Death in High Places

Chapter 17





MCKENDRICK EXTENDED a hand to help him up. Horn shrank from it as if it still held the murder weapon. He went on staring at the older man with appalled, incredulous eyes while his skin crawled and his exhausted body shook. When he could get a word out, it was “Why?”

McKendrick shrugged negligently and took his hand back. “What do you mean, why? He was going to kill you. He meant to kill all of us.”

“He wasn’t going to kill anybody hanging on a rope twenty meters off the ground!”

“But you weren’t going to leave him there, were you? He’d taken money to kill you. As soon as he was able to, he’d have tried again.”

“No.”

McKendrick grinned—humorless, a shark’s grin. “Gave you his word, did he?”

“Yes.”

“And you believed him.”

“I was prepared to take the chance.”

McKendrick turned away with a disparaging sniff. “Well, I wasn’t.”

“No one asked you to! He let you go. You could just have driven away.”

“As a matter of fact, we couldn’t. He’d fixed the car so it wouldn’t start. Nicky, he never meant for any of us to get away. He was just splitting us up so he could deal with us one at a time.”

Which put a slightly different complexion on things, even in Horn’s raging heart. “That was … before…” he said uncertainly.

“Before? Before he cut my daughter’s face to shreds? Before he followed you up here with a gun in his hand? Or do you mean, before you tied a bit of old rope round your middle and threw yourself off a castle wall because you couldn’t see any other way that gave you even that much chance of surviving the day? Don’t fool yourself, Nicky. It was him or us. It was always going to be him or us. It was better that it was him.”

Horn, blinking, shook his head. As if there were stuff in there that he wanted to dislodge. As if there were a hope in the world that shaking his head would be enough to do it. It wasn’t so much that a man had died. It wasn’t even how he’d died. It was that the man who’d killed him hadn’t so much as broken sweat over the decision. It might have been something he’d worked out at his desk, with the profit-and-loss accounts by his elbow. It was what made sense, what the situation required. And Robert McKendrick was, Horn had come to understand, a good choice for doing what a situation required, whether it was closing a factory or firing a CEO or cutting a man’s rope when he was a hand’s span from safety. Not a lot of sentimentality with McKendrick, not a lot of breast-beating. Just, do what’s needed and move on.

Horn had thought he was a hard man until he got to know McKendrick.

Horn hauled himself to his feet—the hand wasn’t offered again—and freed himself from the rope. He made himself look over the parapet.

And the mess on the gravel wasn’t the most upsetting thing he saw. “Mack—what’s she doing?”

* * *

McKendrick, aided by familiarity and spurred by fear, took the steps three at a time, reckless of a fall. Horn followed more slowly, but not much. By the time he reached the front hall McKendrick had got the door open and was reaching for the girl who knelt on the gravel.

“Beth. Beth! What are you doing? Come away…”

“He’s hurt,” she explained patiently. “He fell.” She brushed off her father’s hand and continued trying to sit Hanratty’s man up against the wheel of the car. He was too heavy, and also too dead—it was like moving twelve stone of wet concrete in a sack. When she got his shoulders off the ground, his broken head tipped back, or forward, or sideways, and took the slack torso with it. Time and again the dead man hit the ground. Time and again, with the kind of bemused perseverance of someone who doesn’t know quite what they’re doing and so doesn’t know how to stop, Beth leaned over him, as oblivious of his blood as she was her own, and tried to prop him up.

McKendrick turned to Horn with fear stretching his eyes. Horn had wondered what it would take to fracture his inhuman cool, and this was the answer. McKendrick’s lips quivered and words babbled out. “She’s … she’s not well … tired … hurt … Help me. Help me get her inside. She needs … she needs … she needs to sit down. Beth! Come inside. She needs a doctor. Call the doctor! Can we? The phones were out—weren’t they? I can’t remember!”

“Okay,” said Horn, as firmly as he could manage, “you’ve got to calm down right now. She’s in shock, and so are you. Yes, the mobiles are working. Let’s get you both inside, then I’ll call the police and an ambulance.”

