Death in High Places

Chapter 16





WILLIAM MCKENDRICK stared back at him, eyes white-ringed with a fear that might have been due to the gun whose muzzle he was peering into or to the chaos demons inside his head. A thin string of drool slid down his chin.

It takes a lot to surprise a professional killer. This one wouldn’t have admitted to being surprised now, and no one watching him would have seen him stumble, either mentally or physically. But he felt inside himself how the gears slipped for a moment, how the bogie wheels momentarily jumped the rails. He’d been expecting a strong young man who was possibly just desperate enough to fight back, not an idiot in pajamas.

There’s a riddle that goes: What can you sit on, write on, and sleep on? And the answer is, A chair, a table, and a bed. If Hanratty’s man had had one second longer, he’d have remembered that some problems have more than one solution. That the presence of one man in a room does not imply the absence of another.

Horn gave him no time, not even that second. As soon as he was through the door Horn was moving too, from the shadow on the far side of the armoire, heading for the French windows and not about to be stopped by the man standing in his way.

He was shorter than Hanratty’s mechanic, but he was younger and probably stronger, at least when he was match fit. He saw the man register the movement behind him a split second before Horn barreled into him, lowered shoulder into the small of his back, like a rugby player in the closing stages of a Nations Cup when he thinks the umpire’s looking the other way. Momentum did the rest. Locked together, the gun somewhere in the scrum but neither of them sure where, they were actually off the floor when they hit the French window and it burst wide. A ball of arms and legs rolled across the little terrace and fetched up against the parapet.

Even when he was match fit, Horn couldn’t have lifted a resisting man and thrown him over the hip-high parapet. What he could do—what he did—was wrap his strong arms round the man who had come to kill him and, while he was still working out how to shoot someone apparently grafted onto his spine, throw himself over.

* * *

Beth, still trying desperately to start the car, heard a sharp cry of fear and looked up. What she saw made no sense. She saw two bodies, more or less intertwined, spill over the wall of the little roof terrace outside her uncle William’s room and fall. But they didn’t fall far and, clutched tightly together, came to a jerking halt still twenty meters above her.

Beth continued to watch, mouth open, like a child at a magic show—as if she expected that gravity would at any moment get back from its coffee break and they’d come crashing down.

But they didn’t, and as the astonished pounding of her heart lessened she could see why they didn’t. Nicky Horn had a rope tied around his chest that vanished through a crenel of the parapet. And he was holding Tommy Hanratty’s hired killer as if he would never, ever let go.

* * *

Exactly like everyone else’s attic, the turret room had been filled with old toys and old suitcases, odd skis, the foam mattresses off a pair of bunk beds, a scattering of mousetraps—some of them occupied—cardboard boxes marked , and folded sets of curtains no one could ever have considered tasteful.

And rope.

It wasn’t good rope. It certainly wasn’t climbing rope. It was old and dry and beardy, and Horn couldn’t have guessed what it was used for when it was new, but he doubted anyone had ever trusted his life to it before. Currently it was tying shut the lid of an ancient steamer trunk. But it was synthetic so it was probably stronger than it looked, and there was a fair bit of it, and he had neither much time to think nor many options to consider. So he tore open the knots with a blend of practice and desperation, coiled it into a rough hank, and headed back down the stairs, frantically hoping to meet no one on the way up.

Time pressed unrelentingly; but some instinct of respect that would have made his mother proud caused him to hesitate just long enough to tap William’s door before entering. William McKendrick was sitting up in his bed by the open window, a cardigan over his pajamas. His eyes didn’t so much meet Horn’s as wander near them; Horn couldn’t judge if he understood enough to recognize that strange events were afoot or if they were entirely lost in the confusion that was his everyday life.

Horn mumbled, “Sorry about this,” and shut the door quickly behind him.

