HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three

by Zoe Sharp

  Sixteen

  It took me a few minutes after McKenna’s departure to put my thoughts in order.

  To begin with, out there at the scene, I’d been so certain that the Russians were responsible. I remembered the fear and the loathing on the Peugeot driver’s face after Blakemore had threatened him. His need for retribution had been fierce and blazing, to wipe away that paralysing moment of weakness. Was it enough to override the danger to the child?

  But after I’d spoken to Madeleine, McKenna seemed to fit as a suspect on all fronts. Yet when he’d told me about seeing the other school car my instinct had been to believe him. I wasn’t entirely sure why.

  I looked up. Evening was dropping rapidly over the Manor now. The interior lights were harsh in their brightness, beginning to cast outwards. It was cold, too. I shivered inside my sweatshirt and wished I’d stopped long enough to put on a jacket.

  With a sigh, I trudged back towards the house. I walked across the parking area and up the steps to the smokers’ terrace. I was halfway up before I realised someone was standing out by the French windows, in the shadows, waiting.

  I climbed the rest of the way cautiously. It was only as I reached the top that the figure moved out into the light and I recognised him.

  “Charlie,” Hofmann greeted, his voice expressing neither happiness nor displeasure at finding me. “Was that McKenna I saw you talking to?”

  For a few seconds all I could do was stare back at the big German, my mind furiously working up a reasonable excuse for my actions.

  Eventually, I said, “Yes, he told me he was leaving. He just wanted to say goodbye,” I added, hoping Hofmann hadn’t been around for long enough to see me grappling McKenna to the ground. I might have a little trouble convincing him that kind of behaviour was an English tradition for those departing.

  “We were just realising how close a shave we had the other day,” I went on quickly, hoping to distract him. “Something like Blakemore’s accident really brings it home to you.” I waved a hand in the general direction of the blue tarpaulin that covered the wrecked Audis over in the corner. “We survived a roll and being shot at, and walked away without a scratch, yet Blakemore makes one mistake and poof, he’s gone. Doesn’t it make you think how lucky we all were? How fragile life is?”

  Hofmann considered for a moment, his heavy face reflecting the slow turn of the machinery inside his head. “Motorcycles are dangerous things,” he said at last.

  I felt my shoulders drop a fraction at his response, made to move past him, but as I did so I noticed the narrowed shrewdness of his gaze as his eyes rested on me.

  The next moment he’d turned away and that dull, almost vacant air had settled over him again. Like his mind was totally occupied with the processes of walking upright and operating his lungs.

  So, I wasn’t the only one who’d come to Einsbaden Manor pretending to be less than I was. But why had he?

  Before I could form that thought into a question that stood any chance of an answer, Hofmann said abruptly, “I was sent to fetch you. Major Gilby wants to speak with you in his study.”

  He stayed by my shoulder as we went in through the French windows, like he’d been told to stop me making a break for it. If that was the case, why send a student, rather than one of the instructors? Maybe the Major thought such a move would put me more off my guard.

  Hofmann almost marched me down the set of corridors to the Major’s study without pausing to consider the way. I wondered briefly if he was just efficient, or if there was more to it than that, and I remembered Sean’s warning that the German security services had infiltrated this course. The more I thought about Hofmann as a possible for that, the more he seemed perfect.

  “Ah, Miss Fox, do come in.” Gilby said in his deceptively polite voice and I realised we’d reached the open study doorway. “Thank you, Herr Hofmann,” he added in dismissal. Hofmann hesitated for a moment, then nodded and walked away.

  I stepped over the threshold into the study, aware of a sense of low background panic. I wished I’d had time to prepare for the Major’s questions. More than that, I wished I knew what they were.

  The door closed behind me. I forced myself to be casual as I glanced over my shoulder. Todd was standing behind me. When I looked across the room to where Blakemore had sat the last time I’d been here, Rebanks was in the same chair.

  The Major was watching me carefully for signs of nervousness. I tried not to show him any.

  My chin came up. “You wanted to see me, sir?” I said blandly.

  “Yes,” he said. He didn’t invite me to sit. Instead, he rose, started to walk round the study so I had to keep turning my head to follow him. “I understand you were the last person seen speaking to Mr Blakemore.” He paused, both in speech and movement. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what you and he talked about?”

  Now it was my turn to hesitate. No way was I going to replay the conversation word for word. In view of Blakemore’s throwaway admission that the school men had indeed been behind the kidnapping, it would have been suicide.

  Damn, why hadn’t I called Sean as soon as we got back to the Manor? If only Madeleine’s message hadn’t distracted me. If only my earlier conversation with her hadn’t made me so wary about getting in touch with him. Together we could have formulated something that would have been believable.

  I should have known that Gilby would get to find out Blakemore and I had spoken. We’d been standing in the middle of the square, for heaven’s sake. Not exactly keeping it secret.

