Hard Knocks tcfs-3

by Zoe Sharp

  “Get back,” she said sharply, waving a hand towards the road surface. “The police will need to investigate the scene and all of you are destroying the evidence.”

  Todd snapped his head round, moved in until he was crowding the German woman. “And just what evidence are you expecting them to find here?” he demanded with a quiet vehemence. “Blakemore’s been riding his fucking bikes like a lunatic with half a brain for years. We all of us knew that sooner or later it was going to catch up with him.” He registered the startled looks, swallowed down his anger and shrugged. “Today was the day, that’s all.”

  Elsa edged away from him, uncomfortable. Jan moved up to her shoulder, glaring at the phys instructor, but his attention was already elsewhere.

  “Dumb bastard,” Jan muttered under her breath. “Of course the bloody police are going to want to investigate the scene. What does he think they’re going to do?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Elsa said, but giving her a grateful smile, nonetheless. “He is upset.”

  I wondered when I’d missed out on the bonding process that had gone on between these two. When had they excluded me, or had I excluded myself?

  I eyed the area Elsa had been trying to protect. Casually, I walked a little way back along the road in the direction Blakemore must have been travelling when he’d come to grief, judging from skid marks.

  I tried to work out just how he must have ridden that final corner. How I would have ridden it.

  I would have approached, braking hard, out to the far right of my lane. It was blind. I wouldn’t have cut the apex onto the opposite side of the road and I wouldn’t have turned in and laid the bike down into it, wouldn’t have creamed in the throttle, until I could see my exit was clear.

  The road surface was dry, the day was clear. How on earth had he miscalculated so badly? How had someone of his experience overrun so far that he’d ended up on the marbles and slithered into the safety barrier hard enough to launch him into orbit?

  I shook my head, moved back further. OK, so Todd had claimed that Blakemore was a lunatic. How did that change the perspective? I suppose if I’d had that kind of absolute faith in my own invincibility I might have gone in a lot hotter, braked a lot later, and committed to the corner before my arc of visibility opened up.

  I paced it out. There was no traffic on the road and I could walk my proposed line without having to dodge other vehicles. As I hit what would have been my perfect clipping point, right on the apex of the bend, something sparkled at my feet. I bent to examine it.

  “What is it?”

  I tilted my head up, and found both Jan and Elsa standing over me, frowning.

  For a moment I mentally juggled the effects of telling them what was on my mind, or keeping it to myself.

  “Broken glass,” I said at last. When I followed the skids to the barrier they tracked back to the position of the glass like leading lights to a harbour entrance. “It’s shaped, patterned – headlight or sidelight, most probably.”

  It was Elsa, the ex-policewoman, who put it together fastest.

  “He was hit by a car,” she said. She looked further down the road and her gaze narrowed. She strode away.

  “What?” Jan demanded, and we both hurried after her.

  “Look at this,” Elsa said. “More skid marks, a car this time, not a motorcycle, leading away from the initial point of impact.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jan said. “You both think this was a hit and run, don’t you?”

  I nodded. It wasn’t so hard to put it together, not once you followed the parallel black lines that swept across the road. The car driver, whoever he was, had braked hard enough to lock all his wheels solid and start to broadside, scrubbing off speed along with rubber from his tyres.

  “Yes, look at this. He hits Mr Blakemore, loses control and makes a complete one hundred and eighty-degree slide,” Elsa said. I don’t know how long she was in the police, but she must have been called out to enough road traffic incidents to have learned to read the signs. “He comes to a stop there – see – over on the other side of the road. He was lucky he didn’t hit the far barrier.”

  “Lucky – or skilful,” I said, my voice thoughtful. They looked at me sharply, but it wasn’t such a wild leap. After all, we’d all spent the previous week watching the likes of Figgis performing just such a move as this. A rapid change of direction after your vehicle came under attack. Viewed from that perspective, suddenly that chaotic slide became a textbook manoeuvre.