The big armoire to the left of the door was perfect to conceal him from anyone coming in, but though it was heavy enough for his purposes it was too far from the window. If he was going to do this he had to get it right, and that meant having enough rope. The bed was in a better position, and though it might shift under the weight it wouldn’t go far. But that meant trailing the rope across the carpet, and a man whose senses were as sharp as this one’s wouldn’t fail to notice. Horn took a corner of the bedspread and pulled it onto the floor, trailing it with casual artifice across the line of the rope. Now it just looked like sloppy housekeeping. It was the best he could do in the time available.

Which had now expired. Horn didn’t hear Hanratty’s man at the door, but he knew he was there. Horn’s senses too were pretty well honed. He sucked in a breath and held it, and ducked behind the armoire where he couldn’t see the door open.

Only one chance to get this right, only one time to do it, and that was now, with the man on a direct line between Horn and the window. He emerged from the shadow of the armoire like a greyhound from the slips, an explosion of muscular energy, and he was still accelerating when he hit the man’s back.

There hadn’t been time to check the window, to see if it was locked or unlocked, to leave it a little ajar. His plan would fail if it proved too strong and bounced them back in a heap on the rug.

But the weight of two men hitting it amidships flexed the frame just enough to spring the catch. The French window flew open, and they were still traveling at speed, now trailing a length of rope, a bedspread, and a Whatever next? look from William McKendrick.

It was only a little terrace, which was good. No space to dissipate the momentum, no time for Hanratty’s man to regain control. They piled into the parapet together, Horn’s arms already locked around the other man’s chest, and struggled for a moment on the point of balance where, despite his best efforts, there seemed every chance Horn wouldn’t be able to force their combined mass over the barrier. He only knew he’d succeeded when his view of the castle wall suddenly turned into a view of sky and the man in his arms let out a yell of terror.

For another interesting half second they dropped, locked together in free fall; and half a second isn’t long, but it was long enough for Horn to wonder if the rope would withstand the jerk as they reached its end; and if it did, whether the bed leg it was attached to, the rest of the bed and its occupant would follow them off the terrace and into the courtyard below.

Then the rope snapped taut. There was nothing progressive about it: one moment Horn was weightless, the next his ribs were clamped in a vise as the bight he’d made tightened under the weight.

He’d somehow expected that, if he managed to get them over the parapet, the rope would hold him while the other fell to his death. But it didn’t happen like that. He’d needed to lock on tight to carry the man over the wall, and maybe it was the years of training combined with the climber’s instinct, but his arms refused to yield their grip. As if they honestly couldn’t believe what his brain was telling them—to deliberately let someone fall.

So they hit the end of the rope like a mad dog hitting the end of its tether, with a yelp of terror in Horn’s ears and a gasp of pain in his throat; and above them the bed banged against the bedroom wall, and the rope whined its distress and then it too, somehow, held. And they hung in midair, half a meter from the castle wall, turning slowly while the rope held Horn and Horn held Hanratty’s assassin.

With the rope cramping his lungs it was several seconds before Nicky Horn could find the breath to speak, even in a rasp. “Drop the gun.”

It took the other man several more seconds to reply, and though his voice was shaken to its foundations, his resolve held. “In another universe!”

Horn screwed his eyes tight shut, trying to block out the pain in his chest, the weight on his arms. “All that’s keeping you alive is me. If you shoot me, what do you think’s going to happen next? My brain’s leaking out of my ear, but I’m going to keep on holding you? Drop the damn gun!”

“You’ll let go of me!”

When Horn had planned this last desperate strategy, pounding up the tower steps with death’s shadow on his heels, it was never his intention to try to save anyone but himself. The math stacked up only one way: to have any chance of walking away from this he needed Tommy Hanratty’s hired gun dead, and he could only think of one way to achieve that. It made the massive gamble he was taking worthwhile; because although there was a good chance that the rope might break, or the bed might break, or while he was struggling to carry them over the parapet the man might gather his wits just quickly enough to shoot him, that was as nothing beside the certainty that if he didn’t take the chance, he wouldn’t live long enough to regret it. He didn’t fool himself that killing this killer would stop Hanratty’s sending another; but that would take time, and time was Horn’s friend. Given a week’s head start he could lose himself where even God would have trouble finding him.

