Death in High Places

Chapter 12





HE COULDN’T BELIEVE what he was saying. All the same, he knew this time he’d got it right. Even he wasn’t sick enough to have dreamed it up if the clues weren’t there, if the tap-tap-tapping in his brain wasn’t the explanation trying to get itself heard.

But he expected McKendrick to deny it. The man volunteered nothing. He’d gone to considerable lengths, and no small amount of risk, to get his way on this, and to get it without anyone else knowing what he had in mind.

Robert McKendrick was a powerful man. He’d been a successful and powerful man in a cutthroat business for so long that it informed all his dealings, defined the very shape that he occupied in the world. Part of it was that he lied all the time. He told business competitors that he wanted things that he didn’t want, and had things that he didn’t have, and wasn’t interested in things he’d have sold his granny to get hold of. It was like a great game of charades, only without the rules. He thought nothing of lying—not when it was him doing it, not when it was a rival. It was how the game was played.

But that was when the other players were also successful and powerful men. He never lied to underlings, people of no consequence. He would have deemed it beneath him. He met Horn’s stare of godforsaken shock and said, “Yes.” Quite calmly. Not as if he was saying something that should have shook the heavens.

“No!” exclaimed Horn.

“I assure you,” said McKendrick solemnly, “you’ve finally got there. It may have taken you all morning, you may have gone all round the houses first, but you’ve finally got it right. William may not have thought far enough ahead to know what was going to happen to him and take steps to deal with it, but I did. I found you.”

“I mean, no,” stumbled Horn. “I won’t do it.”

McKendrick elevated an eyebrow at him. “You’ve already agreed. A contract exists.”

“I didn’t know then!”

“You knew what you were getting out of it. Your life—which, may I remind you, was entirely uninsurable at the point at which I stepped in. Was there anything you wouldn’t have given for it right then?”

“No. Yes! I don’t know. But I told you—I told you—I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“No one’s going to be hurt. I told you, it’s a victimless crime.”

“You want me to kill you! To put you to sleep, like an old dog that keeps peeing on the rug!”

“But I can’t be the victim if it’s my choice!” Then the exasperation melted out of his voice and McKendrick sighed. “Nicky, you’re a young man. When I was your age, I was afraid of death as well. I know better now. I saw my father reduced to a helpless shell. I saw the terror in his eyes. It never left him. Long after he’d forgotten who I was, after he’d forgotten who he was, he knew absolutely the horror of what was happening to him.

“People say that Alzheimer’s is harder on the family than on the patient.” McKendrick shook his head. “Don’t you believe it. My father suffered every day. He was frightened every day. He imagined things that weren’t real, terrible things—that people were hurting him, plotting against him. It was impossible to comfort him. When all his memories had gone, when his ability to reason was gone, he still believed the increasingly bizarre outpourings of his dissolving brain.

“Of course he did. What choice did he have? Our whole lives depend on our ability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. We believe what we see and hear and can reasonably deduce. Things that we dream, or imagine, may seem real at the time but we can recognize the difference. You might dream about having a terrible argument with someone, but you don’t stay mad at them after you’ve woken up. Dreams get filed in a different part of your brain. A healthy brain doesn’t mix them up.”

He paused for a moment, organizing his thoughts. Marshaling his argument. “But the system depends on the brain functioning properly. Reporting accurately. Collecting the messages that come in from the senses and processing the information in a rational way.

“With dementia, gaps start appearing where previously there were connections. Things get lost or jumbled up. The brain screws up its filing system. It puts some things in the wrong file, and some things in the right file but with the wrong index card, and some things miss the drawer altogether and drop down the back of the cabinet. So when that knowledge is needed again, it may open the correct file but it’s anybody’s guess what’s going to come out. It might be right. It might be nearly right. It might be absolute nonsense, but we go on believing the information in the filing cabinet because we have no choice. Inside ourselves, the brain is the only arbiter of what’s what. There is no fallback position, no referee.

