LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      La mujer sin hombre es como el fuego sin leña.

      Woman without man is like fire without wood.

      THERE were nights when Liz couldn’t sleep.

      Memories…regrets…doubts…unfulfilled longings…elation at breaking free…panic at her recklessness; all these fizzed about in her brain, like the firecrackers the village boys let off in the street on fiestas, and made sleeping impossible.

      When this happened she would get out of bed, make a mug of herb tea and, unless it was raining, which was blessedly seldom in this benign climate, climb the outside staircase to the flat roof where she dried her laundry and sunbathed.

      One night she was up there, gazing at the moonlit mountains surrounding the valley, when she was startled by noises. They came from the big house that had its front door on the next street up the hillside on which the small Spanish village of Valdecarrasca was built.

      Named after the fig tree in a corner of its walled garden, the big house was called La Higuera. Its rear windows overlooked the rooftops of the terrace of much smaller houses on the street below, where Liz lived. But as La Higuera had been empty since her arrival, six months ago, she had almost forgotten that, some day, its owner would return and her flat roof would no longer be as private as it had been up to now.

      The first intimation that someone had arrived was the rattling sound of the persianas being rolled up, releasing a glow of light from each of the ground-floor windows.

      Liz’s instinctive reaction was to leap up from the lounger, hurry down the staircase and disappear into her house before anyone at La Higuera noticed her.

      Standing in her unlighted kitchen, she waited to see if the blinds hiding the upstairs windows of the big house would be rolled up. It might not be Cameron Fielding, the owner, who had arrived. Sometimes, she had been told, he lent the house to his friends.

      To many of the foreigners living in or around the village, Cameron Fielding was a household name. Liz had never heard of him until she started living in Valdecarrasca. Nor, from what she had been told, did she like the sound of him. However, being a fair-minded person, she took some of the more scandalous stories with a pinch of salt.

      Whoever it was who had arrived at La Higuera must have come without Alicia being notified, she thought, as she watched and waited.

      Alicia was the portly Spanish lady paid a retainer to keep an eye on the house while it was empty, and to air and clean it before anyone used it. According to village rumour, she was supposed to do this once a month so that it was always in order. In practice, so Liz had heard, she did it only a day or two before Mr Fielding or his guests were expected.

      This time, it seemed, she had been caught napping. To Liz’s certain knowledge, Alicia had not set foot in the place for months, which meant that every horizontal surface would be thick with dust and the rooms would have a musty smell.

      Wondering if tomorrow Alicia would find herself out on her ear, Liz saw one of the upstairs persianas being hauled up by the stout tape that reeled the slats into a box at the top of the window. Many village houses, including her own, still had the old-fashioned wooden-slatted blinds that were pulled up by cords into a roll that remained visible. But La Higuera had been altered and modernised.

      The person who had lifted the blind was a man but, because he was silhouetted by the lights in the room behind him, all she could see was that he was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair. In fact he looked like a Spaniard. Although many of the elderly locals were short and often bandy-legged, owing to an inadequate diet in the years when Spain was a poor

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