And yes, that one would find him too, eventually. But Nicky Horn was a young man. Eventually seemed like a lifetime to him. So he’d laid his desperate plan with every intention of holding Hanratty’s man just long enough for his own momentum to carry them both over the parapet, and then let go.

What he hadn’t allowed for was how hard it is for an ordinary human being, given any choice at all, to kill someone. Even someone who’d earned it as thoroughly as this one had. Horn hung on to him because that’s what you did, if you had a soul worth saving, even if you weren’t a climber whose reactions and muscles and deepest instinct were trained for this moment. He wanted to let go. He needed to let go. And he couldn’t.

But he wasn’t going to tell the man in his arms that. “You draw this out much longer, I’ll let go of you anyway. I can’t hold you forever. That’s kind of what we’re doing here, isn’t it? Patrick Hanratty was the best friend I ever had, and I couldn’t save him. You think I’m going to try harder for you? I wouldn’t crack a knuckle to save your life; I wouldn’t break sweat. Do what I tell you, do it now, or I let go. You reckon you can shoot me in the time it takes you to hit the ground? Because you’re sure as hell not going to do it afterwards.”

Knowing better than to struggle, the man had become a dead weight in Horn’s arms. His voice was muffled. “I don’t want to die.”

Horn gave a gusty little laugh. “Guess what—me neither! And I don’t deserve to, and you do. We’re on our own here, nobody’s going to come and help. If we can’t work this out, you are going to die. I’m going to let go and gravity’s going to spread you across three square meters of McKendrick’s gravel. The only chance you have is to convince me you’re no longer a threat to me. And you’d better start soon, because I’ve had a hard day and you’re heavier than you look.”

“All right! All right.” The man held the gun out where Horn could see it. He let it go.

“And the knife.”

“All right.” It was awkward for him to reach it, inching cautiously so as not to weaken Horn’s grip, but he managed and the knife followed the gun into space.

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I swear it! On—” He stopped abruptly.

“On your life is right,” growled Horn. Somewhere in the shadowy depths of him he was almost enjoying this. “Next question. If I get you down safely, what are you going to do?”

The man knew what was expected of him. “Leave you alone,” he muttered.

“Louder.”

“Leave you alone! Give Hanratty his money back and tell him I can’t do the job. Tell him to find someone else—if he can. We don’t like taking on one another’s failures.”

“How very … civilized … of you,” managed Horn. He asked himself whether he could believe a word this man said. Funnily enough, he thought he probably could. Anyway, the only choice he had was to believe him or not, and Horn couldn’t hold him for much longer while he thought about it. He reached the only decision he could.

“Right. Now, you’re going to do exactly what I tell you. You’re going to do it the first time, and you’re not going to ask why. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“I need to park you so I can climb back. Then I’ll haul you up.”

“P-park…?” Mostly what the man could see was sky and, a long way down, the ground, but as they turned slowly on the rope, sometimes he saw the castle wall. It looked sheer.

“About a meter beneath you there’s a drip-molding—a stone ledge sticking out over the window of the room below us. I’m going to lower you so you can get your feet on it. Then we’ll find you a handhold. It won’t be much, but it won’t need to be, just enough to stop you leaning back and falling off. Then I’ll climb up and send the rope back down. All right?”

The man was looking, over his shoulder now, at the castle wall. “There is nothing to hold on to!”

Horn snorted at him with a fine disdain. “I’ve climbed rock walls as smooth as this, and I’ve done it fast and loose—without ropes, without pitons. I know what I’m talking about. There’s always a handhold.” It wasn’t true, but he said it with enough authority that it sounded true.

And in fact, chance declined to make a liar of him. His expert eyes picked out an eroded corner of stone where the mortar had weathered. He was pretty sure that, armed with nothing more than the penknife that was still in his back pocket, he could excavate it deeply enough to provide a hold. All he’d have to do then was convince a grown man that he could support his own weight with the slim bones of his fingers.

