HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three

by Zoe Sharp

  I picked it up. The image looked to have been taken on the deck of a boat. In the background I could see the rail and wake through the water. To the left of the shot were two people, standing wrapped in each other’s arms, smiling into the lens. Madeleine and a tall black man.

  He must have been tall. Madeleine was no short-stop, but he towered over her enough to be resting his chin on top of her head. He was eye-catchingly handsome. Regal, with a brilliant smile. Happiness radiated from them.

  I handed the picture back. She glanced at it with affection before slipping it into her handbag.

  I knew I was supposed to ask, so I said, “Who’s the guy?” If I’m honest, I was curious, anyway.

  “That’s Dominic,” Madeleine said.

  Of course, he would have to be a Dominic. I just couldn’t see Madeleine with a Dave or a Darren.

  “We’ve been together three years now.” She smiled, to herself more than to me. A secret kind of a smile. One that wraps you up in a blanket and keeps you warm in the winter. “I think he’s a keeper.”

  “A keeper?”

  “For keeps.” She looked at me and something of the smile spilled over. I didn’t doubt the strength of her feelings for him. “He’s wonderful. I’d be mad to let him go.”

  I dredged my memory and came up with a distant fact that he was a chef, but I’m not entirely sure where it came from. I was at a loss to know where she was going with this sudden outbreak of palliness.

  “He looks . . . very nice,” I said, lamely.

  Madeleine sighed. “The point is, Charlie, that I love him, but even if I didn’t I’d be asking for trouble making a play for Sean when we work together. Besides, I’d be wasting my time. He’s not interested.”

  “In you?” I asked, almost in spite of myself. “Or in having a relationship full stop?”

  “Both, I think.”

  A young, bored-looking waitress appeared from somewhere deep in the bowels of the café. She paused by our tables, scowling. Madeleine asked for more espresso, much to the girl’s obvious disgust. I ordered the same, just for badness. She stopped just short of tutting out loud, and sloped away again.

  We didn’t speak until she’d rattled a cup down onto each table top in front of us and retreated, not bothering to remove Madeleine’s empty. Milk and sugar, it seemed, were not an option.

  “You seem to know an awful lot about Sean’s private life,” I said then, taking my first sip of real caffeine for over a week. It plugged straight into my nervous system like a set of jump leads.

  “I’ve worked with him since he first set up on his own. I’ll admit there was a time when I had hopes in that direction – before I met Dominic, of course,” Madeleine said, pausing to smile wryly. “One evening, not long after I’d started working there, I managed to contrive getting Sean round to my flat and cracked open a bottle of wine. I thought once he got some alcohol inside him he might loosen up a bit.” She lifted her head and glanced over at me. “Instead, all he did was talk about you.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  It was like one minute I’d been walking along a sunny beach without a care and the next a big black cloud had moved across the face of the sun, the tide had turned with a vengeance, and the last step I’d taken had been onto sand that felt suspiciously soft under foot. Leave now, my mind shouted at me, before it’s too late . . .

  It’s not the first time I’ve thought I should listen to that voice in my head more often.

  But I didn’t.

  I’d said it as a statement, but Madeleine took my single word as a question. She swirled her coffee round in its cup for a moment, disturbing the sediment at the bottom, then said calmly, without looking at me, “He told me you’d spent an amazing spur-of-the-moment first weekend together in a chalet built into the side of a cliff somewhere on the Welsh coast. Said you’d spent the whole time in bed and that it was sensational.”

  I felt my face heat at her dryly delivered words, but I didn’t deny any of it. There was little point when it was quite true.

  The chalet had indeed been built into the side of a cliff, with a long set of winding stone steps leading down to it. They were so steep that if we’d had luggage it would have been a perilous descent, but we hadn’t thought much further ahead than the clothes we stood up in. And how fast we could get each other out of them.

  I turned away so Madeleine couldn’t read the thoughts chasing through my head, and stared out of the window again. Outside I could see a couple of the students standing on the far side of the square with a map in their hands, pointing to various key points of the roof-line opposite. So much for unobtrusive observation. They couldn’t have made their purpose any plainer if they’d been wearing sandwich boards proclaiming it.

  I turned back to Madeleine and picked up what was left of my own coffee. It had turned cold, and black, and bitter.

  “Was that all he told you about me?” I said, with more than a touch of bite. “That I was a good lay?”

  Madeleine regarded me with a level gaze, shaming my unworthy comment. “He told me you were fearless, quick, funny, clever, mentally stronger than anyone he’d ever met,” she said. “He said you were the best thing and the worst thing that had ever happened to him.”

  As you were to me, Sean, I thought. As you were to me.