“It’s like…” McKendrick hunted round for an analogy, something to explain the ineffable. Instinct guided him to one that might make sense to Horn. “It’s like you’re standing on a frozen lake. The lake has always been frozen and the ice has always been strong. But now as you stand on it, it starts to crack. At first it’s just thin little lines that shoot out from under your feet. But then the cracks grow bigger, and the ice begins to groan, and the water starts seeping through. And you know what’s going to happen: it’s going to break up and throw you into the freezing lake and you’re going to die. But—and this is the biggie, this is the killer—there’s nowhere else to stand. As your brain changes, your perception of reality changes with it. Everything you know, everything you’ve ever known, is telling you that it’s the rest of the world that’s gone mad.

“So my father knew that people were hurting him. He knew that I was stealing all his money, and William wanted—you’ll like this—William wanted to sell him to white slavers. He’d have been about sixty-eight at this point. Nothing would persuade him of the inherent unlikelihood of it. And he never got it wrong—it was never William stealing his money and me selling him to the slavers. It wasn’t something he’d invented to hurt us—in his own mind it was real. We employed nurses to care for him, and we made sure he couldn’t wander off. He thought we’d imprisoned him. He lived the last decade of his life in fear and misery.”

McKendrick stopped there, his face haunted, and Horn thought he wouldn’t be able to go on. But after a moment he sucked in a deep breath and composed himself. “That decade turned him from a healthy middle-aged man to something stick-thin under a sheet, his skin so fragile the bones were in danger of poking through. By then he’d lost his ability to speak, to feed himself, to sit up, even to swallow. All he had left was the horror. One evening when I was sitting with him, he breathed out and didn’t breathe in again. I can honestly say I’ve never been gladder in my life.

“Mum was luckier. She was younger than Dad, and she’d been nursing him for three years when she felt the same thing starting in her. She knew what was coming. She tried to keep it from us, me and William, but that only worked while she was able to juggle, to use the faculties she still had a grip on to compensate for those that were slipping. But she didn’t live long enough to deteriorate the way Dad did. She had a heart attack. When the paramedics opened her blouse to listen for a heartbeat, they found the words Do not resuscitate tattooed on her chest.

“Can you imagine…” His voice cracked and he had to try again. “Can you imagine the despair, the sense of utter desolation, that would lead a middle-class, middle-aged woman to have that done? The paramedics wondered if it was some kind of joke. But I knew she’d never been more serious about anything in her life.”

He made himself smile, and a frail and naked thing it was. “With both parents smitten by early-onset Alzheimer’s, it came as no surprise whatsoever when William started getting funny notions. At first they weren’t so funny that they couldn’t have been true. Someone kept moving his papers at work, he could never find what he needed. There was something wrong with his car, except it didn’t do it when he took it to the mechanic. He found the new one-way system near his home unnecessarily complicated.

“Then one day he phoned me and said he’d got lost and would I come and find him? He’d been driving home from his office—I found him two streets over from where he’d lived for twelve years. It turned out there wasn’t even a one-way system. I took him home and we both had a stiff drink, and then we talked about what was happening to him. We both knew what it was, of course, and that it was only going to get worse. He never drove the car again. He sold it the next day and set up a contract with a taxi firm.

“The day after that I took him to see his doctor. They have this damn fool test they do, where they ask you who the prime minister is and whether you can count backwards and stuff like that. And William was sailing through it. I was beginning to think we were wrong, it was something else—a virus, a tumor, something you could hope to cure. Then she asked him how old he was. And he said he was thirty-one. He knew his date of birth. He knew the current year. But when he was asked to subtract one from the other, he kept getting thirty-one. So she asked him to look in a mirror. Something he did every morning when he was shaving. And for a moment he didn’t recognize himself. When he did, these enormous slow tears slid down his cheeks.”

“And that’s…” Horn cleared the scratch out of his throat and tried again. “And that’s about ten years ago?”

“Getting on for. He managed to keep some sort of a life together at first. He took early retirement—told people he wanted to enjoy his garden while he was still fit enough to get out in it. We made sure that if he got lost, people would know to call his house. He wasn’t dangerous, even to himself. While he was still pretty much on top of things, he hired in all the help he needed. That worked well until the growing confusion started to outweigh the residual lucidity.

