by Zoe Sharp
I realised as I looked round that I had no more idea now about who had shot Kirk dead and why, than I did when Sean had first told me about it. Where on earth was I going to start looking? I had to admit that I didn’t have a clue.
Round the corner the gravel scattered onto a concrete path that followed the contours of the house. The air smelt clean, faintly of wood and pine needles.
Another ribbon of concrete stretched away across the grass towards a group of buildings about two hundred metres away, on the edge of the trees. As I watched, a man emerged from a doorway in one of the buildings, carefully locking it behind him. I was too far away to recognise who it was.
As casually as I could, I carried on further round the house. Towards the rear it lost its architectural neatness, became more random. The ground behind it dropped away sharply into what I should imagine were once formal gardens, but they’d been covered over with an all-weather surface. This was scored with tyre tracks. A group of slightly battered-looking, dirty vehicles were parked, haphazard, to one side. Ah, the dreaded defensive driving arena. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to cope with that one.
Reaching out from the ground floor at the back of the house was a walled terrace, raised a couple of metres off the ground so that it overlooked this glorified car park. Several of the students were already occupying this eyrie, despite the cold. As I drew nearer, I realised why.
All of them were furtively smoking. Gilby had made it clear from the outset that the whole of the Manor was strictly a smoke-free zone. It was a sign of their dedication to their habit, I thought, that they were prepared to brave such cold to enjoy it.
The bitter wind whipped over the exposed terrace, dragging the smoke with it. The last vestiges blew over me, tainted my nostrils. I decided not to advance any further.
All the ground floor windows had deep external window ledges, and I settled myself onto one. At least it was partly shielded from the weather.
As I watched, Jan came out onto the terrace. She had the collar of her coat pulled up with one hand as a windbreak, trying unsuccessfully with the other to light the cigarette in her mouth. After she’d made a few failed attempts I saw Hofmann lever himself away from the balustrade and offer her his lighter.
There was what seemed to be a long pause while they just looked at each other, before Jan reached out and took it. From the little I’d got to know of her, I’d worked out that Jan was the kind of girl who didn’t like accepting help from anyone, but least of all from a man.
Whatever make of lighter Hofmann owned, though, it was designed for outdoor use. It sparked and flared first time. She gave it back to him quickly, with a reluctant nod of thanks, before hurrying away.
Elsa was the next person out onto the terrace. She arrived with the only Norwegian student on the course, a surprisingly small guy called Tor Romundstad. I’d always thought the Norwegians were all strapping individuals, descended from Vikings, but he was a good six inches shorter than Elsa. He’d attempted to compensate for his lack of stature by cultivating the most enormous bushy moustache, like a seventies porn star. Elsa must have come out for the conversation rather than the nicotine, because although Romundstad was smoking, she was not.
Elsa’s attention wasn’t completely on her companion, though. I noticed her head kept turning towards Hofmann, who was still standing by the edge of the terrace, staring out over the grounds. After a minute or two longer she excused herself and went over to him.
I was too far away to hear their voices. The wind brought occasional snatches, but too faint and few to piece any words together. I had to work on body language instead.
From that I got the impression that Elsa asked Hofmann a question. One that he either didn’t know the answer to, or didn’t want to give it. Whichever, he met her enquiry with a dismissive shake of his head. She persisted, and it was then that Hofmann’s manner changed. He bent his head, leaning in to her and speaking fast.
I saw Elsa’s body jerk with the shock of his reaction, her face blanking. No one else on the terrace seemed to have noticed what was happening. I started levering myself forwards, but as quickly as it had started, it was over.
Hofmann threw down his cigarette end, stamped it out, and headed back inside, leaving Elsa standing forlornly behind him on the mossy flags.
I hopped down from my window ledge and walked the rest of the distance onto the terrace, crossing to the German woman. She didn’t seem to notice my arrival until I was almost on top of her. I touched her arm.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
She nodded vaguely, then glanced at me and seemed to pull herself together. “Yes, Charlie, thank you. I am OK.”
“I saw you talking to Michael Hofmann, and he didn’t look happy about it,” I said. “What happened?”
“I thought I knew him,” Elsa murmured. Her glasses had darkened in the light so it was difficult to read her eyes, but her voice was off-kilter, almost a babble, and her face was too pale. “You know how it is, you think you recognise someone and then you feel foolish when you are mistaken.”
She looked up at me again, as if to see how I was swallowing the lie. Not well, she realised. “Please excuse me,” she said. “It is time for lunch and we must prepare our little talk for afterwards, no?”
Before I could stop her, she’d hurried inside, letting the partly glazed door slam behind her. Romundstad also watched her go and he turned and raised an eyebrow at me, as though I was the one who’d upset her.