  Now, I looked the Major in the eye and said, “I don’t see what relevance it has, but if you must know we were talking about bikes. I have one at home. I’ve ridden them for a few years.”

  I don’t know quite why I added that last bit. Maybe I just wanted to warn him that if he was intending to pass this off as sheer bad riding on Blakemore’s part it wasn’t going to wash. “I was asking about the FireBlade,” I went on, another nail. “We were discussing cornering technique. He was telling me how well it handled.”

  Todd gave a derisive snort at that last statement, but I refused to back down from it. Gilby glared at him.

  “Might I remind you, Mr Todd,” he gritted out, “that I have just lost a good man today. This is not the time for levity.”

  Todd’s face snapped to attention. “No sir!” he said smartly.

  For several seconds the silence hummed between them. Now seemed a good time to leave, but I’ve always been bad at choosing such moments. Besides, when would I get an opportunity like this again to probe?

  “So, do the police think they’ll catch him?” I asked instead, keeping my tone absolutely neutral.

  All three heads turned slowly in my direction. I read degrees of shock and guilt there in all of them.

  Eventually, it was Gilby who challenged stiffly, “Catch who?”

  “Whoever it was who knocked Blakemore off his bike,” I said patiently, shrugging as though it was an obvious question. As though there was never any doubt that this accident wasn’t purely accidental. I looked at them with an expression of puzzlement on my face.

  “Surely you saw it all – the skid marks, the broken glass?” I said, diffident. “You must have seen how narrow the tyre tracks were when he hit the barrier. He was travelling almost in a straight line, braking hard. If he’d simply gone in too hot and lost it, he would have been almost broadside, or he would have been on the ground already and sliding.”

  “And you worked all this out how, exactly?” Todd demanded. “How come I was there and I didn’t see it?”

  I shrugged again. It was getting to be a nervous habit. “You spent most of the time concentrating on what was happening down in the ravine,” I pointed out. “A few of us had the chance to have a look at the road surface.”

  Todd had been with us in Einsbaden for the morning. He hadn’t been in plain sight, but it would have been a logistical nightmare for him to have got from the village, to the Manor, and back again, pausin
g only to commit murder on the way.

  Rebanks and Gilby, on the other hand, had apparently never left the Manor. And they weren’t the only ones.

  “It’s fortunate the police caught that gang of criminals who attacked us yesterday, isn’t it, Major?” I said, keeping my face level as I fed his own invention back to him. “Otherwise you might almost suspect they were to blame.”

  “Mm, quite,” Gilby muttered, looking as rattled as I’d ever seen him. Where were you, Major, when Blakemore was being murdered?

  Up to that point Rebanks himself hadn’t spoken. Now he took advantage of the death of the conversation to lever himself out of his chair. He moved casually in front of the desk with his back towards me.

  “I don’t suppose you can shed any light on this, can you?” he asked. And when he moved aside there was a single 9mm Hydra-Shok hollowpoint standing on the polished wooden surface.

  I knew, don’t ask me how, that the round was the very one I’d found on the range and given to Blakemore. If they’d had me wired up to a heart monitor it would all have been over at that point, because my pulse rate went storming off into cardiac arrest territory.

  Outwardly, I tried to stay calm. Inwardly, my mind went totally blank, which I suppose is another kind of calm. I tried to figure the innocent response, but couldn’t find one.

  Then, with a mental lurch, my brain reconnected and started running again. Deny everything. Nobody was close enough to know for sure that you gave the round to Blakemore. Unless they were watching you through binoculars . . .

  I shook off that last unwelcome thought and looked Rebanks straight in the eye. “Why should I be able to?” I asked pleasantly. “Munitions are your field, aren’t they?”

  A quick flash of something chased across his narrow face too fast for me to identify.

  “All right, Miss Fox,” Gilby said then. He sat on the edge of his desk, suddenly looking as tired as he had done earlier that day, when he’d realised that Blakemore was dead. “That will be all.”

  I nodded, grateful of the chance to escape. He let me get the study door halfway open before he called me back, the frozen relief at almost making it out of there in one piece grabbing me by the throat.

  “Just one last thing,” the Major said with that deceptive quiet. When I turned back I found him watching me with the dispassionate stare of a stone-cold killer. “The police will be investigating the crash and they will present their findings in due course. In the meantime I will not have anyone shooting their mouth off about what happened today that will unsettle the staff or the students here. Is that quite clear, Miss Fox?”

  People have made that kind of mild threat to me before and it’s never ended well. I didn’t think this was the time to say so, so I nodded meekly. “Yes sir,” I said, not nearly as smartly as Todd had done, and made my exit.

  I was out of the study and had almost reached the end of the corridor when a voice behind me made me stop.

  “Charlie, can I speak with you?”

