Death in High Places

Chapter 7





FROM THE top of the tower Horn had a panoramic view of the heart of England. It was very green, and rather flat, and populated by trees and hedgerows and not so many people. In fact, none that he could see. Not only no people but no signs of people, unless you knew that the straight lines carved through the fields were the mark of tractors. There were no dwellings in sight. He could see no roads other than the driveway by which they had arrived.

From this vantage he could see Birkholmstead more or less as a plan on a map, and it gave him a better impression of the castle than he’d managed from inside. It really wasn’t very big. There would be comfortable stockbroker Tudor houses in any leafy suburb that covered as much ground, though none would have matched it for height. The tower was the highest point, but it was only the size of one fairly small room—the attic room the spiraling steps had brought them through—with a crenellated parapet through whose slits an earlier generation of defenders had ranged their arrows.

The tower was not central but offset to one side so that looking down he could see the leads of another roof, and below it again a wider one that had been turned into a terrace by the addition of a couple of bistro chairs and a table. The main entrance where McKendrick had left his car was on the south side, and there was another in the stone-flagged courtyard to the west, which Horn supposed was Beth’s. He walked round the high parapet, looking for a third, and couldn’t spot it.

And then he did. A dark green station wagon was drawn up against the boundary hedge a quarter of a mile away, all but invisible to anyone who hadn’t a really good reason for looking, totally unmemorable to anyone lacking a really good reason to remember. Horn had such a reason. And that wasn’t the car he’d been forced into six hours earlier. The first thing Hanratty’s man had done after McKendrick interrupted him at his work was change his car. The consummate professional. The thought cheered Nicky Horn not at all.

McKendrick was attaching his mother-in-law’s best supper cloth to the flag halyard with deft movements of his wrists and knots that Horn didn’t recognize. Of course, when Horn tied a knot he was about to trust his life to it, not a nice bit of table linen. “Do this a lot, do you?”

McKendrick grinned. “Not as much as I do it on the boat.”

Horn nodded toward the distant car. “I’m guessing that doesn’t belong to the bird-watching vicar.”

McKendrick peered where he was indicating. “You think that’s our friend’s?”

Horn strove to remain polite. “I’m pretty sure it will be.”

“I still don’t know how the hell he got here.”

“He followed us. He just did it carefully.”

But McKendrick wouldn’t have it. “I’d have known. It’s a two-hour drive, and a lot of it’s on roads that no one else uses, at least not in the early hours of the morning. He couldn’t have kept us in sight without me seeing him, at least from time to time. I’m telling you, there was no one behind us.”

To Horn the answer was obvious. “There must have been. Unless you really did call him when we got here.”

McKendrick bent on him a look of disfavor, declining to dignify the accusation with a reply. He peered at the distant car. “Can you see him?”

“I don’t expect to. Not till it’s too late.”

McKendrick frowned at him. “You’re a pessimistic son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“I’m a realist.”

McKendrick considered for a moment. “You climb, I sail. We’ve both been in more life-threatening situations than most people. We’ve both walked away from situations that could have killed us—that should have killed us. What’s to say this won’t be another one?”

“The sea isn’t trying to kill you,” Horn reminded him, tight-lipped. “The mountains don’t care if you live or die. Him out there: he cares. He cares enough to keep trying until he succeeds. He won’t give up. He’ll keep coming back till he finishes the job.”

“Believe that and you’re as good as dead already.”

“I know,” said Horn, and it was in his eyes and in his voice that while he’d long ago reached the same conclusion, he had never come to terms with it. “Mr. McKendrick, I’ve been a dead man running since Tommy Hanratty realized the law wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction he required. At first it was his own people, heavies off his payroll. It wasn’t too hard staying ahead of them. They’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer—most of them could be out-thought by a rubber duck. When Hanratty realized that as well, he got in a pro. And he’s a whole different ball game. I’m still running. But I know I can’t stay ahead of him forever.”

McKendrick regarded him thoughtfully. “Call me Mack.”

Somehow, that wasn’t what Horn was expecting. “What?”

“Everyone calls me Mack. Even Beth. If we’re going to die together, we might as well be on first-name terms.”

“Fine. Whatever.” It really wasn’t Horn’s highest priority just now. “You can call me…”

“Yes?” A small waiting smile.

“Anything but Anarchy Horn.”

They went back inside, down one flight of narrow stairs onto a corridor, stopped at a black oak door. “This is William’s room.” But McKendrick didn’t knock before they went in.

