"Dave Hutchinson - Discreet Phenomena" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

I looked at them, trying as hard as I could to remember the tail end of yesterday evening. "Did you two
wind up sleeping with each other last night?" I asked.
Harvey looked embarrassed. Pauline stared at me. "So what?"
"I have a hangover," I told her. "Go away."
"No," she said.
"I haven't had breakfast."
"We've got breakfast." Harvey held up a thermos and a grease-smudged brown paper bag. "Doughnuts. I
finally taught Mrs. Frewin how to make them properly." He thought about it. "Well, nearly properly."
"I have a hangover," I told them again. "Go away."
"We're going to stand here, ringing your doorbell every five minutes, until you get dressed and come with
us," Harvey said.
"Jesus," I muttered. "All right. Let me put some clothes on."
"We'll come in and wait," said Pauline, obviously thinking of visiting my front room.
 "No you won't," I told her. "Wait in the car. I won't be long."
I closed the door on them.

There were a lot of stories, some of them going back centuries, concerning the relationship between the
Woods and the Dawson-Fairleighs. One story said that a hundred years or so ago a Wood ancestor had
managed to wheedle his way into the favour of the then-Earl Seldon, who had given him a loan on which the
Wood farm had stood as security. The loan had, of course, never been repaid, but successive Earls had not
bothered to foreclose on the farm because it really wasn't worth having. There were also dark rumours that the
Woods possessed some information which would terminally embarrass the Dawson-Fairleighs.
Whatever. The Wood farm had passed down through generation after generation of pillocks until it fell into
the hands of Derek, in whom all the bad Wood genes appeared to have become dominant at once.
The gene for stupidity, for instance, which gossip said dipped in and out of the family from generation to
generation. Derek was too stupid to hold his little soirees at a secret location far from home, which was how
he got caught, time after time. Doing it at eight o'clock in the morning wasn't going to fool anybody.
Driving through the village, we passed half a dozen photographers and a bunch of Azeris who claimed to
be their country's Press Association. Harvey kept his foot down on the accelerator and almost ran over the
little Frenchman who had been the last person to ask to interview Karen.
"Slow down," I said.
"I'm going to hang him up by his balls this time," Harvey vowed, snarling through the windscreen, but he
did lift his foot off the accelerator pedal fractionally.
"Who is this bloke anyway?" Pauline asked from the back seat while she loaded her cameras.
"Derek Wood," I said.
"Beg pardon?"
"Every town's got one," Harvey said. He changed gear and almost took every tooth off the gearbox.
"Geoff?"
"Derek is not a nice man," I told her.
"Three hundred years ago I'd have been able to have him hanged, drawn and quartered and the bits tarred
and nailed to the door of St. Luke's, and nobody would have been able to stop me," Harvey muttered. We
went around a bend quickly enough for me to feel the Range Rover lift fractionally off its nearside tyres.
"Derek runs dog-fights," I explained.
There was a silence from the back seat. "Oh," she said finally.
I thought about last night, wondering at which point precisely Pauline's scepticism about Harvey had
disappeared. I couldn't remember going home, or Betty ringing Last Orders, and a lot of things before that
were blurred.
"Did you tell me why you paid those students to make the corn circle?" I asked her.
"No."
"Did you tell Harvey?"