Читать книгу Death of a Dormouse - Reginald Hill - Страница 20

January in England was unseasonably mild, but Vienna was full of snow which a bitter east wind whipped into mini-blizzards at every corner.

At Thomas Cook’s they had told her that the cheapest way of getting to Vienna was to go on a weekend package. When she saw that the designated hotel was the Park Hotel Schönbrunn in Hietzinger Hauptstrasse, only five minutes’ walk from her old apartment, she did not know whether to be glad or distressed.

She arrived at the hotel late on Friday afternoon. After unpacking, she bathed the journey off her still skinny body, then got dressed and went out. She knew where she was going even though she did not admit it, and a few minutes later she was standing solitary in the snow, staring up at the line of windows in the high old building behind which she had (so it now seemed) slept away the last three years.

Soon the chill of the pavement began to strike up into her feet and she turned away, her mind numb with more than cold.

In a little while, she reached a small Gasthaus which she and Trent had occasionally visited for a simple meal. Confident of anonymity in her new guise, she entered and ordered a schnapps. To her horror, the owner, after regarding her curiously for a moment, said, ‘Frau Adamson, nicht wahr? We haven’t seen you for a little time. Is your husband joining you tonight?’

Hastily she downed her drink, muttered something about being in a hurry and rushed off into the frosty night.

Back at the hotel she went straight to the bar and had another schnapps. It seemed to her that she was involved in a test of strength with this city. It was determined to turn her into a ghost, driven palely by its cold winds down all the avenues of her old life, unable to communicate except by piteous weepings.

But she was not a ghost; she was a living woman, here with a purpose; two purposes perhaps, or perhaps even three. It was in pursuit of these that she would establish her identity, not by drinking here at the bar or wandering aimlessly round the streets.

She took Astrid Fischer’s last letter out of her handbag and studied the address. Then she went out of the hotel again and walked the hundred or so yards to the underground station.