Hard Knocks

in my fist it felt right. It fitted.

I held the gun in both hands, bringing it up until I knew by instinct that the front and rear sights had come into alignment. We were using standard military paper targets that showed the head and shoulders of a snarling soldier. They were pasted to a flat board and set at the seven metre distance on the range.

To my right, McKenna fired his first shot, jerking the trigger and only just managing to clip the extreme top edge of the board, which splintered wildly. Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Todd shift to stand behind him instead.

I let out my breath and squeezed the trigger, aiming for the eye of my target. The gun fired with a muffled bang, but very little recoil. The trigger action was smooth and progressive.

When I checked my target, the eye was gone.

I glanced sideways and saw that the rest of the targets were gradually filling with random holes. I carefully emptied the rest of my magazine in what I hoped was a haphazard pattern around the board, deliberately bypassing it altogether with the last two, which I put straight into the berm at the back of my lane.

“OK everyone,” Rebanks called. “Place your weapon on the counter in front of you, pointing down range, if you don’t mind, and let’s have a look how you’ve done.”

We all did as ordered, pulled off our ear defenders and eye shields and the outside world suddenly got brighter and louder again. There was a wisp of smoke drifting inside the range, even with the extractor fans switched on. I breathed in the faintly familiar cocktail of cordite, gun oil, and nervous sweat.

Rebanks sauntered along the line, dishing out comments and criticism. Mostly the latter.

The standard varied enormously. Shirley must have been holding her gun with the barrel drooping, because she’d only managed to get two onto the target at all, right at the bottom edge. After her poor performance in the driving session that morning, she was looking thoroughly dispirited.

Hofmann came out on top, placing all his shots within a four-inch square area right in the centre of his target, and he was looking pretty smug about it. Rebanks made much of him, but to be honest I would have expected better from an ex-military shooter, particularly at such close quarters.

“OK, that was only mildly horrible,” Rebanks said cheerfully when he’d finished. “Now let’s try and get some groupings going, shall we?”

We reloaded and fired again. Two lanes down Declan had a stoppage which he struggled to clear. He didn’t have the brute strength to force the slide back to eject the jammed round. In his desperation he started getting careless about where he was pointing the business end of the barrel as he wrestled with the gun.

Rebanks stopped us all shooting immediately while he tore the Irishman off a strip. “You have a problem, you keep the pistol pointing down the range at all times, is that clear, Mr Lloyd?” he yelled. “This is not a toy, it’s a deadly fucking weapon. We’ve never had an accident yet where anybody’s been injured on this range, but you do that again and I’ll shoot you myself. D’you understand me?”

Declan mumbled his reply. Rebanks took the gun away from him, cleared it in one movement, and thrust it back into his hands with a darkly contemptuous look.

We’ve never had an accident yet where anybody’s been injured . . .

I turned the words over as I resumed my slapdash firing. Their choice was an interesting one, and they’d been delivered with just a hint of self-consciousness. Almost as if Rebanks was trying to convince himself, rather than the rest of us. I wondered how, in the face of that statement, I was going to be able to throw in my casual question about Kirk’s death.

I found to my alarm that I hadn’t been concentrating on the last three rounds and I’d planted them so close together in the centre that the holes overlapped each other. Damn. I was going to have to be more careful.

“OK, that’s enough for today, I think,” Rebanks said when we’d all ground to a halt. The SIGs were returned to their plastic carry trays, slides locked back on an empty chamber and magazines out. “Under the counter in front of you, you’ll each find a pot of glue, a brush and a bag of paper squares. Go and paste the squares over the holes in your targets so the next lot can use them, then you can go with Mr O’Neill. He’ll show you how to strip your weapons down and clean them.”

We all dutifully went through the door at the far right-hand side of the counter and out onto the range itself with our glue-pots in hand. Shirley was done well before the rest of us, by dint of the fact that she’d managed to create very few holes.

When I’d finished my own target, I walked back down my lane and put the glue onto the counter where I’d been shooting, rather than carry it round.

As I did so, a bright object on the floor caught my eye. It was tucked hard up against the bottom edge of the counter, completely hidden from view from the normal firing position. I dropped the bag of paper squares close to it, quickly stooping to pick it up.

I palmed it quickly and forced myself not to look round to see if anyone had noticed what I’d done. I joined the others, casually wiping my hands. My fingers were black with ingrained powder and oil.

Back on the other side of the counter I picked up my carry tray and headed for the doors out of the range with the others.

“Hold on a moment, Miss Fox,” Rebanks said from behind me. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

I turned slowly, trying not to panic. “Am I?”

“Your declaration, if you please.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. It was hard not to stand to attention as I rapped out, “I have no live rounds or empty cases in my possession, sir.”

“All right, all right, on you go,” he said, grinning as he waved me though.

It wasn’t until later that afternoon, when I had chance to examine my discovery more closely, that it really came home to me how easily I’d been able to lie to Rebanks.

Still, he’d lied to us, too, so I suppose that made it evens.

The object I’d picked up and carried away with me, against all the rules, was a single live round. It must have rolled off the front edge of the counter when someone was loading up, or maybe clearing a stoppage, as Declan had failed to do.

But you often find the odd live round on a range. That in itself wasn’t unusual. It was the round itself that gave me pause for thought because, according to Sean’s information, the school didn’t use them, or even list them as being held on the premises.

It was a 9mm Hydra-Shok jacketed hollowpoint.

Seven

I was intending to call Sean at the earliest opportunity about my discovery, but when I walked into the dormitory to change before supper, I could tell at once that something was wrong.

Elsa was sitting on Shirley’s bed with her arm around the older woman’s shoulders. Jan was leaning against the wall near the head, looking serious and uncomfortable. All three of them tensed up when I opened the door.

I paused with my fingers still on the handle. “What’s up?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, dear,” Shirley said, and I could tell by the thickness in her voice that she’d been crying. She sat up straighter, opening out a crumpled tissue and blowing her nose fiercely, as though she was annoyed by the need to do so. Elsa let her arm fall away.

“Shirley wishes to leave,” the German woman said bluntly, her voice giving no clue as to whether she was happy about this occurrence or not.

I glanced at Jan, but it was difficult to know what she was thinking at the best of times. She caught my eye and shrugged.

I sat down on the bed opposite Shirley. “Why did you want to come here in the first place?” I asked gently.

Elsa made an impatient gesture. “What is that to do with it?”

I ignored her and held Shirley’s eye instead. I wanted to find out if her reason to stay was stronger than her reason to go. “Well?”

Shirley swallowed, stared up at the corner of the room over my head, biting her lip as though that would keep