"Quintin, Jardine - Fallen Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Quintin Jardine)

at the kitchen table. "Well," he began, "Broughty Ferry's quite
nice."

The baby was still asleep when he left the house fifteen minutes later,
having agreed with his wife's proposal that they find a rental villa
somewhere in France, in early September, and drive there. He climbed
into his metallic blue Mondeo, reversed it carefully out of the
driveway, and headed into the centre of Perth.

Even in the morning traffic, it took him less than ten minutes to reach
his destination. He parked beside a row of five police transport
vehicles, each one full of officers, and stepped out into the morning
sunshine. He looked out over the flat plain of the North Inch; the sun
of the previous few days had begun to dry it out, but it was still
muddy and unsightly. He dreaded to think what the insides of the
houses looked like.

He glanced around him as he walked towards the terrace that faced the
River Tay, where, he knew, the worst of the flooding had happened. His
eye fell on a uniformed inspector, in summer dress, as was he. "Good
morning, Harry," he called out.

Inspector Sharp turned and made an involuntary move to attention as he
recognised the newcomer. He was one of the two senior officers in
charge of policing Perth and its surrounding area. In the larger
Edinburgh force, which Martin had just left, his opposite number
carried a much higher rank.

"Hello, sir," the dark-haired, middle-aged policeman responded; he made
to salute, but the deputy chief constable waved it away with a smile.

"Don't start that, for Christ's sake; on my first week in this job I
started to get tennis elbow. How's it going?"

"It's not yet, sir, but then it's not quite time. As you ordered, we
contacted all the householders who moved out and told them we'd pick
them up from their temporary lodgings and get them here for nine." He
nodded towards two patrol cars that had just drawn up. "That's them
starting to arrive now. I've got our boys and girls waiting in the
minibuses over there, ready to help with the really dirty stuff, and
with the heavy lifting. Some of these people have lived here for
years, and are quite old."

"Fine. Have you got plenty of tools; shovels and stuff for shifting
mud? I guess there'll be plenty of it down there."

"There'll be all sorts of stuff down there in those cellars, sir. I
was a young constable the last time something like this happened, and I
was involved in an operation just like this one. There was fish, rats,
condoms, you name it... and this flood's been a lot worse." He