Hard Knocks (2 page)

I hadn’t always felt that way about him, of course. When we’d been undergoing Special Forces training together everyone wanted big Kirk on their squad for any exercise. Particularly if there was any heavy lifting involved. I’d have sworn he was solid, dependable, one of my comrades. Someone to trust your life to. Mind you, I’d have sworn that about the others, too.

Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay.

I almost winced as the list unrolled inside my head. I’d managed to go without thinking about my quartet of attackers for a couple of months and now it was like they’d never been away.

The four of them were part of the same intake of trainees. We were supposed to form the kind of bond that would see us all attending reunions together in fifty years. Then one night they’d drunk enough to tip them over into macho bravado and I’d taken on the shape of prey.

After they’d raped me, they’d sobered up enough to realise I could finish them, if they didn’t finish me first. I remember lying there, half-senseless from the beating and the pain, and listening with remote interest while they’d discussed the best method of disposing of my body.

And that’s when Kirk had stumbled upon us.

He may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed, but he was certainly one of the heaviest. Even four to one, the others hadn’t had the courage to go against him.

Kirk had stayed with me like a big dog, holding my hand until the medics arrived, until they’d scraped me up and poured me into the ambulance. I never dreamed for a moment that when it came to the court martial he would deny everything he’d seen and heard.

But he did.

My shoulder blades gave an involuntary shudder and I shook myself out of it. A junction sign flowed past my window like a wraith, but I couldn’t recall the last few miles.

I twisted back in my seat. “Madeleine,” I said, my voice level, “you must know I didn’t give a damn about Kirk Salter, alive or dead. Why don’t you cut to the chase and tell me exactly why Sean wants me at his funeral?”

She gave a rueful half smile. “I wondered when you’d ask,” she said, “but the truth is, I don’t know. Sean rang me from Germany yesterday morning and said he needed to talk to you urgently. Something to do with Kirk. He didn’t say what.”

She was concentrating on the road too hard to notice the twitch her words provoked. It occurred to me for the first time that Kirk might have told Sean more than I realised about my shambolic eviction from the army. What other reason could there be?

I fixed my attention on the slap of the wipers across the glass in front of me. I’d had the opportunity once before to explain to Sean the full tawdry details of my attack. I’d bottled out. He already had the bare bones, but when it came to the true extent of my injuries I’d been rather more economical with the truth.

He knew I’d been beaten up, but he didn’t know it had gone so much further than that.

What if Kirk had told him the rest?

***

Madeleine had booked rooms at a small hotel on the outskirts of Harrogate and that’s where we spent the night. The following morning we drove the rest of the way through pretty but desolate countryside. The rain had started almost immediately, slashing in sideways across the landscape, turning it icy grey. Even the sheep looked cold.

Sean was already at the church when we arrived. I hadn’t seen him since we’d climbed out of a riot together two months before. He was looking good, on the whole, with no sign of the shoulder injury that had so restricted him then.

He’d favoured me with a brief nod as we’d walked into the tiny church, but his eyes, dark enough to be almost black, were cool and flat. There was something formidable about the set of those wide shoulders that made me instantly wary. I knew that look. It meant nothing but trouble.

Question was, who for?

He’d spent his own Christmas in Germany, Madeleine had told me, untangling the inevitable shroud of red tape that had delayed the retrieval of Kirk’s body. That would have been enough to piss anyone off, but I had the nasty feeling there was more to it than that.

A burst of alarm flashed through my system, translated as a sudden warmth despite the bone-numbing chill. It was only a degree or so above freezing inside the church but at least it wasn’t raining much in there. The whole place smelt of mildew and mothballs like my grandmother’s wardrobe.

Madeleine and I trailed after the coffin as it was carried out. I hung back purposely, but there were no faces I remembered among the pallbearers.

There were none I’d tried hard to forget, either.

By the time we got to the graveside the ground was slick with mud. The tracks of the Bobcat mini digger they’d used to scratch out the requisite pit had left gouges in the surrounding earth that were deep enough to make you stumble. They’d lined the edges of the void with strips of artificial turf, its harsh bright green the only splash of colour against the greys and blacks.

Someone was fighting to hold an umbrella steady over the vicar’s head, but the wind lashed the rain in under the side of the canopy, the spray coating his glasses. “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,” he croaked, with an uncommon depth of feeling. “He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

As they put Kirk into the ground Sean stood in the second row back with his head bent, staring at nothing. He didn’t seem to notice the rain sliding in rivulets along the angles of his cheekbones.

Afterwards, when clods of sodden earth had been shovelled in on top of the coffin, he spoke only briefly to Kirk’s parents. They thanked him without any sign of resentment for bringing their boy back to them so quickly.

Their intensely grateful manner disturbed me. If Kirk had been working for Sean at the time of his death, as Madeleine had implied, I would have expected a reception that held more bitterness, more blame.

Sean solemnly shook their hands and, with every sign of urbane sophistication, bent to kiss the pale cheek Kirk’s mother offered. Then he turned and walked across the patchy grass towards us, and that air of quiet civility just seemed to drop away from him.

He moved like he always did, covering ground with a long, almost lazy stride, but something had hardened in his face, like he didn’t have to pretend not to be angry any more. My system kicked up a gear as I fought down the impulse to back away from him.

I’d spent most of the previous night lying awake trying to get my head round finally getting things out in the open with Sean. I’d thought I’d come to terms with it.

Looks like I’d been wrong.

***

Half an hour later, I found myself sitting huddled into the open fireplace of an otherwise deserted country pub. My mother’s coat was spread across the chair next to me. It was dripping puddles onto the stone flagged floor and steaming gently in the heat. I hoped it wasn’t dry-clean only.