Invalids’ rooms, whether in castles or cottages, have only two smells. Well-cared-for invalids smell of talcum powder; neglected invalids smell of urine. William McKendrick’s room smelled of talcum powder.

It was a big room, and because it occupied one corner of the castle its mullioned windows commanded views on two sides. Under one was a comfortable sofa with a coffee table and a scattering of magazines. The second had been converted to French windows that opened onto the little terrace Horn had seen from the tower. Inside the door to the left was a large oak armoire, to the right a chest of drawers with a television on top of it, at the foot of the bed a big carved blanket-box. It was a high bed, higher than normal, and not Jacobean oak but painted metal festooned with power lines. A hospital bed. It had been positioned close to the French windows, for the air and the view.

As he looked, at first Horn thought the bed was empty. The sheets seemed too flat to conceal a human being. Nevertheless, that was where William McKendrick was: in his high hospital bed, sitting up against his starched white pillows, gazing out of his French window with the distant preoccupation that the very clever sometimes share with the almost vegetative.

For another moment Horn wasn’t sure which camp the other McKendrick belonged in. Then Mack left Horn’s side and, taking a tissue, wiped a strand of drool from his brother’s perfectly shaven jaw. He said softly, “This is my brother William. Someone to see you, Billy.”

Horn hesitated in the doorway, feeling awkward. “Won’t he mind…?”

Robert McKendrick smiled and shook his head. “William likes visitors. His social circle isn’t what it once was. I’m sure he’s bored to death seeing the same old faces all the time.”

William McKendrick’s eyes were a pale and faded blue, and Horn was not convinced that they saw anything at all. Or, if they saw, that his brain made any sense of the image. He looked at Horn with the same uncritical incomprehension that Horn had once looked at a painting by Picasso.

Horn swallowed. “Was it a stroke?”

Mack shook his head again. “Alzheimer’s disease. Senile dementia.”

“He doesn’t look old enough.”

“He was unlucky,” said McKendrick distantly. “It started while he was in his early fifties. The peak of his career. He was a barrister.” He smiled at the man in the bed, who smiled back hesitantly as if wondering if that was the expected response. “The terror of the Old Bailey, weren’t you, Billy? Horace Rumpole had nothing on you. And then this started.”

Horn wasn’t sure how much he was expected to contribute. “How old is William now?”

“He’s sixty-two. He’s ten years older than I am.”

“And how long…?” Horn didn’t finish the sentence, aware that it verged on the impertinent.

“Has he been like this? Completely locked in, about three years. But he’s been ill for nearly ten, and every one of those years took away more of his past and his personality. It’s a cruel disease, Nicky. Most illnesses can only threaten your present and your future. Dementia steals both the past and the person who lived it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Horn, though he was aware it didn’t go far. He looked again at the man in the bed, trying to fathom how much of him was left. “Does he understand what we’re saying?” He meant, Should we be talking in front of him?

“I’m not sure,” said McKendrick honestly. “There’s a lot that passes him by. On the other hand, he knows where he is—if we have to move him he becomes terribly distressed. I stopped taking him for hospital appointments. They weren’t doing him any good, and being in a strange place upset him. So now we do what we can for him here, and what we can’t do doesn’t get done.”

“You look after him?” Even with all the equipment, it was hard to overestimate the scale of the commitment.

“He has a nurse who comes in by day.” McKendrick saw Horn’s eyes widen, anticipated his next question. “Usually. I gave him the week off. I knew I was going to be around, it seemed a good chance.” He lifted narrow shoulders in a rueful shrug. “Not necessarily the best call ever. Except, of course, from the nurse’s point of view.”

Horn nodded slowly. “And that’s it, is it? That’s everyone in the house? No more surprises? William doesn’t have a wife and six children that you haven’t got round to mentioning yet?”

“William does have a wife,” said McKendrick, “and two children. Margot lives in the States; I don’t know where the kids are now. They couldn’t cope with William’s illness. They were used to depending on him, couldn’t face the idea that he was going to be dependent on them. For everything, for the rest of his life.”

“She left him?” It was none of his business, and Horn tried to keep his voice neutral.

McKendrick gave a gruff chuckle. “Not exactly. She just went on holiday and hasn’t come back yet.”

“When?”

“About eight years ago.”

Horn’s family had never been the conventional nuclear model, but it had been warm and close and he’d been into his teens before he realized it was unusual enough to raise eyebrows. But he’d cut himself off from them after Alaska. Not because they blamed him for what happened. All the Horns were fiercely loyal: matriarch Angela, she of the Velcro-fastened underwear, took as her mantra the Arab proverb “Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.” They’d have stood shoulder to shoulder with Nicky whatever he’d done: it was how they operated. It was his decision to stay away. If a man with a gun came to their door one day, he wanted them to be able to say with absolute honesty that they hadn’t heard from Nicky in years. Not because he thought they might betray him, but because he was genuinely afraid what Tommy Hanratty might do if he thought they could provide the information he wanted and wouldn’t.

