Hard Knocks by Zoe Sharp Read Free Book Online

going to hold my hand up.
     
    ***
     
    The next morning we started our training in earnest. At five o’clock the next morning, to be precise, when Gilby’s merry band of instructors came rampaging through the dormitories. They made a point of producing twice the quantity of noise that was required to get us out of our beds. And at three times the volume.
     
    I was shocked into wakefulness as the overhead lights were slapped on and by the nastily cheerful voice of Todd, who had been introduced after supper the night before as the head physical training instructor.
     
    He was short, almost stocky, with hair clipped razor-thin to his scalp. Not because he still hankered after his undoubted previous army career, but because he spent half his life in the shower after exercise. He had the air of someone who’s fitter on a daily basis than you’ll ever be in your life. And knows it.
     
    “Good morning ladies,” he barked, swivelling his bull neck to survey the room’s occupants with just a little too much attention. “Outside in your running kit in fifteen minutes, if you please!”
     
    The door slammed shut behind him and for a moment I continued to lie still, concentrating on slowing down my heart and preventing its imminent explosion. I’ve never liked loud alarm clocks and this was worse. It can’t be good for you to surface from sleep with such suddenness and ferocity. The wake-up equivalent of the bends.
     
    “Come on then girls,” Shirley said briskly, sitting up in her bed opposite mine and reaching for her sweatshirt. “We can’t let the boys think we’re not up to the job.”
     
    Shirley Worthington was from Solihull, the archetypal bored housewife. She was a bouncy woman who wouldn’t see forty again except in the rear-view mirror. Within five minutes of our meeting last night, she’d been handing round photographs of her grandchildren. Not exactly the kind of person I’d expected to find studying to be a bodyguard.
     
    To my left I heard a quiet groan, and then Elsa pushed back her bedclothes and sat up wearily. The German woman looked like death, but I had a feeling I was probably seeing a fairly accurate picture of myself. Only Shirley seemed irritatingly alert.
     
    I glanced over towards the room’s fourth occupant, who was little more than a vague outline under the blankets. Even Todd’s violent incursion hadn’t made an impact.
     
    Elsa heaved herself out of bed and padded across the squeaky floor. “Jan,” she said loudly, shaking the lump by what appeared to be a shoulder. “It is time for you to be waking up now, please.”
     
    Jan King made a muffled comment that probably contained at least four expletives. I’d never come across a woman with such a wide vocabulary of swear words. Or a man, for that matter. And I was used to hanging out around bikers.
     
    Judging from her dulcet tones, Jan was from the East End of London. She was small, sallow-skinned and intense, with the stringy skinniness of a long-distance runner and very bad teeth. She didn’t look much like a bodyguard, either.
     
    By the time the four of us had scrambled into our clothes and got down the main staircase, the men were already outside on the gravel. They stood in a huddled group, their collective breath rising like steam from winter cattle under the floodlights.
     
    The stars were still glittering above us. By my reckoning we were still a good two and a half hours away from sunrise. Why, I wondered bitterly, couldn’t Kirk have got himself killed on a summer course?
     
    “Ah, so good of you to join us at last, ladies,” Todd’s voice was sneering as he jogged up in a dark blue tracksuit. “Too busy putting your make-up on, were you?”
     
    Jan’s response was short and to the point, but I don’t think the reaction she got was the one she was hoping for. If she’d thought it through that far.
     
    “Physically impossible, I would have thought,” Todd said mildly, then his face tightened.