HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three

by Zoe Sharp

  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.

  “I suppose Madeleine has told you what this is all about?” he said, sitting facing me and stirring his coffee slowly.

  “Some,” I hedged. I was shivering, not entirely from the cold, and I clamped my hands together in my lap so he wouldn’t see them trembling. “She said Kirk came to see you.”

  “Yeah.” He lifted his cup, eyed me over the rim. The silence stretched and snapped. “Salter talked about you, Charlie,” he said at last, softly. “He told me what happened.”

  Inside my head I heard a sound almost like a sigh. So, it was out at last.

  I sat back in my chair, feeling my face setting. I forced a shrug even though my shoulders were so tense the movement nearly cracked them. “So?”

  “So, I can understand that you’re not going to like what I’m going to ask you,” he said, hesitant. I’d never seen him so uncertain. He’d always been supremely self-confident. The change made me nervous, stepped up my heartrate. The beat of my blood was so loud in my ears that I missed his next question and had to make him repeat it.

  “I said, I want you to go to Germany for me and find out what’s going on at that school.”

  He’d veered so far off track that the shock of it turned me slow. “What school?” I said blankly.

  “At Einsbaden. It’s a little place just outside Stuttgart.” He paused, frowning as though I should have known all this. “It’s where Salter was doing his training. The place where they claim he wasn’t killed.”

  Come on, Sean, for God’s sake don’t keep me hanging on like this! If Kirk told you I was gang-raped by the same group of people you were training, that they used the unarmed combat techniques you’d been teaching them to overpower and restrain me, then just get it over with . . .

  “Wait a minute. What do you mean ‘claim he wasn’t killed’?” I demanded, catching up belatedly. “Who else could have been in that coffin?”

  “Oh it was definitely Salter. I saw the body myself,” he said, voice grim. “But he was found dumped in the forest a few miles away from the school. They’re saying he left at the end of the previous week and they thought he’d flown home, when I know for a fact that they’d asked him to stay on and do some kind of work for them. That’s only the first of the anomalies.”

  It dawned slowly that he wasn’t being deliberately cruel.

  He didn’t know.

  Whatever else Kirk had told him, it wasn’t that.

  The relief and the disappointment was like sweet and sour on my tongue. I struggled for composure, to stay with the programme. I reached for my coffee, took a sip. The top was covered in a layer of froth, fooling me into thinking that the liquid underneath had cooled to a drinkable temperature.

  “What anomalies?” I managed.

  Sean must have thought the question implied more interest in the circumstances surrounding Kirk’s death than I actually meant. He gave me one of those quiet smiles, the ones that started out slow yet put out heat. The ones that made me wish I could wipe out our disastrous history together and begin again from new. But I couldn’t, that was the problem.

  “He rang me a week before he died, just as the course was finishing up. Said he’d got a job to do out there, a short-term contract, and could he start for me after he got back. He sounded different. Distracted somehow, evasive.” He ducked his head like a boxer avoiding a punch. “Maybe I should have pressed him harder.”

  “Pressed him harder about what?” I shut my eyes for a moment, took a breath. “Sorry, Sean, I’m missing a few steps here. I thought Madeleine said Kirk went to Germany to train so you’d give him a job with your outfit. What else was going on?”

  He leaned forwards, resting his forearms on his knees and staring into the flames. The action revealed a large-faced Breitling with a polished steel strap. It was a far cry from the battered old watch he’d always worn when I’d known him before, seeming to suddenly emphasise the distance travelled.

  “I need somewhere to train my people,” he said. “I’ve been using a place in Holland, but it’s small and the facilities there are limited. Then I heard about Einsbaden Manor. They’ve got everything I need and they used to have a good reputation, but in the last year or so things have gone off the boil. They had a pupil killed in a driving accident early last year, and there were rumours that it wasn’t quite as accidental as it could have been. I needed someone to check the place out.” He shrugged. “Salter offered.”

  For a moment the silence hung between us. The logs shifted and spat in the cast-iron grate.

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing – to begin with. He rang me twice with progress reports. He said they like to play mind games with you. Like seeing how you react. And they were putting too much emphasis on firearms drills, by the sounds of it, but Salter was a proficient man round weaponry, as I’m sure you can recall. He reckoned he could out-shoot the instructors with just about everything they were using, and I could well believe that.”

