The Villa in Italy: Escape to the Italian sun with this captivating, page-turning mystery. Elizabeth Edmondson

Чтение книги онлайн.

       ONE

      The mattresses of Delia’s girlhood had all been uncomfortable. Her austere father was a great believer in very firm mattresses; he slept with a sheet of wood beneath his own mattress; and urged the rest of his family and staff to do the same. ‘With a hard bed, the body relaxes, not the mattress.’

      The mattresses at her Yorkshire boarding school had been thin, lumpy and set on a sagging mesh of strings; those at Girton College, Cambridge, were likewise meagre and designed to keep your mind on higher things than bodily comforts.

      Which had left Delia a connoisseur of mattresses, and the one on Beatrice Malaspina’s bed was perfect, neither too hard nor too yielding; hooey to her father and his theories of relaxation. Nothing could be more relaxing or comfortable, and when she awoke to the sound of birdsong outside the windows, and saw sunlight filtering through the shutters, it was after a deep and untroubled night’s sleep, a rarity for her this winter, cursed as she was with bronchitis.

      She slid out of bed and padded across the smooth dark red tiles to the windows: long, double windows stretching almost from the ceiling to the floor. She pulled them open and struggled for a few moments with the shutters before she found the catch and pushed them back against the walls.

      Warm air drifted in as she stepped out on to a small terrace. The searing wind had gone, leaving only a slight breeze to make ripples on the red sand, warm and scrunchy under her bare feet.

      Delia blinked at the unaccustomed brightness. It was too early in the morning for the sun to be high or hot, but there was a dazzling quality to the light that made her catch her breath. She looked out over a garden, once formal, now sadly overgrown, and saw a silvery gleam in the distance. It took her a few seconds to realise what it was. The sea! So the villa was on the coast.

      Crashing sounds came from next door, and Jessica’s tousled head looked out of an adjacent window. ‘I say, you’ve got a balcony,’ she said.

      Her head vanished, and then she was calling out to Delia from the door of her room.

      ‘Come out here, quick,’ Delia said. ‘You don’t want to miss a minute of it.’

      They stood together, leaning on the stone balustrade and gazing out at the green and blue and silver vista.

      Jessica let out a long sigh. ‘Heaven,’ she said. ‘Pure heaven. And can you hear Chanticleer out there?’

      The vigorous cock crows mingled with the sonorous dong of a bell marking the hour.

      ‘Was that seven strokes? Oh, the air is so fresh it almost hurts to breathe.’

      ‘I do so hope this is the Villa Dante,’ Delia said. ‘We might find we have to decamp to a crumbling old house with no view and bedbugs in the mattresses.’

      ‘I hadn’t thought about bedbugs,’ Jessica said. ‘Still, no itchy bits this morning, and the bedrooms are quite up to date. It could have been all decayed fourposters with mouldering curtains, instead of which we get stylish art deco.’

      ‘The villa is old, though. Eighteenth-century, wouldn’t you think?’

      ‘Don’t ask me. Could be that, or older, or built fifty years ago. I think Italians, having found the kind of house they like, just go on building them. I’m going to get up, and let’s see what we can do about breakfast.’ Then, suddenly alert, ‘What’s that?’

      Delia, lost in the view, came to. ‘Did you hear something?’

      ‘I think it was the gate. Hang on, we should be able to see it from one of the other rooms.’ She vanished, then called across to Delia. ‘A stout party in black coming up towards the house. At a guess, I’d say a servant.’

      Delia didn’t want to greet the new arrival in her nightclothes, so she hurled herself into the bathroom that led off her bedroom, a huge and marbled affair, with, however, no more than a trickle of water coming out of the substantial taps. Five minutes later, she was washed and dressed and running down the stairs, clutching a red clothbound book. She caught up with Jessica, who was still in her pyjamas.

      Voices were coming from the kitchen quarters. Delia pushed open the door, and there was the woman in black talking at great speed and at the top of her voice to a harassed-looking man with snow white hair and a wrinkled, deeply tanned face.

      ‘Buon giorno,’ Delia СКАЧАТЬ