Hard Knocks (17 page)

“The targets stayed upright for much longer for everyone else,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken, her voice thoughtful. “They weren’t being fair on you,” she repeated. “Yet still you managed to hit them all.”

“Yeah,” I said, casting her a tired glance, “even the one I wasn’t supposed to.”

“When that last one came up at the end for me, Rebanks just nudged my arm. He didn’t grab me and pull me over.” She was frowning now. “You never stood a chance of seeing that it wasn’t the same as the others. They expected you to fail – but you know that, don’t you?”

“They wanted me to,” I said, managing to find half a smile from somewhere. “But I don’t always do what people want.”

“They’re going to make it harder for you next time,” she said, her face serious. “What have you done that they’re trying to trip you up all the time?”

Now,
there
was a question. Did Gilby’s men know about my dual role, or did they just not like it when they came across a woman who showed a spark. And why was Elsa so interested all of a sudden?

“I’m not the only one who’s trying to make life difficult for themselves,” I said, keeping my eyes on the needle-coated path in front of me.

I felt her stiffen. “What do you mean?”

“That lecture,” I said, glancing at her. “You must have known Gilby was going to take it badly.”

Either the German woman was a better actress than I’d given her credit for, or I’d genuinely thrown her off balance. She looked sincerely confused. “Why should he have done?” she demanded, and there was defiance in her lifted chin.

I stopped for a moment, staring at her, but could detect no hint of guile.

“You really don’t know, do you?” I said slowly.

“Know what?” she said. Bewilderment gave way to frustration. “Charlie, please explain.”

I turned and started walking again. We’d fallen a little way back from the rest of the group by now, and I felt safe to launch into the details Sean had given me about Heidi’s kidnap, and the Major’s involvement with the team who were guarding her. The trees had a convenient muffling effect, but I kept my voice low, all the same.

I suppose I should have been more wary about giving her the information, but I figured if she
was
secret service, she already knew it all anyway and if she
wasn’t
, well I probably needed all the help I could get.

Elsa was silent while I spoke. It was only when I’d finished and checked out her face that I saw the closed-in anger there.

“Dumb fuck,” she bit out quietly, and went on in German along what I gathered from the tone were similar lines. Her hands were balled into fists by her sides. “I knew I never should have trusted him.”

Now it was my turn for confusion. “Trusted who, Elsa?”

She took a breath and made an effort to loosen up, even flicking me a short smile that didn’t reach behind the lenses of her glasses. “One of my ex-colleagues,” she said, with no small amount of bitterness. “One of my ex-husband’s colleagues, also. Someone I thought was still a friend.” She gave a derisory snort, shaking her head. “Obviously not.”

We walked on another minute or so while I assumed she ran through a mental list of things she was probably going to do to her ex-colleague – not to mention her ex-husband – when she next got her hands on him.

“What did he tell you?” I asked then.

She sighed. “He told me he knew people who’d been on this course, that we would be asked to present such a lecture and he gave me the details of the Krauss case from the police file. He told me it was because he felt bad about how my husband had treated me and he wanted to help me. Now I realise he was just trying to make trouble for me. To make sure I failed. So they could all laugh behind my back.” She spat out another word in German that I didn’t understand, but it sounded like a useful piece of abuse. I stored it for later. “Bastard.”

“Elsa,” I said carefully. “When I came back to the room yesterday, someone had been searching my stuff.”

She frowned, distracted from her thoughts. “That’s strange,” she said at last. “I thought someone had been through my things, also. Nothing was missing, but some items were not quite as I remembered leaving them. Has anything been taken from you?”

I thought of the 9mm Hydra-Shok, tucked safely under Shirley’s bed. “No,” I said, “but you didn’t see anyone hanging around our rooms did you?”

She shook her head. “No, only you, me, and Jan. No one else. Do you think we should speak to the Major about this?”

“I don’t think there’s much point,” I said, giving her a tired smile. “If it wasn’t any of us, who do you think that leaves?”

***

I don’t know if Major Gilby realised we were starting to go stir crazy by the end of the fifth day, but he announced over that evening’s meal that transport had been arranged to take us into Einsbaden village to visit the local bar, if anyone was interested? He took our unanimous loud vote of approval with something akin to disappointment. As though he hadn’t expected better of us, but had hoped for it, nevertheless.

They rolled out the same canvas-topped trucks that had picked up Declan, Elsa and me on our arrival. Was it really only five days ago? We all began piling into the back.

Figgis and O’Neill were driving and the other instructors commandeered the comfy seats, leaving the rest of us with cattle class. Just as we were loading up Blakemore appeared in his leathers.

“You not riding with the rest of us then?” Declan called across to him.

“Nah, I’m riding in style, mate,” Blakemore said, grinning at him through the open visor of his helmet. He threw his leg over the FireBlade like it was a cavalry charger, hit the electric start and short shifted his way across the gravel. I admit to a pang of envy before that rorty exhaust note was drowned out by the asthmatic rattle of the truck motor cranking into life.

It was only a relatively short trip into Einsbaden. It was too loud for conversation in the back of the truck. We sat and swayed and stared at each other in the dim light from the single flickering light bulb without attempting to speak.

The guys had that scrubbed-up look about them. Freshly showered hair still gleaming wetly, designer shirts, and an air of hopeful anticipation. The mingling aromas of their liberal dousings of aftershave would have felled an anosmic ox at a hundred paces. It wasn’t doing much for me, that’s for sure.

The trucks rumbled into the village square like the advance party for an invasion force. If the locals saw us coming they certainly didn’t hang out flags of welcome. When we’d rolled to a halt outside the one local drinking hole there was a stampede to be first to the bar which I didn’t try to compete with.

