‘Very useful. To be honest, although I call Rita my cousin, she’s actually the daughter of one of my cousins – does that make her my second cousin? – and I haven’t seen her for years. The last time I saw her was at her mother’s funeral nine or ten years ago – she lived on Elba and the funeral was held there. Rita lost both her parents to cancer in the space of a few months, and we’ve rather lost touch since then. I knew she was living on the island so I gave her a call, and she’s been very helpful.’
‘Excellent. You said next month. Any dates in particular?’
‘July and August are always very busy, but the first week of June – before the schools break up – should be a lot less frenetic than high summer.’
I had already come across the phenomenon of the Italian summer holiday. Many businesses close down completely for weeks in summer – particularly in August – and holiday resorts can get seriously overcrowded – without even starting to factor in the millions of visitors from overseas. Early June sounded great. ‘I’ll have to check with work, but I’m pretty sure I can take a week off, and obviously, I’ll need to check with Anna, but hopefully, things will have quietened down for her as well by then.’ I thanked him for the invitation and told him I’d get straight back to him once I’d spoken to her.
Of course, this would mean closing the doors of Dan Armstrong Private Investigationsfor a week, seeing as Virgilio’s wife, Lina, was my sole employee, and we would both be away at the same time. Lina acted as my PA, receptionist, telephonist, keeper of the diary, occasional dog walker, and was generally responsible for the office and what happened there. A quick phone call confirmed that she could easily rearrange things for me so as to free us both for the first week of June, so I phoned Anna at home to see how she felt about it. She’s a lecturer in medieval and Renaissance history at Florence university and I knew that the academic year would be coming to an end pretty soon. When I floated the idea of Elba past her, she sounded very keen and confident she could get the time off. But then she came up with an idea of her own.
‘While on the island, it would be fun if we were to do a windsurfing course. How’s that for a suggestion? I’m sure you’d love it.’
I hesitated, telling her I’d think about it, while Oscar and I completed our walk.
The reasons for my hesitation were twofold. First, I was born and bred in London and, although I’d learned to swim in the local public pool, I had little experience of the open sea and none whatsoever of sailing in any of its iterations. Secondly – and secretly this was the one that worried me the most – I would be fifty-eight in a month’s time and I wasn’t sure that taking up a new and probably energetic hobby at my ripe old age was to be recommended.
I glanced down at Oscar again. He was standing patiently at my feet with an old vine root in his mouth, clearly waiting for me to throw it for him to retrieve. What Virgilio had said about the hotel having its own private beach would suit my big, black Labrador perfectly. I might be a bit hesitant about splashing around in the sea but I knew that Oscar, given the opportunity, would love it.
I reached down, took the gnarly lump of dark-brown wood from Oscar’s mouth and flung it as far into my neighbour’s olive grove as I could. As he scampered off to collect it, I looked around and found myself smiling appreciatively. My little house in the hills to the southwest of Florence is set in some spectacular scenery. All around me were vineyards with row after row of vines laid out with mathematical precision and olive groves where the dusty leaves of century-old trees provided dappled shelter from the warm, Tuscan sun. Today had been hot for mid-May and even now, at six o’clock in the evening, the shade was welcome. For me and for my dog.
Thought of the time reminded me that Anna was doing a risotto, and I had been warned on pain of death not to be late. Anna and I had been living together for a year now, and things were going really well between us. Following the break-up of my marriage a few years back, and my radical decision to move from London to Tuscany, things had been looking up for me, and Anna was one of the best things to happen to me for a long time.
My thoughts were interrupted when Oscar burst out of the undergrowth in front of me, bearing the root proudly in his teeth. As I took it from him, I caught his eye.
‘And you’re one of the best things to happen to me as well, Oscar.’
He wagged his tail, but he was clearly far more interested in the vine root.
I patted his head. ‘And now, dog, we need to get home for dinner.’
Without hesitation, he immediately turned and started trotting back downhill again. When it comes to food, his linguistic ability is second to none – and that’s in Italian as well as English.
By the time we got back home, I had made up my mind. I went over to where Anna was stirring the risotto and kissed her on the back of the neck.
‘Elba it is. And if you’re serious about the windsurfing, I’m prepared to give it a go.’
She turned towards me and beamed, repeating what she’d said before. ‘You’ll love it, I’m sure.’