  “He could just have been lucky,” Elsa said. There was a hint of mild censure in her tone, but it was laced with doubt, too.

  “So why didn’t he stop?” I said. “Why didn’t he call the police himself?”

  She paced across to the point where the car must have come to a halt, her brow furrowed in focus. “He is horrified that he has clearly hit someone. Maybe he sits there for a moment. He might have stalled his engine. His heart is thundering in his throat at what he has done.”

  Jan threw me a sideways look at this flight of deductive fantasy. Elsa didn’t seem to notice her scepticism.

  “Maybe he even gets out of his car, runs over to the barrier, and looks down at the wreckage he has caused. He looks and, like Mr Todd, he too assumes Mr Blakemore is already dead.”

  Caught up in her snapshot of a life balanced on the edge of instant ruin, the picture began to unfold in my mind. “He thinks briefly of calling an ambulance, and the police, of facing the consequences of his momentary lapse of concentration,” I put in. Jan rolled her eyes as if to say, “Don’t you start.” I ignored her.

  “Then it comes to him just how deserted is this stretch of road,” Elsa went on, nodding. She was right about that. During the time we’d been stopped not a single other car had passed us. “And he realises—”

  “—There are no witnesses.” It was Jan who finished it, seeming to surprise herself as much as us. We turned to stare at her and she shrugged, embarrassed.

  We walked back to where I’d first found the broken glass. There wasn’t much of it. Elsa nudged it with the toe of her boot.

  “The damage to his car cannot have been severe,” she said. “He would still have been able to drive it away.”

  “It wouldn’t have taken much to knock Blakemore off his line,” I said. “A glancing blow.” That was all it took to deflect something as narrow and jittery as a bike. To send it careering to disaster.

  “So,” Elsa went on, her voice carrying contempt now for Blakemore’s unknown assassin, “he jumps back behind the wheel of his car and he runs like a rabbit.” She scanned the area again. “Haste makes him heavy-footed.” I followed her gaze and found two thick black lines to suggest that, in his efforts to escape the locality along with the blame, the scared driver had dumped the clutch and lit up his tyres like a drag racer.

  We fell silent for a few moments while we replayed the scene, shaping it to fit the scenario we’d just created. It did fit, after a fashion. More off-the-peg than made-to-measure.

  “We’re all assuming, of course,” I said quietly, “that this was just an accident.”

  I felt their disbelief in the way they stiffened beside me. “What are you suggesting, Charlie?” Elsa asked. I tried to read an argument into her voice, but could only find surprise and not a little interest. Should I risk it?

  “If you had to pick a good spot for an ambush along this road, where else would you go for?” I said. I paused while they thought about it.

  We’d all driven this way several times during our rides out with the school instructors, who’d asked us all just such a question.

  I couldn’t help the eerie feeling that somewhere along the line the men in the Peugeot had received the same training we had, and probably a good deal else besides.

  They’d certainly seemed to know all about ambushes yesterday in the forest, even though that one had blown up in their faces. Perhaps they’d decided that taking the school men out one at a time was a less risky proposition.


  But what about Blakemore’s threat?

  Maybe they hadn’t taken his warning seriously. Or maybe they’d taken it very seriously indeed.

  Fifteen

  Blakemore didn’t make it.

  He bowed out long before the emergency services reached the scene. He never regained consciousness, never made a sound, never made another movement. It was like his soul was out of there long before we ever reached the crash site. It just took his body a while to get the message.

  Figgis stayed down in the ravine with him, laying blankets from the truck over the top of him, talking to him even though he was probably beyond hearing much of anything at all. The rest of us loitered up on the road, waiting for the ambulance. Waiting for Blakemore to die.

  When Figgis finally stood up and called, “He’s gone,” to Todd, it almost came as a relief. I let a shaky breath out slowly, felt the implications sink in like heat on frozen skin, and wondered how this new death changed things.

  It was at this point that Major Gilby arrived.

