PROLOGUE
Katerina opened her laptop and squinted at her inbox. There was one new message, which she clicked on, but her eyesight was poor and she couldn’t read it.
Frowning, she cast around for her glasses. They weren’t on the rough wooden table, where she’d set her laptop, nor on the floor by her feet.
Muttering to herself, she rose and hurried a few paces across the flagstones. She’d kicked off her woollen slippers and the ground felt hard and chilly.
‘Ah!’ she cried triumphantly, picking up the glasses, which were lying on the stone worktop next to the sink. They were covered in smears, which she wiped on the bottom of her black skirt.
Glancing out of the little window, she noticed a mangy brown dog peeing down her pots of beloved crocuses.
‘Buzz off, you pesky mutt!’
She banged on the glass with her knuckles and the dog slunk away, but not before scratching at the ground with its back legs, kicking up dirt.
Katerina growled, a bit like a dog herself, before pushing the glasses up her long straight nose and settling down again.
A few strands of wiry grey hair escaped from her bun and she blew them off her face with one big puff, but they only settled back in the same place.
Dear Miss Papadakis…
She sniffed. Well, whoever it was had made their first error. Katerina might be a widow, but she was definitely not a ‘Miss’.
Careless of the writer not to check. People were so sloppy nowadays. But she supposed it wasn’t exactly a hanging offence. She read on…
Forgive the short notice, but I’m looking to book a villa for two weeks in May, for myself and my two children plus my friend and her two children.
We need four bedrooms minimum – one for me, one for my friend, Louise, one for our boys, age nineteen and sixteen, and one for our fourteen-year-old girls.
We just wondered, Villa Ariadne looks absolutely lovely and perfect for our needs. Is it by any chance free?
The writer went on to give her preferred dates over the half-term holiday and mentioned she’d never been to Crete before and had always wanted to visit.
Blah, blah. They were all the same, trying to wheedle themselves into Katerina’s good books, just so they could get the weeks they wanted.
The final paragraph, however, made the elderly woman pause…
My family and I have been through a difficult time and we’re badly in need of a break!
The exclamation mark struck Katerina as a somewhat clumsy attempt to lighten the sentence. She wasn’t fooled. When a woman told a complete stranger she’d been through a tough time, she was rarely exaggerating.
The writer signed off as Stella Johnston. Katerina pushed back her chair and closed her eyes. Her hand went instinctively to the right-hand pocket of her skirt, where she felt for the woollen pouch containing a miniature vial of olive oil, some dried laurel leaves and a silver pendant with a double-headed Minoan axe: her lucky talisman.
It was comforting to squeeze the pouch and feel with her fingertips for the objects inside. She took several deep breaths and tried to focus on the word ‘Stella’.
S T E L L A. She mouthed the letters, then whispered them out loud, one by one, almost reverentially, waiting for an image to form in her mind – of what, she had no clue.
At first, she could see nothing, only the letter shapes, but then gradually they started to jumble up, whirring round her brain like dirty washing in a machine: the pale-blue sleeve of a man’s shirt here, a brown corduroy trouser leg there.
The motion made Katerina feel sick and she longed for the whirring to stop. When it finally did, the letters seemed to come to a standstill right before her eyes, only they weren’t in the correct order.
Now they spelled ALTELS. Her English was good, and she was pretty sure there was no such word; it meant nothing to her.
Squeezing her eyelids tighter still, she forced herself to concentrate even harder. It made her head throb; it was quite painful.
All of a sudden, a sense of calm came over her, like a gentle breeze fanning her face and neck. She exhaled, long and slow.
‘Of course,’ she said at last, with a relieved smile. She nodded, as if in response to some comment or other, though she was quite alone. ‘Let’s wait and see.’
