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

He knew what they were after. The green leather case was his mother's most precious possession; he
would never dream of looking through it, and he didn't even know where she kept it. But he knew it
contained letters, and he knew she read them sometimes, and cried, and it was then that she talked about
his father. So Will supposed that this was what the men were after, and knew he had to do something
about it.

He decided first to find somewhere safe for his mother to stay. He thought and thought, but he had no
friends to ask, and the neighbors were already suspicious, and the only person he thought he could trust
was Mrs. Cooper. Once his mother was safely there, he was going to find the green leather case and
look at what was in it, and then he was going to go to Oxford, where he'd find the answer to some of his
questions. But the men came too soon.

And now he'd killed one of them.

So the police would be after him too.

Well, he was good at not being noticed. He'd have to not be noticed harder than he'd ever done in his
life before, and keep it up as long as he could, till either he found his father or they found him. And if they
found him first, he didn't care how many more of them he killed.



Later that day, toward midnight in fact, Will was walking out of the city of Oxford, forty miles away. He
was tired to his very bones. He had hitchhiked, and ridden on two buses, and walked, and reached
Oxford at six in the evening, too late to do what he needed to do. He'd eaten at a Burger King and gone
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to a cinema to hide (though what the film was, he forgot even as he was watching it), and now he was
walking along an endless road through the suburbs, heading north.

No one had noticed nun so far. But he was aware that he'd better find somewhere to sleep before long,
because the later it got, the more noticeable he'd be. The trouble was that there was nowhere to hide in
the gardens of the comfortable houses along this road, and there was still no sign of open country.

He came to a large traffic circle where the road going north crossed the Oxford ring road going east and
west. At this time of night there was very little traffic, and the road where he stood was quiet, with
comfortable houses set back behind a wide expanse of grass on either side. Planted along the grass at the
road's edge were two lines of hornbeam trees, odd-looking things with perfectly symmetrical close-leafed
crowns, more like children's drawings than like real trees. The streetlights made the scene look artificial,
like a stage set. Will was stupefied with exhaustion, and he might have gone on to the north, or he might
have laid his head on the grass under one of those trees and slept; but as he stood trying to clear his
head, he saw a cat.

She was a tabby, like Moxie. She padded out of a garden on the Oxford side of the road, where Will
was standing. Will put down his tote bag and held out his hand, and the cat came up to rub her head
against his knuckles, just as Moxie did. Of course, every cat behaved like that, but all the same Will felt