As they burst noisily through the main doors, though, my fellow pupils discovered that, not surprisingly, Blakemore had beaten them to it. He was sitting at one end of the bar, looking very much at home, with a beer by his elbow and an open paperback on his knee. He grinned smugly at us when we came in, sliding a marker into the book and setting it pointedly aside as if to say, what kept you?

“What’ll you have, Charlie?”

I turned to find Craddock had muscled his way through to the front and was standing at the bar holding a euro note in his hand. I hesitated briefly, but there was nothing devious about the Welshman.

“A beer would be great,” I said. “Whatever they have is fine.”

The landlord was on nodding acquaintance with the instructors, although he seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see his customer numbers so vastly swelled for the night. He greeted the few locals who ventured in with the same stolid lack of hospitality.

The original decorators of the place had gone for an alpine tavern look, all rough cut timbers, old-fashioned wooden skis, and cow bells. I snagged a table in a corner. It had ornately carved heavy wooden chairs at each end and rustic benches along both sides that had been polished smooth by the passage of years of hutching bottoms. I sat at one end of a bench, where I had my back to a wall and could watch the rest of the room.

Craddock returned from the bar with two bottles of lager and no glasses. Declan was with him, and we were soon joined by Jan, Elsa, and a couple of the others whom I didn’t know well enough to confidently put names to. They all sat and we tilted the bottles.

“Ah, but that hits the spot,” Declan said, his tone almost reverential.

The rest of the Manor crew, once they’d found there were no local women under the age of sixty to receive the benefit of their collective charms, lost their predatory boisterous edge and seemed to settle, mentally downgrading the evening from possible pulling session to night out with the lads.

I watched the change come over them and felt the tension ease out of my shoulders. I could almost hear the hiss as the steam escaped from my system. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been holding it in.

The evening progressed better than it had any right to, given the circumstances. Declan bought a second round, then one of the other lads got a third in. A suitable while later, I got to my feet and waved a hand at the empty bottles cluttering the table top.

“Same again?” I asked. Nobody came over all chivalrous on me, so I headed for the bar.

When I returned, clutching two handfuls of lager bottles, I found O’Neill was in my place.

“She double-tapped the lot of them, just like that?” Declan was asking. “Now
that
I would have liked to have seen. Why the feck couldn’t I have been one of the ones to go before her?”

I didn’t have to ask what he was talking about. I put the beer down on the table top with more of a sharp click than I might otherwise have done. O’Neill looked up at me then and winked. He slid out of my seat and gestured for me to regain it with exaggerated courtesy.

“Please, be my guest,” he said, grinning. “I make it a rule never to start a fight with a lady who could kill me just as easy with either a nine-mil or a telephone.” But as he made to move past me I put my hand on his arm and stopped him.

“Why did Rebanks do it?” I asked him quietly.

O’Neill had the grace not to play dumb with me. He glanced across the room to where the weapons’ man was sitting, and leaned in close. The move sent a waft of beer breath gusting over me that almost made me flinch.

“Because he didn’t think you’d got a hope in hell of hitting them,” he said, blunt with the truth of it. There was a certain amount of smug satisfaction in his voice, too. No love lost there. “I doubt he would have maxed out that one himself and he knows the position of those targets in his sleep.”

He grinned at me again, and this time there was a hint of sly in his face. “It doesn’t happen often that we get someone as good with a pistol as you, Charlie,” he said.

I remembered Sean’s comment, that day in the little pub in Yorkshire, about Kirk being able to out-shoot most of the instructors.

“So who was the last?” I asked.

O’Neill shrugged. “Big guy called Salter. He was here last month. Bit of a coincidence really,” he went on, giving me a sideways look. “We get years of no-hopers, then two crack shots come along, one after another.”

Before I could think up a response to that one, there was a crash of breaking glass from the direction of the bar and the kind of quick scatter of movement you only get in pubs when someone’s just dropped a full pint, or just started a fight with one.

We all twisted round to look. In this case, it seemed that both option boxes had been ticked.

Blakemore was off his bar stool, tense with anger and surrounded by a sea of broken glass. Beer was splashed up the front of his leather jacket, and the front of the shirt he had on underneath was dark with it. Blakemore didn’t seem to notice the mess. He had that head-down stance I knew well. The kind that counts down to violence like the timer on a bomb.

“What’s going on?” Craddock asked, jiggling to see past me.

It took a moment for the people around the bar to shift enough for us to see who the other player was.

“Looks like McKenna’s got himself a death wish,” I said. “He’s just squaring up to take Blakemore on.”

“This I have to see,” Declan said, hopping out of his seat.

After a second’s pause, the rest of us scrambled after him.

“Looks like you’ve started a trend for attacking the staff, Charlie,” O’Neill said, nudging my arm. I ignored him.

As we closed on them, McKenna was so unsteady on his feet that for a moment I thought Blakemore had already thumped him.

“You’re not bloody fit to teach us anything,” McKenna said, his voice slurred so that he ran the words at the end of the sentence together. He stabbed a finger towards the other man’s chest. “You get careless and then people die, yer bastards. And you don’t give a shit, do ya? You just don’t give a shit. It won’t be the first time that you’ve had to clear up the bodies, though, will it?”

My heart jumped. Was he talking about Kirk? And if not, who else had died here?

Blakemore stood there, vibrating with suppressed fury the way a big dog does, just before it launches itself straight for your throat. He didn’t move, but under his heavy drawn-down brow his eyes had begun to smoulder like a dropped cigarette down the side of a cheap foam sofa.