felt that the journey might never come to an end, she might be stuck in this dirty cab with Mauro and his sweet grappa breath forever.
    ‘The car went into the river?’ she’d asked. The pick-up had slewed on the gravel as he turned on to the back drive, and Mauro had grunted an affirmative. He hadn’t spoken again.
    The boxes were stacked in the room behind her now: she’d carried them up herself. Mauro had other things to do; she wouldn’t have asked him even if he had hung around, but Luca had come out of his office to meet her and Mauro had stomped off towards the kitchen without a backward glance, leaving them to it.
    At first she’d thought it might be Mauro she saw coming up through the darkening trees, his stocky outline, hunched with temper, still in her thoughts, but quickly she saw that it could not be him. Apart from anything else, it would have been difficult for him to get around the castle to the bottom of the hill in time, even supposing he had barely paused to conduct whatever business he had in the kitchen. There were two figures, moving slowly, stopping and starting, neither with anything of Mauro’s distinctive, stamping gait about them.
    Two women, as physically unlike as two women could be. Tina, the pale-skinned girl from Florida with poker-straight, colourless hair, upright and slender to the point of emaciation, and Michelle the New Yorker, strong, muscular, fierce, her grey-blonde hair stuffed into a beanie. Michelle was wearing a parka with a fur hood, short leggings and trainers; this was her uniform. Tina was in the loose Japanese trousers she often wore – not warm enough, and they made her look even thinner; she had little flat oriental gym shoes on her feet, small like everything else about her. Her hands were in her pockets, shoulders tense. The two women leant into each other for support, an
awkward, slow-moving arrangement, neither of them constructed for co-operation, thought Cate, and they kept stopping.
    When they were less than twenty metres from the castle they stopped again, and Cate saw that it wasn’t so much that Michelle was comforting Tina, as restraining her. Tina’s movements were jerky; she was pulling at her hair. She was hysterical. Then Michelle put two arms up to Tina’s shoulders and held her still, looking into the younger woman’s face. Cate tentatively took a step closer to the window, hands up to the glass; she hadn’t turned the light on in the room yet and the two women below her were illuminated by the soft yellow of a carriage lamp attached to the wall of the castle. She could hear Michelle’s harsh accent as she said, No way, baby. It’s not your fault . Get a grip . Then Tina tilted her head sideways and suddenly she was looking straight up at the window where Cate stood.
    Instinctively Cate took a step back, but not before she saw that Tina’s face was puffy with tears; swollen as though she’d been crying – or