She might be sure, but I wasn’t. I intercepted a sceptical look from Oscar that said quite clearly that he wasn’t so sure either. Still, I told myself, it would give Anna and me some time together away from our busy working lives, and that had to be a good thing – as long as I didn’t drown in the process.
2
SATURDAY 2 JUNE
The drive from Florence that Saturday was uneventful and we took the three o’clock ferry from the port of Piombino to Elba. The island was clearly visible from the mainland as a dark-green, seriously hilly lump sticking up from the deep blue of the pleasantly calm sea. It took barely an hour to get us and a boatload of other vehicles across to Portoferraio, the main town of the island. As we pulled in, Anna the historian pointed out an elegant, cream-coloured villa on the promontory at the entrance to the harbour. This charming, large building, with what looked like an equally lovely garden, had been where Napoleon had been sent in exile. He had subsequently escaped and started up the war again, but, from what I could see, it struck me that settling down here to a peaceful life would have been far more sensible and enjoyable – but dictators do what dictators do.
Portoferraio was a bustling little place built around a horseshoe-shaped bay that formed a perfect natural harbour. Yachts of all sizes, ranging from economy to luxury, including some larger cruise ships, were moored up all the way around the bay, and much of that was lined with three- and four-storey buildings in a delightful mixture of white, cream, ochre and pink colours. Behind these, the ground sloped sharply upwards and the hills behind the town were dotted with red-roofed houses. Close to the ferry port, I was delighted to see a number of fishing boats with people working on and near them. Although tourism had taken over as the main business of the island, at least there appeared to be a healthy fishing fleet still here – and that boded well for some good meals.
It was barely a twenty-minute drive from there to our hotel on the coast not far from the chic resort of Porto Azzurro. Although we were on a main road, in places, it was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, and I rapidly discovered that the drivers of the island’s buses felt that they had priority over everybody else. Nevertheless, we got to our destination safely just after four-thirty and checked in.
Hotel Augustus was a charming boutique hotel only a stone’s throw from the sea. It would normally have been far from cheap, but Virgilio’s cousin hadn’t been exaggerating when she had told him she could offer us a great deal. The building itself was relatively modern and not of great architectural interest, but its location right on the coast overlooking the sea was delightful. The hotel was on the outside edge of the picturesque village of Santa Sabina sull’Elba, where sun-bleached pink and ochre houses clustered around an ancient, white church that was almost dwarfed by a pair of magnificent umbrella pines that looked even older than the church.
Virgilio’s cousin, Rita, was behind the reception desk and she greeted him and the rest of us warmly. She introduced us to the owner, an elderly gentleman called Signor Silvano, who came out of his office, shook our hands, patted Oscar on the head, and then immediately went outside for a smoke. Rita was probably in her mid or late thirties, and she told us that she had been born in the nearby village and she loved the place. By the sound of it, old Signor Silvano had more or less handed over management of the hotel to her, and she was clearly enjoying being almost her own boss.
The first thing we did after getting to our rooms was to change into our swimming things and head for the beach. The grounds of the hotel ran right to the clifftop and included a tiny private cove with a strip of sand little more than the size of a tennis court. Access to it was via a sloping path that zigzagged its way down the steep, rocky hillside between two vertical cliffs that looked as much as ten metres high or even more. The water was crystal clear and I spotted flashes of silver as shoals of little fishes flitted about. It looked as though the seabed shelved steeply until it disappeared into the deep blue of the Mediterranean, or, to be precise, the Tyrrhenian Sea. The water by the shore was an amazing translucent aquamarine colour and we could clearly make out darker patches of weed or rocks on the bottom far below. It was a delightful sight.
We were making our way down the path when a man came running up it. As he approached us, I could hear him panting with the exertion – and on a boiling-hot summer day like this, I wasn’t sure this was a sensible thing for him to be doing. As he barged past, it was immediately clear that this was no jogger out for a run. This guy was probably almost sixty like me and he was clearly out of condition. He was wearing a pair of garish, red and orange, Hawaiian-style swimming shorts and his flabby stomach bounced about as he ran. His face was even redder than his shorts and, from the expression on his face, he was either terrified or furious with somebody or something. Whatever it was that had bugged him, I hoped it wasn’t going to give him a coronary.
Virgilio turned and surveyed the man’s retreating figure as he disappeared up the path, before catching my eye.
