Hard Knocks

by Zoe Sharp

  The barrel of the gun, extended by its silencer, edged into view at eye level round the corner of the desk, followed by the man who was holding it. Without speaking, he flicked his head to indicate that I should rise, and he stepped back while I did so.

  But as I moved to pass him heading back for the doorway, he came in close, jamming the gun into my back to shove me down onto the surface of the desk. I landed face down, hard enough to bruise, hard enough to frighten, rammed into the smooth wooden surface.

  Afterwards, I told myself I could have coped with that, with the rough pat-down search they decided to subject me to. I didn’t like it, didn’t see the need for it, but I could have stood for it, even so.

  And then the man grabbed me at the back of my neck, and held me down.

  Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay.

  I panicked totally. I couldn’t help it.

  Terror exploded into rage, expanding instantaneously out of nothing like a chemical chain reaction. Unstoppable and toxic. My emotions were banded by colours. White heat. Red mist. Black.

  The heavy old-fashioned telephone was close to my right hand on the desktop. I closed my fingers around it, feeling the coldness and the weight. I heaved and bucked at the man pinning me, twisting under him as I brought my arm round at full stretch, like a pro golfer unwinding his best drive.

  I’d selected target by instinct. At the last moment, the last fraction before I hit, I managed to connect with sanity long enough to shift my aim by a few millimetres. It was enough.

  The phone smacked up under the side of the man’s masked jawbone, snapping his head back with a nauseating crunch. The phone’s internal bell reverberated as it hit and seemed to carry on vibrating for a long time afterwards.

  The man shot backwards and sprawled across the leather Chesterfield sofa on the far side of the room, limbs flopping. I jacked my body upright away from the desk and went forwards automatically, ready to go again. He didn’t move.

  My ‘principal’, Ronnie, had scuttled himself into a corner at the first sign of violence. He was now cursing with great fluidity and vigour for a man who only moments earlier had been pretending to be at death’s door.

  Rebanks and Blakemore had come charging through the doorway in sync by this time, flicking on the overhead lights. Blakemore went and pulled the balaclava off the inert figure on the sofa, bending over him to take the pulse at his throat. I recognised Todd. Strangely detached, I registered the blood around his nose and mouth.

  “Get a medic in here,” Blakemore told Ronnie. The cook clambered to his feet, dropping the offal that had been standing in for his guts into the waste bin as he went out.

  Blakemore stared at me and his eyes were still very bright. I saw a feral excitement in them, and it sickened me. I looked away, ashamed. The smell of violence hung in the air dull and bitter, like burnt plastic.

  Rebanks put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you OK?”

  I swallowed, nodded, not trusting myself to speech. He carefully prised the telephone out of my clenched fingers and inspected it. Blood was smeared up one side.

  He murmured, “Now what was that all about, hmm?”

  I let out a shaky breath, shrugged his hand away. I was beginning to come round, to snap out of it. “Well,” I said, aiming for a relaxed tone, almost bringing it off, “you know what they say – it’s good to talk.”

  He nearly made it to a smile, twisted into mocking. “In that case,” he said, “remind me not to have a conversation with you.”

  His eyes had dropped from my face and I realised that Todd must have ripped my shirt collar, although I didn’t remember him doing it. The material was gaping open across my shoulder, revealing the scar in all its lurid glory.

  Rebanks’s gaze lingered in that direction and when it shifted up to my face again, his expression was cool and calculating.

  Ronnie returned with Figgis in tow, who went quickly to deal with Todd. Major Gilby wasn’t far behind.

  “What the hell happened here?” he demanded as he stalked in. His eyes flicked to my neck, then to my face, and back again.

  Rebanks lifted the telephone. “Old Toddy went in a bit heavy and Charlie here made a collect call,” he said, laconic.

  The Major’s nostrils grew pinched. “This is not a laughing matter,” he snapped with a glance at Todd’s unconscious figure. He jerked his head to Blakemore. “My study, the pair of you. Now.” He favoured me with a last brooding stare. “You too, Miss Fox, if you don’t mind.”

  ***

  “I think perhaps that you have some explaining to do, Miss Fox,” Gilby said when the four of us were closeted in his inner sanctum.

  I was in the centre of the room, trying to resist the urge to stand to attention. The other two men were slightly behind me, with Blakemore lounging against the door jamb and Rebanks slumped in an armchair with his legs stretched out straight before him.

  The Major was sitting stiffly behind a desk not unlike the one in the simulation, although its surface was covered in a more realistic clutter of papers. He fidgeted a little, I noticed, straightening papers that were already neat, tidying a set of keys into a top drawer. He had an old-fashioned letter spike by his left hand and I noted its position almost unconsciously.

  I could feel the location of all of the school men, without having to look. If things went bad I could estimate exactly how long it would take them to react and reach me. The fact that I was even beginning to think that way scared me to death.

