Death in High Places

Chapter 3





THE SILENCE went on and on. A glacial silence. Beth said nothing to break it because everything she’d had to say she’d said in those two sentences. Even with time to think, she knew they couldn’t be improved on. Horn said nothing because he had nothing to say. Everyone and his dog knew the story and had an opinion about what had happened on Anarchy Ridge above the Little Horse River. Horn hadn’t been left with a lot, but he still had too much pride to beg forgiveness of total strangers.

McKendrick said nothing because he seemed to be waiting. As if he thought Beth’s revelation were an opening gambit rather than a last word. But no further information was forthcoming, so finally he looked at Horn. “I notice you’re not denying it.”

Horn turned to face him, and it seemed to take more effort than even the residual concussion might have explained. “Why would I deny it? She knows who I am. Most people know who I am. Most people reckon they know what happened.”

“You’re saying they don’t?”

“I’m saying none of the fireside experts has the faintest idea what they’re talking about.” Horn’s eyes were hot, red-rimmed with resentment. “Climbers know. What it’s like in the mountains, where you put your life in other people’s hands so often, so totally, that it stops seeming like a big deal. You hold them, they hold you. It’s the norm. You trust one another. Then something goes wrong and suddenly it’s a big deal again. Other climbers have the right to judge me. People in pubs haven’t. Nor have people who care so much about their own safety that they live in castles.”

“Actually—” began McKendrick, but Beth interrupted him.

“Other climbers have judged you.”

The flash of desperate anger died in Horn’s eyes as quickly as it had flared. She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. He lived with the knowledge; the knowledge was like a worm in his gut, eating away even when he was asleep. He growled, “They weren’t there.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” said Beth McKendrick tartly. “The only one there was you, which is why Patrick Hanratty’s buried in a glacier in Alaska. Anyone else—anyone—would have got him out of there, or died trying. But it was you. And you cut his rope.”

“I held him for three hours,” gritted Nicky Horn. “I couldn’t hold him any longer. I thought by then he was dead. That I was holding a dead man.”

“But you would say that, wouldn’t you?” spat Beth. “And we’ve only your word for the three hours. Maybe you got tired after the first ten minutes. When you couldn’t pull him up and he couldn’t help himself. Maybe that’s when you got your knife out. Maybe you thought, since that was how it was likely to end anyway, there was no point straining yourself first.”

“It was hours,” repeated Horn. There was something odd, thought McKendrick, about the way Horn spoke. Almost mechanical. As if he’d told the story so often that the words came automatically now, almost without his thinking about them. But that was just the words. Behind them, in the pits of his eyes, the emotion was still raw—as raw as if it had happened yesterday. “The wind was whipping the snow off the ridge around us. He was hanging on the end of a rope in the wind and the snow. He hadn’t answered me, and I hadn’t felt him move, for hours. When I cut him loose, I thought he was dead. I still think that.”

He didn’t say aloud, “I have to,” but McKendrick heard it as clearly as if he had.

Beth’s voice dropped softer. “But you’re the man who killed his partner rather than risk being pulled off the mountain by him. Why would anyone believe a word you say?”

Incredibly, Horn laughed. “They don’t,” he said, as if she’d missed the point of a rather simple joke. “They never have. But they can’t prove anything different, so they have to accept it. So do you. Patrick’s death was an accident—misadventure, a combination of recklessness and bad luck. You can think what you like, but the inquest said I wasn’t responsible.”

“But his father,” murmured McKendrick, putting the pieces together quickly now, “was no more convinced by the findings of an Alaskan coroner than my daughter appears to be.”

“Tommy Hanrattty’s a criminal and a thug,” snarled Horn. “If I’d done everything I’ve been accused of doing, I’ll still be kept waiting at the gates of hell while Old Nick ushers Tommy Hanratty inside.”

“Is he serious? About killing you?”

Horn stared at McKendrick, wide-eyed with disbelief. “You were there last night. Did that guy look to you like he was kidding?”

