Hard Knocks

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 for 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.

“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 question.

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.”