"Paul J. McAuley - Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Room
to a ward, her husband following the porter who wheeled her stretcher
towards the elevators, Tolley asked at the desk whether he could get
something to eat, and was directed through a long hall and up a flight
of
stairs to a snack bar set up in the blind end of a corridor. But the
cheese roll sat like a cannonball in his stomach, and the coffee,
faintly
greasy and with grains of undissolved powdered milk floating on the
surface, was undrinkable.
He sat for an hour at the little Formica table, listening to the
chatter
of the people around him but not taking any of it in. Once, he absently
traced the letters OR in spilled sugar grains, then hastily erased
them.
The mark had been all over the kitchen, scraped in pools of flour and
salt
on the floor, in drying tomato sauce (they'd first thought it was
blood)
on the appliances and on the windows. Whatever had done it seemed to be
 single-mindedly trying to communicate something. Someone's initials?
Its
own? At any rate, Tolley no longer believed that the Beaumonts had
anything to do with the disordered state of his hotel room. It was
something else.
At last, Beaumont, his face stiff and pinched, pushed through the swing
doors; Tolley stood and met him halfway. "How is she?"
"Sleeping now. They gave her something."
Tolley said, as they walked towards the exit, "Do you know what
happened?"

"She said that she thought she glimpsed someone through the kitchen
window, but she can't remember anything after that, next to waking up
in
the hospital."
"Who? A man?"
"She can't remember, and I didn't press her. She needs her rest."
"I'm sorry."
"There was something else. Just as she was drifting off, she said
something, a name. Orlando Richards. Mean anything to you?"
"O R!"
"That's what I thought. And then she said, 'One wants rest, the other
worse."
Tolley held the door for Gerald Beaumont before following him into the
parking lot. The air was cold and dark; sodium streetlights dropped
pools
of orange light amongst the rows of parked cars. Tolley said, "I
remember
your wife saying that the woman is stronger, when it comes to ghosts,
but