Madeleine had disappeared at her earliest opportunity, no doubt eager to get back to what was left of her Christmas break. Sean would take me where I needed to go she’d said, almost cryptically. I’d transferred my bag into his car, another of the Grand Cherokee jeeps he seemed to favour, and allowed myself to be ushered into the passenger seat without argument.

We hadn’t talked of much on the drive to this middle-of-nowhere pub. Nothing of any note, anyway. We scratched the surface of his recovery, which was well under way, and his troubled family situation, which was going to take rather longer to resolve.

Now Sean came back from the bar, stooping to avoid the lower beams that spanned the ceiling, and put two cups of coffee down onto the oak bench in front of us. He shrugged out of his overcoat and loosened the top button of the starched white shirt that suited him just as well as fatigues had ever done. I knew he was gearing up to get right to the point, and I almost braced myself.

“I suppose Madeleine has told you what this is all about?” he said, sitting facing me and stirring his coffee slowly.

“Some,” I hedged. I was shivering, not entirely from the cold, and I clamped my hands together in my lap so he wouldn’t see them trembling. “She said Kirk came to see you.”

“Yeah.” He lifted his cup, eyed me over the rim. The silence stretched and snapped. “Salter talked about you, Charlie,” he said at last, softly. “He told me what happened.”

Inside my head I heard a sound almost like a sigh.
So, it was out at last.

I sat back in my chair, feeling my face setting. I forced a shrug even though my shoulders were so tense the movement nearly cracked them. “So?”

“So, I can understand that you’re not going to like what I’m going to ask you,” he said, hesitant. I’d never seen him so uncertain. He’d always been supremely self-confident. The change made me nervous, stepped up my heartrate. The beat of my blood was so loud in my ears that I missed his next question and had to make him repeat it.

“I said, I want you to go to Germany for me and find out what’s going on at that school.”

He’d veered so far off track that the shock of it turned me slow. “What school?” I said blankly.

“At Einsbaden. It’s a little place just outside Stuttgart.” He paused, frowning as though I should have known all this. “It’s where Salter was doing his training. The place where they claim he wasn’t killed.”

Come on, Sean, for God’s sake don’t keep me hanging on like this! If Kirk told you I was gang-raped by the same group of people
you
were training, that they used the unarmed combat techniques
you’d
been teaching them to overpower and restrain me, then just get it over with . . .

“Wait a minute. What do you mean ‘claim he wasn’t killed’?” I demanded, catching up belatedly. “Who else could have been in that coffin?”

“Oh it was definitely Salter. I saw the body myself,” he said, voice grim. “But he was found dumped in the forest a few miles away from the school. They’re saying he left at the end of the previous week and they thought he’d flown home, when I know for a fact that they’d asked him to stay on and do some kind of work for them. That’s only the first of the anomalies.”

It dawned slowly that he wasn’t being deliberately cruel.

He didn’t know.

Whatever else Kirk had told him, it wasn’t that.

The relief and the disappointment was like sweet and sour on my tongue. I struggled for composure, to stay with the programme. I reached for my coffee, took a sip. The top was covered in a layer of froth, fooling me into thinking that the liquid underneath had cooled to a drinkable temperature.

“What anomalies?” I managed.

Sean must have thought the question implied more interest in the circumstances surrounding Kirk’s death than I actually meant. He gave me one of those quiet smiles, the ones that started out slow yet put out heat. The ones that made me wish I could wipe out our disastrous history together and begin again from new. But I couldn’t, that was the problem.

“He rang me a week before he died, just as the course was finishing up. Said he’d got a job to do out there, a short-term contract, and could he start for me after he got back. He sounded different. Distracted somehow, evasive.” He ducked his head like a boxer avoiding a punch. “Maybe I should have pressed him harder.”

“Pressed him harder about what?” I shut my eyes for a moment, took a breath. “Sorry, Sean, I’m missing a few steps here. I thought Madeleine said Kirk went to Germany to train so you’d give him a job with your outfit. What else was going on?”

He leaned forwards, resting his forearms on his knees and staring into the flames. The action revealed a large-faced Breitling with a polished steel strap. It was a far cry from the battered old watch he’d always worn when I’d known him before, seeming to suddenly emphasise the distance travelled.

“I need somewhere to train my people,” he said. “I’ve been using a place in Holland, but it’s small and the facilities there are limited. Then I heard about Einsbaden Manor. They’ve got everything I need and they used to have a good reputation, but in the last year or so things have gone off the boil. They had a pupil killed in a driving accident early last year, and there were rumours that it wasn’t quite as accidental as it could have been. I needed someone to check the place out.” He shrugged. “Salter offered.”

For a moment the silence hung between us. The logs shifted and spat in the cast-iron grate.

“So what happened?”

“Nothing – to begin with. He rang me twice with progress reports. He said they like to play mind games with you. Like seeing how you react. And they were putting too much emphasis on firearms drills, by the sounds of it, but Salter was a proficient man round weaponry, as I’m sure you can recall. He reckoned he could out-shoot the instructors with just about everything they were using, and I could well believe that.”

Sean paused, took a sip of his coffee. The side of my calf nearest to the fire had started to burn. I hutched round in my seat to a cooler spot, and waited.

“During his last phone call, when he’d told me he was going to be late coming back, he mentioned your name. Said he wished he’d stood up for you. That it had been on his conscience and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I’ve no idea what he meant. Then he said, all jokey, that if anything happened to him, would I see him right.”