But he never stopped loving them and he never stopped missing them. Two of his sisters had families of their own now: he was an uncle. His mother had been starting to have trouble with her eyes. It weighed on him that she might be blind by now and he didn’t know. Sometimes he spent all night plotting how he might get in touch with one or another of them without leaving a trail; but in the cold, hard light of morning he always decided it simply wasn’t worth the risk. For himself he’d have taken it, but not for them. They had so much more to lose.

So while to all intents and purposes he had no family now, it wasn’t long since he’d been an integral part of a close-knit clan whose members argued passionately and behaved irresponsibly and loved without reservation. And he couldn’t imagine any one of them turning their backs on another of them who fell ill.

McKendrick saw him recoil and his tone softened. “It’s asking a lot, you know. William now isn’t the man that she married. You expect to grow old and stiff and doddery together—you don’t expect that one of you will jump the gun by thirty years. It sounds great, doesn’t it—all that in sickness and in health stuff. And if he’d fallen off his hunter and ended up in a wheelchair, or if he’d got cancer and gone bald and frail and left her a widow before she was fifty, I don’t doubt she’d have done her best for him and seen it through to the bitter end. Alzheimer’s is different. It doesn’t kill you. William could live into his nineties. But everything that made him William—that made Margot marry him and have two children with him—has gone. I never held it against her—well, not really, not for long—that she didn’t want to see him reduced like this.” He gave his brother a friendly grin that robbed the words of their sting.

“Marriage is a matter of choice,” he went on pensively. “You choose someone to spend your life with. If they change, even if it’s not their fault, maybe it’s fair enough to consider all bets off. The family you’re born into is different. They have to take you as you are, for better or worse. If Margot finally gets a divorce, William will no longer be her husband. But he’ll always be my brother.” He looked at the man in the bed with a mixture of sorrow and affection. “I promised him this would be his home for as long as he lived.”

A terrible thought occurred to McKendrick. “My God. You don’t suppose he”—a glance toward the window and the car at the bottom of the garden—“would kill the rest of us and leave William alive?”

It was possible. Even a very cautious man could see no danger of being identified by William McKendrick. But it was plain, in Mack’s face and in his tone, that that was not the reassurance he sought. Horn told him what he needed to hear. “No. By the time he gets in here, he’ll just want to finish the job as quickly as he can and get out again. He won’t even ask himself why William’s still in bed.”

The tall man nodded, relieved. He said in a low voice, “I’d kill him myself before I’d let that happen. Before I’d leave him to be nursed in a geriatric ward.”

Horn believed him. He cleared his throat, changed the subject. “So if we can’t move William downstairs, how are we going to do this?”

“I’ll stay here. We won’t make any noise, will we, Billy? You watch the monitors in the hall.”

“I don’t know how to operate the security system.”

“Beth does.”

Horn had no wish to spend the last few hours of his life with someone who despised him. “Or Beth could sit with William.”

“She can’t lift him on her own. I can. Except…” McKendrick looked at the bedside table, indicated a plastic device with an incongruous clown’s face. “There’s the baby monitor. We can keep the speaker with us. Then if she needs a hand, she can let me know.” His voice adopted the bright, cheery tone appropriate for addressing invalids. “That all right, Billy? If Beth comes and sits with you for a while?” There was no measurable alteration in the white-faced basilisk stare. “Good. Fine.”

McKendrick headed back downstairs, Horn in his wake. All he could see of McKendrick was his back disappearing round the central column of the spiral stairway. It encouraged a kind of intimacy. He murmured, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

A shade unexpectedly, McKendrick stopped, pivoted on one heel, and looked back and upward, his gray eyes searching. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry for all of this.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“No, I don’t think it is. But you wouldn’t be in danger if you hadn’t stopped to help me.”

McKendrick thought for a moment. “I knew what I was doing. That there could be consequences. I never thought there could be consequences for Beth, but that isn’t your fault either.”

Horn sucked in a deep breath. “I meant what I said. If you think it’ll do any good—if you think it might do some good—I’ll go out and meet him. Let what happens happen.”

McKendrick was still regarding him with that pale, penetrating stare. He nodded. “I appreciate that. But I meant what I said too. I don’t want that to be how this ends. I suppose, I don’t want to die a coward.”