  Sean paused, took a sip of his coffee. The side of my calf nearest to the fire had started to burn. I hutched round in my seat to a cooler spot, and waited.

  “During his last phone call, when he’d told me he was going to be late coming back, he mentioned your name. Said he wished he’d stood up for you. That it had been on his conscience and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I’ve no idea what he meant. Then he said, all jokey, that if anything happened to him, would I see him right.”

  “Premonition or preparation?” I wondered aloud. I didn’t probe into Kirk’s reference to me. I didn’t have the courage to. Instead, I said, “What was the job?”

  Sean shook his head. “He wouldn’t say. Next thing I know I get a call from Salter’s parents telling me he’s dead and can I help get his body home.”

  “And what does the school say they think happened to him?”

  “They’re claiming they’ve no idea why he should still have been in the area, but perhaps it was an accident. Illegal hunters.”

  “But you don’t believe that.” It was a statement, not a q
uestion.

  Sean glanced at me. “He was shot three times in the back,” he said, voice neutral. “Right hip, spine, left kidney.” He formed the first two fingers of his right hand into a gun and plotted the diagonal course.

  I sat up straight as old memories surfaced. “They used a machine pistol,” I murmured. I’d fired fully automatic weapons often enough when I’d been in the army to recognise the way the rounds tracked, stitching across a target from low right to high left. It was almost impossible to hold one steady.

  Sean nodded. “Not the kind of thing you’d use for hunting, however illegal it was. But, the school supposedly don’t use machine pistols either. The pathologist recovered the rounds, by the way. They were hollowpoints.”

  He was watching my reaction as he said it. Hollowpoint rounds were designed to mushroom and distort on impact with soft tissue, maximising damage. Nasty, whichever way you squared it, and expensive, too.

  “Not the kind of thing you’d use for training rookies, either,” I murmured.

  “Not if you’re keeping an eye on the budget, no,” Sean agreed.

  “If he was shot in the back, that implies he was running away from something,” I said slowly. “What, though? What had he found there that made him stay on and what was so important that they killed him for it?”

  “I don’t know,” Sean said. “I got the impression when he first told me he was going to be delayed that it was the school that had offered him a job, but now I don’t think so.”

  “What do the German police think?”

  He gave me a wry look. “They’re playing things very close to their chest,” he said. “They’re still investigating and therefore can’t give me any information, but I get the feeling they’re not too interested. It’s just—” He broke off, opening his hands in a gesture of frustration.

  “I send people into dangerous situations all the time,” he began again. “But they know the score. It’s their job, their choice, and they’re well paid for it. All Salter was doing was scouting the place for me. I never considered for a moment it would get him killed. That’s why I need you to go and find out what happened to him.”

  He looked up. “The only way in is as a pupil, and I’m too well-known in the industry to do it myself. They’d suss me out straight away. I don’t have anyone else I could send who’s sharp enough for the job, Charlie. Not at this notice.”

  I gazed into the fire again, long enough for my eyes to dry out and my cheeks to begin to cook. Not quite long enough to successfully tamp down the anger that was rising at the back of my mind.

  “Why would you think that I would give a damn about Kirk Salter, after what he did?” I asked at last, without meeting his eyes.

  “He was under pressure, Charlie,” Sean said gently, and the hairs came up on the back of my neck. I felt them riffle against my collar as I turned my head. “He was having his strings pulled all the way along the line. It wasn’t his fault.”

  I half-rose, shoving my chair backwards. “I don’t care whose fault it was that Kirk shit on me,” I snapped. I put my fists on the table and leaned in close, adding in a savage whisper, “All I know is that he did, and I only came to his funeral to make sure the bastard really was dead! If you think I’m going out there looking for justice for him, you’ve got another think coming!”

  Sean didn’t react to my outburst, just caught and held my gaze, level, steady. “I’m not asking you to go for Salter’s sake,” he said quietly. “I’m asking you to go for mine.”

  Not quite what I was expecting. I almost fell back into my chair, deflated. “I—”

  That was as far as I got before the shrill interruption of Sean’s mobile phone. Without taking his eyes off me he reached into his jacket pocket for a unit about the size of a cigarette lighter, flicked it open. “Meyer.”