  “Todd should have kept his hands to himself,” I said now, my tone on the defiant side.

  “Very probably,” Gilby said. He repositioned the leather blotter so that the corners were precisely aligned. “Although I would hazard a guess that you overreacted somewhat.”

  “That,” I said coldly, “is a matter of opinion. Anyone who expects me to lie there and put up with him feeling me up has another think coming.”

  “Difficult to think when you’ve got concussion,” Gilby rapped back. “Is that what happened when you had your throat cut?”

  The sudden unexpectedness of the question took my breath away. I couldn’t pull back the gasp his words provoked, nor could I speak.

  “What do you mean, she had her throat cut?” Blakemore demanded. He moved away from the door, circled me with his eyes fixed on my jugular like a starving vampire. I did my best to ignore him.

  Gilby nodded towards my neck. “That scar’s not surgical,” he said. He put his head on one side slightly, pursing his lips. “Knife, by the looks of it. A big one with a serrated blade. I would say you were damned lucky.”

  I felt my shoulders drop. “Yes,” I said, “I was.”

  Gilby ducked his head, a small nod as though recognising my capitulation. “Thank you, Miss Fox,” he said, gracious as a snake before it strikes. “Tell me, did this happen before or after you left the army?”

  Now that had to be a stab in the dark. No way could he have known about that. Sean had promised me.

  “What makes you think I’ve ever been in the army?” I stalled.

  It was Rebanks who spoke, lazily throwing my own words back at me. “When we’d finished shooting yesterday you came straight out with, ‘I have no live rounds or empty cases in my possession, sir,’ without having to be told, didn’t you?” he repeated with a grin. “It’s a standard army range declaration, babe. No reason for you to have known it unless you were in.”

  He grinned at my consternation. “And before you try that excuse again, you must know as well as I do that the TA don’t let you loose with weapons on any old open day. Not until you’ve been through basic training.” He shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “So, Miss Fox, time to make a clean breast of it, don’t you think?” Gilby said, brisk, but with a deceptive mildness.

  “Yes, I was in,” I said. “But the army didn’t suit me, and I didn’t suit the army. They chucked me out.”

  “Why?”

  I hesitated. I was faced with three choices. An outright lie, which I
hadn’t prepared for and couldn’t sustain for long enough to be convincing. I could tell them about Sean, which would be embarrassing, but probably believable. Or I could tell them the truth. I almost flinched at the thought of it.

  “I had a fling with one of my instructors,” I said at last, feeling my face colouring. “It didn’t go down too well.”

  Rebanks looked me up and down slowly, insultingly. “Oh but I’m sure you did,” he murmured.

  The Major silenced him with a look of intense distaste and continued to stare at me for a while. I just hoped there was enough truth showing in what I’d said for him to accept it. Still, he was the type who was predisposed to believe that I’d done something so predictably female, so stupid.

  In the end, he nodded. “All right, Miss Fox, we’ll overlook this one, but if I find out that there’s anything else you haven’t been telling us, you’ll be in more trouble than you can imagine. Is that understood?”

  “Yes sir,” I said, resisting the urge to salute.

  So, what had Kirk found out that he wasn’t supposed to know? Was that the kind of trouble the Major had in mind? The thought made my skin go suddenly cold and start to prickle.

  “All right,” Gilby said, glancing at his men in dismissal. “Now get her out of here.”

  ***

  Rebanks took me down the corridor to the students’ mess hall where the others who’d been through the exercise were waiting. Shirley took one look at my face and my torn shirt, and came to put her arm round my shoulder.

  “What on earth happened to you, lovey?” she demanded.

  Elsa, though, was a little more observant. She waved a hand to my neck. “So, this is what you have been hiding under all those high collars,” she said.

  Her cool comment made everybody stare at me like I was a science exhibit. I glared at them, and all but those with the thickest of skins let their eyes drop away.

  They were looking expectant, though. I knew I was going to have to tell them something or the rumour mill was going to be working overtime.

  Question was, what?

  And, more to the point, what the hell was I going to tell Sean?

  Nine

  As soon as I could get away at lunch, I called Sean. He sounded surprised to hear from me during the daytime, his voice switching to wariness almost right away.

  “Charlie, are you OK?”

  “You’d better get Madeleine to plant some new information in this mythical past of mine she’s been creating,” I said.

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  So I told him. I told him in detail how I’d slipped up on the range and given away my army training. I told him in somewhat less detail how I’d come to overreact during the first-aid simulation.

  “You knocked him out with a telephone?” Sean demanded, and I could hear the faintest trace of laughter behind his words.

  For some reason, the funny side totally eluded me. My temper was still edgy, close to the surface, and that was enough to spill it over again.

