HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three

by Zoe Sharp

  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.

  Even Declan’s eagerness to witness the bloodshed started to wilt in the face of this sense of burgeoning menace. Those nearest began to back way.

  Alongside me O’Neill muttered, “Oh shit,” under his breath. “He’ll fucking kill him.”

  I turned. “Blakemore?”

  “No,” he said, and nodded.

  I looked back and found that another of the instructors had stepped into the demarcation zone. Possibly the last one I would have expected.

  Figgis.

  “I think maybe you’ve had a little too much to drink, Mr McKenna,” Figgis said politely. His voice was as calm as his words. His body language was calmer than that. “I think maybe you need a bit of fresh air.”

  McKenna lurched away like the floorboards had tilted wildly under his feet and mumbled, “F’cough will ya?” He waved an arm at Blakemore, the movement unbalancing him even more. “This is between me and ’im.”

  Figgis straightened up and seemed to come together in front of us. Normally he was a shambling figure, as if all his limbs were slightly loose in their attachment. Now, it was as though someone had threaded cord right the way through his body and suddenly taken up all the slack.

  He ambled towards McKenna, took hold of him almost gently and went up his arm in a sequence of what looked like clips and squeezes that was never hurried, but at the same time was too fast to properly take in.

  Figgis finished by lightly chopping McKenna under the sides of his jaw with the edges of both hands. If it had been an open-handed slap to the face, it would barely have been hard enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  McKenna watched him make the moves with a mystified look on his face, then his eyes rolled back and he folded up almost gracefully, like he’d just fainted. Figgis caught him neatly on the way down.

  “There now,” Figgis said to the room at large. “Too much beer, like I said. Let’s get the lad outside and get him some air.” He glanced at Blakemore and added, “No harm done, eh?” and there was a trace of something in his tone that might almost have been a warning.

  Blakemore seemed to shake himself out of it, brushed off his jacket and made a careless gesture. “No,” he said darkly. “No harm done.”

  A couple of the others helped McKenna out of the bar. He was conscious, but unaware, staggering blindly. Figgis turned to beam at everyone, and dropped back into the baggy skin that we’d all assumed was the real him.

  We drifted back to our table.

  “Now, I know we’ve all just seen that, but would somebody mind explaining to me exactly what the feck it is that we’ve just seen?” Declan demanded.

  I could have answered his question, but I chose not to. I’d come across a few martial arts practitioners who used Kyusho-Jitsu pressure-point techniques, but I’ve never seen one take somebody out of a fight with them quite so easily. Figgis, I considered, was more than an expert. He was a master.

  “Ah well,” O’Neill said. “He’s a bit of a dark horse is our Mr Figgis. Bit like Charlie here.” He glanced sideways at me, but I didn’t rise to that one, so he let it go. “Up until a few months ago Blakemore was teaching defensive driving and Figgis was your man for unarmed combat, but they did a bit of a job swap. It’s a waste, so it is, because good old Figgis is absolutely fucking lethal. I wouldn’t be wanting to go up against him.”

  I waited until everyone had settled back into their drinking. Waited until the boys who’d helped McKenna outside had returned without him. Waited until I could make my excuses to look for the ladies’ room without it seeming obvious that I wasn’t going there.

  Then I slipped out of my seat and walked into the cold little back corridor where the toilets were located. I kept walking, moving past them and out through the back door at the end. From there I picked my way round the crates of empty bottles and aluminium beer kegs, and headed for the front of the building.

  I spotted McKenna almost right away. He was standing leaning against the tailgate of one of the Manor trucks. If I was going to find out what he meant by his outburst, I reckoned, then doing it while he was half-cut and disorientated might be the best time.

  I walked over to him. As I approached he dragged out a packet of cigarettes and lit one with a disposable lighter, cupping his hand around the flame. He still looked a little unsteady on his feet, but when he heard my footsteps he lifted his head and stared at me with perfect focus.

  “What do you want?” he said. Not roughly, but with no sign of the slurring that had marked his earlier speech, either. It was embarrassment I could hear there, I realised, as though he’d fallen for some cheap stage hypnotist’s trick in front of his mates.