“Well—no,” McKendrick said slowly. “I suppose he didn’t.”

Finally Beth seemed to realize that, consumed by her anger, she’d missed a large chunk of what was going on. “What guy? Where did you go last night? Where did you find … this”—she invested the word with infinite contempt—“and why did you bring it here?”

McKendrick summarized what had happened in a handful of brief, simplistic sentences that probably raised more questions than they answered. At least, the way Beth was looking at him didn’t suggest that now she understood any better. It took her a moment to find a voice. “You risked your life? For that?”

McKendrick shrugged. “I didn’t know who he was, then,” he said reasonably. “I’m not sure it would have made a difference if I had.”

She quite literally didn’t know what to say to him. She felt riven by betrayal but couldn’t tell him why. She might have tried but for the fear of what would come through if she opened the floodgates. All she could manage was a stunned expression and a few breathless, uncomprehending words. “You could have died. You could have died and left me alone. For that.”

Horn hauled himself stiffly off the sofa. “I get the message: you don’t want me here. Point me in the direction of anywhere I’ll have heard of and I’ll leave. You’ll never see me again and there’s no reason you should waste another thought on me, let alone an argument. Thanks for what you did,” he told McKendrick, “but she’s right, you shouldn’t have got involved. Do the”—he wiggled his thumb on an imaginary keypad—“thing with the locks and let me out.

“Just for the record, though,” he added, his gaze swiveling round to Beth, “Patrick Hanratty was my friend. My best friend. I did everything I could to save him. It wasn’t enough. Nothing I could have done would have been enough. If I could have bought his life with mine, I would have done.”

If he was looking for some hint of understanding, some glimmer of compassion, some brief acknowledgment of their shared humanity and the knowledge that everyone makes mistakes and it’s the intention by which an act should be judged rather than its consequences, then he’d come to the wrong counter.

Beth McKendrick’s lip twisted in a sneer of infinite disdain. “You think you’re your own harshest critic? Not while I’m alive you’re not. You think that anyone else, put in the same position, would have done as you did? Don’t flatter yourself. Patrick had a lot of friends, from a lot further back than you. Any one of us would have died on that mountain rather than leave him there.”

Everything else he’d expected—the sneer, the contempt, nothing new there—but that he hadn’t. “You knew him?”

“Yes, I knew him. We were at university together.” She said it with a kind of unconscious hubris. “We were both in the climbing club. He was way out of my league, but we did several routes together. And guess what? Every time we climbed—every time—the same number of people came down as went up.”

Something changed in Nicky Horn’s eyes. It had been his last redoubt, the belief that other climbers—who understood and accepted the risks, who could imagine finding themselves in the same cruel quandary—might judge him less harshly than the general public, whose view of what happened was shaped by tabloid headlines consisting largely of exclamation marks. If he was wrong about that, then he was entirely alone—a pariah, unforgiven and unforgivable.

The only way to survive with the whole world against you is to fight.

He’d been running for four years. From Tommy Hanratty, but also from the past. Now there was nowhere left to go. This woman with her iron eyes had nailed his soul to the wall. She knew who he was, she knew the story of what he’d done—she thought she knew everything. But if there was nowhere left to hide, there was no reason left to try. In so far as he could be honest with anyone, he could be honest with her. It might not do much to salve her hatred of him, but that wasn’t the point. Hatred is a corrosive, like acid splashed on skin. Self-hatred is like injecting it into a vein. For once he wanted to stand up like a man and hit back, because if he didn’t he’d go to his grave without even trying to set the record straight. Or no, not that—setting the record straight was the last thing he wanted, he’d thrown his life away to avoid setting the record straight. But there were things he needed to say to someone, and she’d do.

McKendrick saw him stiffen, the strong muscles drawing his sturdy, compact frame into a state of balanced tension. In such a state he could have crimped his fingertips on a ledge of rock and swung out over the void, feeling the fear but doing it anyway—knowing he could do it anyway. Adrenaline fed into his blood not in a wild rush but like fuel injected into a highly tuned engine, equipping him first to face his demons and then to deal with them. To conquer them or die trying.

