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

-- you can just run away. We have to live with whatever it is you've
disturbed."
"Me? I didn't do anything but come here."
"Aye, well," the man said truculently.
"Look, if you go to a priest and tell him your wife was attacked by a
ghost, do you really think that he is going to believe you, in this day
and age? Let it go, Mr Beaumont," Tolley said, and unlocked the car.
During the fifteen-minute drive back to South Heyston, the two men hardly
exchanged a dozen words. Gerald Beaumont's silence was downright
accusatory, but rather than guilt, Tolley felt a growing anger. Why should
it have anything to do with him? He didn't choose his ancestors. Marjory
Beaumont was the believer, not he: why should he be blamed? Still, outside
the cottage, he was moved to ask, "Will you be all right?"
"Leave it be," Beaumont said shortly, and got out of the car, then dipped
his head and added, "Maybe without you, things will calm down." Then he
shut the door firmly, before Tolley could reply.

One wants rest, the other worse. It ran through Tolley's head like
maddening jingle as he drove back to Oxford. Worse, presumably, meant
revenge. It had torn up his room, let him know its name through Marjory
Beaumont . . . and next? The best thing to do would be to leave for London
a day early; surely he would not be followed there.
But at the hotel Tolley was unwilling to return to the menacing disorder
of his room. He took an early supper in the dining room, lingered over a
couple of scotches at the bar. But at last he could put it off no longer;
he had to pack, and if he didn't make a move he wouldn't find a room in
London in time. The noise of the key turning in the lock of the door to
his room was loud in the deserted corridor. He waited half a minute, then
pushed the door open.
He had a nasty moment groping for the light switch, remembering an
account, surely the world's shortest ghost story, of how someone had
awoken with a start and groped for matches to light a candle . . . and
felt something place them in his hand. The light came on.
The room was as it should have been: his case on its stand, the bed-covers
neatly stretched over the mattress, one corner turned back and a chocolate
mint wrapped like a gold medallion on the plumped pillow. Of course, the
maid had been in. Even the initials scraped into the carpet pile had been
erased by vacuuming. He crossed to the bed and picked up the 'phone to
call the desk.
And, twenty minutes later, set it back angrily. He had tried to get a room
in the hotel he'd booked for tomorrow: no luck. And no luck either at the
half dozen others he'd tried. The desk clerk had suggested that he try a
bed-and-breakfast place, and Tolley had lost his temper.
"I want proper accommodation, not someone's second-best bedroom. Why is
that such a problem?"
"It's Christmas, I'm afraid, sir."
"Don't tell me," Tolley said, "no room at the inn." And slammed down the
'phone. Well, perhaps he'd be safe here. He checked that the window was
locked, and went down to the bar, spent a couple of hours in conversation
with a married couple from Idaho -- she had majored in architecture, and