The First Apostle Read Free Page B

the fireplace.
    The work took very little time, and in some twenty minutes the entire area was exposed. Both men stood in front of the fireplace, staring at the letters carved into one of the stones.
    “Is that it?” Alberti asked.
    Rogan nodded uncertainly. “It looks like it, yes. Get the plaster ready.”
    As Alberti left the room carrying a bucket to collect some water, Rogan removed a high-resolution digital camera from his pocket and took half a dozen shots of the stone. He used the screen to check that they all clearly showed the inscription carved on it. Then, for good measure, he wrote down the words in a small notebook.
    Alberti reappeared with the water. From the detritus left by the builders, he picked a wooden mixing board and trowel, then selected a bag of plaster from the pile stacked against one wall. A few minutes later, once he had a firm mix, he carried the board over to the fireplace.
    The lintel rested on a steel plate, obviously a fairly recent repair to compensate for an unsightly crack that ran diagonally through the stone about two feet from the left-hand edge. The steel projected about half an inch in front of the lintel, and provided a firm base for the plaster.
    Alberti clearly had some experience of the technique, and in about half an hour had produced a smooth and professional finish that neatly matched the new plaster on the right-hand side of the fireplace. The other side still had old plaster on it—the builders hadn’t got that far yet—but there was nothing they could do about that.
    Fifty minutes after Jackie Hampton died, and almost ninety minutes after the two Italians had forced the rear door of the house, they walked away from the property, heading for the nearby lane where they’d left their car.

II
    Chris Bronson swung his silver Mini Cooper into a space on the second floor of the Crescent Road multistory parking garage, which was directly opposite the police headquarters in Tunbridge Wells. For a few moments he sat in the driver’s seat, lost in thought. This morning, he anticipated, was going to be difficult, very difficult.
    It wasn’t the first time he’d had problems with Harrison, though the way he was feeling it might well be the last. Detective Inspector Thomas Harrison—“Tom” to his few friends, and “the fat bastard” to almost everyone else—was Bronson’s immediate superior, and they hadn’t got on from day one.
    Harrison considered himself to be an old-school policeman, who’d come up through the ranks, as he never tired of telling anyone who asked and most people who didn’t, and he resented Bronson for a number of reasons. The D.I. was particularly scathing about “smart-arse coppers”: officers who joined the force after university and enjoyed certain privileges as a result. He’d lumped Bronson in with this group, though he didn’t have a degree and had joined the army on a short-service commission straight from school. In short, Harrison believed that Bronson—whom he normally referred to as “Death Wish”—was just “playing” at being a policeman: the fact that he was clearly a highly competent officer cut no ice with him.
    In the six months that Bronson had been stationed at Tunbridge Wells he’d been reprimanded virtually on a weekly basis by Harrison for something or other but, because he really did want a career in the police force, he’d tried his best to ignore the man’s obvious dislike. Now he’d had enough.
    He’d been told to report to the station early that morning, and Bronson thought he knew exactly why. Two days earlier, he’d been involved with other officers—uniformed and plainclothes—in the apprehension of a gang of young men suspected of dealing in Class A substances. The gang’s normal turf was East London, but they’d recently expanded their operations into Kent. The arrests hadn’t gone as smoothly as everyone had hoped and in the resulting scuffles two of the young men had suffered minor injuries.