Hard Knocks (3 page)

“Premonition or preparation?” I wondered aloud. I didn’t probe into Kirk’s reference to me. I didn’t have the courage to. Instead, I said, “What was the job?”

Sean shook his head. “He wouldn’t say. Next thing I know I get a call from Salter’s parents telling me he’s dead and can I help get his body home.”

“And what does the school say they think happened to him?”

“They’re claiming they’ve no idea why he should still have been in the area, but perhaps it was an accident. Illegal hunters.”

“But you don’t believe that.” It was a statement, not a question.

Sean glanced at me. “He was shot three times in the back,” he said, voice neutral. “Right hip, spine, left kidney.” He formed the first two fingers of his right hand into a gun and plotted the diagonal course.

I sat up straight as old memories surfaced. “They used a machine pistol,” I murmured. I’d fired fully automatic weapons often enough when I’d been in the army to recognise the way the rounds tracked, stitching across a target from low right to high left. It was almost impossible to hold one steady.

Sean nodded. “Not the kind of thing you’d use for hunting, however illegal it was. But, the school supposedly don’t use machine pistols either. The pathologist recovered the rounds, by the way. They were hollowpoints.”

He was watching my reaction as he said it. Hollowpoint rounds were designed to mushroom and distort on impact with soft tissue, maximising damage. Nasty, whichever way you squared it, and expensive, too.

“Not the kind of thing you’d use for training rookies, either,” I murmured.

“Not if you’re keeping an eye on the budget, no,” Sean agreed.

“If he was shot in the back, that implies he was running away from something,” I said slowly. “What, though? What had he found there that made him stay on and what was so important that they killed him for it?”

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “I got the impression when he first told me he was going to be delayed that it was the school that had offered him a job, but now I don’t think so.”

“What do the German police think?”

He gave me a wry look. “They’re playing things very close to their chest,” he said. “They’re still investigating and therefore can’t give me any information, but I get the feeling they’re not too interested. It’s just—” He broke off, opening his hands in a gesture of frustration.

“I send people into dangerous situations all the time,” he began again. “But they know the score. It’s their job, their choice, and they’re well paid for it. All Salter was doing was scouting the place for me. I never considered for a moment it would get him killed. That’s why I need you to go and find out what happened to him.”

He looked up. “The only way in is as a pupil, and I’m too well-known in the industry to do it myself. They’d suss me out straight away. I don’t have anyone else I could send who’s sharp enough for the job, Charlie. Not at this notice.”

I gazed into the fire again, long enough for my eyes to dry out and my cheeks to begin to cook. Not quite long enough to successfully tamp down the anger that was rising at the back of my mind.

“Why would you think that I would give a damn about Kirk Salter, after what he did?” I asked at last, without meeting his eyes.

“He was under pressure, Charlie,” Sean said gently, and the hairs came up on the back of my neck. I felt them riffle against my collar as I turned my head. “He was having his strings pulled all the way along the line. It wasn’t his fault.”

I half-rose, shoving my chair backwards. “I don’t care whose
fault
it was that Kirk shit on me,” I snapped. I put my fists on the table and leaned in close, adding in a savage whisper, “All I know is that he did, and I only came to his funeral to make sure the bastard really was dead! If you think I’m going out there looking for justice for him, you’ve got another think coming!”

Sean didn’t react to my outburst, just caught and held my gaze, level, steady. “I’m not asking you to go for Salter’s sake,” he said quietly. “I’m asking you to go for mine.”

Not quite what I was expecting. I almost fell back into my chair, deflated. “I—”

That was as far as I got before the shrill interruption of Sean’s mobile phone. Without taking his eyes off me he reached into his jacket pocket for a unit about the size of a cigarette lighter, flicked it open. “Meyer.”

He paused for a moment, wincing at a burst of static that even I could hear. “Hang on, the signal’s awful,” he said. “Let me go nearer a window.”

He stood, moved away across the stone floor. I watched him lean against one of the wooden shutters, speaking too quietly into the phone for me to hear. He was back in control again, cool, hard. There was no hint of the fact that a few moments earlier he’d been almost pleading. Sean Meyer was not a man who begged often. Not for anyone.

But he’d come close to begging me.

I glanced back into the fire, as though I’d find my answers there. Somebody once told me that you always regret most the things you
didn’t
do.

If I said no, what would happen?

Sean would incline his head politely, make some throwaway comment. Of course, it was too much to ask. Then he would deliver me back to Cheshire and he would drive away. And I knew, instinctively, that I would never see him again.

If, on the other hand, I agreed, what then?

I could go to Germany for him and do my best, whatever that might turn out to be. If nothing else it might tell me if I’d been a fool when I’d turned down Sean’s last offer of a job. As it was I couldn’t be sure, and I’d rued my decision more or less ever since. This might be my only second chance.

I thought of my burned-out flat and the stiff, uncomfortable prospect of another week in my parents’ company.

Sean needed my help. Needed me. I hugged the thought to me, felt the warmth of it, and the excitement. I probably would never have got in touch with him if he hadn’t made the first move, but now he had, how could I let it go?

And he didn’t know.

He didn’t know about the utter humiliation I’d suffered. Whatever else I saw in his eyes when he looked at me, it wasn’t going to be pity.

I twisted in my seat and took advantage of his distraction to watch him as he spoke to some unseen colleague. When the call was over he flipped the phone closed and moved back towards me. As he sat down again there was just a tinge of resignation about him, and of disappointment.

My chin came up.

“OK Sean,” I said calmly. “OK, I’ll do it.”