“Most people get as far as thinking I don’t want to die and stop there.”

McKendrick grinned. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I was a soldier when I was your age, and staying alive was high on my list of priorities too. Your perspective changes slightly as you get older. You accept that, like it or not, you’re not going to be here forever, and all you can try to do is leave the place tidy and face whatever comes next with courage and optimism.”

“You think something comes next?”

“How’s your physics?” Horn looked at him like a joiner. “One of the cornerstones is the idea that mass and energy are different facets of the same thing, and you can alter it but you can’t destroy it or make any more and the component parts are pretty much eternal. I imagine the component parts of me will be altered a fair bit by death, but the atoms at least will go on. It’s a kind of afterlife. And maybe the atoms will remember.” It was hard to tell from his expression if he was joking again.

Either way, it all sounded rather implausible to Horn. But then, as a way of holding things together, he thought you couldn’t beat a dovetail. Even if he’d heard of it, the strong nuclear force would have left him unimpressed.

“And then,” added McKendrick, “I’m not ready to buy what you’re selling. You think we’re all going to die. I think there’s a lot of ways this could end. I spent a lot of money on the security here. If one man, however expert and determined, can breach it in a few hours, I’m going to have serious words with the company that installed it.”

“Good luck with that,” muttered Horn to McKendrick’s descending back.

They’d reached the front hall. Beth had overheard the tail end of their conversation. “The company that installed the security here,” she said pointedly, “advised you against squandering the goodwill of the local police by testing the speed of their response every few days.”

“Well, that’s true,” admitted McKendrick. “Okay. We’ve got the Tablecloth of Truce flying over the battlements. And we’ve worked out a plan of campaign. Will you sit with William, Beth? Keep the phones with you—nip outside every few minutes and try for a signal. But be careful. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess we’ll be doing that. Keep low, behind the parapet.

“I’ll man the screens, try to get some idea what he’s doing. I’ll have the baby monitor in here so if you need help upstairs, or if you see anything, or if you get a phone signal, you can let me know.”

Beth nodded.

“And the other thing we can do,” continued McKendrick, “is prepare some fallback positions. So if he gets inside the house, we can retreat and put some solid doors between us. Remember, that’s what this house was designed to do. Long before there were steel shutters—long before there was steel—it was laid out in such a way that the defenders would always have the advantage over the attackers. Using your house as a weapon may be a bit of a lost art, but we’ll get the hang of it. We have all the advantages—stone walls, steel shutters, CCTV, food and water. He has to make all the going. All we have to do is sit tight.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes. Until something changes.”

“You mean,” said Beth flatly, “until he finds a way in and slits all our throats.”

McKendrick regarded her coolly. “That would count, yes.”

“And you’re going to let it happen?” She was looking at Horn.

But McKendrick answered, and his tone left little room for argument. “No, Beth, he’s going to do what you’re going to do. You’re both going to do what you’re told. You’re going to go sit with your uncle William, and Nicky’s going to prepare some last-ditch defenses. Get together some things we can fight with if push comes to shove.”

Horn thought that push would go a great deal further than shove but he’d already said so as clearly as he could. And maybe McKendrick was right. Maybe something would happen. Even hit men are only human: they get heart attacks, they get toothache, they get the trots. This was a good place to finish the job he’d been paid for, but if circumstances turned against him, he would know he could always find Horn again. He’d leave here before compromising his own safety or his client’s identity. Maybe McKendrick was right, and all they had to do was make it really difficult for him.

Horn wished with all his heart that he could believe it. But he didn’t. He thought he was going to die today and take with him some people who didn’t deserve it. That was almost his biggest regret. He didn’t want to die; but he didn’t much want to go on living the way he had either. It left him with not much to lose. The McKendricks had more. If it was hardly worth the trouble of fighting for his own life anymore, something deep inside him told him it was worth fighting for them.

Courage and optimism, McKendrick had said. A man could have a worse epitaph. “Do you have any guns? Shotguns, sporting guns—anything?”

McKendrick shook his head. “Never saw much point in shooting at something that couldn’t shoot back.”

Horn had to laugh. It was that or go mad. “I wish everyone felt the same way. What about the simple stuff—swords, spears, bows and arrows?”

“Yeah, right,” began McKendrick in tones of vast scorn; but the words dried in his mouth. A look of surprised appreciation stole into his eyes. “Yes. Of course. To me it’s just medieval wallpaper, an apt way to decorate a castle, but that’s not what it was designed for. It was designed to kill people. The Great Hall, on the first landing. Take anything you can find.”

