"Pawson, Stuart - Some By Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pawson Stuart)

Chapter 1

The ferocity of the blast shocked him. He'd barely started to stuff
the burning newspaper under the door when, with a roar like a jet
engine, a blade of flame scythed his feet and hands, sending him
staggering backwards down the stone steps and out on to the pavement.
His gloves and plimsolls were on fire, his bare ankles stinging with
pain. He jumped up and down in a wild dance, slapping the flames until
they were extinguished, and swung a still-smoking leg over the Claud
Butler racing bike that had cost him most of his first year's grant.
Panic is a defence mechanism given to us by nature, in spite of
protestations that we should never succumb to it, and it had served him
well. The paint on the door was already bubbling with heat and the
glass panel cracking as he turned out of the cobbled street and on to
the main road, expertly spinning the pedals to locate his toes in the
clips.

Duncan Roberts was twenty years old, a student of chemistry at Leeds
University, and in trouble. Correction. He had been in trouble. Now,
hopefully, his tribulations were behind him. He snicked the Derailleur
gears up five sprockets and stood on the pedals, swooping down towards
the city centre on the traffic-free road, the cool morning air chilling
the sweat of fear that had drenched him in that terrifying moment when
it looked as if his well-laid plan had gone wrong.

He was behind with his rent, his studies and his overdraft, but so were
most of his friends. They survived by bumming meals and beer, dos sing
on floors and copying each other's lecture notes. Then Melissa, his
girlfriend, had announced that she was pregnant.

"A hundred quid," she'd said.

"A hundred quid!" he'd echoed. "Where do you think I'll get a hundred
quid? Can't you get rid of it, you know, locally, sort of thing?"

"Get real, Duncan. I'm not having some old biddy poking a coathanger
up me, and I'm not drinking a bottle of gin while sitting in a bath
holding a nutmeg between my knees. There's this place, like a clinic,
where someone I know went. It's in London. What with the fare and a
room for the night it'll cost a hundred pounds, and that's all I'll
settle for, so you'd better get used to it."

Duncan glanced over his shoulder to check for traffic and made a
sweeping right turn across the empty junction that took him into
Buslingthorpe Lane. He stopped once, to dump the empty petrol bottle
in a litter bin, then chased his shadow, flickering and dancing over
cobbles and kerbs, back to student bed sit land via a maze of streets
of blind terraced houses. The only other people he saw were
early-morning dog-walkers and muscle-bound paper-boys, cursing the
advent of the Sunday supplements. Behind him, a hundred years of