A week later, just after New Year, I flew to Germany.

I took a BA flight out of Heathrow to Frankfurt, then caught a Lufthansa connection for the internal on to Stuttgart. It wasn’t the most direct route but, at that kind of notice, it was the best Madeleine could organise.

Things had moved fast since the day of Kirk’s funeral. Sean had driven me back to Cheshire, but only to collect the rest of my stuff and pack up. My parents had greeted his appearance with surprising equanimity, considering they’d once warned him off ever contacting me again.

They took my announcement that I was taking off with Sean for an indefinite period with less composure, though. My mother just bit her lip and looked away, but I had to weather my father’s aloof disapproval. I imagine it was the same kind of reaction enjoyed by his motorcycle accident patients when they told him that although he’d expended hours of his undoubted surgical skill piecing them together, they were getting back on their bikes again.

Nevertheless, they didn’t actively try to stop me. Which was just as well, really, because I don’t think they would have succeeded.

Regretfully perhaps, I left my Suzuki RGV 250 motorbike in their garage, tucked away behind my father’s Jaguar XK-8. I didn’t like the idea of abandoning my independent transport, but at least the bike would be safe there until I got back.

Sean rang Madeleine on his mobile once we were on the road again. By the time we got down to his base of operations in Kings Langley on the outskirts of London, she had sorted me a room in a small privately-owned guest house nearby. The owner turned out to be a slim, upright chap in his eighties, a retired Royal Marine Commando with a line in war stories that kept me riveted late into the evenings.

My days were lost in whatever groundwork Sean could devise. He ran through roughly the kind of syllabus he expected them to teach until my head swam to overflowing with information I couldn’t hope to digest.

On the practical side, I reckoned my biggest problem was going to be the defensive driving section. My passion for motorcycling meant I hadn’t seriously driven anything with four wheels since I’d left the army. I was badly rusty, and it showed.

Sean didn’t seem to share the same concerns. “As you stand now you’re as good, if not better, than most of the people who come to me having completed one of these courses,” he told me, but I had a feeling he was just trying to bolster my confidence.

He and Madeleine both came to Heathrow to see me off and Sean had one last piece of advice to offer. “Don’t forget, if this is as dodgy as we think, they’re most likely going to be expecting you,” he said. “Not you personally, but someone. And they’re going to be expecting them to be good. You’re going to have to tone it down, Charlie. Play it quiet and you’ll be OK.”

I wasn’t so convinced.

***

Outside Stuttgart airport, I snagged one of the line of Mercedes diesel taxis, and gave the driver the address of the school. As he pulled out into traffic he radioed to his controller, in German, complaining about the distance he was having to travel outside town.

“If it’s too much trouble,
mein herr
,” I said, a little tartly, “then please tell me.”

I saw his eyes flick sharply to meet mine in the rear-view mirror. It was only then that I realised the old cupboard in my brain had fallen open. The one where I stored those years of school German lessons. I’d forgotten it was there, let alone what might be still inside.

It took just short of an hour to reach the little village of Einsbaden where the school was located. At normal speeds it probably would have taken two, but once we were out onto one of the main twin-lane roads my driver put his foot down. He cruised with the speedo needle quivering at a hundred and sixty-five kph. I did some mental juggling from klicks back into miles per hour and found we were doing a sliver over a hundred. Even at that speed he was constantly being flashed out of the way by other drivers.

Once we’d got away from the uniform industrial drabness of the city itself, the countryside was surprisingly pretty, even if I was holding on too hard most of the time to really appreciate the scenery.

He flashed through Einsbaden village itself hardly lowering his speed. The little I saw of the place was picture postcard stuff. A square with a fountain, a small café, a couple of shops, a bar. Then the houses thinned and we were back into thickly wooded countryside again.

A couple of klicks the other side of Einsbaden the driver finally slowed and swung the Merc between a pair of tall stone gateposts with poised griffins on the top of them. There was no signage, but the driver seemed confident over direction.

The driveway was narrow, pocked with water-filled ruts. It twisted out of sight into the forest that surrounded us. The driver proceeded with caution, and I let go of the centre armrest for probably the first time in the journey, edging forwards in my seat to peer out of the windscreen.

The afternoon was slipping away and the light level had started to drop fast. Under the thick, evergreen canopy it was downright gloomy. The driver switched on his headlights.

Just round the next bend there was a small security checkpoint, like some throwback to the Cold War. The lowered barrier across the road gave us no choice but to stop.

We braked to a halt alongside a hut that looked as though it had started out life as a large garden shed. A figure in camouflage gear emerged, carrying a clipboard. He and the driver spoke together too quickly for me to catch the words, and the driver grunted.

“He says this is far as I go,” he said to me. I paid the seemingly exorbitant fare without complaint, even though it bore no relation to the amount displayed on the meter. It was Sean’s money I was spending, after all.

I grabbed my kit bag and climbed out into a temperature that was cold to the point of hostile. The driver didn’t bother to wave goodbye as he performed a rough five-point turn, his headlights bright enough now to carve swathes and shadows through the trees.

The wood went back much further than the reach of the lights, shrouding the sound of the Merc’s engine and tyres so there were no echoes. It hinted at a scale that was monumental, like something alive and breathing. Something implacable in its patient pursuit, and without mercy.

“What’s your name?” the man asked. He was short and dark, with an aggressive Northern Ireland accent that made his words sound like an invitation to a fight. He had a long scar that ran from the lobe of his left ear across his cheek to his nostril, then curved down to his upper lip, so maybe someone else had felt the same. I gave him my details trying not to hold my breath.