  He paused for a moment, wincing at a burst of static that even I could hear. “Hang on, the signal’s awful,” he said. “Let me go nearer a window.”

  He stood, moved away across the stone floor. I watched him lean against one of the wooden shutters, speaking too quietly into the phone for me to hear. He was back in control again, cool, hard. There was no hint of the fact that a few moments earlier he’d been almost pleading. Sean Meyer was not a man who begged often. Not for anyone.

  But he’d come close to begging me.

  I glanced back into the fire, as though I’d find my answers there. Somebody once told me that you always regret most the things you didn’t do.

  If I said no, what would happen?

  Sean would incline his head politely, make some throwaway comment. Of course, it was too much to ask. Then he would deliver me back to Cheshire and he would drive away. And I knew, instinctively, that I would never see him again.

  If, on the other hand, I agreed, what then?

  I could go to Germany for him and do my best, whatever that might turn out to be. If nothing else it might tell me if I’d been a fool when I’d turned down Sean’s last offer of a job. As it was I couldn’t be sure, and I’d rued my decision more or less ever since. This might be my only second chance.

  I thought of my burned-out flat and the stiff, uncomfortable prospect of another week in my parents’ company.

  Sean needed my help. Needed me. I hugged the thought to me, felt the warmth of it, and the excitement. I probably would never have got in touch with him if he hadn’t made the first move, but now he had, how could I let it go?

  And he didn’t know.

  He didn’t know about the utter humiliation I’d suffered. Whatever else I saw in his eyes when he looked at me, it wasn’t going to be pity.

  I twisted in my seat and took advantage of his distraction to watch him as he spoke to some unseen colleague. When the call was over he flipped the phone closed and moved back towards me. As he sat down again there was just a tinge of resignation about him, and of disappointment.

  My chin came up.

  “OK Sean,” I said calmly. “OK, I’ll do it.”

  Two

  A week later, just after New Year, I flew to Germany.

  I took a BA flight out of Heathrow to Frankfurt, then caught a Lufthansa connection for the internal on to Stuttgart. It wasn’t the most direct route but, at that kind of notice, it was the best Madeleine could organise.

  Things had moved fast since the day of Kirk’s funeral. Sean had driven me back to Cheshire, but only to collect the rest of my stuff and pack up. My parents had greeted his appearance with surprising equanimity, considering they’d once warned him off ever contacting me again.

  They took my announcement that I was taking off with Sean for an indefinite period with less composure, though. My mother just bit her lip and looked away, but I had to weather my father’s aloof disapproval. I imagine it was the same kind of reaction enjoyed by his motorcycle accident patients when they told him that although he’d expended hours of his undoubted surgical skill piecing them together, they were getting back on their bikes again.

  Nevertheless, they didn’t actively try to stop me. Which was just as well, really, because I don’t think they would have succeeded.

  Regretfully perhaps, I left my Suzuki RGV 250 motorbike in their garage, tucked away behind my father’s Jaguar XK-8. I didn’t like the idea of abandoning my independent transport, but at least the bike would be safe there until I got back.

  Sean rang Madeleine on his mobile once we were on the road again. By the time we got down to his base of operations in Kings Langley on the outskirts of London, she had sorted me a room in a small privately-owned guest house nearby. The owner turned out to be a slim, upright chap in his eighties, a retired Royal Marine Commando with a line in war stories that kept me riveted late into the evenings.

  My days were lost in whatever groundwork Sean could devise. He ran through roughly the kind of syllabus he expected them to teach until my head swam to overflowing with information I couldn’t hope to digest.

  On the practical side, I reckoned my biggest problem was going to be
the defensive driving section. My passion for motorcycling meant I hadn’t seriously driven anything with four wheels since I’d left the army. I was badly rusty, and it showed.

  Sean didn’t seem to share the same concerns. “As you stand now you’re as good, if not better, than most of the people who come to me having completed one of these courses,” he told me, but I had a feeling he was just trying to bolster my confidence.

  He and Madeleine both came to Heathrow to see me off and Sean had one last piece of advice to offer. “Don’t forget, if this is as dodgy as we think, they’re most likely going to be expecting you,” he said. “Not you personally, but someone. And they’re going to be expecting them to be good. You’re going to have to tone it down, Charlie. Play it quiet and you’ll be OK.”