Free A Murder in Tuscany by Christobel Kent Page B

raging – for some time. When a moment later Cate stepped back to the window, the woods beyond the soft semicircle of light were quite dark, and the two women were gone.
    As she stood there in the darkened room it felt to Cate as though she was marooned, the castle her chilly, unknowable island. With something like homesickness she thought of Pozzo, its avenues of dusty trees, its run-down station, its sleepy bars; she thought of her bedsit and Vincenzo on the till at the supermarket.
    Getting out her mobile, Cate gazed at the screen and its image of her and Vincenzo, little V’cenz, cheeks pressed against each other, on that outing to Rimini at the end of the summer. She knew she should phone him, but she didn’t want to get into it; she didn’t want to hear the little boy in his voice. With a dextrousness born of long practice her thumb darted across the keyboard and she flicked off a message to him. Sorry , caro, stopping at the castle tonight, they need me here . Call later?
    Because Ginevra needed her in the kitchen – she’d made sure Cate knew it too and didn’t get above her station – and dinner would be at seven. She didn’t know if she’d be eating it or serving it or both, but she had to be there; she didn’t have time to placate Vincenzo, nor to
explain the new situation to him, to talk baby talk and tell him she loved him.
    She stared at the phone, willing the message on its way: like so many things in the castle, the mobile signal was unreliable, subject to mysterious fluctuations. Message sent , it said.
    Still in darkness, the room suddenly felt cold; Cate could feel the deep chill of the castle settling in at her back. The grand, draughty apartments, the second floor where the Englishman would be sitting and staring out across the winter fields, writing nothing, and the Norwegian would be stamping around, pulling down his big old books and leaving them scattered on the floor. Tina should be hunched intently over her work table ornamenting her pots with weird things she picked up around the grounds, hairballs and dust and pins and bottletops, only she was sobbing on Michelle’s shoulder. Tina, the most private, contained person Cate had ever come across.
    It came to Cate that these people, whom she had until today lumped together as customers, another set of foreigners who would be gone in a month and never seen again, were suddenly, in the aftermath of Loni Meadows’s death, more real and distinct to her than her own family. She felt a sudden, urgent need to understand them.
    And now they’d all be converging on the great cold library that sucked all the heat from its radiators, gathering again for the aperitivo , a niggardly few bottles of prosecco, ready-mixed Campari soda and perhaps some spirits. Every night as Ginevra went into the storeroom she complained of how much the guests drank; Michelle for one might be late up for coffee, but every evening she was bang on time for the aperitivo .
    ‘I’ll brief you properly tomorrow,’ Luca had said, meeting her out of the pick-up in the dusk, a sideways glance at Mauro. They’d never really got on, she realized; like her, Luca was an outsider, and Mauro’s surly intractability didn’t yield, even under the full warm glow of his attention. As he’d watched the gardener slope off through the trees towards the shed where he kept his tools and his ride-on, Luca had looked weary in the grey light, not glowing at all. Loni Meadows’s death seemed to have crept into every corner of the place, clammy as fog.

    ‘Just – keep everyone happy, for the time being,’ he’d said in the quiet dusk. ‘I don’t know how much time I’m going to have – for all that.’ And so, reluctantly closing the door on the warm safety of her new accommodation, Cate had headed for the main keep.
    When she walked into the library there was no sign of Luca, but Per the Norwegian was there, muffled up in a padded corduroy jacket and a scarf, drinking whisky at the