“Shock,” said McKendrick uncertainly, echoing Horn’s words. He looked at him beseechingly. “Are you sure?”

Horn didn’t follow. “You don’t think she’s entitled? With everything that’s happened today? You don’t have to approve of what she did to understand what made her do it. Her feet haven’t touched the floor since you brought me here. She’s been on an emotional roller coaster. Four years’ worth of grief and anger made her do something appalling, something she must know in her heart was unforgivable. Then someone she thought was on her side took a knife to her face, and then she saw him fall from the roof and spill his brains right in front of her. Yeah, I’m pretty sure she’s in shock.”

“Just shock?”

Finally he realized what McKendrick was thinking, the specter that was haunting him. Comprehension hit Horn in the midriff like a mailed fist and his mouth went dry. “Of course,” he said, though all the certainty was gone. “She needs taking care of. A good night’s sleep, maybe a bit of sedation. Tomorrow she’ll be fine.”

“Yes,” agreed McKendrick, and a tremor shook his voice. “Shock. Tomorrow she’ll be fine. William and I have pretty much the same genes, but Beth’s only got half of them. And she’s only twenty-six. It can’t—it couldn’t … It’s just shock.”

He blinked and looked at Horn with a little more intelligence and a different kind of fear. “We can’t call the police.”

“We have to. We can’t bury him among the rhododendrons!”

“What will we tell them?”

Horn shrugged. “The truth. That Tommy Hanratty hired him to kill me, that you tried to help me, that when it became a matter of survival we took him on. And won.”

“I cut his rope.”

“Yes. Well. A lot of people will think you did the right thing.” The fact that it was true didn’t make it any less ironic.

“How do we explain him being here? I won’t tell them it was Beth!”

“We don’t have to. He was a professional, it was his job to find me. He’d always managed it before, sooner or later. We don’t know how. You understand? We don’t know.”

“What she did. Calling Hanratty. That wasn’t … rational.”

“From where she was standing, maybe it was,” Horn argued weakly. “She’d hated me from a distance for years. Now she had the chance to hate me in person. And to do something about it.”

They were heading up the front steps, the confused girl between them, talking over her head as if she were a child.

For a moment McKendrick said nothing more. He seemed to be considering that. “All right. Anyone might think it was fate sending them an early Christmas present. Anyone might think, momentarily, of taking the revenge they’d dreamed of. But normal people don’t do it. They think about it, think how satisfying it would be, then reality intervenes and they don’t do it. But Beth did.”

They sat her down in the little room beside the kitchen and McKendrick sat beside her, gently cleaning her ravaged face with his handkerchief. Beth smiled at him and he smiled back; but he could see in her eyes that she couldn’t quite remember how any of this had happened. Who had hurt her, and why, and what had become of him.

Horn went through into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Before he called anyone he needed some caffeine, and he doubted it would do the others much harm either. The spoons he dropped in the saucers rattled like castanets.

He put the tray on the low table and straightened up. “I can be away from here before the police arrive. You can tell them I cut the rope.” He did the feral grin. “They won’t need much convincing. Mention Anarchy Ridge to them and the whole thing will seem to make sense.”

McKendrick appreciated the magnitude of what Horn was offering. “Won’t they come looking for you?”

“Sure. But they won’t look very hard, they won’t find me, and they won’t be surprised. They know about Hanratty’s contract. They’ll know the guy outside, at least by reputation. Even if they caught up with me, what would they charge me with? Self-defense isn’t a crime. They’ll go through the motions, then they’ll move on to something more worthwhile.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’m not telling you that!” Horn cranked out a thin smile. “I don’t know yet. Somewhere I’ve no reason to go—that’s always the best. Hanratty will look for someone else to take the contract, but there’ll be no trail to pick up. It’ll take him months to find me again.”

“But he will?”