“Well now,” I muttered to myself, “what the hell was that all about?”
***
The Major was right about the Manor’s library. There was indeed all the information we could wish for on the subject of assassinations – failed and successful. I decided to go for the attempt on US President Ronald Reagan by John Hinkley Jr in March 1981.
Not only was it well documented in the library’s files, but I felt it gave me plenty to talk about on the subject of his close protection team – both good and bad. After all, Reagan’s secret service bodyguards had missed the fact that his would-be assassin had been hanging around all day outside the Washington Hilton Hotel looking highly suspicious.
On the plus side, when the attack did happen they’d reacted textbook fast. Three of them, including Reagan’s Press Secretary, had even managed to get themselves shot in the process.
The members of the team who were still left standing had bounced on Hinkley, while another had thrown their injured principal into his limo and hustled him away from the scene.
What I didn’t add, because it wasn’t included in the Manor’s information, was that if Hinkley had chosen a revolver with a longer barrel and a higher muzzle velocity than the Rohm R6-14 he’d been using, the explosive-head Devastator rounds he’d loaded might just have had the effect their name implied. Scratch another US president.
“So, Miss Fox, what conclusions do you draw from this?” Gilby asked when I’d finally ground to a halt.
“That Reagan’s close protection team were good in a crisis, but not so hot at planning and prevention,” I said. “They should never have let it happen in the first place. But, it does make Reagan unique – he’s the only serving US president to date who’s survived actually being shot by an assassin.”
He smiled. “Excellent,” he said, the praise pleasing me more than it should have done. “Who’s next?”
I regained my seat next to one of the tall windows that looked out over the rear of the house. Elsa stood up, gathering her file of papers, and walked to the front of the classroom. The students were all sitting at tables, but the instructors, including Gilby, had lined themselves up along the back wall.
They had listened to all the presentations so far, mine included, with poorly disguised boredom. I got the impression that this was one of Gilby’s pet ideas as far as the curriculum went and nobody else could see the value of it.
Elsa was the last to go. She reached the desk at the front and put her papers down neatly. “Good afternoon
,” she said, sombre. “We have heard already about many famous events, but I would like to speak about one that is not in your library records. It is more recent, and not so well known. My subject is the abduction of a young girl called Heidi Krauss.”
The name meant nothing to me, but it was instantly apparent that it did to Gilby and his men. It was as though someone had passed an electrical current through the wall behind them. Every one of them jerked upright and Gilby even took a step forwards, as though he was going to try and prevent Elsa from speaking.
The German woman looked up. “Is there a problem, Major?” she asked, without inflection.
The rest of us followed the exchange like the crowd at a top-class tennis match, heads following each volley from one end of the room to the other. Gilby must have realised almost immediately that to stop her now was going to look more suspicious than letting her continue. “Of course not, Frau Schmitt, if you feel it’s relevant,” he said stiffly, allowing a trace of doubt to enter his voice.
Elsa brushed it aside. “She was taken from her own bed, in the middle of the night, from under the noses of her bodyguards,” she said, coolly now. “Yes, I think it is very relevant, don’t you?”
Gilby recognised defeat when it was staring him in the face. Without further demur he stepped back to his place and waved her to continue. I twisted round slightly in my chair so I could watch the instructors as much as Elsa.
The German woman had come well prepared for her lecture and she didn’t get it from the Manor library, that’s for sure. There was an elderly photocopier in there, which we’d all used to produce grainy pictures of our main protagonists, taken from the newspaper cuttings and books.
Elsa already had photographs, which meant she could only have brought them with her. She tacked a line of them up onto the dusty blackboard for us to see.
“This is Heidi Krauss,” she said, indicating an awkwardly posed studio picture of a girl who looked barely sixteen. “This is her father, Dieter, a successful and wealthy industrialist, and this is their home on the outskirts of Düsseldorf.”
She delivered the details in a flat, almost clinical style, the way I imagine she used to report to her superior officers when she’d been in the police. She hardly referred to her notes and barely glanced at Gilby or his men as she spoke.
Dieter Krauss, she told us, was away in the Middle East on the night his daughter had been kidnapped, just two weeks before Christmas. I realised with a jolt that she was talking about this Christmas. Heidi was at home with three household staff and four personal bodyguards. Of a Mrs Krauss, there was no mention.
There had been trouble with the movement sensors round the perimeter of the property. They had been badly adjusted so that small animals had been causing a number of false alarms. When the system was triggered again shortly before eleven on that evening, the man on duty did not immediately alert his colleagues to a possible security breach.
Instead, he had taken a torch and gone out alone through a side entrance to check the grounds for himself. There, a small force – more than four, it was reckoned, but less than eight – had overpowered him and gained entry through the open door.