“Patrick Hanratty was my friend,” he said again. There was a tremor in his voice that McKendrick thought Horn was unaware of, that McKendrick attributed not so much to fear or even anger as the absolute need to get this said. Horn had taken everything Beth had to throw at him, and now it was his turn. There was the sense that he’d been waiting for it for a long time. “More than that, he was my climbing partner. You knew him at university? Wow, I’m impressed. I bet you went punting on the river and everything, didn’t you? I bet you wore matching scarves.

“But it wasn’t you he went to Alaska with. Or to Utah, or the Cascades, or even the Alps.” McKendrick almost fancied he felt a cold wind breathe through the little room as Horn spoke. “When the climbing was going to be hard, and dangerous, and he knew as we all do that if he fell there’d only be one chance for someone to catch him, it wasn’t you he wanted on his rope. It was me.

“We climbed in places where no one could help if it all went wrong—where no one would even know. And it did go wrong. Not once, but again and again. He owed his life to me more times than either of us could count, and I owed mine to him. And we never, ever wore matching scarves.”

He sucked in a hard breath. “What happened on Anarchy Ridge wasn’t a fluke. It didn’t come out of nowhere and take us by surprise. When you climb the way we did, pioneering our own routes, our own mountains sometimes, every time you go out you know there’s a real risk you’re going to come up against something you can’t deal with. Hell, it’s why we went out. He could have stayed with the university climbing club and got really good on indoor walls and the routes that figure in the guidebooks, the ones where you’re likely to meet someone’s mom on the way down. He could have done that with you, couldn’t he? But he didn’t want to. It wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to be up there at the sharp end, finding routes and making them, and for that neither you nor any of his university friends were good enough. For that he needed me.

“You know why? Because I’m good.” There wasn’t much pride in the way he said it: mostly it was bitterness. “I’m strong, and I’m savvy, and I don’t give up easily. I can take the pain, and the exhaustion, and still want to go on—still find some way of going on. Patrick was the same. Apart from the university thing, of course. He talked posher than me. He was cleverer than me. But up there, where the wind and the ice don’t much care about your accent or the letters after your name, we were pretty much alike. Most of the time”—the most fractional of catches—“I knew what he was thinking, what he was going to do next.

“We hardly talked when we were climbing. We didn’t have to. I always knew what he was going to try because it was always what I’d have done in the same situation.” He took a moment then to get the words in the right order. “That’s what I did on Anarchy Ridge. I did what he’d have done for me in the same situation. I did my best. I held him for as long as I could. When I couldn’t hold him anymore, and the only alternative was dying with him, I let him go.”

He moistened his bruised lips. “If you think you can make me feel worse about that, you’re wrong. If you think you can make me wonder if it was the right decision, you’re wrong about that too. I know it was the right decision. If I’d been hanging on his rope, it’s what I’d have wanted Patrick to do. I’d have wanted him to do everything in his power to save me—and when it wasn’t enough, I’d have wanted him to save himself. To survive. To get home and tell people what happened. That I’d got the death I wanted. That I’d rather have lived, but if I had to die, that was the place to do it. That I never wanted to be buried anywhere other than a mountain glacier.

“Mind,” he added as a sarcastic footnote, “I never went to university. I don’t think you can do a PhD in joinery. Pity, really. Maybe if I’d got a PhD, I’d behave more like an officer and a gentleman, and see the point of having two people dead on a mountain when you could just have one.”

It was the most talking Horn had done since McKendrick had met him. It was the nearest thing to eloquence he’d heard from him. It made him view Horn in a rather different light. It didn’t make him change his mind about anything, though.

It had more of an effect on Beth. She’d gone very white. Now a flush of pink stole up her cheeks. She opened her mouth to reply but no words came. As if, McKendrick thought critically, she were willing to beat a cowering dog but not one that might snap back.

