“I’m not the only one who’s trying to make life difficult for themselves,” I said, keeping my eyes on the needle-coated path in front of me.
I felt her stiffen. “What do you mean?”
“That lecture,” I said, glancing at her. “You must have known Gilby was going to take it badly.”
Either the German woman was a better actress than I’d given her credit for, or I’d genuinely thrown her off balance. She looked sincerely confused. “Why should he have done?” she demanded, and there was defiance in her lifted chin.
I stopped for a moment, staring at her, but could detect no hint of guile.
“You really don’t know, do you?” I said slowly.
“Know what?” she said. Bewilderment gave way to frustration. “Charlie, please explain.”
I turned and started walking again. We’d fallen a little way back from the rest of the group by now, and I felt safe to launch into the details Sean had given me about Heidi’s kidnap, and the Major’s involvement with the team who were guarding her. The trees had a convenient muffling effect, but I kept my voice low, all the same.
I suppose I should have been more wary about giving her the information, but I figured if she was secret service, she already knew it all anyway and if she wasn’t, well I probably needed all the help I could get.
Elsa was silent while I spoke. It was only when I’d finished and checked out her face that I saw the closed-in anger there.
“Dumb fuck,” she bit out quietly, and went on in German along what I gathered from the tone were similar lines. Her hands were balled into fists by her sides. “I knew I never should have trusted him.”
Now it was my turn for confusion. “Trusted who, Elsa?”
She took a breath and made an effort to loosen up, even flicking me a short smile that didn’t reach behind the lenses of her glasses. “One of my ex-colleagues,” she said, with no small amount of bitterness. “One of my ex-husband’s colleagues, also. Someone I thought was still a friend.” She gave a derisory snort, shaking her head. “Obviously not.”
We walked on another minute or so while I assumed she ran through a mental list of things she was probably going to do to her ex-colleague – not to mention her ex-husband – when she next got her hands on him.
“What did he tell you?” I asked then.
She sighed. “He told me he knew people who’d been on this course, that we would be asked to present such a lecture and he gave me the details of the Krauss case from the police file. He told me it was because he felt bad about how my husband had treated me and he wanted to help me. Now I realise he was just trying to make trouble for me. To make sure I failed. So they could all laugh behind my back.” She spat out another word in German that I didn’t understand, but it sounded like a useful piece of abuse. I stored it for later. “Bastard.”
“Elsa,” I said carefully. “When I came back to the room yesterday, someone had been searching my stuff.”
She frowned, distracted from her thoughts. “That’s strange,” she said at last. “I thought someone had been through my things, also. Nothing was missing, but some items were not quite as I remembered leaving them. Has anything been taken from you?”
I thought of the 9mm Hydra-Shok, tucked safely under Shirley’s bed. “No,” I said, “but you didn’t see anyone hanging around our rooms did you?”
She shook her head. “No, only you, me, and Jan. No one else. Do you think we should speak to the Major about this?”
“I don’t think there’s much point,” I said, giving her a tired smile. “If it wasn’t any of us, who do you think that leaves?”
***
I don’t know if Major Gilby realised we were starting to go stir crazy by the end of the fifth day, but he announced over that evening’s meal that transport had been arranged to take us into Einsbaden village to visit the local bar, if anyone was interested? He took our unanimous loud vote of approval with something akin to disappointment. As though he hadn’t expected better of us, but had hoped for it, nevertheless.
They rolled out the same canvas-topped trucks that had picked up Declan, Elsa and me on our arrival. Was it really only five days ago? We all began piling into the back.
Figgis and O’Neill were driving and the other instructors commandeered the comfy seats, leaving the rest of us with cattle class. Just as we were loading up Blakemore appeared in his leathers.
“You not riding with the rest of us then?” Declan called across to him.
“Nah, I’m riding in style, mate,” Blakemore said, grinning at him through the open visor of his helmet. He threw his leg over the FireBlade like it was a cavalry charger, hit the electric start and short shifted his way across the gravel. I admit to a pang of envy before that rorty exhaust note was drowned out by the asthmatic rattle of the truck motor cranking into life.
It was only a relatively short trip into Einsbaden. It was too loud for conversation in the back of the truck. We sat and swayed and stared at each other in the dim light from the single flickering light bulb without attempting to speak.
The guys had that scrubbed-up look about them. Freshly showered hair still gleaming wetly, designer shirts, and an air of hopeful anticipation. The mingling aromas of their liberal dousings of aftershave would have felled an anosmic ox at a hundred paces. It wasn’t doing much for me, that’s for sure.
The trucks rumbled into the village square like the advance party for an invasion force. If the locals saw us coming they certainly didn’t hang out flags of welcome. When we’d rolled to a halt outside the one local drinking hole there was a stampede to be first to the bar which I didn’t try to compete with.
As they burst noisily through the main doors, though, my fellow pupils discovered that, not surprisingly, Blakemore had beaten them to it. He was sitting at one end of the bar, looking very much at home, with a beer by his elbow and an open paperback on his knee. He grinned smugly at us when we came in, sliding a marker into the book and setting it pointedly aside as if to say, what kept you?
“What’ll you have, Charlie?”
I turned to find Craddock had muscled his way through to the front and was standing at the bar holding a euro note in his hand. I hesitated briefly, but there was nothing devious about the Welshman.
“A beer would be great,” I said. “Whatever they have is fine.”
The landlord was on nodding acquaintance with the instructors, although he seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see his customer numbers so vastly swelled for the night. He greeted the few locals who ventured in with the same stolid lack of hospitality.
The original decorators of the place had gone for an alpine tavern look, all rough cut timbers, old-fashioned wooden skis, and cow bells. I snagged a table in a corner. It had ornately carved heavy wooden chairs at each end and rustic benches along both sides that had been polished smooth by the passage of years of hutching bottoms. I sat at one end of a bench, where I had my back to a wall and could watch the rest of the room.
Craddock returned from the bar with two bottles of lager and no glasses. Declan was with him, and we were soon joined by Jan, Elsa, and a couple of the others whom I didn’t know well enough to confidently put names to. They all sat and we tilted the bottles.
“Ah, but that hits the spot,” Declan said, his tone almost reverential.
The rest of the Manor crew, once they’d found there were no local women under the age of sixty to receive the benefit of their collective charms, lost their predatory boisterous edge and seemed to settle, mentally downgrading the evening from possible pulling session to night out with the lads.