  “I’m glad it amuses you, Sean,” I snapped. “Meanwhile I’m the one out here taking the shit. I just want some reassurance that if they follow up on my story – and I think Gilby is the careful type – they’ll find it checks out. At the moment I don’t have a lot of confidence that it will.”

  Sean’s voice dropped cold and serious instantly. “Why not?”

  I shrugged, aware that maybe I’d said too much. “I just have the feeling that Gilby’s men knew what they were looking for today,” I said. “They seemed to know just which buttons to press to get me to let go.”

  “By the sound of it, Charlie, they’re pressing everyone’s buttons.”

  “True,” I said. “But not like this.”

  I’d asked around and they’d given the others a rough ride also, but nothing quite as specific as the treatment they’d given me. Having said that, the sim had been the final straw for Shirley. She’d packed up her stuff and taken the long walk up the driveway and out of the Manor, struggling to carry her dignity along with her suitcase.

  “Apart from that one slip-up on the range yesterday,” I went on, “I don’t think I’ve done anything that should have made them so suspicious – unless my cover story isn’t holding water. Where else could they be getting their information from?”

  “I’ll check,” Sean said, his voice clipped. Anger or concern? I couldn’t tell. “Call me tonight. I’ll try to have something for you then.”

  ***

  At lunch we found out that we’d all failed the first-aid simulation. Almost everyone had blundered straight in and been judged shot dead, too indoctrinated by their army training to question the order to go over the top. Those who weren’t hamstrung by a military background had simply been too intimidated by the frenzy of the instructors not to do as they were told.

  Apart from me, only Tor Romundstad had perceived the dangers waiting in that darkened room. He’d point-blank refused all Blakemore’s rabid inducements to enter the study. Some sixth sense warning the Norwegian to stay clear.

  Despite this, we still failed. When Romundstad asked Major Gilby why, he was told it was because we’d obviously left our principal unguarded for long enough for him to be attacked in the first place. A real no-win situation.

  I think I was finally beginning to learn.

  ***

  Todd was back on his feet in time to eat, so it didn’t seem like I’d done him any lasting damage. It was clear I hadn’t made any friends in that direction though, and more than ever I regretted my instinctive violent reaction.

  I found out just what a bad idea it was during the unarmed combat session that followed. Previously Blakemore had used O’Neill as his guinea pig, but when I saw the stocky phys instructor step into the gym in his place, I knew there was going to be trouble.

  The thing that alarmed me most was the fact that there was nothing overt about the threat Todd exuded. There was no stare-out contest, no stamping of hooves in the dust, no throwing of salt into the ring. He didn’t even look at me. Not once.

  But I could feel his enmity washing in like the cold draught from a broken window.

  Blakemore had decided to teach us how to use extendible batons. In countries where we would not be allowed to carry firearms, he said, they were a viable alternative for disabling a would-be attacker.

  In its collapsed form the baton was about eight inches long. It sat cold and heavy in my hand, the weight of the concealed end making it feel unbalanced.

  Blakemore demonstrated the technique for opening it up, flicking his wrist so the two magnetically held inner sections telescoped out and locked into position with a solid click like the racking of a pump-action shotgun. Fully extended, the baton was just short of two feet in length and weighed four hundred and fifty grams, nearly a pound.

  The sight of it was enough to push sweat out all along my hairline.

  A year or so previously I’d had my left arm broken in two places by someone using a metal rod that seemed very similar to the baton. He’d been aiming for my face at the time and if he’d connected I probably wouldn’t be still around to tell the tale. My forearm still gave me gyp when the weather was cold and I could forecast rain with it more reliably than the Met Office.

  Listening to the fizzing sound of the baton parting the air as Blakemore made a few exploratory swipes with it brought that memory rushing back in all its sharp and bitter glory. It made my bones tingle, sent a ripple sizzling across my skin.

  Blakemore and Todd moved onto the crashmats and sprang at each other, sparring with the batons and a liberal dousing of testosterone. They clashed with great energy but to little effect. Like a couple of stage actors indulging in a sword fight designed to make the audience gasp, but not to put either in any real position of danger. It looked impressive, though.

  When they were done they stepped apart, breathing hard. Blakemore had put enough effort into the display for the sweat to track down his temple and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. He
turned, caught my set face and grinned. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we don’t expect you to practise on each other.”

  He and Todd dragged out a line of weighted mannequins and strolled among us while we went through the drills of deploying the baton and striking the dummies across the head, chest, and neck.

  Once we’d got the feel of it, Blakemore moved on to set attacks and defences. As he’d done before he formed us into two groups. Instinctively, I graduated towards his side, trying not to make it look too obvious that I’d made a conscious choice.

  Just as casually, it seemed, the instructors deliberately changed places at the last minute so I ended up in Todd’s group anyway.