Before that, though, Horn needed to change his grip, so that instead of hugging the man’s chest he had him by the wrists. For an octopus this would have posed no problem. “Raise your left hand in front of you. Put your knuckles against your chest and crank your wrist outwards. Move it up till it’s touching my arm. Good. Hold it like that. I’ll tell you before I make my move.”

But he didn’t. Frightened people do stupid things: they cramp up, they start to struggle, they try to save themselves when they can’t instead of trusting to someone who maybe can. The man in his arms was already as frightened as Horn wanted him. So when Horn was ready, he just sucked in the best breath he could force past the bight of rope, then sent his right hand diving for the man’s left wrist.

Not being an octopus, this meant releasing the bear hug, trusting to the strength of his left arm alone to defer just long enough the moment at which gravity took over. It was a risky maneuver. If he’d been doing this with another climber—if he’d been doing it with Patrick—he’d have been confident of success. It was the sort of thing they used to do for fun. With a frightened man of unknown strengths and weaknesses, and he himself both out of practice and currently somewhat dog-eared, the outcome was less certain.

Still Horn didn’t hesitate, for two good reasons and a bad one. If the gambit failed and the man fell, he himself would still be hanging safe. And delay would only increase the risk, as his strength waned and the man’s fear grew. Finally, the wail of startled terror as the man felt his connection to the world waver and his body begin to slip gave Horn a surge of satisfaction. It was time to repay this man for some of the sleepless nights, the weary fleeing days.

But no sooner had his burden begun to slip than Horn had his strong right hand latched onto the man’s wrist, so that while he went on falling—and wailing—the limit of his fall was prescribed by the length of his arm. By then Horn had his left hand free, and though the man floundered like a fish on a line, it only took a few seconds for Horn to capture his flailing right hand too. “Okay?” Horn said.

The man didn’t trust himself to speak. He nodded. Even that was a falsehood; but his eyes, staring whitely up at Horn, acknowledged that he was in the hands of an expert. He trusted Horn to take care of him.

“The molding’s right in front of you. Look down and you’ll see it. Feel for it with your feet.”

Horn knew when he’d found it from the easing of the weight on his arms and the pressure on his chest. They weren’t there yet. But they were getting there.

“I need my right hand. I’m going to let go of your left wrist, and I want you to put your hand flat against the wall. Don’t worry about locking on, just put your hand against the wall.”

Feeling Horn release his grip, the man shuddered with fear. But his feet were firm on the drip-molding, and his right wrist was secure in Horn’s left hand. He reached out quite tentatively at first, stroking the weathered stone. Then he pressed his hand flat against it, as if he thought that what let geckos scuttle up walls might work for him too.

With his free hand Horn felt for the crack he’d seen, began excavating it. He opened his penknife with his teeth and dug the strong, short blade again and again into the ancient mortar.

When the hole was as deep as the blade could reach, he stopped. “You’re going to think this can’t possibly hold you. But it will. Do you believe me?”

The man, who’d been able to see what Horn was doing better than Horn could, shook his head. No.

“Your feet will carry your weight. What this is for is to stop you barn-dooring—coming away from the wall. Dig three fingers as far in as they’ll go, then bend the joints as much as you can. Bend them till it hurts. Have you done that?”

The man nodded. Yes.

“I’ve still got you—you’re not going to fall. Now, without straightening your fingers, try to pull your hand out of the crack.”

He did as he was told. “Ow.”

“Exactly. As long as you don’t straighten your fingers, you can’t fall. Now I’m going to let go.”

“No!”

But Horn wasn’t asking permission. He kept his left hand close in case the man began to swing, but he didn’t. Carefully Horn reached across his body and put the penknife into the man’s right hand. Right here and now, he saw no problem with giving a weapon to a professional killer. “You saw what I did. Find another crack and open it up. Crimp your fingers the same way. All you have to do is not fall off for about three minutes. Can you do that?”

