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

Abruptly, Marjory Beaumont got to her feet. "I'll make another pot of tea.
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
less confirming Marjory Beaumont's confabulation, and Tolley ordered
references to the history of Steeple Heyston as well. It had been
mentioned in the Domesday Book, but had seemingly declined in population
ever since, a process Tolley's ancestors had speeded up by shrewd use of
the enclosure acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, Steeple Heyston was no more than a
hamlet dependent upon a small paper mill; then there had been the fire
Gerald Beaumont had mentioned, the beginning of the end. The last cottage
had been demolished after the Second World War, although the church was
still occasionally used.
Tolley pocketed his notes and joined the press of laden shoppers slowly
swirling past long lines waiting for double-decked buses. Street