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‘You know, back to nature and whittling... I happened to mention that I ran away there once.’
He closed his eyes, waiting for her wrath, but all he got was a squeeze of his arm.
‘Oh, God, I can’t tell you how... That’s marvellous!’ She beamed. ‘What are we waiting for?’
He nodded down at her feet.
‘Oh, yes.’ She ran across the room, shoved her feet in a pair of sandals and was at the door before him.
She struggled to protect her hair form the updraft from the helicopter as it landed.
‘Right!’ he yelled over the din. ‘You get that this can only take us to the...well about a mile off the cabin? But the forester leaves a four-wheel drive in the shed there and he’d left the keys in the ignition for us.’
She nodded and ducked her head as she ran behind him.
Inside she put on the mufflers and sat silently trying not to allow the lurid scenarios in her head to take root. A few minutes in, she became aware of the conversation between Ezio and the pilot.
‘Will the rain storm stop us landing?’
Ezio shook his head and spoke into his ear piece. ‘No problem,’ he said, seeing no point in adding that the road to the cabin might be more of a problem, and taking comfort from the fact that the last time it had been washed out was ten years ago.
By the time they landed, the rain was falling horizontally. She had imagined Greece to be a dry place; she’d not seen anything this bad since she and Sam had tried camping in the Lake District.
‘What if we don’t find him?’
‘We will, and you’re not going fall apart.’
She looked up at him and smiled. ‘No, I’m not, I’m a little trooper,’ she mocked.
‘No, you’re a wonder of a woman,’ he contradicted her, before immediately transferring his attention to the map on his phone. ‘The four-wheel drive should be fifty yards that way,’ he said when they landed.
It was.
‘Right, this might be a bit bumpy.’
She flashed him a tense grin. ‘Don’t worry about me!’
Theos, but he did; the self-denial seemed futile at the point when he would have walked through a sea of sharks to protect her, and any attempt on his part to deny the fact was by that point redundant.
‘Right,yineka mou, hold tight.’
Tilda did. The white-knuckle ride lasted what seemed like an age but was probably in reality less than fifteen minutes. At times it seemed as if they were driving along a river bed and there had been some drops that she coped with by simply closing her eyes.
Finally, the cabin came into view—a lot less primitive than it had seemed in her mind.
‘There are no lights,’ she observed fearfully. It might be the afternoon but the storm had turned the sky night-dark.
‘There is no electricity,’ he told her as he pulled up in the gravelled parking area that was now a small pond.
She clambered out before he come to help her, landing up to her ankles in water. She sensed him at her side as she ran up to the front door.
Calling her brother’s name, she rushed in, pausing as behind her she heard the hiss of flame as Ezio lit a lantern.
‘He’s not here!’
But something was... She watched as Ezio went across to the table where there stood a large bunch of red roses and a champagne bottle inside an ice bucket, against which was propped a note.
Ezio held it up, his eyes scanning the single page of writing.
