Beautiful People (31 page)

    "Oh dear," Emma muttered. She wasn't sure she was terribly interested. The full weight of the afternoon sun seemed to be pressing hard on her head. She longed to be somewhere cool.

    The villa before her looked, she longingly noted, very cool. It was an attractive, mellow building, a long oblong of pale-yellow stone with a red tiled roof. There were windows everywhere, at all heights, of all periods, of all sizes, and in all places. It looked as if someone had picked them up in a fistful and just thrown them at the wall.

    "He very nice. Very funny, very 'ardworking. He chef."

    Mara, Emma realised, was evidently still talking about her nephew. "But Marco, 'e work too 'ard. No time to meet right girls."

    She looked Emma up and down. Her lips pursed, and one black eyebrow raised speculatively.

    Emma felt indignant as well as hot. Mara seemed very nice, but she'd only met the woman five minutes ago. What made her think she would be interested in her nephew? Besides…

    An image of a handsome, blond boy rose and fell in her mind's eye. Briefly, Emma let herself dream, yet knowing there was no point. Orlando was in Italy, certainly, but it was a big place.

    Mara was leading her down the middle of a sunny green lawn with a leaping, foaming, scented, gloriously colourful border of roses.

    "What beautiful roses," Emma said in delight. "Do you do the garden?"

    "Gino! Yes! He has been gardener here for long time. More than thirty years. He love just roses. He say they are the queen of the flowers. He no want to plant anything else."

    Emma felt she could see Gino's point. There were brilliant roses of all colours, of pink, yellow, white, apricot, and red, and endless variations, rippling pink through purple, yellow through red. Some were classic Valentine's blooms, huge dark and velvety, each curl-edged petal distinct. Others were tumbling, old-fashioned, pink floribunda, petals tightly squished and gathered like the skirt of a ballgown. Still others, smaller and more businesslike, scurried along the ground. Others clambered the weathered stone walls, wrestling with honeysuckle. The scent, even in this hot part of the day, was powerful. Emma could imagine, in the cool of the evening, that it would be almost overwhelming.

    The rose garden gave way to a big, flat, sunny terrace in which an enormous oblong of water sat like a bright blue jewel. There were chocolate-brown recliners beside the pool, trimmed with white, each with its own matching shade. It was, Emma thought, disbelievingly, like something from a magazine.

    They had reached the villa now. Mara led the way into a big white-painted entrance hall hung with tapestries and large black paintings whose subjects were obscured by age. A flight of wide, shallow wooden steps led to a fatly railed upper landing.

    "I take you to your room," Mara said. She paused and looked puzzled. "You share with baby, no?"

    Emma nodded. "Is there a cot?"

    Mara shook her head apologetically. "No one tell me about bambino." She brightened. "But you can get one from Florence tomorrow."

    Emma swallowed. After the long trip she had just endured, a next-day journey to an unknown city for a large piece of furniture was all she needed. What the hell was the Italian for travel cot anyway?

A couple of fields away from the Villa Rosa, Richard Fitzmaurice was trying hard to enjoy his holiday. He sat beneath the big green parasol, his spare frame in its white, short-sleeved shirt and old blue trousers hunched over the dining table, a bottle of Nastro Azzuro next to him, ostensibly buried in the
Daily Telegraph.

    His surroundings were gracious. Behind Richard was the farmhouse, the aubergo as Georgie preferred to call it, with its glamorous succession of double bedrooms decorated in the best contemporary rustic-luxe manner and with adjoining bathrooms featuring powershowers. Plus the impressive lounge with denim-blue suede furniture, satellite telly, and bright contemporary paintings.

    The kitchen's highlights included a lifestyle-statement six-ring cooker, a butcher's-block-cum-champagne-bar. and a leatherbound
Visitor's Handbook
with recommendations of local eateries.

    In front of him spread the patio, clean and brilliant in the sun. At its far end was a large, round-ended swimming pool whose blue water, enlivened by gushing pumps, danced and sparkled and sent spiky reflections over the white recliners at its edge. Around the patio was a garden that went as far as the wall bordering the main road. The intense green of the lawn had surprised Richard at first, until he had spotted the twisting sprinkler that jerked back and forth like a whirling dervish.

    Yes, Richard reminded himself. He was in a beautiful house, in a beautiful country, with his wife and son, whom he loved. Even if Orlando had disappeared into his room immediately on arrival and had not emerged even for lunch. And now, thanks to the combined efforts of the Faugh males, nothing remained of the big spaghetti carbonara that Georgie, with her usual skill and resourcefulness, had whisked up. Richard tried not to give in to the sense of bitterness that swept him whenever he thought about how Hugh and Laura Faugh had hijacked his holiday.

    If Richard raised his head a fraction and looked over to the pool, he could see a darkly sunglassed Hugh, big hair glossy in the sun, stretched out in a pair of well-packed electric blue trunks on a recliner. His sons lay next to him, one reading, Richard saw, a glossy called
FHM
and the other one called
Nuts.

    They had lost no time in making themselves comfortable; they had only been in the damned place an hour.