But he remembered how upset she’d been by Patrick Hanratty’s death. She’d hardly talked about it—they had never, thought McKendrick ruefully, been great talkers—but first the news and then the details that emerged over the following weeks had swept the feet from under her. As if she and young Hanratty had been better friends than he’d realized.

She stood frozen, staring at Horn’s battered, embattled face as if he’d stepped out of one of her nightmares and she didn’t know what to do about him. Then she clamped her jaw shut, turned abruptly and left the room, slamming the door behind her so that the air in the little sitting room went on reverberating for seconds.

After a moment McKendrick said mildly, “She always used to do that when she was cross. You wouldn’t believe the number of hinges I’ve had to replace.”

Horn gave a little pant like a hunted fox as some of the tension left him. “I think,” he said carefully, “she was more than cross.”

“She was upset. It’s understandable, in the circumstances.”

“You reckon?” drawled Horn with heavy irony. “What in God’s name were you thinking? You knew she was a friend of Patrick’s, you must have realized how bringing me here was going to hurt her. Why would you do that?”

McKendrick chuckled. “I’m sorry, Nicky—Nicky?—but you’re nowhere near as famous as you think you are. I didn’t recognize you. Sure, I’d heard the story—of course I had, Beth was at university with the boy who died. But it was all years ago. I probably saw your face in the papers at the time, but I’d no reason to remember it. I’d no reason to suppose Beth would know you from Adam.”

McKendrick leaned forward to refill his cup from the coffeepot. “So that’s what it was all about—the guy with the gun. Patrick Hanratty’s father sent him. And he’s still after you four years later.” He thought about that. “A bit obsessive, I’d have thought. I mean, yes, it was his son, he was entitled to hold a grudge. But if you go in for risk sports, sometimes you draw the short straw. I’d have thought that was part of the deal. I can see he might strike you off his Christmas-card list, but a hired killer seems a bit much.”

“I told you,” growled Horn, “he’s not a nice man. I mean, really. He runs one of Dublin’s crime syndicates. He scared the shit out of Patrick—from when he was old enough to leave home he stayed as far away from his dad as he could. He bullied him as a child, used his fists on him as a teenager. He’s got some nerve now pretending Patrick was the apple of his eye.

“He isn’t doing it for Patrick. He’s doing it because someone took something away from him. From him—Tommy Hanratty. If I’d boosted a slab of his cocaine, he’d have called the same guy. Nobody takes anything from Tommy Hanratty.”

McKendrick was nodding slowly. “I still think four years is long enough to make a point. Have you tried talking to him?”

Horn looked at him as if he were mad. “Talking to him? He sent a hired gun after me! He wants me dead, and he doesn’t care who knows it. It’s the worst-kept secret in criminology. If I went to his house, he’d do it himself. If he saw me in the street, he’d run me down in his car. Tonight wasn’t the first time he’s got close. This is how I’ve been living since the police lost interest in me. Because Tommy Hanratty is willing to do anything, pay anything, gamble anything, on seeing me dead. I wouldn’t know how to begin talking him out of that.”

“I could have a word with him.”

Horn laughed aloud at the sheer effrontery of it. “No, you won’t have a word with him. You’ll keep your head down, and your shutters up, and your drawbridge in the upright position, and hope Tommy Hanratty never hears your name. If he ever gets the idea that it was you who came between him and having my heart in a plastic bag tonight, he’ll come after you too. And your daughter, and anyone else he thinks you might care about. And you’ll be easier to find than me.”

“Oh, I think I can handle Mr. Hanratty.” McKendrick smiled lazily.

“No, you can’t,” insisted Horn. “He doesn’t play by your rules. He doesn’t play by any rules. I’m sure you’re a hard man in the City, and the closest thing your club has had to a rakehell since Byron got blackballed, but you’re not in Tommy Hanratty’s league. No one is. He hurts people for fun. When he’s seriously pissed off, he does things you’ve never dreamed of, even after a lobster supper. You don’t want him doing them to you, or to Beth.”

“That’s true,” allowed McKendrick. “I’m not that happy about letting him do them to you, either.”

