Only a Game Read Online Free Page B

the participants, before he wound down his window and registered the shouted taunts and insults. With a rising Asian population and a recession in the economy to accentuate resentments, these confrontations were now almost a nightly Brunton occurrence.
    The police were outnumbered as usual. There were just three of them against around a score of young men. Two men and a woman; you had to call them all police officers now, irrespective of gender.
    Percy didn’t want to stop. He was plain clothes and off duty, long past dealing with skirmishes like this. But it didn’t seem long since he’d been a young copper himself, treading the beat and feeling the fear he could not show in dangerous situations like this. He could not say afterwards whether it was a fact that there was a woman in the trio which made him tread fiercely upon his brake pedal.
    He climbed reluctantly out of the Focus and moved reluctantly back towards the screamed obscenities and the more measured warnings of the police. He brandished his warrant card as he arrived, well aware that the chief inspector rank would not be registered by young men intent upon a fight.
    But his reputation went before him. The oldest man among the white contingent had a record and he recognized an old adversary. ‘It’s that bastard Peach!’ he shouted to his companions, waving an arm with BNP tattoos towards the new arrival. ‘Get the fuck out of it, or the bastard’ll throw the fucking book at you!’ With that warning, he and his British National Party companion forsook the group and raced away into the shadows.
    It was a temporary relief. The group of Asian youths, whom the three police constables were holding back with linked arms, now saw an advantage in numbers. They surged forward against their ineffective cordon, so that the girl, losing her balance and her hat, almost descended beneath their advancing feet. Percy caught her involuntary cry of alarm in the same instant that he glimpsed the glint of steel in two places in the advancing horde.
    Knives! The weapons the modern beat copper fears now more than anything, the deadly steel which can be suddenly evident in even minor incidents, often in the hands of young men who panic easily.
    This incident was not minor. Percy flung himself upon the raised arm which held one of the knives, heard the yell of agony as he twisted it, even before he heard the clang of metal upon the pavement. ‘You’re nicked, sunshine!’ he yelled at the top of his voice.
    Peach thought that it must be his shouting of the formal words of arrest which had sobered the rest, but he should have known better. The blare of the police siren rang in his ears as he finished his warning, followed an instant later by the flashing blue lights of the car and the arrival of the much-needed police support the young coppers had summoned before his arrival.
    The two rival gangs vanished as quickly as water through a colander, but the three uniformed officers who had been here from the start cut off the retreat of the two who had brandished knives and one other vociferous man, who seemed to be the leader of the Asian contingent. The three were stowed away in the police van with warnings against further resistance.
    By the time a returning Helen Capstick drove her Mercedes along the same street ten minutes later, the town centre was silent and no one would have known there had been such recent drama there.

THREE
    D arren Pearson was a man who did not panic easily. That was just as well, for being the secretary/chief executive of a Club like Brunton Rovers was a demanding task.
    The club had clung characteristically to the old title of secretary, but in terms of the commercial enterprise every Premiership soccer team must be, their secretary was now what most companies would term a chief executive. Or general dogsbody, he sometimes thought. In the first hour of his working day, Pearson chivvied the printer about the delivery