  I turned to find Rebanks had followed me out and was hurrying after me. Without waiting for an answer, he took my elbow as he came past and hustled me towards the hallway, as though afraid Gilby would appear and call back both of us.

  I let him walk me well out of earshot before I twisted my arm out of his grasp.

  “What’s this all about, Rebanks?” I demanded. “What’s going on?”

  “Why did you ask about hollowpoints the other day?” he said, ignoring my question to pose one of his own. “You asked if you’d be firing them. Why?”

  “Just something somebody mentioned,” I said, wary enough to be deliberately vague.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  He let his breath out, exasperated. For a moment he regarded me with his head slightly cocked, as though he couldn’t quite make up his mind if I really was innocent, or whether I was just stalling him.

  “Look, Charlie, there’s stuff going on here that you can’t begin to understand,” he said suddenly then, speaking low and urgent. “Blakemore was into it and look what happened to him. You and I both know that crash wasn’t an accident, but the Major’s stonewalling.” He glanced over his shoulder, just to make sure the corridor leading to Gilby’s study was still empty.

  Surprised by this unexpected confidence, I said, “Surely the local police will turn up evidence of the other vehicle.”

  He gave me a withering look. “The local plod will toe the line,” he said. “What they turn up is immaterial. Gilby’s got influence. If he wants it kept quiet, that’s the way it will stay. Trust me on this.”

  And how would he know that? Of course, Gilby had done it before. Kirk had died in the most suspicious of circumstances, but the school had not been put under the microscope, hadn’t been closed down. The whole matter had been dusted under the carpet.

  I feigned puzzlement, tried to push aside everything Blakemore had told me right before he died. “But why the hell would the Major want to cover up the man’s death?”

  “Ah,” Rebanks said, giving me a bleakly knowing look. “Isn’t that the question? Maybe what you should be asking is why he wanted him dead in the first place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh come on, Charlie,” he said. “You said yourself it wasn’t an accident!”

  “No,” I said carefully, dismissing the doubts I’d shared with Elsa and Jan. “That’s not what I said. It could very well have been an accident. I meant it wasn’t simply down to rider error. The other driver could just have panicked and run, that’s all. And now you’re telling me that Major Gilby wanted Blakemore dead. What possible reason could he have had for that?”

  Rebanks stepped back away from me abruptly, staring, and a combination of thoughts flitted across the screen of his face too fast for me to unravel any of them.

  “I thought—” he began, then stopped, shook his head. “Never mind, forget it.” He turned and started away from me, but I grabbed his arm, pulled him back.

  “Hang on a minute, Rebanks,” I said. “You can’t just drop that one on me and then walk away. What the hell are you talking about?”

  Rebanks shook his head again, more forcefully this time, his mouth compressed as though I wasn’t going to force another wrong word out of it. “Forget it, Charlie,” he repeated, urgently. “I mean it. If you value your safety, you won’t pursue this any further.”

  ***

  That evening we handed in our reports on the fleshpots of Einsbaden village, which Gilby warned us he would mark and return the following morning, like junior school homework. I wondered who’d be getting a gold star and who’d be getting a “See me.”

  I was aware, also, when I’d finished mine that it was a shoddy piece of work and unlikely to earn me particular praise, but that was just too bad. I had other things on my mind.

  Why would Gilby have killed one of his own men? And why choose such a hit and miss fashion to do it? There was always the chance that Blakemore might have avoided the ambush. Kirk’s death had been much more certain, much more precise.

  Maybe Gilby had realised that he wouldn’t get away with two such obvious executions. It made it all the more important to find out what he was up to.

  Just after supper McKenna had walked out of Einsbaden Manor, as he’d said he would, to meet a taxi down at the main gate. I watched him go from the dormitory window, but didn’t feel inclined to go down and indulge in any kind of fond farewells. Not many of the other students did, although I was surprised to see Jan talking to him outside the front door. Maybe she had a softer heart than she’d like us all to think behind that sharp exterior.

  McKenna hadn’t tried too hard to make friends during his short spell in Germany. I doubt he was going home with answered questions. Still, at least he was going home in a seat in Economy, rather than a box in the hold.

  Elsa came into the dormitory then and disappeared into the bathroom announcing her intention to soak in the bath before turning in. I didn’t w
ant to risk being overheard, so I grabbed my jacket and the mobile, and headed back out to the woods where I’d collared McKenna that afternoon.

  It took me a while to wind myself up to call Sean, but even so I had no clear idea what I was going to say when he picked up the phone. In the end I needn’t have worried.

  “I know about Blakemore,” he said as soon as he came on the line. “Madeleine called me.”

  I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. “Did she tell you about McKenna’s uncle as well?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Do you think he could be our boy, or do you think the Russians took Blakemore out?”

  “Neither,” I said, and I told him what had happened since I’d got back to the Manor.