Dead and Buried: A Scottish Detective Mystery (A DCI Harry McNeil Crime Thriller Book 13) by John Carson

Author:John Carson [Carson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-29T23:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

‘The cold isn’t keeping them away, I’m glad to see,’ Tom Michaels said.

Clifford Dunn smiled. He stood on the small platform they’d erected, which consisted of a couple of wooden boxes with a wooden board placed on top. Some of the church members had hastily put it together when the crowd had started getting bigger.

They were in St Andrew Square, a garden square at the end of George Street. Christmas lights were everywhere, bathing the square in a festive glow. But there was no festive message from Clifford Dunn as he stood on the board with his megaphone.

‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! By coming here tonight, I know that you are as concerned as we are about the audacity of this city. Look around you! We all love the glitz and glamour of Christmas. Time to spend with the family. To eat, drink and be merry. That’s what we love. But while we’re sitting round the table this Christmas, remember the families who weren’t so fortunate hundreds of years ago! Families who were here not through their own choice but the choice of rich men who were only getting richer through the blood of those people. And what happened afterwards? Huge monuments to the rich men were erected, so they could stand high and lord it over you, the people, long after they were dead! So let’s do the right thing and bring these monuments to greed and degradation down to the ground.’

The crowd erupted and the uniforms kept an eye on them, but nothing went out of control.

Dunn gave the megaphone to Michaels, who was just as good at revving the public up. While it wasn’t quite fire and brimstone, it still got the crowd cheering. Michaels believed in that moment that he could have told them to go and burn the castle down and they’d have formed an orderly queue and marched up to it and thrown flaming torches at the old fortress.

After his spiel, Michaels stepped down and members of the church began handing out flyers illustrating that evening’s speech and directing them to the website, where they could donate funds to help fight the good cause. The flyers also suggested people to bombard with complaints, including politicians, who might read them after having a few gins with the elite who had put them in power.

Michaels had liked that about Dunn right from the off: he hated politicians even more than Michaels did.

‘That was a resounding success,’ he said as Dunn clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Indeed it was. And I made sure to get a photo of the uniformed sergeant’s badge number. Plus plenty of photos of you and I being here. And look, nobody threw a bucket of blood over the monument.’

‘That was a stroke of genius,’ Michaels said, ‘changing the venue at the last minute. Then having people down there directing the protesters round here instead. Genius, Clifford.’

‘Thank you. I think being at Wellington’s statue would have focused more on the fingers found at the Glaswegian version of the duke’s statue, and that’s not what we want.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.