“By then he was dependent on someone for just about everything. And I wasn’t happy leaving him with people I didn’t know and couldn’t supervise. There are plenty of well-qualified, professional, kind people out there who’d have done a good job of looking after him. But what if I got it wrong and left him with one of the other sort? The lazy sort, the greedy sort—even the vicious sort? Even if he’d have been able to tell me, would I have believed him? I needed to be on the spot. So I brought him here. About four years ago now.”

They’d strayed a little off the point, but Horn never considered prompting him. This was the longest they’d talked, and it explained so much of what was going on, both in McKendrick’s life and in his head.

His head …

“When…” Again the catch in Horn’s throat tripped him. “When did you start getting symptoms?”

McKendrick laughed out loud, a savage sound. “Thanks, Nicky. I haven’t yet. This is all me, genuine and unreconstructed. If you think I’m behaving irrationally, you should see me on a bad day.”

From somewhere Horn pulled a little censorious frown. “I never know when you’re joking.”

“That’s easy,” said McKendrick briefly. “I never joke. I’m always in deadly earnest.”

“And you want someone to kill you before you end up like William.”

Something, some emotion, washed through McKendrick that for a moment he didn’t recognize. But it was relief. At having it out it the open. At having it fixed and framed by words. The idea had lived in his head and nowhere else, growing but also festering, for over a year now. He’d guarded it like a treasure because he knew there was no one he could share it with for fear of being stopped. It had taken him two or three months to be sure this was what he wanted to do, and the rest of the time to find a way of doing it. That’s a long time to keep a secret.

“Right now I could do it without any help at all. But right now it doesn’t need doing. I enjoy my life—I don’t want to cut the good bit short. But if I leave it until it needs doing, I won’t be able to manage alone. I might not even recognize that the time has come. I’m going to need help. Someone who knows what needs doing and how to do it. Someone who knew me when I was rational enough to state unequivocally what I wanted.”

McKendrick let out a slightly uneven breath and his eyes dipped momentarily closed. Someone knew. Someone knew, and now he could talk about it. “And it can’t be Beth. I don’t know if she’d do it; but if she did, she’d be prosecuted. However sympathetic a court might be, mercy killing still counts as murder—she could lose everything. That’s why I need you. Of course I knew who you were, what you’d done—at least, what you said you’d done. I thought you were perfect for my purposes. Getting you on board was important enough to risk my own neck doing it.” He gave a wry little smile. “Mind, knowing what you know now, you may feel that wasn’t as big a gamble as it first appeared.”

“You had people out looking for me?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Four months. They’re top people, good at what they do. When they found you they let me know, but I didn’t want them to approach you. I wanted to talk to you myself—to find out if you’d left Alaska sufficiently far behind that my proposition wouldn’t interest you. When I saw a man with a gun shove you up a dark alley, I knew you hadn’t.”

Horn couldn’t argue with that. “When were you going to tell me?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you. I was going to offer you a job. You’re a carpenter, aren’t you? There’s always work to be done in a place like this. Once I’d made contact with you, and you had somewhere to work and a place to live that you didn’t have to leave in a hurry every few weeks, there’d have been time to get round to the other thing. As it turns out, we’ve been rather overtaken by events.”

There wasn’t much arguing with that, either. Horn was watching McKendrick’s face intently. “So, if we come through this, I get a job as your handyman and a cottage in the grounds. And one day, maybe years from now, you ask to see me in your study, and it’s not because you’re giving me the sack, or even a pay rise. It’s because your mind’s going and you’re scared you can’t hold things together much longer, and you want to tell me how and when you want it done. To get hold of a gun and ambush you in the Lime Walk. Or some of that blue stuff they put horses down with, and inject you while you sleep.” Horn looked him full in the face. “Is that what we’re talking about?”