    Hugh's big, long, trunk-like legs were slightly apart, and, like his huge, fleshy chest, covered with sun oil and black hair. He watched the shadow of Hugh's big, long arm, raised slightly in the air, juddering over the patio stone as he keyed into his BlackBerry. He was obsessed with the thing. He claimed it was full of messages from constituents, as well as, of course, those from the centre of Shadow power.

    This Richard found puzzling. Hugh's constituency was quite similar to his own. His own comprised the tenants of an impoverished Gloucestershire housing estate as well as their near neighbours in one of the Cotswolds' wealthiest villages. Only very few of either group—uneducated and poor on the one hand, elderly and conservative on the other—had the faintest idea how to send an email. Certainly not enough to keep him as busy as Hugh seemed to be, his thumbs and forefingers in a blur of almost constant movement.

    But perhaps such keenness had got Hugh where he was. If his constituents wanted to get in touch with Richard, they rang him on the telephone. Or on the mobile, as he was on holiday, but only in dire emergency would he expect any such calls now. In twenty-five years of representing his constituency, Richard could count on the finger of one hand the number of times he had been disturbed by a constituency emergency on summer holiday.

    Hugh grunted, sat up, looked around, and waved at Richard. He ambled over to where he sat, stared at his Nastro Azzuro, and boomed, "Any chance of one of those beers you've got there, old boy?"

    Richard's reply was drowned in the sudden chug-a-chug-a of a helicopter overhead. This was just as well.

Emma had just put Morning to sleep in her own bed. There was nowhere else for him to go until she could get to Florence tomorrow. Lightening her burden slightly was the fact that Mara had offered to look after Morning while she made the journey. He, at least, would be spared a long stretch in a hot bus.

    "You're sure you don't mind?" Emma had asked the housekeeper.

    "I'll only mind if you come back early," was the twinkling reply.

    Emma looked out of the window of her room. It had a view of the rose garden…

    The colours of the flowers blazed in the rich evening light beneath the still-azure sky, and the scent was as heady as a boudoir. It was a beautiful, blue and gold end to what had been a beautiful, blue and gold day. The air rang with competing birdsong, some of it surprisingly loud.

    Chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga.

    Very loud indeed. There was a thudding noise—a helicopter, Emma now realised as, suddenly and without warning, everything was plunged into sudden shadow and the black underside of some huge airborne beast suddenly appeared above the villa.

    Emma shot down the stairs and dived out of the rose garden onto the pool patio and peered up at the menace roaring above, dark and heavy, slashing violently at the air. Surely—surely—it wasn't trying to land in the garden?

    Mara appeared. She stared up at the approaching aircraft with an expression of utter incomprehension.

    The helicopter was lower now. It filled the sky; Emma could no longer see the sun for it. Where there had been birdsong and an expanse of warm blue, there was now earsplitting noise and blackness.

    Who was this idiot, who'd so spectacularly lost his way? She must stop this enormous, destructive, noisy thing from landing. She ran back on to the lawn of the rose garden, her arms waving wildly.

    "It's not a helipad!" Emma screamed, leaping up and down, trying to spot a pilot, a passenger, someone behind the expanse of impassive black plastic covering the front of the helicopter. She couldn't see anyone; could they see her? Could they see anything?

    "The rose garden!" Mara yelled, as the scented air was smashed and sliced by the deadly whipping blades. Emma ducked and ran towards the villa, not just her ears but her entire body full of the hideous screaming of the engine.

    It was incredible, but it actually was happening. The helicopter really was landing in the rose garden. Right in the middle of the path. The heads of the blooms were being pulled into the air, sucked into the blades, mashed by slashing lengths of metal. And now the blades were slowing down, the machine subsiding—and not a single rosehead remained.

    The silence that now flooded Emma's ears was as violent and absolute as the noise had been. Not a bird could be heard.

    As for the garden, that beautiful rose garden, full of colour and scent and movement…

    Shattered petals plastered the front of the helicopter. The grass beneath it was gouged and black: churned, torn, and crushed as the beast had juddered in landing. All that love, Emma thought, all that care and time, all the planting, weeding, spraying, watering, all the pride, joy, and knowledge that the unknown Gino had put into creating this beautiful garden. All destroyed in an instant.

    Emma rarely got angry, but a terrible rage filled her now. Whoever was in that helicopter, whoever it was who had done this horrible thing, they were going to hear exactly what she thought of them.

    The helicopter door now slid back. A woman emerged. Emma started forward, her anger hot on her lips, but then she fell back.

    The woman was blonde and held a small dog. Her platinum mane blazed white in the sun as she shook it out. Shadowy caves shifted beneath her cheekbones. She wore a tight, short black dress, bright red lipstick, and huge black glasses.

    "Well don't just stand there," Belle exclaimed angrily to Emma. "I've got a cockpit full of luggage here."

    "You've ruined the rose garden," Emma stammered.

    "Oh, did I?" Belle looked about her and surveyed the devastation. Not a muscle of her face moved. She looked back at Emma. "You're sure that was me?"

    "Quite sure."

    "Never mind," Belle beamed. "It'll grow back."

The Italian landscape, in which Darcy had so delighted before, now seemed to flash past her as in a dream. All she was conscious of was Christian. His watch, which was thick and large and had tiny diamonds round the face, flashed in the sun as his muscled arms changed position on the Ferrari's padded leather steering wheel.