  “He couldn’t understand how you came to betray him after what you’d shared together,” she went on, into her stride now, relentless. “He couldn’t understand how you could tell them about your affair, could claim he’d raped you, to try and save your own skin.”

  “I didn’t,” I denied automatically, but without heat.

  “He knows that now,” Madeleine agreed, “but he didn’t then.”

  When we’d met again last winter, Sean and I had solved the mystery of just how the army had uncovered the details of our clandestine relationship. It had been a relief to find that he hadn’t, after all, abandoned me as I’d thought, but by then it had been almost too late for it to matter.

  I suppose it might have cleared the air between us.

  Human history is littered with might-have-beens.

  I’d heard enough. I got to my feet again, throwing down enough change to cover the cost of my coffee.

  This time, I almost made it to the doorway before Madeleine’s cut glass voice stopped me in my tracks.

  “You’ve never told him, have you?” she said. “What really happened to you.”

  I stilled like she’d just jerked a snare around my neck. I swallowed, and my imagination felt the cut of the wire into my throat. Without turning, I asked, “How much do you know?”

  “All of it, more or less,” Madeleine said. “Don’t you think Sean has a right to know it, too?”

  Anger lit me. I took another couple of steps towards the door and yanked it open. I gripped the handle tight, making sure I had my escape route before I glanced back towards her.

  “He doesn’t have to know,” I managed through lips that seemed suddenly stiff, unyielding. “It wouldn’t do any good for him to know.”

  “Why not, Charlie? It might make him understand what you went through.”

  I shook my head. “No. I’d rather he thought of me as a ruthless bitch than a helpless bitch,” I bit out. “Don’t tell him, Madeleine.” In my head I’d summoned up the words as an order, a cool command, but instead they came out shaped as a plea.

  She shrugged. “OK, it’s your choice,” she said, frowning, “but I go home tomorrow and Sean’s planning on coming out here himself to take over. You know what he’s like. You can’t keep something like that from him forever.”

  “I can try.”

  Fourteen

  The full effect of my dramatic if rather flouncy exit from the café was somewhat spoiled by my immediately colliding with a person who’d been hurrying along the pavement outside. I spun round without caution from slamming the outer door shut behind me and my momentum nearly sent both of us sprawling.

  On a reflex, I grabbed at their jack
et. It was only when we’d steadied that I realised who it was I’d got hold of.

  “McKenna?” I said, my voice sharp and incredulous. “What are you doing here?”

  But the youngster just threw me a panicked glance, jerked himself free, and hurried away. I watched, puzzled, until he’d turned the corner. He looked dreadful, his skin grey and clammy. He hadn’t come across as the type dedicated enough to the course to drag himself from his sick bed to take part in a group exercise.

  I shrugged and let it go. I had other things on my mind as I stalked across the square with my shoulders hunched down into my jacket and my anger bubbling away under the surface.

  Blakemore was just the unlucky one. He was the first of the instructors I came across, but even so, he was the one I suppose I had the most faith in. Maybe it was just fate that it happened that way. I caught him just as he was climbing onto the FireBlade, with the engine already fired up and ticking over.

  He nodded when he saw me approaching, unconcerned, but when I reached across the tank and hit the kill switch his eyes narrowed under the open visor of his helmet. I stood there and stared long enough and hard enough for him to slowly sit back, undo the chinstrap and pull off his lid. He put it down on the tank, folded his arms and regarded me, stony, one eyebrow raised.

  Temper is never the best thing to wear to a confrontation. It has a nasty habit of disintegrating into tatters just when you need its protection most and the colour has never suited me.

  Ah well, nothing ventured . . .

  I said, “Tell me about Kirk Salter.”

  Blakemore’s eyebrow shifted up another few millimetres. “How do you know Salter?” he hedged. He flashed a quick, almost nervous smile. “What’s he to you? Old boyfriend?”

  “Old comrade,” I said, adding deliberately, “We trained together.”

  It took a moment for that one to track from starting point to logical conclusion. Blakemore looked up. “He was ex-Special Forces,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

  “He was,” I agreed.

  He made a small snorting sound through his nose. His gaze turned calculating and then he nodded. “It figures,” he said.

  “So why did you kill him?” I pushed, ignoring the fact that it was probably unmitigatingly stupid to blow my cover like this, on Gilby’s home ground, with only Madeleine for back-up. “Did he find out what you were up to and try to stop it?”

  “Stop us what?” Blakemore asked. After the initial shock of my opening gambit he’d relaxed slightly. Did that mean he was an accomplished liar, on top of his game now, or that I was so far off the right track he felt secure?

  “From grabbing the kid.”

  He laughed. “Oh no,” he said, “he was with us all the way. Salter wasn’t the one who threw a spanner in the works.”