McKendrick considered the details a shade gothic, but Horn seemed to understand the wider picture pretty well. “Perhaps not a cottage in the grounds. At least, not until Beth’s resigned to having you around. But I’ll set you up somewhere not too far away. Somewhere I can protect you from Hanratty.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Why would you refuse? You owe me your life. Why would you refuse me a favor that might cost you just a few years of it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. McKendrick.” The strain was audible, stretching Horn’s voice. “Maybe, because it’s wrong?”

“To rescue someone from fear and suffering? When that person has made it abundantly clear that it’s what he wants, and has done from the day he realized it was going to become an issue? How can that be wrong?”

“Don’t ask me,” snarled Horn, “ask the Lord Chamberlain. He seems to think it’s wrong!”

“No, he thinks it’s illegal. That’s different. I’ll give you something in writing to produce if the police catch up with you. It won’t keep you out of court, but it’ll show that you weren’t acting on your own authority. And that Beth didn’t hire you to speed through her inheritance. Nicky, nobody will think you did anything very wicked. It’s a bit of a gray area, I admit—they only call it assisted suicide if you have the physical strength and the mental clarity to do the final act yourself. But everyone except the law knows there’s all the difference in the world between murder and mercy killing, and nobody apart from cranks thinks what I’m proposing is wrong anymore.”

“What if I think it’s wrong?”

McKendrick looked at Horn, as he sometimes did, as if he’d brought him in on the sole of his shoe. “It doesn’t matter what you think. You owe me this. You don’t have to like it. Anyway”—his narrow jaw rose combatively—“what entitles you to take the moral high ground? You cut your best friend’s rope!”

Horn’s voice was low. “I told you, that isn’t what happened.”

“You told the police something different. And you told Beth something else again. I think you’ve told so many lies even you aren’t sure what the truth is anymore.

“I’ll tell you what the truth is—the only truth that matters. Patrick Hanratty was on your rope, and now he’s dead. His father blames you, and his father’s hit man is just the other side of this wall. You don’t have to like me—in fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. But by God, Nicky, if you want to live through today, you’d better start seeing things my way!”

“Because you’ll shove me outside if I don’t?” In the white face, Horn’s eyes flamed with a kind of desperate rebellion.

“Maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do. It’s what you did—bought your safety with someone else’s life. It would be a kind of poetic justice.”

They glared at one another across the little kitchen, both stoking the anger they hoped would protect them from fear. Their backs were against the wall. Even if Hanratty’s man had got bored and gone home, their backs would still have been against the wall.

Horn broke the savage silence. “And what’s Beth going to say when she hears about this?”

“Beth isn’t going to hear about this,” McKendrick shot back, “until you’ve paid your debt. After that she’ll probably have to know. And yes, she’ll hate you forever. She’ll hate me too. I can live with that.” He grinned a vivid acknowledgment of the irony. “I can’t afford to worry too much about what Beth wants. I have to concentrate on what she needs. And this is it—this is the best I can do. And, God help me, I need your cooperation to do it.”

“Then, Mr. McKendrick, you have a problem.”

“You think this is easy for me?” When McKendrick’s temper flared, suddenly Horn could see the likeness between him and his daughter. She didn’t take after him physically. But her temperament—her intellectual arrogance, her risk-taking, her absolute single-mindedness—she’d inherited from him almost unchanged. “This isn’t how I wanted my life to be! When I was your age, I was working like a maniac so I could enjoy the kind of lifestyle I wanted. For my family, but also for myself. I imagined that around now I’d be planning my retirement. A boat on the Med. Maybe a beach house in the Seychelles. Enough money amassed to provide for whatever I wanted, whatever opportunities came along.

“I did not imagine I’d be spending my time and money and, yes, risking my neck trying to persuade someone to do me the final kindness when playing out the hand I’ve been dealt has become unbearable. Because that’s what we’re talking about, Nicky. A life so frightening that no one should be made to live it. Don’t have any illusions about what it is I’m facing. I’m not going to be just a charming old dodderer whose socks never match. I’m going to be a broken and tormented man who won’t know a moment’s peace short of death but who might have to wait ten or fifteen years for it.”

