Murder in a Japanese house. Alla KrasnovaЧитать онлайн книгу.
interesting. Everything was becoming bright and beautiful. The food became delicious, and the lights on the city streets became bright. Most importantly, Barbara felt at home among these people.
In the catalog on the agency’s website, Barbara viewed new cases through her personal account. To take on a task, she had to put a tick in front of it. Then her name would appear next to it, and none of the detectives could take the case.
The catalog list included not only new cases, but also old ones that were returned for further investigation. Detectives could take them repeatedly, but they rarely did. No one wanted to re-investigate the cases, because if it wasn’t solved right away, then most likely the case can hardly be solved later.
But this time Barbara was attracted to one case, because it contained the names of Gregory Richardson and Valencia Shakhmatova. Barbara’s eyes lit up as she realized that this case would be hers without even reading the case file.
Barbara always tried to be close to Gregory, to have some kind of connection with him, even if it was through a general investigation. It was also a way to kick the nose of Valencia Shakhmatova, who worked with him in pairs. Barbara seemed to say, «Well, Valencia couldn’t help you solve this case, but I can. She’s a bad helper.»
Barbara thought that Valencia, despite her youth and beauty, was not worthy of Gregory. She tried to tell herself not to be jealous of him, but she couldn’t.
Barbara noted the case and reviewed the materials. There were too many of them. It was necessary to print them out in order to work further.
Barbara had heard about the case. They killed a millionaire who owned pharmacies in the city. He was killed in a Japanese house where he liked to spend time.
Barbara wanted to get ready for work. She turned off her laptop and went to the park. The park was nearby. There you could walk, sit and watch squirrels that quickly appeared as if out of nowhere, and then disappeared.
Barbara was wearing sneakers and a jacket, her hands in her pockets. From the back, she could have been mistaken for a young girl. She was walking along the path, looking at the yellow leaves near the trees. Barbara was thinking about a serious case that even detectives like Gregory Richardson and Valencia Shakhmatova couldn’t handle.
Valencia was very smart. She was 30 years old, but she made a dizzying career in the agency and was known among colleagues from other cities. Gregory had taught her everything.
Barbara sat down on a green bench, tilted her head back, and looked up at the clouds. They were different and bizarre. Barbara thought of Valencia again and smiled ruefully. It was a smile of resentment because Valencia was taking Gregory away from her.
The second chapter
That evening, when Barbara got home, she carefully put the stack of papers on the floor. It was part of her ritual. It was the case file for a murder in a Japanese house. In fact, this Japanese house had a very specific name "─う», it was translated as"meet». But everyone called it Japanese home. It was a club where fans of Japanese culture spent time, or rather, it was its Russified version with a lot of cliches and cliches.
Barbara turned on the TV, which usually ran in the background. It was her tradition to come home and turn on the TV. She didn’t have time to watch it, all the news she got was from the Internet. The TV was very quiet, she didn’t switch channels, it was mostly an adult channel, and it was very quiet. Oddly enough, the soft sound of it helped her think – when something distracted her mind a little, her subconscious mind worked better, and that was important for a detective. Sometimes she could hear snatches of conversation coming from the TV, sometimes moans of sex scenes, because it was often erotic in the evening, but Barbara was minding her own business, making herself dinner, making tea. And Barbara went to bed at midnight sharp, midnight symbolizing zeroing out for her.
***
Barbara was born with a peculiar personality, and her strange style was evident in everything. She didn’t specifically plan it and didn’t support it, it came about by itself, because she didn’t try to be like anyone else, she wasn’t interested in it. She just lived.
Barbara, who was naturally very thin, ate very little, like a bird, although she never looked after her figure. And if she’d gotten better with age, she wouldn’t have noticed it at all. For dinner, one sandwich with cheese or sausage was enough to satisfy her, and she didn’t make a cult out of food either. She preferred «the simpler the better» food, but simple food had to be of good quality.
Barbara didn’t really like eating at all, and only did it when she was really hungry. She was much more of a drinker. And everyone’s favorite coffee, which was consumed by liters of her colleagues at work.
Barbara didn’t like him very much; she could have done without him. Most of all, Barbara loved tea, which took on an almost ritual meaning for her, she drank it constantly and could drink a lot, without sugar. She had an entire cupboard set aside for the tea boxes in the kitchen, and when she opened it, its fragrance spread throughout the room. Barbara, who didn’t like scents at all, forgave tea for its ability to exude fragrance. Moreover, she liked the smell. It was the only smell she could tolerate calmly. She skillfully combined different types of tea, adding chicory and other ingredients to them to create different flavor compositions.
In her house, you could find many packages of tea that her colleagues gave her. But her colleagues didn’t know much about tea varieties, so these boxes were left unopened at Barbara’s.
As she made herself a cup of tea, Barbara began to think. But that was only part of her ritual. To set a rhythm to her inner world, Barbara sometimes wore high-heeled shoes. The rhythmic click of her heels, like a hammer, kept her focused. At 52, she had a lot of high-heeled shoes and a lot of other clothes that she didn’t wear in real life.
Previously, she only wore mini skirts, stockings, and other sexy items for the men she met when they asked. But then she realized that these unfamiliar clothes and high heels helped her think better. This reincarnation helped her relax, as if she was even more detached from herself, from the body, and thoughts thought for themselves. So she started wearing these things when she was home alone. And at home, she was always alone.
It didn’t cost her anything, she didn’t feel any discomfort at this moment, she remained a little detached as always. Barbara had had a lot of men in the last ten years, and she’d dated them for sex, and they knew it. She met them on dating sites.
Sex for Barbara was something simple and not demanding tension, because the thrill and delight she experienced only before love. In her strange world, sex didn’t connect with love, they were two different things. But they, like parallel lines that never intersect, did intersect in her world. This was one. Once in a lifetime. On New Year’s Eve fifteen years ago, and it was Gregory Richardson. It was after this brief relationship that Barbara began to think about dating anyone for the sake of intimacy, because Gregory did not accept her and did not accept her, clearly making it clear that they were not made for each other. After that night, she never talked to him about it, so it was clear without words: their short-term relationship of one night was possible only under the influence of hot drinks and New Year’s Eve intoxication in a hotel room in another city.
It just so happened that Barbara didn’t start having sex until she was in her late forties, and all her men were significantly younger than her. When she was forty, they were ten or fifteen years younger. When she turned fifty, her men remained in the same age range: from 25 to 32 years. If you think about it, Barbara was a constant person, and probably if she had turned seventy, nothing would have changed: she would have loved tea and Gregory, and she would have been surrounded by the same young lovers.
***
Barbara, in her long pointed gray shoes, crouched on the floor next to a stack of papers, exposing her bony knees, and began to look through the case file. She was thinking about the Japanese house. It was a club that everyone called the Japanese home, although it officially had a different