‘Fantastic,’ she said with a frown.

Elliott told her to open the gun barrel and make sure the revolver was empty, put the gun on the table and to come and have a look at the target.

‘Bit of a calamity, Jane. You only got one shot in the inner ring,’ Elliott said.

Jane glanced at Dabs and felt herself flush. ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong,’ she said nervously.

‘Your stance is fine, as is your grip,’ Elliott reassured her. ‘But you’re still anticipating the recoil and flinching before you fire. Like I said, it happens with first-time shooters, so don’t let it get you down. You just need to do more dry practice, and there’s some other drills I can teach you that will help.’

‘On that note, Jane, I really need to get myself home,’ Dabs said, looking at his watch.

By the time Jane got back to her car she felt totally drained. For some reason, she had thought that by the end of the evening her old confidence would have returned, but quite the opposite had happened.

*

After a long, tedious day at work, Jane felt the evening on the range hadn’t been such a bad experience after all, despite her disappointing performance, and while things didn’t improve dramatically on the next session, by the fourth lesson she knew she had made great strides forward and her membership was accepted. One of the most important problems she had overcome was the panicked feeling whenever she pressed the trigger. Elliott had given her one of his lengthy monologues about controlling her breathing to keep her mind calm, and it seemed to have worked. She no longer felt he talked down to her quite so much, and couldn’t help respecting his expertise.

After seeing how much she’d improved, Elliott invited her to visit an ‘impressive’ gun club with him.

‘You’ll find it similar to a lot of the training in America where they use moving targets representing police officers, innocent bystanders, an armed bank robber and a guy holding a knife. Hopefully Calamity Jane won’t let me down like my previous trainee, who not only shot the unarmed pedestrian, but also the police dog,’ he joked.

Jane was flattered he had that much confidence in her, but wanted to keep her gun training quiet for the time being.

‘Thanks for the offer,’ she said with a smile, ‘but I think I’d better wait until I’m a bit more proficient.’

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO