Hard Knocks tcfs-3

by Zoe Sharp

  Hard Knocks

  ( The Charlie Fox Series - 3 )

  Zoe Sharp

  'An exciting...entertaining first novel' Sunday Telegraph

  'One of the best crime debuts for years' Yorkshire Post

  Charlie Fox really didn't care who shot dead her ex-army comrade, Kirk Salter during a bodyguard training course in Germany. But when old flame Sean Meyer asks her to go undercover and find out what happened she just can't bring herself to refuse. Keeping her nerve isn't easy when events bring back fears and memories she's worked so hard to forget. It's clear there are secrets at Einsbaden Manor that people are willing to kill to conceal. To find out what's going on, Charlie must face up to her past and move quickly, before she becomes the next casualty. She expected training to be tough, but can she graduate from this school of hard knocks alive?

  HARD KNOCKS

  Charlie Fox book three

  by

  Zoë Sharp

  For Andy, who’s stopped me giving up altogether on occasions too numerous to mention . . .

  www.ZoeSharp.com

  HARD KNOCKS is the third in Zoë Sharp’s highly acclaimed Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox crime thriller series, now available in e-format for the first time, complete with author’s notes, excerpt from the next Charlie Fox – FIRST DROP – and a bonus excerpt from Libby Fischer Hellmann’s PI Georgia Davis/Ellie Foreman novel, DOUBLEBACK.

  ‘Perhaps if the army had known what was inside me, what I would eventually turn into, they might not have been so keen to let me go.’

  Charlie really didn’t care who shot dead her traitorous ex-army comrade Kirk Salter during a bodyguard training course in Germany. But when old flame Sean Meyer asks her to go undercover at Major Gilby’s elite school and find out what happened to Kirk she just can’t bring herself to refuse.

  Keeping her nerve isn’t easy when events bring back fears and memories she’s worked so hard to forget. It’s clear there are secrets at Einsbaden Manor that people are willing to kill to conceal. Some of the students on this particular course seem to have more on their minds than simply learning about close protection. Subjects like revenge, and murder. And what’s the connection between the school and the recent spate of vicious kidnappings that have left a trail of bodies halfway across Europe?

  To find out what’s going on, Charlie must face up to her past and move quickly before she becomes the next casualty. She expected training to be tough, but can she graduate from this school of hard knocks alive?

  ‘If you only know Charlie Fox from First Drop, Second Shot, and Third Strike, you don’t know Charlie. What you’ve got in your hands is a rare and special treat. It’s like finding some lost Jack Reacher novel or a couple of non-alphabet Kinsey Millhones that nobody knew existed. Don’t let anyone tear it from your hands without drawing their blood.

  ‘These early Zoë Sharp books haven’t been a secret, but they’ve been harder-to-get than Charlie Fox in your bed. Think of these as the early years of Charlie Fox – she’s lethal and relentless, but still raw from the military experience that made her the kick-ass, take-no-prisoners bodyguard that she’s become.

  ‘But there’s more going on in these books than breakneck action and adventure. Charlie has heart, maybe too much for a woman in her profession . . . and it’s that caring, that humanity, that makes her much more than a killer babe on a motorbike. These books are your chance to discover Charlie Fox as she discovers herself, her strengths and her weaknesses, and sustains the scars to her body and soul that make her such a unique and compelling character.’ US crime author and TV producer, Lee Goldberg

  Bonus Material

  Don’t miss the bonus material at the end of HARD KNOCKS:

  The other Charlie Fox novels and short stories

  Excerpt from FIRST DROP: Charlie Fox book four

  Meet Zoë Sharp

  Meet Charlie Fox

  Excerpt from the PI Giorgia Davis/Ellie Foreman novel from Libby Fischer Hellmann – DOUBLEBACK

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  HARD KNOCKS

  One

  It rained on the day of Kirk Salter’s funeral. Hard cold rain, close to sleet. Driven down off the moors by a frenzied wind, it rampaged through the gravestones of the bleak little Yorkshire churchyard and buffeted the sparse group of mourners clustered round the open grave.

  I stood a respectful distance back from the family, listening to the droning voice of the vicar, nasal with ‘flu. The rain stung my face, plastering my hair flat to my scalp. As I tried desperately to stop my teeth from chattering I wondered, not for the first time, what the hell I was doing there.

  It was two days after Christmas. Yesterday morning I didn’t even know that Kirk was dead. We hadn’t kept in touch since our army days, and I’d had absolutely no wish to do so.

  The last time I’d seen him all I remember was being scalded by a white-hot rage, an impotent fury at his actions – or lack of them. He was a fucking coward, I’d yelled at him. A traitor. I hoped he died screaming.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  ***

  It was Madeleine who’d broken the news that Kirk had been shot dead in Germany. She turned up quite out of the blue at my parents’ house where I was reluctantly spending the holidays. That was what surprised me most about her unexpected appearance. I hadn’t told anyone I was going to be there.

  In fact, until recently, I would have done just about anything rather than be found within a fifty-mile radius of the family fold in Cheshire. It certainly wasn’t the obvious place to start looking.

  For various reasons, my relationship with my parents had fractured about the time I got kicked out of the army. It had taken the best part of five years before it had begun to knit back together again. If the warehouse building next to my Lancaster flat hadn’t caught fire in early December, it probably would have taken longer.

  Still, it’s amazing what the prospect of being homeless at Christmas does to your pride. I’d swallowed mine dry and accepted my father’s coolly delivered invitation.

  It hadn’t been easy. My mother, aware of how fragile was this truce, had greeted my return with a twitchy delight that was almost hysteria. By Boxing Day, if I listened carefully enough, I could almost hear her rack-tight nerves snapping quietly behind her apron strings. My own were not far behind.

  And then, into this scene of agonising tension, had come Madeleine.

  “There’s a funeral tomorrow that I think you might want to go to,” she’d said carefully, her face solemn.

  She knew – I’m damned sure she did – whose death I’d instantly assume she was talking about. I’d had no contact with Kirk for nearly five years. Why on earth would I think of him? Besides, she was too good at digging out such information not to have known I’d be only mildly interested at best in his untimely demise.

  No, I’d thought she meant Sean, and the shock of the blow I’d felt at that moment had quite literally taken my breath away. I’ve never fainted in my life, but I came pretty close to it then. It was only afterwards, when I caught her studying my reaction, that I realised she’d broken the news that way deliberately.

  Sean Meyer. Madeleine’s boss. Now there was a name I’d spent so long conjuring with I was practically eligible for entry to the Magic Circle.

  Madeleine worked for Sean handling electronic security and surveillance. When I’d first met her I’d believed there was a lot more to their relationship than strictly business. Bearing in mind my own shattered affair with Sean, a certain antagonism from that assumption still lingered. I couldn’t seem to put it aside.

  I told myself it was a relief to have an excuse to get away from
my family. That Sean’s relayed request for my presence at the service was no deciding factor, but maybe I was still feeling too shaky to put up much of a fight.

  It would have been difficult to refuse in the face of Madeleine’s stubborn determination, in any case. Sean hadn’t dragged her away from her Christmas dinner to spend the best part of a day tracking me down, she told me grimly, to have me back out now.

  She’d practically stood over me while I’d thrown some suitably sober clothing into a bag and borrowed a black coat from my mother that contrived to make me look bulky without actually keeping me warm. Then we’d headed north.

  As we’d crawled across the Pennines in freezing fog, Madeleine had filled me in on how she’d come to be involved in Kirk Salter’s life and the aftermath of his death.

  “He came into the office to see Sean in early November,” she explained. “He was back in civvy street and looking for a job.”

  Somehow I wasn’t surprised at the news. Since he’d left the army himself, Sean had moved into close protection work. If you’re ex-Special Forces and you’re an expert in your field, there aren’t many alternative career choices open to you. Sean had, it seemed, found immediate success, and Kirk had certainly been big enough to have been useful as a bodyguard.

  “So what was he doing in Germany?” I asked. When she’d initially told me the location and manner of his death, I’d automatically assumed it was military. “Was he on a job for Sean?”

  “Sort of,” Madeleine said. “He’d gone to do a VIP protection course over there. Since they banned handguns in the UK most of the bigger training schools moved to either Holland or Germany, as you probably know.”

  I hadn’t known it, but I wasn’t inclined to correct her. “So what happened?”

  Madeleine flicked her eyes to the rear-view mirror before she pulled out round a slower moving truck in the centre lane. “We’re not entirely certain,” she said, off-hand. “I’m sure Sean will fill you in.”

  I watched the gloomy humps of other cars appearing out of the fog alongside us and reflected idly that Kirk should have been too experienced a soldier to get himself shot so carelessly. Well, hell, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.

  I hadn’t always felt that way about him, of course. When we’d been undergoing Special Forces training together everyone wanted big Kirk on their squad for any exercise. Particularly if there was any heavy lifting involved. I’d have sworn he was solid, dependable, one of my comrades. Someone to trust your life to. Mind you, I’d have sworn that about the others, too.

  Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay.

  I almost winced as the list unrolled inside my head. I’d managed to go without thinking about my quartet of attackers for a couple of months and now it was like they’d never been away.

  The four of them were part of the same intake of trainees. We were supposed to form the kind of bond that would see us all attending reunions together in fifty years. Then one night they’d drunk enough to tip them over into macho bravado and I’d taken on the shape of prey.

  After they’d raped me, they’d sobered up enough to realise I could finish them, if they didn’t finish me first. I remember lying there, half-senseless from the beating and the pain, and listening with remote interest while they’d discussed the best method of disposing of my body.

  And that’s when Kirk had stumbled upon us.

  He may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed, but he was certainly one of the heaviest. Even four to one, the others hadn’t had the courage to go against him.

  Kirk had stayed with me like a big dog, holding my hand until the medics arrived, until they’d scraped me up and poured me into the ambulance. I never dreamed for a moment that when it came to the court martial he would deny everything he’d seen and heard.

  But he did.

  My shoulder blades gave an involuntary shudder and I shook myself out of it. A junction sign flowed past my window like a wraith, but I couldn’t recall the last few miles.

  I twisted back in my seat. “Madeleine,” I said, my voice level, “you must know I didn’t give a damn about Kirk Salter, alive or dead. Why don’t you cut to the chase and tell me exactly why Sean wants me at his funeral?”

  She gave a rueful half smile. “I wondered when you’d ask,” she said, “but the truth is, I don’t know. Sean rang me from Germany yesterday morning and said he needed to talk to you urgently. Something to do with Kirk. He didn’t say what.”

  She was concentrating on the road too hard to notice the twitch her words provoked. It occurred to me for the first time that Kirk might have told Sean more than I realised about my shambolic eviction from the army. What other reason could there be?

  I fixed my attention on the slap of the wipers across the glass in front of me. I’d had the opportunity once before to explain to Sean the full tawdry details of my attack. I’d bottled out. He already had the bare bones, but when it came to the true extent of my injuries I’d been rather more economical with the truth.

  He knew I’d been beaten up, but he didn’t know it had gone so much further than that.

  What if Kirk had told him the rest?

  ***

  Madeleine had booked rooms at a small hotel on the outskirts of Harrogate and that’s where we spent the night. The following morning we drove the rest of the way through pretty but desolate countryside. The rain had started almost immediately, slashing in sideways across the landscape, turning it icy grey. Even the sheep looked cold.

  Sean was already at the church when we arrived. I hadn’t seen him since we’d climbed out of a riot together two months before. He was looking good, on the whole, with no sign of the shoulder injury that had so restricted him then.

  He’d favoured me with a brief nod as we’d walked into the tiny church, but his eyes, dark enough to be almost black, were cool and flat. There was something formidable about the set of those wide shoulders that made me instantly wary. I knew that look. It meant nothing but trouble.

  Question was, who for?

  He’d spent his own Christmas in Germany, Madeleine had told me, untangling the inevitable shroud of red tape that had delayed the retrieval of Kirk’s body. That would have been enough to piss anyone off, but I had the nasty feeling there was more to it than that.

  A burst of alarm flashed through my system, translated as a sudden warmth despite the bone-numbing chill. It was only a degree or so above freezing inside the church but at least it wasn’t raining much in there. The whole place smelt of mildew and mothballs like my grandmother’s wardrobe.

  Madeleine and I trailed after the coffin as it was carried out. I hung back purposely, but there were no faces I remembered among the pallbearers.

  There were none I’d tried hard to forget, either.

  By the time we got to the graveside the ground was slick with mud. The tracks of the Bobcat mini digger they’d used to scratch out the requisite pit had left gouges in the surrounding earth that were deep enough to make you stumble. They’d lined the edges of the void with strips of artificial turf, its harsh bright green the only splash of colour against the greys and blacks.

  Someone was fighting to hold an umbrella steady over the vicar’s head, but the wind lashed the rain in under the side of the canopy, the spray coating his glasses. “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,” he croaked, with an uncommon depth of feeling. “He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

  As they put Kirk into the ground Sean stood in the second row back with his head bent, staring at nothing. He didn’t seem to notice the rain sliding in rivulets along the angles of his cheekbones.

  Afterwards, when clods of sodden earth had been shovelled in on top of the coffin, he spoke only briefly to Kirk’s parents. They thanked him without any sign of resentment for bringing their boy back to them so quickly.

  Their intensely grateful manner disturbed me. If Kirk had been working f
or Sean at the time of his death, as Madeleine had implied, I would have expected a reception that held more bitterness, more blame.

  Sean solemnly shook their hands and, with every sign of urbane sophistication, bent to kiss the pale cheek Kirk’s mother offered. Then he turned and walked across the patchy grass towards us, and that air of quiet civility just seemed to drop away from him.

  He moved like he always did, covering ground with a long, almost lazy stride, but something had hardened in his face, like he didn’t have to pretend not to be angry any more. My system kicked up a gear as I fought down the impulse to back away from him.

  I’d spent most of the previous night lying awake trying to get my head round finally getting things out in the open with Sean. I’d thought I’d come to terms with it.

  Looks like I’d been wrong.

  ***

  Half an hour later, I found myself sitting huddled into the open fireplace of an otherwise deserted country pub. My mother’s coat was spread across the chair next to me. It was dripping puddles onto the stone flagged floor and steaming gently in the heat. I hoped it wasn’t dry-clean only.

  Madeleine had disappeared at her earliest opportunity, no doubt eager to get back to what was left of her Christmas break. Sean would take me where I needed to go she’d said, almost cryptically. I’d transferred my bag into his car, another of the Grand Cherokee jeeps he seemed to favour, and allowed myself to be ushered into the passenger seat without argument.

  We hadn’t talked of much on the drive to this middle-of-nowhere pub. Nothing of any note, anyway. We scratched the surface of his recovery, which was well under way, and his troubled family situation, which was going to take rather longer to resolve.

  Now Sean came back from the bar, stooping to avoid the lower beams that spanned the ceiling, and put two cups of coffee down onto the oak bench in front of us. He shrugged out of his overcoat and loosened the top button of the starched white shirt that suited him just as well as fatigues had ever done. I knew he was gearing up to get right to the point, and I almost braced myself.