blocking the door.
Afraid she’d bring the whole lot down if she tried to force her way in, she trundled her wheelie and shopping around to the main entrance, found the correct heavy iron key and let herself in.
There were no worries about wet sandy feet messing up the gleaming marble tiled floor now. It was thick with dust and there was a drift of feathers where a bird must have got in through the roof and panicked.
She gave a little shiver, hoping that it had got out again.
Everywhere was shuttered. The only light was from the open door and, as the sun slid behind the mountains, that was fading fast. Using her bag to prop the door open, she crossed to a light switch but when she flicked it down nothing happened. She tried another in case it was just a duff bulb but with the same result.
She’d remembered the house as inviting, full of light, air, laughter. She’d never given a thought to how it might be in the winter, to be alone here, but the damp chill, dark shadows were weirdly creepy and suddenly this didn’t seem such a great idea.
She could manage with candles for light—there had always been tall white candles in silver holders throwing their soft light in the evenings—but she was going to need hot water to clean the place up.
If rainwater had got into the wiring she was in trouble.
She hurried through the house opening shutters, letting in what light remained before braving the cupboard under the stairs in search of a fuse box.
There was good news and bad news. The bad news was that this had to be a regular occurrence. The good news meant that there was a torch and fuse wire on top of the old-fashioned fuse box.
More bad news was that the torch battery was on its last legs and she checked the fuses as quickly as she could, found the blown one and had just finished when the torch died. She shoved it back into place and breathed a sigh of relief as a light came on in the hall.
She carried her shopping into the old-fashioned kitchen. Someone had had the sense to leave the door of the huge old fridge open. It would need a good wash down but holding her breath in case it blew another fuse, she switched it on at the mains, still holding her breath as it stuttered before reluctantly humming to life.
Better.
She tried a tap. Nothing. The same someone had sensibly turned off the water and drained the tank.
She left the taps turned fully on and looked under the sink for a stopcock. It wasn’t there and she opened the door to the scullery.
It was a mess. Directly below the damaged part of the roof the rain had seeped down through the upper floor and the ceiling was sagging dangerously and she certainly wasn’t about to risk switching on the light.
Using the little light spilling in through the kitchen door, she picked her way across the debris to the big old sink in the corner and opened the door of the cupboard beneath it.
Something scuttled across her foot and she jumped back, skin goosed, heart pounding.
It was a mouse, she told herself. Not a spider. She’d seen a tail. She was almost sure she’d seen a tail...
Swallowing hard—and desperately trying to think why she’d thought this was a good idea—she bent down and peered into the cupboard. It was too dark to see anything and too deep for her to be able to reach the stopcock without getting down on her hands and knees and sticking her head inside. She swallowed again, knelt gingerly and, with a little squeak as her face brushed against cobwebs, made a grab for the tap handle.
She was about to give it a turn when the bright beam of a torch lit up the inside of the cupboard to reveal the thick festoon of cobwebs and a startled mouse frozen in the spotlight.
Then, out of the darkness, a man’s voice rapped a sharp, ‘Come?’
Already on edge, a notch away from a scream, she leapt back, caught her head on the edge of the cupboard and saw stars.
‘Mi dispiace, signora...’
Too damn late to be sorry...
‘Don’t dispiace me!’ Andie staggered to her feet and, hand on top of her ringing head, turned furiously on the intruder. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Oh, you’re English.’
‘What in the name of glory has that got to do with anything?’
‘Nothing. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘Epic fail,’ she retaliated gamely, but her shaky voice wouldn’t have scared the mice, let alone the man standing in the doorway, blocking out what little light there was. Half blinding her with his torch. She put up her arm to shield her eyes from the glare. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’
‘Matthew Stark.’ He lowered the torch, took a step forward, began to offer her his hand but wisely thought better of it. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on the villa for the owner.’
‘Oh? She didn’t mention you when I picked up the keys. Rosalind Marlowe is my sister.’
‘Rosalind?’
‘She prefers Posy.’ She would have cursed her sister for not warning her that she had appointed a caretaker but she’d carefully timed her arrival at her sister’s digs for the moment when she would be dashing off to warm up for the evening performance. Sisters had a way of looking at you and instantly knowing that something was wrong. ‘I’m Miranda Marlowe.’
‘Oh...’ He sighed with relief, clearly not that keen on evicting a squatter. ‘Of course. You were at the funeral. If she’d let me know you were arriving I would have come up earlier and turned on the water. Checked that everything was working.’
‘It was a last-minute decision and, since I’m the practical one in the family, she knew I could handle a stopcock—’ spiders were something else and, stepping back to let him in, she said, ‘—but knock yourself out, Matthew Stark.’
‘Of course.’ He stepped forward.
‘Don’t stand on the mouse,’ she warned.
‘You like mice?’
‘Not in the kitchen, but I don’t want to have to clean up the bloody body of one you’ve squashed with your size tens.’
‘Right,’ he said, his tone clearly that of a man who wished he’d stayed at home. ‘No squashed mice...’
That was one squashed mouse too many and her stomach heaved as he ducked beneath the sink. He immediately backed out again and looked up at her. Breathing through the wave of nausea, she was grateful for the dark.
‘You’d better turn the tap on or the air—’
‘It’s already done,’ she snapped.
‘Of course it is,’ he muttered.
He re-emerged from the cupboard a moment later with a cobweb decorating his hair, which made her feel marginally more generously disposed towards him.
They retreated to the kitchen; he brushed the dust off his hands. ‘Shall we start again? And it’s Matt, by the way. Nobody calls me Matthew.’
‘Andie,’ she replied discouragingly as the pipes began to clang and air spurted noisily from the tap. ‘How did you know I was here? Did I trip an alarm?’
‘Chance would be a fine thing. No mobile signal, no Internet. I saw the light.’
‘Very low tech.’
‘You work with what you have. We were Sofia’s nearest neighbours as we live at the edge of the village. I looked out for her.’ He looked around. ‘Are you staying here on your own?’
She recognised that his question was provoked by concern—obviously if there had been anyone else in the house they would have appeared by now—but, conscious of her isolation, she responded