“Oh, yes. Eventually.” There was an unbearable fragility to his smile. “Unless something happens first. Tommy Hanratty may have a change of heart. Slightly more likely, he may have a heart attack and his widow decide she has better uses for his money than paying a hit man. It’s a head start. I’ll settle for that.”

McKendrick, his arm protective around his daughter’s shoulder, regarded Horn for a long time before reaching a decision and nodding. “All right. Get on your way. Take his car—I’ll tell the police I never saw it so I can’t give them a description. And you’re going to need money. I keep a few thousand in the safe—if you’ll sit with Beth for a minute, I’ll go and get it. Call me when that’s gone and I’ll send you some more.”

Horn shook his head. “I don’t want your money.”

“You mightn’t want it. You’re going to need it.”

“No more than I did last week, and I managed fine then. I can earn what I need, as long as I can stop running long enough. There’s plenty of casual work around for a tradesman.”

“Then … I won’t see you again?” McKendrick was surprised by the regret in his own voice.

“Unless they pull me out of a ditch somewhere and slap my face on the front of your newspaper.” Horn was making a joke, but both men knew it could happen exactly like that.

For some minutes they drank the coffee and said nothing more. Finally Horn went to go. But he paused in the doorway and looked back. “What will you do about … the other thing? You know I’m not going to do it, don’t you?”

McKendrick nodded—carefully, Beth had gone to sleep on his shoulder. “I know that now. You were never a good choice. But then, you were never the man you were meant to be. The man you claimed to be.”

“You understand why? Why all the lies?”

“Not really,” said McKendrick honestly. “I can imagine doing what you did, I just can’t imagine doing it for the reason you did it.” He lapsed into a reflective silence as the echo of what he’d said caught up with him. Horn had embarked on the lie that was going to get him killed in a misguided effort to be kind. Kindness was the bit McKendrick couldn’t get his head round.

He blinked and changed the subject. “I’ll need to rethink everything now. What if it’s not me who’s going to get ill, who’s going to need looking after? I can’t opt out if Beth’s going to need me.”

Nicky Horn nodded, and stole a last troubled look at the damaged girl sleeping on her father’s shoulder. Then he turned through the entrance hall and down the steps, past the dead man on the gravel, and out across the grass to where his car was parked under the hedge. Horn never broke his stride and never looked back, and he felt his burden lighten with every step.

* * *

Two years passed. Robert McKendrick made a point of reading those bits of the newspaper that didn’t directly relate to business, but he never saw anything that suggested that Tommy Hanratty had caught up with Nicky Horn or that time had caught up with Hanratty.

Beth’s face healed well. But McKendrick remained deeply anxious about her state of mind. He took her—protesting but resigned, humoring him—to see their doctor. Of course, McKendrick was less than candid about the reason for his concerns. He talked about the vagueness, the lapses of memory, the loss of focus that he’d witnessed in his daughter since the siege of Birkholmstead, and he reminded the GP of the family history hanging like Damocles’s sword over all the McKendricks.

It wasn’t enough—in truth, it was nowhere near enough—for a responsible GP to diagnose Alzheimer’s dementia in a woman of twenty-six. He thought post-traumatic stress a much likelier explanation, and suggested that time and perhaps counseling would effect a cure. McKendrick demanded referral to a consultant; but she agreed with the GP. She saw nothing in Beth’s manner or behavior—at least, the behavior she’d been told about—to justify even considering early-onset dementia.

McKendrick wouldn’t be comforted. He knew in his bones that what he was seeing in his daughter was the start of what he’d already been through with his father, his mother and his brother. That the events at Birkholmstead were not the start of Beth’s problems but a result of them. She’d tried to get someone killed. Four years after Patrick Hanratty died on Anarchy Ridge, she was still so consumed by hatred that she conspired with his father to accomplish the death of the man they held responsible. Any way you looked at it, that was not the act of a rational woman. To McKendrick, it was clear evidence that what should have been an imperforate barrier in her head—dividing the real from the unreal, memories from dreams, the world of experience from that of the imagination—had begun to leak, allowing the contents from either side to mix and meld.