  “I just wanted to check you’re OK,” I said.

  “I’m fine,” he said shortly.

  I waited a beat, but he wasn’t going to follow that up with anything else. I stuck my hands in my jeans pockets and jerked my head towards the bar entrance. “So what was that all about?”

  He shrugged, as if to loosen a stiff neck. “Just had a bit too much to drink, that’s all,” he said, sucking in on the cigarette and blowing the smoke out down his nostrils.

  If that was the case, I thought, how come he was stone cold sober now? I nearly left it there, but I couldn’t let the opportunity slip. “What did you mean about people dying here?” I asked
carefully, and so as not to lead him I added, “Who died?”

  McKenna’s face closed in. He took a final deep drag on his cigarette and dropped the half-finished butt to the floor, stamping it out with more vigour than the task demanded. Then he glanced up and stared at me, his eyes shrewd. “You really want to know?” he asked. “Why don’t you ask them?”

  He nodded to a point over my shoulder as he pushed himself away from the tailgate and headed back towards the bar.

  I turned and followed the direction he’d indicated. Just in time to see a dark coloured Peugeot saloon on the other side of the square start up. It moved off fast, the driver not switching on his headlights until the car was nearly halfway down the far street.

  Even so, there was enough illumination spilling out of the windows of the bar and the surrounding houses for me to recognise the outline of four men inside.

  Eleven

  The next day, during rapid de-bus drills in the rain behind the Manor, Figgis was back to his usual relaxed self. So much so, in fact, that I began to wonder if I’d imagined last night. One look at McKenna’s wary face told me I hadn’t.

  More than ever, the youngster seemed to be avoiding contact with everyone else. Where another of the pupils might have brushed off his foolish challenge to Blakemore as drunken bravado, McKenna was finding it hard to let it go. Maybe the fact that he hadn’t been nearly so drunk as he’d been pretending had something to do with it.

  And with that in mind, what had he hoped to achieve by starting a fight with Blakemore, other than concussion and stitches? The more I turned it over in my mind, the more I came to the conclusion that there’d been something calculated about his words in the bar. They weren’t just random ramblings. There was a point to them. A message. But was it about Kirk? And if so, who was it aimed at? I’d really no idea.

  I’d switched the phone on and tried to reach Sean when we got back from the village, but his mobile rang out without reply until it finally clicked over onto his voice mail. Disconcerted, I’d left him a brief message, telling him I’d call him in the morning. I’d tried again before breakfast, but still he wasn’t answering.

  For the first time since I’d arrived in Germany, I felt cut off, and alone.

  Phys seemed to be getting harder every day, which didn’t help. This morning, one of the blokes had packed up and left shortly after our usual pre-dawn marathon, claiming he’d aggravated an old back injury. It was clear from Todd’s dismissive reaction to his departure that the staff believed he simply couldn’t hack it.

  Now, I stood trying to keep the rain from sliding down my neck while a group of us watched Romundstad, Craddock, and two of the others pulling up fast in one of the school Audis and hustling Todd out of the back seat in a suitably protective scrum.

  At a shout from Figgis that signified a gunshot, they had to get their principal back into his car, throwing themselves on top of him to provide body cover, and then get the vehicle away from the danger zone as rapidly as possible. They were piling in on top of the phys instructor with great gusto, eager to get their revenge for the punishing early morning regime any way they could.

  “Do it again. That was crap,” Figgis said mildly when they’d finished. “You’re anticipating too much. This time there might be a threat, or there might not. I’ll decide. And don’t forget, you’re supposed to be blending in with a big business atmosphere. If you do every de-bus like that, you’ll give your principal a nervous breakdown inside the first day. Not to mention breaking most of his ribs.”

  He glanced round at the sheepish faces. “You’re supposed to be giving him confidence, making him feel protected, not looking like you’re expecting a full-scale assault every time. If you was looking after me like that, you’d be frightening me to death. Go on. Get back out there and do it again.”

  The rest of us stood and grinned as they set up for another run, but as I watched them swing the car round again I suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling that I, too was being watched.

