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

performers strummed guitars or juggled in shop doorways; at the Carfax
crossroads, a Salvation Army band was playing carols beneath a huge
plastic Santa Claus strung high in the cold air.
Tolley found a McDonald's and hungrily devoured a cheeseburger with all
the trimmings, washed it down with a milkshake. Looking through the
plate-glass window toward the tower of Christ Church, poised like a
spaceship beyond the town hall, he thought: The hell with all the mystery;
I'm on vacation, right? He spent the next couple of hours checking off the
minor colleges he'd missed the first time around, and only reluctantly
fought his way through the crowds to the photographic shop.
When the assistant handed him the envelope, he opened it straight-away.
There were the shots he had taken at Stratford-upon-Avon, and the few of
Oxford he had taken before leaving for Steeple Heyston, but that was all.
He asked, "What about the others?"
The assistant, a teenager with streaks bleached into her hair, shrugged.
Tolley looked in the envelope, found a strip of milky film, asked her what
the problem was. She didn't know, and didn't seem to care. He waved the
ruined film, protested, "It looks like you've made some kind of mistake."
"I dunno, it's all done by computers and stuff. Maybe your camera's
broke."
"Let me speak to your manager, if you won't help me."
"She won't be in until the day after tomorrow. It's Christmas, see."
"Not really," Tolley said, but this wasn't the first time he'd come across
such wilful unhelpfulness in England. He paid and left to look for lunch.
Anger always made him hungry.

That afternoon, his stomach comfortably distended by steak and kidney pie,
his anger tempered by several pints of bitter, Tolley returned to his
hotel, intending to take a nap. But when he pushed open the door of his
room, it stuck halfway. Something was lying on the floor behind it; the
case he'd set on the folding frame. He reached around and shoved until the
door opened far enough for him to be able to squeeze through. And then the
smell hit him: a dense stench of burning, thick as molasses. Yet there was
no smoke. His case and its contents, mostly underwear, lay on the floor
behind the door, and the quilt and sheets had been pulled off the bed.
Tolley opened a window to get some fresh air, and dialled the reception
desk. His first thought was that the room had been burgled; but his camera
was sitting on the night table, next to his Walkman and Bach tapes. And
then he noticed the carpet. Scraped into the pile were the letters O and
R, linked in just the same way they had been on the Beaumont's kitchen
window. Just then the clerk answered, and Tolley set the 'phone down.
There were two explanations, he thought, as he drove the rental car up the
Banbury Road out of Oxford. Either the Beaumonts were hounding him for
whatever crazy reason, had broken into his hotel room, even bribed the
photographic shop to ruin his film . . . either that, which was so utterly
unlikely, or what Marjory Beaumont had told him was true. And he couldn't
believe that, either. But he wanted to go back to Steeple Heyston: in full
daylight this time, and preferably not alone.
Gerald Beaumont looked surprised when he opened the door, but after
Beaumont had ushered Tolley inside, his wife came out of the lounge and