  I could have – should have – pursued that one in any number of directions, but I was blinkered by anger at his amused denial. “So why did you shoot him?” I demanded.

  “We didn’t,” Blakemore said, still grinning at me. “What makes you think that we did?”

  “Nine-mil hollowpoints fired from a machine pistol,” I said. “That’s what killed him.”

  “Sorry, Fox,” he said quickly, “but we don’t use full autos – or hollowpoints for that matter.”

  He reached for his helmet, but before he could put it back on I brought the round I’d shown to Madeleine out of my pocket and held it up to him.

  “So what’s this?”

  He stopped reaching for the helmet. Instead he took the Hydra-Shok round out of my fingers, examined it carefully. “Where did you get this?” he asked and any trace of laughter had been sucked right out of his voice, leaving a dustiness behind that was almost arid.

  “I found it on the indoor range,” I said. “I picked it up the first time we shot there.”

  “That’s against the rules,” he said, but he was only going through the motions of rebuke.

  “It is,” I agreed. “But last time I checked, so was killing people.”

  Blakemore glanced up then, pinned me with a straight look. “And you would know all about that, would you, Charlie?” he said softly.

  I swallowed, pushed it aside and went on doggedly. “Why did you kill him?”

  Blakemore sighed. “I didn’t,” he said. “I thought I knew who was responsible, but now I’m not so sure.” He regarded me for a few seconds, that brooding, drawn-down stare he had as though he was mentally walking through his options and not finding any of them to his liking. Eventually he held up the round. “Can I hang onto this?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to plant this in front of someone, like you’ve just done, and see what it shakes loose.”

  I found a half-smile from somewhere. “Didn’t work too well on you,” I said.

  He grinned again, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, “but that’s because I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  He tucked the Hydra-Shok round into his jacket pocket and fired the ‘Blade up again. I caught his arm.

  “What’s going on, Blakemore?”

  He shook his head. “It’s too complicated to go into right now,” he said. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”

  I hesitated again, then stepped back. He nodded, rammed his helmet on and toed the bike into gear, as though afraid I’d change my mind. It was only as he ripped out of the square that I relayed the conversation through my mind and cursed myself for all the gaps I’d left unplugged with questions.

  By the time our allotted research period was up, Blakemore still hadn’t returned. I hung around by the back of the truck, hoping that he would still show, until Todd impatiently herded me in with the others.

  I scanned the phys instructor’s broad face for some sign that I was walking into a trap by allowing myself to be taken from a public place to a private one without a struggle, but there was nothing to alert me there beyond his usual arrogance.

  Even so, as we rumbled out of the square I was aware of a tightness in my chest, a prickling in my hands that made me clench them together in my lap hard enough to turn the skin white around the knuckles.

  Had Blakemore been telling the truth? Or had he just been stalling for time, putting me off my guard? His denial when I’d first mentioned the hollowpoint had seemed genuine. But faced with the evidence, there’d been something missing. Now, in the back of that lurching truck, it took me a while to work out what it was.

  Surprise.

  Whatever I’d triggered in Blakemore, whatever I’d said to him that had acted as a spur, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t suspected already. Suddenly, I remembered the little drama they’d organised for us on the range with Craddock. “So that’s how you did it,” Blakemore had said. Did what? And how was it done?

  Behind us I could see Todd at the wheel of the second truck, trying to steer with his elbows while he lit his cigarette. When he caught me watching him he threw me a cocky salute that only served to increase my uneasiness.

  Then, without warning, our truck braked hard, swerving to the right.

  The students were thrown against one another as the heavy vehicle skidded slightly. Declan’s shoulder hit mine and I grabbed on to the tailgate to stop myself pitching out over it.

  My first thought was that it was another ambush. That the men in the Peugeot had brought in reinforcements and come back for a return match. I strained for the sound of gunfire, realising with a sick dread that the thin canvas tilt sides of the truck would be sliced like butter in a firefight.

  Figgis managed to bring us to a jerky halt, but Todd had been following too close and not paying attention. I saw him rise in his seat as he stamped hard on the brake pedal. Smoke puffed from the offside front tyre as he locked it solid. For a moment I thought a collision was inevitable. When he finally wrestled the truck to a standstill his front bumper was less than half a metre from the tailgate. I could look straight into his startled eyes.

  It was only once we’d all stopped that
I heard the frantic voices. A man and a woman. It took a few seconds to tune out the panic and latch on to the vocab. I caught it in snatches. Accident. Mobile phone. Ambulance.

  I pushed out of my seat and scrambled over the tailgate, just as Todd jumped down from his cab. As we ran forwards I was aware of other people following.

  The couple who’d flagged Figgis down were elderly. Both were talking at once, gesturing towards the edge of the road. The woman was crying.