Читать книгу Payment Deferred. Psychological Thriller онлайн

19 страница из 53

Marble turned away with evident relief as they closed the door.

‘Now we can be comfortable,’ he said. ‘Draw your chair up closer to the fire, er—Jim. What a night,’ he added, as the wind howled outside.

Medland nodded moodily. He was feeling awkward. He was not at all at home with these strange people. He didn’t like the way Marble behaved towards his children. The kids were all right of course, and the mother was a nonentity. But there was an atmosphere about the place that he hated. He pulled himself together and tried to shake off the brooding premonitory mood that was oppressing him. It was absurd, of course. Old Marble was only a very ordinary sort of chap. Seedy and down at heel, but quite all right. He was smiling oilily at present, but that didn’t mean anything necessarily. Hang it all, if he didn’t like the place he could clear out in a few minutes’ time and never come back to it. For the matter of that Medland’s thoughts swerved suddenly to the utterly absurd—he could change his hotel next morning and then they could never find him again. The bare idea was sufficient to bring his mind back to reality. There was no reason why he should think about things like that at all. The kids were fine, and he’d see a lot of them while he was in England. He could take them to a lot of the places he felt he had to go to, the Tower of London and St Paul’s, for instance. That would be topping.