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

You'll have a cup before you go."
"Why, thank you."
"Traffic's bad this time of night," Gerald Beaumont said as he
carefully
laid away his photograph album. "In half an hour the worst of the rush
hour will be over."
"I appreciate it. I'm still not used to driving on the wrong side of --
"
The collie, which all the while had been dozing in the corner,
scrambled
 up, looking at the door of the lounge and making a low noise that was
half-whimper, half-growl. Then there was the sound of crockery
smashing.
Gerald Beaumont hurried out, and Tolley followed.
Marjory Beaumont was standing in the middle of the small, brightly-lit
kitchen, her hand at her throat. Her husband asked what the matter was,
and she pointed at the window. Her hand trembled. Backed by night, the
glass had steamed over, and two letters were traced in the
condensation,
an O and an R linked together.
"I saw it happen," Marjory Beaumont said in a small voice. The lavender
cardigan had slipped down from her shoulders and lay on the floor. Her
husband put an arm around her, and she added, "I didn't ever think it
would come here. I'm sorry, Professor Tolley. I think you ought to go
now."
Driving back to Oxford, headlights of homeward bound commuters flashing
by
one after the other, Tolley thought that it would have been easy for
the
woman to have set the whole thing up: the story, the excuse to leave
the
room, deliberately dropping a cup and acting out a pretence of shock.
Crazy English, he would have nothing more to do with them. He lit a
cigarette and switched on the radio: the car filled with the solemn
tones
of the BBC news. Steeple Heyston, the ruins, the shadowy figure, seemed
far away.

Early the next morning, Tolley found an express photographic developer
that promised to have his slides ready that afternoon, then walked to
the
Bodleian and bought a visitor's ticket. Another quaint English
ceremony:
reading aloud, he had to swear a solemn oath not to injure any volume
or
light fires in the library. He spent a couple of hours browsing in the
local history section, utterly at home amongst the serried shelves of
leather-bound books, the little desks walled off from each other. The
librarian fetched up several accounts of the railway accident, all more
or