The List Of Seven

Начало книги

no watermarks. Expensive. Scuffed at the corners, it had attracted grime as it was slid under the door, silently. The Doctor did not hear it, and his ears were keen, sharp as a crone's knees, like all his senses.

He was in the front room, had been throughout the evening, feeding the fire, absorbed in an obscure text. Forty-five minutes earlier, he had glanced up as the Petrovitch woman ascended the stairs, the scrabbly scuttle of her dachshund's claws dragging her back to an evening of heart-heavy sighs amid the torpid musk of stewed red cabbage. The Doctor watched their spidery shadows flit by, dancing off the glazed floorboards under the door. There had been no envelope.

He vaguely remembered wishing there were an easier way to examine his timepiece than extracting it from his waistcoat and cracking it open. That was why, when he spent an evening in, he set it open, on his reading table. Time, or rather the elimination of its senseless squandering, obsessed him. And he had looked at his watch when the rat dog and its scrawny, melancholic Russian mistress shuffled by: quarter past nine.

Читать дальше →