  We heard the Skyline approaching for a good couple of minutes before the big silver-grey car snaked into view. The deep throaty growl of its exhaust rebounded through the valley and set up an echoing vibration like the onset of thunder.

  Gilby pulled up fast by the side of the road and jumped out. He stalked over to Todd, demanding a situation report. Todd just waved a hand towards the barrier without a word.

  When the Major went and leaned over it, he saw Figgis climbing back up the rocks towards the road, leaving Blakemore’s still figure lying in the stream at the bottom. After that, he didn’t need to be told the man was dead.

  Gilby turned away and just for a second he let himself droop. Just for a second he let the mask slip and I saw the tension that was tearing him apart. The Major, I realised with no little surprise, for all his apparent icy cool, was feeling the pressure. And feeling it badly.

  Then, as quickly as it opened up, the fissure was sealed. He was barking out orders for us to get back to the Manor. It was just a tragic accident. There was nothing to see here.

  Sluggishly, we began to converge on the trucks. As I joined the others I watched the Major walk out the same lines that Elsa, Jan and I had taken on the road. He saw it all just as quickly – the skid marks, the broken glass – and from the way he was frowning I knew he’d put together a scenario that was very similar to our own.

  So what was he planning on doing about it?

  As little, it would seem, as he’d done about the ambush in the forest. If my suspicions were correct and he was behind the kidnappings, what could he do?

  The Major stayed at the roadside waiting for the police and the now redundant ambulance. As we pulled away I watched him move across to talk to the elderly couple who were waiting stoically by their camper van. I had a feeling that by the time the police arrived he would have persuaded them to leave, too.

  If you’re going to construct your own version of events, it’s always better not to have anyone around who might conceivably contradict you.

  ***

  Figgis and Todd dropped us all off at the Manor’s front door. We had been posted to be doing unarmed combat in the afternoon, but even though Figgis was more than qualified to take over the class, they decided to let it drop.

  Instead, they told us that after lunch we had the couple of hours to write up our survey reports on the village, while it was still fresh in our minds. By that time I’m sure the only thing that was fresh in any of our minds was the image of Blakemore’s broken body lying at the bottom of that drop.

  Lunch was a sober and almost silent affair. The only noise that accompanied the meal was the clink of cutlery on china. Even Ronnie had forsaken his usual tuneless whistling as he served up dollops of pasta with meatballs.

  McKenna made a reappearance towards the end of the meal, pale and subdued. He sat at a table as far away from me as he could manage, but after I’d dumped my plate onto one of the plastic waste trays I swung by where he was sitting. I quickly realised from his vague answers to the others’ questions that he was trying to make out he’d never left the Manor all morning.

  “So you’ve heard about Blakemore?” I challenged.

  He looked at me warily. Maybe because I could call him a liar in front of everybody else and know it was the truth. He shook his head even though it could have been the only topic of conversation.

  “He’s dead. Got knocked off his bike and went off the road,” I said bluntly. “It was a long way down.”

  McKenna turned paler still. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Craddock raise his eyebrows at me.

  “Are you trying to make the boy faint, Charlie?” he said in that mild voice of his.

  It made me pause, blinking. Then I turned and walked away.

  I walked out of the dining hall and slowly upstairs, almost blindly. What was I trying to do? Take out my anger at the wilful waste of a life on the nearest person who wasn’t going to hit back?

  I needed to talk to someone. More than that, I needed to talk to Sean.

  I picked up the pace and hurried along the faded corridors to the dormitory. It was empty when I walked in. I went straight to my locker and switched on the mobile phone, but before I could dial a number, it rang.

  A generated voice at the other end told me I had one new message and I obligingly pressed the right buttons to retrieve it.

  “Hi Charlie, it’s Madeleine.” On the recording she sounded hesitant and almost breathless. “Look, I’ve got some information you asked for, some things you ought to know about McKenna and that fight he had with Blakemore. It’ll probably explain a few things. I should have told you this morning but, well, other things got in the way. Call me as soon as you can, OK?”