A whine. “I don’t know…”

“Well, we’re going to find out.” Horn might have accepted the human obligation to save this man if he could, but he didn’t have to be nice to him as well. “I can climb this rope but I doubt if you can, so don’t try. When I tell you, take one hand out of the wall, wrap the rope round your chest, and knot it. Nothing fancy, just lots of knots—anything you can tie with one hand. I’ll pull you up.”

Shakily: “Can you do that?”

“Anybody’s guess.” Horn shrugged, though he was pretty sure he could. No gale was blowing here, no cold was sapping his strength, and he could find something much better than snow to brace himself against. And they were only three meters below the parapet. If Patrick had been only three meters below Anarchy Ridge, the lives of both of them would have panned out quite differently.

Almost the hardest part was freeing his legs from the man’s embrace without pushing him off the wall. Once he was clear, Horn went up the rope like an old horse climbing a hill—not quickly, not easily, but plugging away till he got there. A last effort and he rolled over the parapet onto the terrace.

For long moments he just lay there gasping, like a stranded fish. From the bed inside the open window William McKendrick was watching him with interest.

Time pressed, but Horn needed more rope. As soon as he could move, he untied it from the bed leg and belayed it round him. Finally he leaned over the parapet.

“I’m sending the rope back down. Don’t grab for it—wait till you feel it against you. Then take one hand, wrap it round you twice and tie the end in as many knots as you can. It’ll pull tight, but a cracked rib won’t kill you.”

At last the man asked what he hadn’t dared ask before. “Why are you doing this?”

Horn was damned if he knew the answer. “I think, because I’m better than you are.”

He’d thought that climbing the rope would be the hardest part. But this was: pulling up a man who was essentially a dead weight on a beardy old rope that hadn’t been designed for the job when it was new. But climbers are good at ignoring pain. Bracing his feet against the parapet, Horn ignored the protests of his chafed hands and went on pulling, often just centimeters at a time, belaying the slack off around himself and counting a triumph every time the rope bit into his shoulder. Each bite was a bit more rope he wouldn’t have to pull again, a bit more old rope no longer in danger of breaking.

Braced against the parapet he couldn’t see the load he was hauling, could only imagine how long this felt to be taking to the man below. But he heard no complaints, nor did he expect to. This was hard on both of them; but only one of them had no alternative, and he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

All the same, Horn was beginning to wonder if something peculiar had happened to the rope—if it was slowly stretching under the weight so that, however long he pulled at it, he would never reach the man on the end. But then between one haul and the next, a hand appeared at a crenel of the parapet.

Which didn’t mean the job was done. A last major effort was required of both of them. But it was the light at the end of the tunnel, and Nicky Horn spared himself a moment to catch his breath and look forward to a time without twelve stone on a thin rope digging into his shoulder.

The first he knew that they were not alone was when Robert McKendrick walked past him.

They say great minds think alike, and McKendrick had had the same thought as Hanratty’s mechanic. He’d armed himself with a chef’s knife from the kitchen. Now he bent and applied it where the rope came through the gap in the wall.

Horn let out a strangled yell but there was nothing he could do. The octopus could have held Hanratty’s man with two of its arms and fought off McKendrick with the others, but all Horn could do was hold the rope tight, and shout breathless abuse, and watch with shock-dilated eyes as McKendrick’s knife sawed at the rope.

All Horn’s effort, all his climber’s skill and strength that it had taken to get them to this point, went for nothing in the few seconds it took McKendrick to cut an old rope with a sharp knife. When it parted, Horn measured his length on the terrace and so never saw Hanratty’s man fall; but he heard him. He heard the low, mournful wail as he fell, and the terrible, terribly final thump as he came to earth.

McKendrick looked over the parapet and nodded with every appearance of satisfaction. Then he put the knife down carefully on top of the wall, where no one could hurt himself with it.