aren’t going to faint, are you?”
She laughed, her voice sounding high and unstable even
to herself. “I feel quite drunk!” she confessed, giggling.
“Everything is going round, like a fairground.”
Marc supported her gently. “Can you walk to the car?
The road is still blocked.”
“I think so,” she said, trying to stop giggling. The road
was awash with rain, but the purple sky was now clear and
cloudless. To the east there were a few grey wisps of light,
heralding the coming dawn, but the stars still flashed, far
off, like tiny diamonds, and the moon sailed, like a slice of
lemon, above the shadowy hills.
They picked their way carefully back over the rocks
which littered the road. Marc helped her into the jeep,
climbed in and began reversing slowly, sounding his horn,
to warn anyone coming up the road behind them. At a
convenient widening he managed to turn the jeep and they
drove home fast.
Kate swayed with the movement of the jeep, her head
feeling almost loose on her shoulders. So much had
happened tonight and she had worked with such intent
concentration that she had lost sight of everything else but
the job in hand. Now the loss of a night’s sleep was catching
up with her. Her eyes were raw and dry, as if rubbed with
sand, and her throat hurt.
The greyness in the sky grew as they drove. “It will be
morning soon,” Marc murmured as they drew up outside
the villa.
Kate climbed out and stretched, yawning. Through the
trellised tunnel at the side of the house she could see the