"Ken MacLeod - The Highway Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

big window to the right of the door. I glanced inside the room behind the
empty window, just to check. A rotting sofa against the far wall, a coffee jar,
a mouldy mug. No dangers there. I looked down at the window frame.
Above the cracked wood and blistered paint there was maybe half an inch
of glass. It was the same all around the frame. The glass had been cut out.
I moved to the window on the other side—another empty room, with a
plastic chair in the middle of the floor—and found the same. Farther around
the house was the wee window of the downstairs lavvy. Half an inch of
frosted glass along all four sides of it.

I crunched through frosty bracken and nettles, put my foot on the
sagging wire of the fence, and hopped into the next empty house. Same
deal with the windows.

“Someone’s cut out all die glass with a glass cutter,” I said, back at
the lorry.

“’With a glass cutter’!” Euan mocked. “Whatever next?”

“Why would anybody bother?” I asked. “They could buy all the glass
they wanted in Inverness.”

“To save themselves the drive to Inverness,” said Murdo.

“We’re wasting our time here,” said Euan.
 “We can spare a minute,” I said. I turned and walked to the fifth house
along. It was smaller than the others and had no garden. The front-room
window was cut out just like the others. In the room was a bedstead up
against the back wall. It didn’t look like it had been a bedroom. I imagined a
sick person lying there, gazing out.

Gazing out. Suddenly it hit me that I’d been looking at this the wrong
way. Really looking the wrong way. I stepped to the door and pushed. It
swung open. Inside I found a narrow hallway with stairs a few steps ahead.
There were a lot of scratches on the walls and the banister, and on the floor
leading into the room. When I looked through, I saw that the scratches led
straight to the legs of the bedstead.

The bedstead had been dragged in. When the floor was bare after
the carpets and everything else had been taken from the house.

I sat down on the creaking springs and looked out the empty window.
I could see the road and a low dry-stone wall. A patch of overgrown grass
on the other side. Then the moor behind it and the hills in the far distance.
Long shadows of short fenceposts. That frozen yellow grass across the
way would be a sweet green meadow in the spring and summer. The wild
sheep would come down from the hills and eat it. Them or the deer. The
deer would be way down the hills now, off the moors and into the glens.

“Got ya!” I said to myself. I was out the door and across the road in a