the fear and the loathing on the Peugeot driver’s face after Blakemore had threatened him. His need for retribution had been fierce and blazing, to wipe away that paralysing moment of weakness. Was it enough to override the danger to the child?
But after I’d spoken to Madeleine, McKenna seemed to fit as a suspect on all fronts. Yet when he’d told me about seeing the other school car my instinct had been to believe him. I wasn’t entirely sure why.
I looked up. Evening was dropping rapidly over the Manor now. The interior lights were harsh in their brightness, beginning to cast outwards. It was cold, too. I shivered inside my sweatshirt and wished I’d stopped long enough to put on a jacket.
With a sigh, I trudged back towards the house. I walked across the parking area and up the steps to the smokers’ terrace. I was halfway up before I realised someone was standing out by the French windows, in the shadows, waiting.
I climbed the rest of the way cautiously. It was only as I reached the top that the figure moved out into the light and I recognised him.
“Charlie,” Hofmann greeted, his voice expressing neither happiness nor displeasure at finding me. “Was that McKenna I saw you talking to?”
For a few seconds all I could do was stare back at the big German, my mind furiously working up a reasonable excuse for my actions.
Eventually, I said, “Yes, he told me he was leaving. He just wanted to say goodbye,” I added, hoping Hofmann hadn’t been around for long enough to see me grappling McKenna to the ground. I might have a little trouble convincing him that kind of behaviour was an English tradition for those departing.
“We were just realising how close a shave we had the other day,” I went on quickly, hoping to distract him. “Something like Blakemore’s accident really brings it home to you.” I waved a hand in the general direction of the blue tarpaulin that covered the wrecked Audis over in the corner. “We survived a roll and being shot at, and walked away without a scratch, yet Blakemore makes one mistake and poof, he’s gone. Doesn’t it make you think how lucky we all were? How fragile life is?”
Hofmann considered for a moment, his heavy face reflecting the slow turn of the machinery inside his head. “Motorcycles are dangerous things,” he said at last.
I felt my shoulders drop a fraction at his response, made to move past him, but as I did so I noticed the narrowed shrewdness of his gaze as his eyes rested on me.
The next moment he’d turned away and that dull, almost vacant air had settled over him again. Like his mind was totally occupied with the processes of walking upright and operating his lungs.
So, I wasn’t the only one who’d come to Einsbaden Manor pretending to be less than I was. But why had he?
Before I could form that thought into a question that stood any chance of an answer, Hofmann said abruptly, “I was sent to fetch you. Major Gilby wants to speak with you in his study.”
He stayed by my shoulder as we went in through the French windows, like he’d been told to stop me making a break for it. If that was the case, why send a student, rather than one of the instructors? Maybe the Major thought such a move would put me more off my guard.
Hofmann almost marched me down the set of corridors to the Major’s study without pausing to consider the way. I wondered briefly if he was just efficient, or if there was more to it than that, and I remembered Sean’s warning that the German security services had infiltrated this course. The more I thought about Hofmann as a possible for that, the more he seemed perfect.
“Ah, Miss Fox, do come in.” Gilby said in his deceptively polite voice and I realised we’d reached the open study doorway. “Thank you, Herr Hofmann,” he added in dismissal. Hofmann hesitated for a moment, then nodded and walked away.
I stepped over the threshold into the study, aware of a sense of low background panic. I wished I’d had time to prepare for the Major’s questions. More than that, I wished I knew what they were.
The door closed behind me. I forced myself to be casual as I glanced over my shoulder. Todd was standing behind me. When I looked across the room to where Blakemore had sat the last time I’d been here, Rebanks was in the same chair.
The Major was watching me carefully for signs of nervousness. I tried not to show him any.
My chin came up. “You wanted to see me, sir?” I said blandly.
“Yes,” he said. He didn’t invite me to sit. Instead, he rose, started to walk round the study so I had to keep turning my head to follow him. “I understand you were the last person seen speaking to Mr Blakemore.” He paused, both in speech and movement. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what you and he talked about?”
Now it was my turn to hesitate. No way was I going to replay the conversation word for word. In view of Blakemore’s throwaway admission that the school men had indeed been behind the kidnapping, it would have been suicide.
Damn, why hadn’t I called Sean as soon as we got back to the Manor? If only Madeleine’s message hadn’t distracted me. If only my earlier conversation with her hadn’t made me so wary about getting in touch with him. Together we could have formulated something that would have been believable.
I should have known that Gilby would get to find out Blakemore and I had spoken. We’d been standing in the middle of the square, for heaven’s sake. Not exactly keeping it secret.
Now, I looked the Major in the eye and said, “I don’t see what relevance it has, but if you must know we were talking about bikes. I have one at home. I’ve ridden them for a few years.”
I don’t know quite why I added that last bit. Maybe I just wanted to warn him that if he was intending to pass this off as sheer bad riding on Blakemore’s part it wasn’t going to wash. “I was asking about the FireBlade,” I went on, another nail. “We were discussing cornering technique. He was telling me how well it handled.”
Todd gave a derisive snort at that last statement, but I refused to back down from it. Gilby glared at him.
“Might I remind you, Mr Todd,” he gritted out, “that I have just lost a good man today. This is not the time for levity.”
Todd’s face snapped to attention. “No sir!” he said smartly.
For several seconds the silence hummed between them. Now seemed a good time to leave, but I’ve always been bad at choosing such moments. Besides, when would I get an opportunity like this again to probe?
“So, do the police think they’ll catch him?” I asked instead, keeping my tone absolutely neutral.
All three heads turned slowly in my direction. I read degrees of shock and guilt there in all of them.
Eventually, it was Gilby who challenged stiffly, “Catch who?”
“Whoever it was who knocked Blakemore off his bike,” I said patiently, shrugging as though it was an obvious question. As though there was never any doubt that this accident wasn’t purely accidental. I looked at them with an expression of puzzlement on my face.
“Surely you saw it all – the skid marks, the broken glass?” I said, diffident. “You must have seen how narrow the tyre tracks were when he hit the barrier. He was travelling almost in a straight line, braking hard. If he’d simply gone in too hot and lost it, he would have been almost broadside, or he would have been on the ground already and sliding.”
“And you worked all this out how, exactly?” Todd demanded. “How come I was there and I didn’t see it?”
I shrugged again. It was getting to be a nervous habit. “You spent most of the time concentrating on what was happening down in the ravine,” I pointed out. “A few of us had the chance to have a look at the road surface.”
Todd had been with us in Einsbaden for the morning. He hadn’t been in plain sight, but it would have been a logistical nightmare for him to have got from the village, to the Manor, and back again, pausing only to commit murder on the way.
Rebanks and Gilby, on the other hand, had apparently never left the Manor. And they weren’t the only ones.
“It’s fortunate the police caught that gang of criminals who attacked us yesterday, isn’t it, Major?” I said, keeping my face level as I fed his own invention back to him. “Otherwise you might almost suspect they were to blame.”
“Mm, quite,” Gilby muttered, looking as rattled as I’d ever seen him.
