The Final Cut

Начало книги

It was late on an afternoon in May, the sweetest of seasons in the Troodos, beyond the time when the mountains are muffled beneath a blanket of snow but before the days when they serve as an anvil for the Levantine sun. The spring air was filled with the heavy tang of resin and the sound of the breeze being shredded on the branches of great pines, like the noise of the sea being broken upon a pebbled shore. But this was many miles from the Mediterranean, almost as far as is possible to get from the sea on the small island of Cyprus.

A colony of martins tumbled through the trees like acrobats, driven desperate by the demands of the nestlings. These were good times, a season of abundance even in the mountains. For a few weeks in spring the dust of crumbling rock chippings which passes for soil becomes a treasury of wild flowers -erupting bushes of purple-flowered sword lily, blood-dipped poppies, alyssum, the leaves and golden heads of which in ancient times were supposed to effect a cure for madness.

Читать дальше →