Echo of the Reich Read Free Page B

interrupt when I’m talking. I couldn’t give a toss whether you like sport or not. I’ve got any number ofcoppers queuing up to be on duty in a stadium when some of the events are being held. But we need other bodies.”
    The Metropolitan Police inspector—the name on his door was S. R. Davidson—paused for a moment and glanced down at a note on his desk. Then he looked back at Bronson and smiled. “To be specific, I need somebody with certain talents and abilities, and I’m told you’re the ideal man for the job.”
    “What talents?” Bronson asked suspiciously.
    “You’re big and bolshie and nobody here knows you. Now open the door.”
    “What?”
    “You deaf or something? Open the bloody door.”
    Bronson turned round and pulled open the glass door he’d closed behind him three minutes earlier.
    As it swung wide, Davidson bellowed: “Curtis! Get in here.”
    “Jesus,” Bronson muttered, temporarily deafened by the inspector’s impressive vocal capability. “Can’t you use an intercom or something?”
    “Broken,” Davidson replied shortly, as a heavily built man, whose appearance and dress sense seemed closer to Bronson’s casual scruffiness than the inspector’s sartorial elegance, got up from his desk and ambled over to the door of the cubicle.
    “Boss?”
    “Remember that SLJ we discussed the other day, Bob? Detective Sergeant Bronson here is going to take care of it for us.”
    A smile spread across Curtis’s face as he looked Bronson slowly up and down.
    “And what shitty little job is that, exactly?” Bronson asked.
    “Bob will explain everything,” Davidson replied, looking slightly miffed that Bronson had recognized the acronym he’d used. “Take him away, Bob, and fill him in.”
    “A pleasure.”
    Curtis led the way across the squad room to his desk.
    “Grab one of them,” he said, pointing to a stack of dark gray metal-framed chairs with plastic seats.
    “Popular man, your boss, is he?” Bronson asked, taking the top chair from the pile and sitting down in front of Curtis’s desk.
    Curtis grinned at him. “Not so’s you’d notice, no. He’s one of that new breed—fast-track coppers. Gets a degree in knitting or something and then joins the force, aiming for a chief constable slot before he’s fifty. Frightening thing is, he’ll probably make it. His initials stand for Steven Richard, by the way, but round here everybody calls him Shit Rises.” Curtis paused and glanced across at Bronson. “Been in long, have you?”
    Bronson nodded. “A few years, yes. But I was in the army on a short-service commission before I joined the force.”
    Curtis smiled again and looked to his left, toward the officer sitting at the adjacent desk. “That’s a tenner you owe me, Jack.” He swung back to face Bronson. “Had a small wager running,” he explained. “Jack figured you for another graduate fast-tracker like Davidson. But I reckoned he was wrong because you look like you’ve been around the block a few times.”
    Bronson thought that worked out as a compliment.
    “I hadn’t planned on making chief constable,” he replied. “For one thing, I’m not a Mason, and in any case I don’t think I could handle the bullshit that comes with the job. Talking of jobs, what’s this nasty surprise you’ve got planned for me?”
    “It’s not that nasty,” Curtis said. “In fact, you might even enjoy it. But it is really important, because we’re running out of ideas.” There were about half a dozen files sitting in an irregular pile on one corner of his desk, and he reached across and pulled out the bottom one, which was also the slimmest. He flicked through the first couple of pages before looking up at Bronson again.
    “Let me give you the background. Pretty much ever since London won the bid to hold the twenty twelve Olympics, there’ve been cases of sabotage and malicious damage at the various venues. At first, we thought it was the usual mindless vandalism that you