"Mary Stewart - Madam will you talk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd,

Aylesbury, Bucks
ISBN 0340 01262 5
CHAPTER I Enter four or five flayers.


the whole affair began so very quietly. When I wrote, that summer, and
asked my friend Louise if she would come with me on a car trip to
Provence, I had no idea that I might be issuing an invitation to danger.
And when we arrived one afternoon, after a hot but leisurely journey, at
the enchanting little walled city of Avignon, we felt in that mood of
pleasant weariness mingled with anticipation which marks, I believe, the
beginning of every normal holiday.

No cloud in the sky; no sombre shadow on the machiolated walls; no
piercing glance from an enigmatic stranger as we drove in at the Porte
de la Republique and up the sun-dappled Cours Jean-Jaures. And certainly
no involuntary shiver of apprehension as we drew up at last in front of
the Hotel Tistet-Vedene, where we had booked rooms for the greater part
of our stay.

I even sang to myself as I put the car away, and when I found they had
given me a room with a balcony overlooking the shaded courtyard, I was
pleased.

And when, later on, the cat jumped on to my balcony, there was still
nothing to indicate that this was the beginning of the whole strange,
uneasy, tangled business. Or rather, not the beginning, but my own cue,
the point where I came in. And though the part I was to play in the
tragedy was to break and re-form the pattern of my whole life, yet it
was a very minor part, little more than a walk-on in the last act. For
most of the play had been played already; there had been love and lust
and revenge and fear and murder--all the blood-tragedy bricabrac except
the Ghost--and now the killer, with blood enough on his hands, was
waiting in the wings for the lights to go up again, on the last kill
that would bring the final curtain down.

How was I to know, that lovely quiet afternoon, that most of the actors
in the tragedy were at that moment assembled in this neat, unpretentious
little Provencal hotel? All but one, that is, and he, with murder in his
mind, was not so very far away, moving, under that blazing southern sun,
in the dark circle of
6 MADAM, WILL YOU TALK?


his own personal hell. A circle that narrowed, gradually, upon the Hotel
Tistet-Vedene, Avignon.