their injured principal into his limo and hustled him away from the scene.
What I didn’t add, because it wasn’t included in the Manor’s information, was that if Hinkley had chosen a revolver with a longer barrel and a higher muzzle velocity than the Rohm R6-14 he’d been using, the explosive-head Devastator rounds he’d loaded might just have had the effect their name implied. Scratch another US president.
“So, Miss Fox, what conclusions do you draw from this?” Gilby asked when I’d finally ground to a halt.
“That Reagan’s close protection team were good in a crisis, but not so hot at planning and prevention,” I said. “They should never have let it happen in the first place. But, it does make Reagan unique – he’s the only serving US president to date who’s survived actually being shot by an assassin.”
He smiled. “Excellent,” he said, the praise pleasing me more than it should have done. “Who’s next?”
I regained my seat next to one of the tall windows that looked out over the rear of the house. Elsa stood up, gathering her file of papers, and walked to the front of the classroom. The students were all sitting at tables, but the instructors, including Gilby, had lined themselves up along the back wall.
They had listened to all the presentations so far, mine included, with poorly disguised boredom. I got the impression that this was one of Gilby’s pet ideas as far as the curriculum went and nobody else could see the value of it.
Elsa was the last to go. She reached the desk at the front and put her papers down neatly. “Good afternoon,” she said, sombre. “We have heard already about many famous events, but I would like to speak about one that is not in your library records. It is more recent, and not so well known. My subject is the abduction of a young girl called Heidi Krauss.”
The name meant nothing to me, but it was instantly apparent that it did to Gilby and his men. It was as though someone had passed an electrical current through the wall behind them. Every one of them jerked upright and Gilby even took a step forwards, as though he was going to try and prevent Elsa from speaking.
The German woman looked up. “Is there a problem, Major?” she asked, without inflection.
The rest of us followed the exchange like the crowd at a top-class tennis match, heads following each volley from one end of the room to the other. Gilby must have realised almost immediately that to stop her now was going to look more suspicious than letting her continue. “Of course not, Frau Schmitt, if you feel it’s relevant,” he said stiffly, allowing a trace of doubt to enter his voice.
Elsa brushed it aside. “She was taken from her own bed, in the middle of the night, from under the noses of her bodyguards,” she said, coolly now. “Yes, I think it is very relevant, don’t you?”
Gilby recognised defeat when it was staring him in the face. Without further demur he stepped back to his place and waved her to continue. I twisted round slightly in my chair so I could watch the instructors as much as Elsa.
The German woman had come well prepared for her lecture and she didn’t get it from the Manor library, that’s for sure. There was an elderly photocopier in there, which we’d all used to produce grainy pictures of our main protagonists, taken from the newspaper cuttings and books.
Elsa already had photographs, which meant she could only have brought them with her. She tacked a line of them up onto the dusty blackboard for us to see.
“This is Heidi Krauss,” she said, indicating an awkwardly posed studio picture of a girl who looked barely sixteen. “This is her father, Dieter, a successful and wealthy industrialist, and this is their home on the outskirts of Dusseldorf.”
She delivered the details in a flat, almost clinical style, the way I imagine she used to report to her superior officers when she’d been in the police. She hardly referred to her notes and barely glanced at Gilby or his men as she spoke.
Dieter Krauss, she told us, was away in the Middle East on the night his daughter had been kidnapped, just two weeks before Christmas. I realised with a jolt that she was talking about
There had been trouble with the movement sensors round the perimeter of the property. They had been badly adjusted so that small animals had been causing a number of false alarms. When the system was triggered again shortly before eleven on that evening, the man on duty did not immediately alert his colleagues to a possible security breach.
Instead, he had taken a torch and gone out alone through a side entrance to check the grounds for himself. There, a small force – more than four, it was reckoned, but less than eight – had overpowered him and gained entry through the open door.
Leaving a man guiding them towards Heidi’s location using the internal security cameras, the intruders had closed in on her. They had used a taser stunner to instantly incapacitate her, then wrapped her in a blanket and started to carry her out, with the rest of her security team oblivious in the next room.
Had the housekeeper not stepped out into a corridor at the wrong moment, that’s where the story would have ended. As it was, the woman started screaming. The intruders shot her in the neck, killing her almost instantly.
The close-protection team had responded immediately to the alert, drawing their own weapons, but they had been understandably reluctant to become involved in a gunfight when the risk of accidentally hitting their principal was so high.
Hamstrung in this way, they’d stood little chance. One of them was also shot and killed, while another received a leg wound which had resulted in amputation. They had exchanged fire but, Elsa reported, they were doubtful that they hit anyone. Certainly none of the intruders had been injured sufficiently to prevent their escape – with Heidi.
Elsa paused and looked around at us. She didn’t seem to be aware that she held the absolute attention not only of the class, but of the instructors as well. They had frozen up like a Madame Tussaud’s exhibit, only not so lifelike. If Gilby clamped his jaw shut any tighter he was going to shatter those perfect teeth.
“So, Frau Schmitt, what conclusions do you draw from this?” he managed to grit out from between them.
Elsa closed her folder and shrugged. “That the bodyguards were careless and that they totally underestimated the level of threat to their client,” she said at last.
Gilby took a breath as though he was fighting to control a temper that was rising like fire. He won, but I was sitting close enough to see the cost of that victory manifest itself in the tremor of a tiny muscle at the side of his jaw.
He nodded, jerky. “Very good, Frau Schmitt,” he bit out. His narrowed gaze swept across the rest of us, just in case we were thinking of making any smart remarks. “Class dismissed!”
He stalked out of the room with the instructors following him in a wave. I looked round and saw that most of the students were staring blankly at each other. Like me, they knew something was going on, but they had no idea what.
“Well, Elsa my darlin’, I don’t know what it is that you’ve said that should upset the Major so much,” Declan remarked as he got to his feet, “but I don’t think he’ll be round to bring you a cup of tea and a biscuit first thing tomorrow morning,
Five
On Day Two the four of us thought we’d spike our instructors’ guns by setting our alarm clocks half an hour earlier than the six o’clock they’d told us would be our wake-up call. We should have known that wasn’t the way things were going to work.
Todd came barging in at 5 am anyway, just like yesterday.
When Elsa sleepily protested we had been told we had another hour in bed, he launched into a screaming fit that any drill sergeant I’ve ever come across would have stood back and admired. As he ranted, flecks of spit sprayed from his lips like a nobbled racehorse. We scrambled out of our beds and fled into our running gear before he had a full-blown embolism.
As we hustled down the stairs I wondered briefly if Declan was right and Todd’s reaction did have anything to