McKendrick’s voice was actually shaking. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that it was shaking with fear. He took a moment to steady it. “Look on the bright side. I might never get this illness. I might die of something else first, or I might live to be a hundred with my marbles perfectly intact. And that’s something that would give me enormous satisfaction.

“But if I don’t kill myself while I’m fully in command of my wits—if I wait until the symptoms start—I won’t do it at all. Because by then I won’t think it needs doing. I’ll think everybody else is being thoroughly unreasonable if not downright cruel but I’m the same as I’ve always been. I need to have this all organized long before that. I need to set up some kind of chain of events—when Beth notices I’m starting to lose it, she tells my solicitor, and my solicitor posts a sealed letter he’s never read and you get your instructions—while I can still work it all out. I can’t leave it until it matters. Do you understand that?”

Horn nodded slowly. “I understand it. I just can’t do what you want me to.”

“You can,” retorted McKendrick, no shadow of doubt in his voice, “and you will. It’s the price of what I’ve done for you. What I’m still doing. If you live through today, it’ll be down to me. So do what you’re told, do your time, go away somewhere and get on with your life. I’ll make sure there’s money to help with that—help you go somewhere Hanratty can’t follow.

“It’s the best deal you’re going to get, Nicky. You ought to grab it with both hands.”

Incredibly, Horn seemed to be thinking about it. His voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. “I don’t think there is anywhere Hanratty can’t follow. I know there’s nowhere Patrick can’t follow.”

It wasn’t that McKendrick very much cared about Nicky Horn’s ghosts. It was more that he knew he needed to deal with them before Horn would be much use to him. “Tell me what happened. The truth, this time. I don’t care what the truth is, I just want to hear it.”

Horn sighed. It was a long time ago. And McKendrick was right, it really didn’t matter anymore. Except that if he was going to die because of it, there wouldn’t be another chance. If he wanted someone to bear witness for him, it had to be Robert McKendrick. “Patrick was leading. We shouldn’t even have been climbing in those conditions, but we were. Three-quarters of the way up Anarchy Ridge, with the wind throwing bucketloads of snow in our faces, suddenly he wasn’t there anymore and the rope went tight.

“What I told Beth, about what he’d said—what we both said—the night before: that’s how it started. Now we were like strangers. I was angry with him, he was upset with me. When he went off the ridge, I didn’t know if he’d fallen or jumped, if he wanted me to die there with him or not. I held on to him, swore to him I wouldn’t let go. But after three hours I was exhausted, and I couldn’t get him back, and I was shit-scared of falling with him. That’s when he cut the rope. He fell, yelling my name.” There were tears on Horn’s face that McKendrick thought he was entirely unaware of.

“And that’s the truth?”

Horn nodded. His eyes were hollow, whether with fear or remembrance McKendrick couldn’t judge. “No point lying now.”

“There never was much point. You lied rather than tell his family that Patrick was in love with you, and you rejected him, and you’ll always be afraid that’s why he died. But if you’d told them the truth, it’s hard to see how things could have worked out any worse.”

“They didn’t take it as well as I’d hoped,” admitted Horn.

“Maybe not.” McKendrick’s scrutiny seemed to flay Horn’s soul. “Or maybe you wanted them to hate you. Them, and everyone else. You thought you deserved it. You thought it was your fault Patrick was dead. You said you cut his rope because you couldn’t bring yourself to say you broke his heart.”

Horn’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. “Yes.”

“But Nicky—what if he just fell? What if it was just an accident? It was blowing a gale up there, there was snow everywhere, you couldn’t tell where the rocks ended and the ice began. What if Patrick just made a mistake? You were climbing an untried pitch in an Alaskan blizzard, for God’s sake! I don’t know much about climbing, but I know this much: everyone falls sometimes. The rock crumbles, the ice breaks away. And neither of you had your whole mind on the job. I don’t think Patrick was trying to punish you. I think he was just unlucky.”