In the end he did what, ten years earlier, he’d done about his brother: he stopped making medical appointments but trusted to his own ability to care for her by love and by instinct. For weeks at a time their lives were calm, pleasant and uneventful. Sometimes McKendrick experienced a momentary panic that she wasn’t where he thought she was, but the gardens were extensive and McKendrick always caught up with her before Beth reached the hedge.

Once he found her standing in the courtyard, staring up at the little terrace outside William’s window. Puzzled, she asked, “Who was it that fell?”

McKendrick said, “Someone we didn’t know,” and that seemed to satisfy her. They never again discussed what had happened.

Much later Beth complained, only half jokingly, that he kept her a prisoner in his castle like jealous fathers of old. McKendrick responded, entirely seriously, that he was trying to keep her safe.

She looked at him oddly. “I know what you think. That I’m losing my mind.”

“No,” he replied quickly, and part of him meant it. “But we have … history. We have to be careful.”

“Has it ever occurred to you,” she wondered quietly, “that maybe it’s you? That what happened to Granddad and Uncle William is now happening to you? That when it comes to keeping us safe and secure, you’ve lost all sense of proportion? You keep me locked away in this ivory tower as if the world outside was a dark and dangerous place. But Mack, what you’re afraid of isn’t out there—it’s in here, with us. It’s part of us.

“Yes, we have a history. And maybe you’re right to be afraid—maybe our history is also our future. But you can’t keep it out with stone walls and steel shutters, and most people would consider it insane to try. If there’s something wrong—with either of us—we need to face up to that and deal with it. And I’m willing to, and I don’t think you are.”

That night in the silent dark he mulled over what she’d said. He’d have liked to dismiss it as wrongheaded, perhaps symptomatic of her illness, but he couldn’t entirely. Maybe she was right. Maybe what she did was bad rather than mad—an outrageous demonstration of hate-fueled rage but not in any clinical sense psychotic. If that was the case, what he thought of as caring for her was a punishment worse than any the law would have imposed. Imprisoned for conspiracy and attempted murder, at least she’d have had the prospect of release and the hope of making a normal life afterward. Locked up here, with him and William, normality was an impossible dream. If she wasn’t sick now, inevitably his treatment of her would chip away at her personality until her illness became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So he hoped to God he was right. And, even in the darkness and the silence, on balance he still believed that she was the one on whom the family curse was now descending. That she was the firework with the blue touch paper already lit, and if he lowered his guard for a moment something terrible would happen to her. Perhaps he had to believe it. But that didn’t mean he was wrong.

The reality was, they were both standing on the frozen lake, wondering where the ice was thinnest, where the thaw would begin. And whether, when the summer was come, there would be any ice left anywhere.

* * *

And then, two years down the line, as he dutifully scanned the uninteresting bits of his newspaper, the name Hanratty leaped out at him.

The thing about glaciers is, they move. Everyone knows this; and still, when things fall into glaciers and turn up years later and miles away, everyone seems surprised.

The glacier that had cut Anarchy Ridge into an overhang moved faster and traveled farther than most and, aided by a bit of global warming, reached the end of its travels in a little over six years. The ice cliff at its front broke down and melted on the banks of the Little Horse River, and one autumn morning a couple of hunters found the body of a young man in lime-green climbing gear lying on a gravel spit, his top-of-the-range boots still encased in ice. His knife was attached by its lanyard to his wrist, and all that was left of his rope was what was round him and half a meter more. It took no time at all to identify him as Patrick Hanratty.

A reporter braver than the others went to interview the deceased’s father. Tommy Hanratty, massive and threatening even in a black-and-white photograph, stared unwinking into the camera and professed no surprise at all to learn that his son had cut his own rope to save the life of his climbing partner.

McKendrick made inquiries, but he never learned what happened to Nicky Horn after that. He never heard that he was finally living in peace and security somewhere. At the same time, and perhaps more significantly, he never heard that he’d died.