HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three

by Zoe Sharp

We’d stopped just before a sweeping left-hand bend. As corners went it was a beauty. A long continuously curving entrance and a tightening fast exit. It slanted towards the inside like a banked circuit. A corner designed for speed. And misjudgement.

  To the outside, slightly past the apex, was a lay-by just about wide enough for a single vehicle to pull off the road. Indeed, it was where the old couple had stopped their Westfalia camper van. The road surface broke up there into gravel that had been scraped and scuffed towards the safety barrier in a long ominous twin gouge.

  Beyond the barrier was nothing. Open space.

  Because Todd stopped to find out from Figgis what was going on, I was the first to reach the barrier and lean out over it. There was a rocky drop on the other side that went down almost sheer for twenty metres before it levelled out into a stream at the bottom, and then away into the trees.

  I suppose, if I’m honest, I already knew in my heart what I was going to see down there.

  But it still came as one hell of a shock.

  Alongside me I heard Declan whisper, “Holy Mary, Mother of God.”

  I don’t know just how fast Blakemore had been going when he hit the barrier, but his trajectory had taken him fifteen metres or so out from the incline. He’d landed a little way from the bike, on his back, with his torso half-submerged in the stream. From this height I could see the current creating whirlpools and eddies around this unexpected obstruction to the flow.

  His body was bent and twisted, his limbs contorted inside his leathers. A good set will keep you together, but that doesn’t mean it will keep you whole. The darkened visor of his helmet stared up blankly at the sky.

  Shards of plastic debris were scattered around his body, splashes of harsh colour against the grey rocks. The faring of the Blade had detached itself in the crash and splintered into fragments, leaving the aluminium box frame exposed.

  I was certain he was dead, and then I saw the flutter of one gloved hand.

  I’ve seen dead bodies twitch before, little more than the nervous system shaking out the last few drops of life, but this was different. A controlled movement. A weak signal.

  I turned. The two instructors were still trying to get sense out of the elderly couple. “It’s Blakemore,” I shouted, cutting them short. “And he’s still alive.”

  Todd reached my shoulder first and stared down at the drop. “You’re fucking joking,” he muttered, stepping back, shaking his head. “Forget it, Fox, nobody could have survived that fall.”

  I glared at him, then inwardly recoiled. Blakemore had suspected somebody of being responsible for Kirk’s death. It might be rather convenient for Todd if Blakemore never came out of that ravine alive. Too convenient, perhaps . . .

  Figgis came up on Todd’s other side in time to hear that last remark. He threw Todd a disgusted glance.

  “Let’s find out for certain, shall we?” he said and climbed over the barrier.

  Todd didn’t try and stop him from going. Maybe he was as surprised as the rest of us by the driving instructor’s actions. Figgis crabbed across the face to an area where the incline of the rocks was at its most mild. From there he half-climbed, half-slithered his way down, sending a rash of pebbles skittering in front of him like a bow wave.

  His agility surprised me. He made it look easy, but no one else volunteered to follow him down.

  At the bottom we watched him pick his way across the rocks and reach Blakemore. I couldn’t imagine that the unarmed combat instructor looked any better close up. However strong and fit you are, you’re never going to win in a straight fight with inertia, gravity, and impact.

  Figgis stepped round the other man’s blasted limbs and crouched in the stream alongside him. Carefully, he flipped open the visor of his helmet, but didn’t attempt to remove it. He undid the velcro cuff on Blakemore’s left glove and pulled it off with a gentleness I wouldn’t have given him credit for. Then he pinched the inside of his wrist, looking for a pulse. He seemed to take a long time to find one. Long enough for me to suspect I’d imagined that feeble wave.

  Finally, he stood up and looked back up to the road, shielding his eyes. By this time we were all hanging over the safety barrier, staring down. I hoped briefly that the force of the FireBlade slamming into it and catapulting over the top hadn’t weakened its foundations or things were going to get crowded down there.

  “He’s still alive,” Figgis’s voice floated up. “We need an ambulance – now.”

  “They’re on their way,” Todd shouted down, “but we’ve got some ropes in the trucks. We can use one of the tailgates as a stretcher and haul him up ourselves. It’ll be faster.”

  “I wouldn’t move him if I were you,” Figgis called. He glanced back at Blakemore for some sign that he had any sense of cognition, but he was patently oblivious. When Figgis spoke again his voice was calm, devoid of emotion. “I think his back is broken.”

  People’s reaction to this piece of news was interesting. Some pressed forwards more fully, stretching their necks for a better look. Declan went and perched on the front bumper of the lead truck and lit a cigarette with hands that weren’t quite steady. I was one of those who moved back from the barrier. I’d seen enough, and grisly voyeurism was never in my line.

  Elsa turned away, too and belatedly realised that we’d been shuffling our feet across the gravel where Blakemore’s bike had skidded off the road.

  “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 h
e 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.