“I am not your responsibility,” yelled Horn, beside himself with exasperation. “You’ve done enough already. I don’t know why you got involved, and I don’t know why we’re still arguing about this when I’ve told you who I am and who Tommy Hanratty is. But you’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t let me get on my way right now. You bought me some time, and I’m grateful for that. Now let me use it.

“He hasn’t given up—the guy with the gun. He never did before, he hasn’t this time. He’s still looking. If I’m here when he catches up with me, it’s going to be another of those inexplicable country-house murders that the Sunday papers love because it’s rich people coming to a sticky end and no one’s ever going to know why. He’ll kill me, and you, and Beth, and he’ll burn the house down, and he’ll make it look like something quite different. As if maybe I broke in, and we killed one another in the struggle.”

It seemed he’d finally found some words, evoked an image, that resonated with McKendrick. He had no reply. He stood for a moment, blinking stupidly, as though he’d just realized this wasn’t a corporate team-building exercise, some kind of an elaborate game—a treasure hunt where the first one back to the hotel with a policeman’s helmet gets the magnum of champers. As if he’d thought Horn had been exaggerating the danger, and now he wasn’t sure.

Horn pressed his advantage, momentarily forgetting what winning the argument would mean. “Your stone walls and your steel shutters won’t keep him out. Most of the people he goes after have them too. People as good at their job as this man cost a lot of money, and that means the people who hire them and most of the people they’re sent after have lots of money too. Except me.” He gave a mirthless grin.

“But even that sort of money won’t buy everything. There isn’t enough of it, there never would be, to stop someone like him. Once he took the job, it was a matter of professional pride for him to finish it. His reputation is everything to him—he’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect it. The stone walls and the shutters will slow him down but they won’t stop him. Nothing will stop him.

“I can keep ahead of him. I have done this far, I can keep doing. For a while longer, anyway. Maybe I can run far enough and fast enough that he’ll never catch up with me.”

“And maybe you can’t,” said McKendrick levelly.

“That isn’t your problem,” insisted Horn. “Keeping yourself, and Beth, safe—that’s your problem. And the thing about castles is, you pull up the drawbridge and immediately you’re out of options. All you can do is sit there and wait to see what the other guy’s going to do.

“Mr. McKendrick, what you did back there was a hell of a thing. You risked your life for someone you didn’t even know. You risked losing all this”—Horn gave a jerky wave, encompassing the whole of the McKendrick estate with one unsteady gesture—“for a stranger. Whatever happens now won’t alter that. Don’t keep tempting fate until the old bitch bites your hand off.”

McKendrick went on looking at him much too long, and Horn couldn’t read his expression. Something was happening behind the cool gray eyes, but Horn couldn’t tell what, or even if it was good or bad. But he knew that if McKendrick had been going to back down he’d have done it then, while the images of violence were vivid in his mind’s eye. Once he started to think about it, he’d convince himself there were alternatives—that he was a clever enough man, a rich enough man, to find alternatives.

Horn gave up. He let the air out of his lungs in an audible sigh, weary and defeated. Without the starch of adrenaline his whole body sagged. He reached for the coffee. He’d done his best. His only consolation was that if Hanratty’s man could find a way into this little fortress, Horn could find a way out. He murmured, “Maybe you should go after Beth. She was pretty upset. I probably shouldn’t have said what I did.”

McKendrick gave a disparaging sniff. “She overreacted. I know she was fond of the boy, but it is four years ago. She’s a grown woman. It shouldn’t still surprise her that shit happens.” He buttered a slice of toast, poured himself more coffee, and only after he’d finished his breakfast did he stand up. “Help yourself, will you? I’m just going upstairs.” He headed toward the hall and the massive stone staircase.

“Tell her I’m sorry,” said Horn in a low voice. “For what it’s worth.”

“Oh, I’m not going after Beth,” said McKendrick shortly. “She can come back when she’s calmed down. It’s time I saw to William. I won’t be long.”

“Who…?” began Horn, but McKendrick had gone.