"Night Warriors - 01 - Night Warriors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

Henry watched the police activity for almost twenty minutes. Then he went back into the cottage and sat down on the white-painted bamboo sofa, and stared at himself in the shiny glass door of the stereo cabinet on the opposite side of the room.

Life after death? The only life in that poor dead girl had been those wriggling eels; and what kind of life did they represent?

He thought about the morning's events and all he could see was a series of frightening still pictures. The girl's hand, clutching at the beach. The silver chain on her ankle. The whiteness of her back. Then the eels, in their complicated Chinese-puzzle pattern. And the severed head of that single captured eel, gripping the policeman's face like an ancient symbol of evil persistence.

He finished his third glass of vodka, and then tilted across to the cocktail cabinet to drain the bottle into his glass. 'Stolichnaya,' he pronounced, with what he liked to think was a thick Russian accent. Then, 'Zdarovya.'

With inebriated care, he went to the bookshelf at the end of the room, under the window, and ran his finger along the spines of all the marine books that his less-than-dear departed wife had left behind her. At last he came across a large illustrated volume entitled Anguilliformes: Migration & Life-Cycles of Common Eels. He tugged it out, took it over to the coffee-table, and opened it up.

It was the quotation on the opening page that caught his attention first of all. It said simply, The eel was eaten in olden times because it was thought to give exceptional potency. In certain parts of ancient Scandinavia, shoals of eels were described by a single mystical word which meant "sperm of the Devil".'

Henry was about to take another drink, but he paused, and read the quotation again. Then he looked towards the balcony, and out towards the beach, and frowned.



















CHAPTER TWO





Gil and Susan said very little as they drove back to Del Mar Heights Road, where Susan lived. Gil glanced across at Susan from time to time, but he could see that she was still shocked by what had happened at the beach. He was pretty queasy himself, thinking about those eels writhing silvery-black in that woman's white body, and how that policeman's face had been half bitten off.

Susan said, 'Here - here it is,' and Gil steered the shiny yellow Mustang up the steeply angled concrete driveway, and yanked up the handbrake. He hopped out of the car without opening the door, and went around to the passenger side to let Susan out.

'This your grandparents' place?' he asked her. It was a small Mexican-style house, with a balcony overlooking the garden, and rows of pink-painted arches. Three lizards watched them from the clay-tiled roof, blinking in prehistoric small-mindedness. Outside the back door there were six or seven recently watered azaleas, in terracotta pots, and matching rocking-chairs, in white-painted cane.

'Thank you for driving me home,' said Susan. 'I really felt nauseous.'

'You're welcome,' Gil told her. He nodded, and smiled, but made no immediate move to get back into his car.

Susan glanced behind her. 'I'd invite you in, but - well, my grandparents are kind of old fashioned. They'd want to know everything about what happened, you know; and right now I just don't feel like talking about it at all.'