"Philip Pullman - Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pullman Philip)

The house was silent. In the last of the evening light the man across the road was washing his car, but he
took no notice of Will, and Will didn't look at him. The less notice people took, the better.

Holding Moxie against his chest, he unlocked the door and went in quickly. Then he listened very
carefully before putting her down. There was nothing to hear; the house was empty.

He opened a tin for Moxie and left her to eat in the kitchen. How long before the men came back?
There was no way of telling, so he'd better move quickly. He went upstairs and began to search.

He was looking for a battered green leather writing case. There are a surprising number of places to hide
something that size even in any ordinary modern house; you don't need secret panels and extensive
cellars in order to make something hard to find. Will searched his mother's bedroom first, ashamed to be
looking through the drawers where she kept her underclothes, and then he worked systematically through
the rest of the rooms upstairs, even his own. Moxie came to see what he was doing and sat and cleaned
herself nearby, for company.

But he didn't find it.

By that time it was dark, and he was hungry. He made himself baked beans on toast and sat at the
kitchen table wondering about the best order to look through the downstairs rooms.

As he was finishing his meal, the phone rang.

He sat absolutely still, his heart thumping. He counted: twenty-six rings, and then it stopped. He put his
plate in the suik and started to search again.



Four hours later he still hadn't found the green leather case. It was half past one, and he was exhausted.
He lay on his bed fully clothed and fell asleep at once, his dreams tense and crowded, his mother's
unhappy, frightened face always there just out of reach.

And almost at once, it seemed (though he'd been asleep for nearly three hours), he woke up knowing
two things simultaneously.

First, he knew where the case was. And second, he knew that the men were downstairs, opening the
kitchen door.

He lifted Moxie out of the way and softly hushed her sleepy protest. Then he swung his legs over the
side of the bed and put on his shoes, straining every nerve to hear the sounds from downstairs. They
were very quiet sounds: a chair being lifted and replaced, a short whisper, the creak of a floorboard.

Moving more silently than the men were, he left his bedroom and tiptoed to the spare room at the top of
the stairs. It wasn't quite pitch-dark, and in the ghostly gray predawn light he could see the old treadle
sewing machine. He'd been through the room thoroughly only hours before, but he'd forgotten the
compartment at the side of the sewing machine, where all the patterns and bobbins were kept.