“You weren’t there,” whispered Nicky Horn. “I’d give anything—anything—to believe that. But I don’t. I can’t. Five hours earlier he said he loved me, and I called him a freak. They were almost the last words we said to one another.”

“You were taken by surprise.”

“I didn’t have to humiliate him! I didn’t have to rip everything from him—our friendship, his dignity, everything. He thought he’d lost the lot. He thought I despised him. And I didn’t! That was the first lie—the worst lie. I didn’t feel the way he felt, but if it had been two other guys we’d been talking about I wouldn’t have reacted like that. I don’t know why I said what I did. If we’d had one more day I could have told him—apologized, told him everything would be all right. We’d have finished the climb and gone home friends.

“Why did I do that?” By now the tears were falling openly, streaking Horn’s face. He made no effort to dash them away. McKendrick thought that he genuinely wanted an answer. That it had taken him four years to even ask the question, and now he needed an answer. “Why would I tear him apart like that?”

“Because,” said McKendrick with an uncharacteristic gentleness, “you’re only human. You make mistakes too. It was just bad timing all round. If it had happened back in England, he’d have gone out to drown his sorrows, and after the hangover had worn off he’d have been working out what he needed to do to get his life back on track. It happens all the time: people we love turn out not to love us. You get over it.

“But it didn’t happen in England. It happened on a mountain ridge in the middle of one of the world’s great wildernesses, with a gale howling in his ears. And mountains do things to people, don’t they? Beth’s talked about it. You can see so far, you feel so small.… The sea’s like that too. It sucks you in. People say they sail in order to leave their problems behind, but I don’t think that’s what it is. When you’re out there like a flyspeck on the map, surrounded by nothing but the elements, your values change. Everything’s either very, very close or very far away. It’s hard to keep a sense of perspective.

“Yes, you handled it badly. But so did Patrick. He shouldn’t have cornered you with this when there was nowhere for you to retreat. He should have known it could only end with at least one of you being hurt.”

“We were days from civilization,” Horn remembered. He was talking now almost as if he were asleep, a heartaching monotone. “I thought he couldn’t face the long hike back. When you’re climbing, your mind’s full to bursting and you put the personal stuff on the back burner. But walking back, hour after hour, after he’d reached out to me and I’d bitten his hand off at the wrist … I thought he couldn’t face it. I thought he’d decided stepping off into the whiteout was a better option.”

Against the habit of a lifetime, McKendrick found himself feeling what this young man had felt. Empathy. It’s a terrible idea in business, to feel for the people you’ve just shafted. “Nicky, you’re never going to know exactly what was going through Patrick’s head. But you know he was a good man, and a good friend. You know he’d looked after you every other time you’d climbed together, as you’d looked after him. Even if he was hurt, even if he was upset, why would he suddenly turn into someone else? If he’d fallen twelve hours earlier, you wouldn’t even have asked yourself if there was something more to it.”

“I thought—I think—I thought I’d killed him. Was responsible for his death. As surely as if I had cut the rope.” But if Horn couldn’t decide on the tense, that meant he was no longer sure. He’d felt so guilty about Patrick Hanratty’s death that he’d lied, and gone on lying even after he realized it could cost him his life. Now this tall man, this stranger, this cold man whose heart was a battlefield, was telling him he’d been mistaken. It was just an accident. Perhaps it was just an accident all along.

But if that was so … Horn shook his head. He couldn’t begin to come to terms with what that meant. That he’d spent four years running, and was probably going to die, for nothing. It was almost better to go on believing what he’d always believed, that at least there was a kind of justice to it.

Watching the turmoil in the younger man’s face, suddenly it occurred to McKendrick that they’d been talking about this for too long. That too long had passed since he’d checked the monitors or Horn had listened at the kitchen door. He turned abruptly and strode back into the hall.

Another of the screens had gone blank. It didn’t matter. McKendrick could see where Hanratty’s man was. He was standing in the courtyard, in full view of one of the three remaining cameras, waiting patiently for someone to notice him, and he was holding Beth McKendrick in front of him like a shield.