I watched the change come over them and felt the tension ease out of my shoulders. I could almost hear the hiss as the steam escaped from my system. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been holding it in.
The evening progressed better than it had any right to, given the circumstances. Declan bought a second round, then one of the other lads got a third in. A suitable while later, I got to my feet and waved a hand at the empty bottles cluttering the table top.
“Same again?” I asked. Nobody came over all chivalrous on me, so I headed for the bar.
When I returned, clutching two handfuls of lager bottles, I found O’Neill was in my place.
“She double-tapped the lot of them, just like that?” Declan was asking. “Now that I would have liked to have seen. Why the feck couldn’t I have been one of the ones to go before her?”
I didn’t have to ask what he was talking about. I put the beer down on the table top with more of a sharp click than I might otherwise have done. O’Neill looked up at me then and winked. He slid out of my seat and gestured for me to regain it with exaggerated courtesy.
“Please, be my guest,” he said, grinning. “I make it a rule never to start a fight with a lady who could kill me just as easy with either a nine-mil or a telephone.” But as he made to move past me I put my hand on his arm and stopped him.
“Why did Rebanks do it?” I asked him quietly.
O’Neill had the grace not to play dumb with me. He glanced across the room to where the weapons’ man was sitting, and leaned in close. The move sent a waft of beer breath gusting over me that almost made me flinch.
“Because he didn’t think you’d got a hope in hell of hitting them,” he said, blunt with the truth of it. There was a certain amount of smug satisfaction in his voice, too. No love lost there. “I doubt he would have maxed out that one himself and he knows the position of those targets in his sleep.”
He grinned at me again, and this time there was a hint of sly in his face. “It doesn’t happen often that we get someone as good with a pistol as you, Charlie,” he said.
I remembered Sean’s comment, that day in the little pub in Yorkshire, about Kirk being able to out-shoot most of the instructors.
“So who was the last?” I asked.
O’Neill shrugged. “Big guy called Salter. He was here last month. Bit of a coincidence really,” he went on, giving me a sideways look. “We get years of no-hopers, then two crack shots come along, one after another.”
Before I could think up a response to that one, there was a crash of breaking glass from the direction of the bar and the kind of quick scatter of movement you only get in pubs when someone’s just dropped a full pint, or just started a fight with one.
We all twisted round to look. In this case, it seemed that both option boxes had been ticked.
Blakemore was off his bar stool, tense with anger and surrounded by a sea of broken glass. Beer was splashed up the front of his leather jacket, and the front of the shirt he had on underneath was dark with it. Blakemore didn’t seem to notice the mess. He had that head-down stance I knew well. The kind that counts down to violence like the timer on a bomb.
“What’s going on?” Craddock asked, jiggling to see past me.
It took a moment for the people around the bar to shift enough for us to see who the other player was.
“Looks like McKenna’s got himself a death wish,” I said. “He’s just squaring up to take Blakemore on.”
“This I have to see,” Declan said, hopping out of his seat.
After a second’s pause, the rest of us scrambled after him.
“Looks like you’ve started a trend for attacking the staff, Charlie,” O’Neill said, nudging my arm. I ignored him.
As we closed on them, McKenna was so unsteady on his feet that for a moment I thought Blakemore had already thumped him.
“You’re not bloody fit to teach us anything,” McKenna said, his voice slurred so that he ran the words at the end of the sentence together. He stabbed a finger towards the other man’s chest. “You get careless and then people die, yer bastards. And you don’t give a shit, do ya? You just don’t give a shit. It won’t be the first time that you’ve had to clear up the bodies, though, will it?”
My heart jumped. Was he talking about Kirk? And if not, who else had died here?
Blakemore stood there, vibrating with suppressed fury the way a big dog does, just before it launches itself straight for your throat. He didn’t move, but under his heavy drawn-down brow his eyes had begun to smoulder like a dropped cigarette down the side of a cheap foam sofa.
Even Declan’s eagerness to witness the bloodshed started to wilt in the face of this sense of burgeoning menace. Those nearest began to back way.
Alongside me O’Neill muttered, “Oh shit,” under his breath. “He’ll fucking kill him.”
I turned. “Blakemore?”
“No,” he said, and nodded.
I looked back and found that another of the instructors had stepped into the demarcation zone. Possibly the last one I would have expected.
Figgis.
“I think maybe you’ve had a little too much to drink, Mr McKenna,” Figgis said politely. His voice was as calm as his words. His body language was calmer than that. “I think maybe you need a bit of fresh air.”
McKenna lurched away like the floorboards had tilted wildly under his feet and mumbled, “F’cough will ya?” He waved an arm at Blakemore, the movement unbalancing him even more. “This is between me and ’im.”
Figgis straightened up and seemed to come together in front of us. Normally he was a shambling figure, as if all his limbs were slightly loose in their attachment. Now, it was as though someone had threaded cord right the way through his body and suddenly taken up all the slack.
He ambled towards McKenna, took hold of him almost gently and went up his arm in a sequence of what looked like clips and squeezes that was never hurried, but at the same time was too fast to properly take in.
Figgis finished by lightly chopping McKenna under the sides of his jaw with the edges of both hands. If it had been an open-handed slap to the face, it would barely have been hard enough to bring tears to his eyes.
McKenna watched him make the moves with a mystified look on his face, then his eyes rolled back and he folded up almost gracefully, like he’d just fainted. Figgis caught him neatly on the way down.
“There now,” Figgis said to the room at large. “Too much beer, like I said. Let’s get the lad outside and get him some air.” He glanced at Blakemore and added, “No harm done, eh?” and there was a trace of something in his tone that might almost have been a warning.
Blakemore seemed to shake himself out of it, brushed off his jacket and made a careless gesture. “No,” he said darkly. “No harm done.”
A couple of the others helped McKenna out of the bar. He was conscious, but unaware, staggering blindly. Figgis turned to beam at everyone, and dropped back into the baggy skin that we’d all assumed was the real him.
We drifted back to our table.
“Now, I know we’ve all just seen that, but would somebody mind explaining to me exactly what the feck it is that we’ve just seen?” Declan demanded.
I could have answered his question, but I chose not to. I’d come across a few martial arts practitioners who used Kyusho-Jitsu pressure-point techniques, but I’ve never seen one take somebody out of a fight with them quite so easily. Figgis, I considered, was more than an expert. He was a master.
“Ah well,” O’Neill said. “He’s a bit of a dark horse is our Mr Figgis. Bit like Charlie here.” He glanced sideways at me, but I didn’t rise to that one, so he let it go. “Up until a few months ago Blakemore was teaching defensive driving and Figgis was your man for unarmed combat, but they did a bit of a job swap. It’s a waste, so it is, because good old Figgis is absolutely fucking lethal. I wouldn’t be wanting to go up against him.”