  I sighed, suppressing my irritation. She seemed to have plenty of time to interrogate me about my relationship with Sean, so why had something like this taken a back seat?

  I dialled in the number she’d left and she picked it up almost right away, as though she’d been waiting for my call.

  “Charlie! Thanks for getting back to me so quick. It’s about McKenna and Blakemore—”

  “He’s dead,” I interrupted.

  “Oh,” she said, coming to an abrupt halt. “What do you mean? Which one?”

  “Blakemore.”

  “My God. How?”

  “He crashed his bike,” I said, “and before you ask, no, it wasn’t entirely an accident.”

  Of course, she wasn’t going to let things go at that. I explained, as briefly as possible, what we’d found by the ravine, my suspicions about the men in the Peugeot, and about the conversation I’d had with Blakemore just before he died.

  “That doesn’t mean he was killed deliberately,” she said when I’d finished. I could hear the frown in her voice. “It just means somebody else was involved.”

  “So why didn’t they stop?”

  “People often don’t,” she said, almost gently. “That’s why it’s called hit and run.”

  “OK,” I allowed, trying not to take offence at her moderate tone. “But it seems a hell of a coincidence that the guy admits to involvement in the kidnapping, tells me he can get me answers about who shot Kirk, goes off and then just happens to get himself accidentally knocked off his bike and killed by a complete stranger. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” she agreed slowly. “It does seem a bit unlikely, I’ll grant you that.”

  There was a pause while we both considered the implications.

  “Anyway,” I said, “what was this news about Blakemore and McKenna’s argument the other night?”

  “Well, it hardly seems relevant now, but actually young McKenna had a very good reason for taking against Blakemore.”

  I went very still. “Which was?”

  “Well, McKenna had an uncle who was in the Paras. He was only about six years older than McKenna, as it happens. When he came out earlier this year he decided to train to be a bodyguard. So, he signed up for a course at Einsbaden Manor and m
anaged to get himself killed in a car crash during the first week of the course.”

  Memory arrived like a camera zoom, hitting me flat in the face out of nowhere. Sean’s words back in that pub came back to me, hard and fast. “They had a pupil killed in a driving accident six months ago, and there were rumours that it wasn’t quite as accidental as it could have been.”

  Suddenly, all McKenna’s edgy behaviour fell into place. His almost unhinged reaction when we were all buzzed by the men in the Peugeot that first time and his attack on Blakemore in the Einsbaden bar.

  “Of course,” I murmured. “That’s how McKenna knew Blakemore used to be in charge of the driving, not Figgis.”

  “What?” Madeleine said. “Oh, yes, according to the reports, Blakemore was supposed to be responsible for the class at the time. He claimed that McKenna’s uncle was using one of the school cars on his own time, without permission. It all got very messy, but the Major managed to slide out of any suit for negligence. Looking at the financials for the time, it probably would have been enough to finish him.”

  “So why does McKenna now want to be a bodyguard? And why has he come to the same place that might have been responsible for the death of his uncle?” I wondered aloud, although as I said it, I realised there were two possible answers.

  Justice. Or revenge.

  “Well, he certainly doesn’t seem interested in this as a long-term career,” Madeleine said. “He’s actually a driving instructor back at home, and before he left for the course he put in an order for a new car, which he’s having modified to dual controls for when he gets back. Hardly the action of the man looking to chuck it all in and become a full-time bodyguard, is it?”

  “A driving instructor?” I queried. He’d never shown any particular spark during the driving lessons. In fact he’d been awful. But then, I’d tried not to show any in the unarmed combat, either. If he was hiding his abilities, he had to have a reason.

  I don’t know what Madeleine said next, I wasn’t paying enough attention. Instead I was remembering those skid marks at the crash site. There was something precise about them. Something measured. A driving instructor.