Leaving a man guiding them towards Heidi’s location using the internal security cameras, the intruders had closed in on her. They had used a taser stunner to instantly incapacitate her, then wrapped her in a blanket and started to carry her out, with the rest of her security team oblivious in the next room.
Had the housekeeper not stepped out into a corridor at the wrong moment, that’s where the story would have ended. As it was, the woman started screaming. The intruders shot her in the neck, killing her almost instantly.
The close-protection team had responded immediately to the alert, drawing their own weapons, but they had been understandably reluctant to become involved in a gunfight when the risk of accidentally hitting their principal was so high.
Hamstrung in this way, they’d stood little chance. One of them was also shot and killed, while another received a leg wound which had resulted in amputation. They had exchanged fire but, Elsa reported, they were doubtful that they hit anyone. Certainly none of the intruders had been injured sufficiently to prevent their escape – with Heidi.
Elsa paused and looked around at us. She didn’t seem to be aware that she held the absolute attention not only of the class, but of the instructors as well. They had frozen up like a Madame Tussaud’s exhibit, only not so lifelike. If Gilby clamped his jaw shut any tighter he was going to shatter those perfect teeth.
“So, Frau Schmitt, what conclusions do you draw from this?” he managed to grit out from between them.
Elsa closed her folder and shrugged. “That the bodyguards were careless and that they totally underestimated the level of threat to their client,” she said at last.
Gilby took a breath as though he was fighting to control a temper that was rising like fire. He won, but I was sitting close enough to see the cost of that victory manifest itself in the tremor of a tiny muscle at the side of his jaw.
He nodded, jerky. “Very good, Frau Schmitt,” he bit out. His narrowed gaze swept across the rest of us, just in case we were thinking of making any smart remarks. “Class dismissed!”
He stalked out of the room with the instructors following him in a wave. I looked round and saw that most of the students were staring blankly at each other. Like me, they knew something was going on, but they had no idea what.
“Well, Elsa my darlin’, I don’t know what it is that you’ve said that should upset the Major so much,” Declan remarked as he got to his feet, “but I don’t think he’ll be round to bring you a cup of tea and a biscuit first thing tomorrow morning, that’s for sure.”
Five
On Day Two the four of us thought we’d spike our instructors’ guns by setting our alarm clocks half an hour earlier than the six o’clock they’d told us would be our wake-up call. We should have known that wasn’t the way things were going to work.
Todd came barging in at 5 am anyway, just like yesterday.
When Elsa sleepily protested we had been told we had another hour in bed, he launched into a screaming fit that any drill sergeant I’ve ever come across would have stood back and admired. As he ranted, flecks of spit sprayed from his lips like a nobbled racehorse. We scrambled out of our beds and fled into our running gear before he had a full-blown embolism.
As we hustled down the stairs I wondered briefly if Declan was right and Todd’s reaction did have anything to do with Elsa’s lecture of the day before.
Physical training this morning involved our usual merry little five kilometre jog, followed by twenty minutes of sprints and press-ups. Todd only finally called a halt when one of the most unfit actually threw up. I think he’d been waiting for that as some kind of signal.
“If that’s what makes him let up on us, remind me to puke after about ten minutes tomorrow morning,” Jan said wearily as we hauled ourselves, groaning, up the staircase and headed for the showers. It might just have been the floor creaking as we traipsed along the corridors to our dormitory, but I wouldn’t have sworn to it.
A few minutes later I was standing under water as hot as I could bear it. As I let the stinging spray pummel the back of my neck I recalled my brief phone conversation with Sean the night before. He’d asked if I was getting on OK, coping with the regime. I was beginning to think that even my cautious yes might have been over optimistic.
I’d hesitated over ringing him so soon, as though I didn’t have enough to say to justify the call. His tone when he picked up seemed a little distant, and I’m not just talking about him being half a continent away.
I greeted him coolly and realised I could hear the same restraint in my own voice.
Still, when I’d filled him in on Gilby’s reaction to Elsa’s report on the Heidi Krauss kidnap, he’d seemed interested enough in that.
“I’ll get Madeleine onto it straight away,” he’d said. “I should have something for you the next time you
call.”
“I didn’t know if it was relevant, but the way they clammed up, you never know.” I’d shrugged, feeling oddly pleased.
“No,” he’d said, “if there’s anything you think I should know, then call me. I need to talk to you regularly, Charlie. I need to know you’re OK, that nothing’s happened to you.”
My heart jumped, then I remembered Kirk. Of course, Sean was just protecting his interests. Keeping his conscience clear. “No problem,” I’d said, casual. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow evening, then?”
“Charlie, are you OK in there?” Elsa’s voice, just outside the shower curtain, made me jump back into the present with a start.