  I turned my head to find O’Neill standing a few feet away. He was regarding me narrow-eyed through the smoke from his cigarette. When he saw that I’d clocked him, he took that as his invitation to come over.

  “I was just thinking back to our little conversation in the pub last night,” he said, a mite too pally in his approach.

  I said, “Oh yes,” in what I hoped were entirely neutral tones, while I frantically searched my memory for anything I might have said that he could possibly have taken encouragement from. After a few moments I gave it up as futile.

  “Yeah,” he said. He put his head on one side and looked at me with an expression of exaggerated puzzlement playing across his scarred features. “Y’know there’s something familiar about you. I thought that first time I saw you. I keep getting this feeling that I know you from somewhere.”

  I cocked him a quick look to check that it wasn’t a chat-up line. Believe it or not there are still some guys out there who think that kind of remark qualifies.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, turning away. Jan, standing close enough to overhear the exchange, flicked me a sympathetic glance. Hofmann’s group had started their approach now. I concentrated on watching them roll to a halt and begin their second de-bus.

  “You sure about that are you now, Charlie?” O’Neill said softly. He’d moved to just behind my shoulder. There was something intimately knowing in his voice, the blur of it halfway between a threat and a caress.

  “I guess I must just have that kind of face,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “Is that right?” O’Neill murmured. “Well I got to thinking about coincidences, and how I don’t believe in them. Two crack shots, one after another,” he repeated his words from last night, emphasising them with two taps on my shoulder. I suppressed the urge to scratch. “I know you from somewhere, no mistake, and sooner or later it’s going to come back to me where that is.”

  I didn’t reply to that and when I next glanced round, he’d gone. I found myself clutching a desperate wish for him to suffer sudden, total, and irrevocable amnesia.

  ***

  After the driving we were in the classroom until lunch, learning about the organisation behind successful bodyguard work. Checking out hotels, restaurants, itineraries, schedules. It would have been right up Shirley’s street, had she lasted that long.

  Just before the lesson finished, Gilby dropped it on us that we’d be back in Einsbaden over the course of the next few days, carrying out site surveys of the village.

  “For the purposes of the exercise, your principal is going to be staying there. He wants to relax, see the sights, visit the local bar and café,” he told us. “You need to know where the dangers could come from, and your best escape routes.” He picked up his notes and gave us his usual parting cool stare. “You will be tested on this.”

  At lunch, ignoring the table manners that had been drummed into me since I was a child, I bolted my food as fast as I could shovel it in. It was efficient rather than stylish, but I managed to get my lunch finished before anyone else and almost ran up the stairs. This time, when I dialled Sean’s number, it was picked up on the third ring.

  “Sean!” I said, the relief like a weight lifted. “Thank Christ for that. Where have you been?”

  “No, sorry,” said Madeleine’s ever-efficient voice. “He’s not here at the moment. If you’d like to tell me what you need, though, I’ll try and help.”

  “Where’s Sean?” I demanded, feeling cheated.

  “He’s away. Rush job,” Madeleine said carelessly. “Some Arab prince flew in for a quick shopping trip and he won’t venture into the jungles of Knightsbridge without Sean by his side. Don’t worry. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Yes, but that’s no good when I need Sean now.

  I sat on Shirley’s empty bed and stared at the rain slanting across the window. Below me I heard an engine and when I looked down I saw Major Gilby returning from some short run out in the platinum-coloured Skyline. He wal
ked a couple of strides away from the car, then turned and looked back at it for a moment, disinclined to hurry despite the weather. I was too far away to see his expression, but I knew that look. Pride. New toy.

  At the other end of the line there was silence for a second longer, then Madeleine said, “So, what’s been happening over there?”

  I vacillated over launching into the whole story, or waiting until Sean was back. In the end I decided any other viewpoint was better than none.

  “We went out for a bit of R&R in Einsbaden last night,” I said, “and one of the lads, McKenna, got a bit out of hand.”

  “With you?”

  “No, he had a go at one of the instructors – guy called Blakemore.” I could have added more detail, but some perversity made me want her to have to ask for more information.