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

Martin Fletcher, for doing his best to make me better.

One.

Nobody could remember weather like it in June. "A side-effect of El
Nino," the lovely weather woman on BBC Breakfast had described the
phenomenon, on the third morning of the blizzards that swept the
Scottish mountains, a savagely unprecedented sting in the tail of a
winter which, after seeming for a while to be endless, had been
interrupted by the wettest spring on record.

The hardy Highlanders had moaned their way through the dark months,
counting at the same time the money as it flowed into the ski resorts,
but even they found the summer snows too much to bear. On the second
day, there was a report of a suicide on a remote farm, whose tenant had
lost more than half of his sheep.

And then, on the fourth day, it was over, as dramatically as it had
begun. The clouds disappeared, the temperatures rose overnight by as
much as eighteen Celsius, and the snows melted in the course of half a
day.

They poured into the mountain streams, which fed into the tributaries,
which in their turn flowed into the River Tay, turning it into a sudden
raging torrent.

The people on the North Inch of Perth knew what was coming; many of
them had experienced it before, and had supposed that it could not
happen again, even though in their heart of hearts they knew that it
could.

A few piled sandbags in their doorways as high as they could, in the
vain hope that they would prove an effective dam against the murky
rushing water. The rest, those who had learned the hard lesson, moved
as much of their furniture and as many of their valuables as they could
into the upper floors of their terraced houses, and moved out to camp
with relatives until the worst was over.

If they had stayed, they would have seen the river rise, little by
little at first, then more swiftly, foot by foot, until finally it
broke out, forming a new loch as it swept across the low-lying Inch,
finding the streets and the waiting houses, making a mockery of the
sandbags as it poured through them, finding the lower floors and
cellars, and filling them to drowning depth.

Some had stayed, sitting safe upstairs, and even out on their roofs, in
the blazing sunshine, watching the personal disasters unfold, and
shaking their heads as they did. "This will never be allowed to happen
again," the politicians had declared as the North Inch householders had