Horn took his toolbag with him. He assumed that, when you hung a morning star on the chimney breast, you relied on more than a picture hook and a bit of string to keep it there.

All things are comparative. In one of the grander castles, Warwick or Arundel for instance, Birkholmstead’s Great Hall would have been little more than an anteroom. But it was the heart of McKendrick’s little fortress. It occupied virtually the whole of the first floor, with long lancet windows on two sides and a fireplace where you could have roasted an ox if you could have got it up the stairs.

The views were nowhere near as spectacular as those from the tower, but then these windows weren’t for looking out of. They were narrow enough to exclude attackers but wide enough for an archer; narrow enough that glazing them, even in medieval times, would not have been prohibitively expensive; and narrow enough that the strong stone walls between them had no difficulty carrying the floors above.

But even by the time Birkholmstead was built, no one of quality wanted to spend all day looking at a stone wall. They covered them with tapestries, with banners, with trophies—and with weapons. Great long pikes that were the foot soldier’s answer to a man on a galloping horse. The lance and saber that were the cavalryman’s riposte. Corselets of chain mail, long ago turned to rusty knitting that would never again ripple like liquid armor however much WD-40 was applied. And bows. Elegant six-foot shafts of English yew, once the most devastating weapon in the world, and ugly composite crossbows that were heavy to carry and took perilously long to reload but could be mastered by any fighting man with rudimentary training. And maybe even by scribes and carpenters, if the need was pressing enough.

Much as he was drawn to the wood, Horn had to admit that none of these bows was ever going to fire again. The elegant longbows were warped and shriveled by the years, their strings long sundered, the ugly crossbows corroded to inaction. The quivers of cloth-yard shafts and punchy crossbow quarrels were fit only for decoration now, their points rusted together, their fletchings depredated by mites.

The swords, the lances, the pikes—and yes, there was a morning star—might still have something to offer. Not much of an edge anymore, perhaps, but five feet of Damascus steel swung with enough determination would still break bones and rend flesh. Even a man used to dispensing instant murder from a weapon the size of his hand might hesitate for just long enough when confronted by someone trying to take his head off with a broadsword.

With hacksaw and pliers, guiltily standing on furniture he knew to be priceless, Horn took them down from the walls and stacked them on the floor. Then he stood back, wondering how to deploy them.

And while he was looking, a strange thought stole over him. In four years this was the first time, the very first time, that he’d considered fighting back. He’d hidden and he’d run, turn and turn about, until there was nowhere left to hide and nowhere to flee. But he still wouldn’t have thought of fighting if he hadn’t met Robert McKendrick. The ghost of a smile touched his lips. Every other challenge in his life he’d done battle with and, for the most part, defeated. Why had it taken a city slicker in an expensive suit to point out that he could fight this too? Maybe he couldn’t win, but he had nothing left to lose by trying. He didn’t have to accept his fate like a butcher’s beast. He could go down fighting—if not like a cornered lion, at least like a seriously pissed-off ferret. It was a better way to die, and he owed that to McKendrick. It was a pity he was going to repay the gift by annihilating his family.

Except, of course, that he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to pull the trigger. He hadn’t hired the man who was going to pull the trigger. Nothing he had done justified what Tommy Hanratty was going to do to him. He hadn’t even done what Hanratty thought he’d done.

He straightened up and, leaving the cache of ancient weapons on the floor, walked quietly back downstairs.

McKendrick, flicking between cameras, barely looked up as Horn walked behind him. “Any luck?”

Horn didn’t answer. “I need to tell you something.”

Then McKendrick looked round. He hadn’t imagined that odd note in the younger man’s voice: there was an odd look in his eyes too. Not just the stress, that had been there all along, but something new. Something suspended halfway between urgency and resignation: a curiously intense calm. Not so much the calm of resolution, more what you find in the hearts of hurricanes. “All right.”

“I know you don’t really believe what I’m saying. That this is where it ends, and not just for me. I know you think that with a bit of effort and ingenuity there are other ways this could work out. And maybe you’re right. I hope you are. But just for the moment, will you humor me? Will you consider the possibility that you’re going to die today? You’re going to die, and Beth’s going to die, because you helped me when most people would just have kept walking.”

Horn swallowed, but he wasn’t finished. McKendrick waited.

“You didn’t know who I was when you took the decision to get involved. You knew nothing about me. So maybe it doesn’t too much matter to you that a lot of people wouldn’t have thought my skin worth saving. Not just not worth risking your life for—not worth getting your hands dirty for. But it matters to me. I know you wish you’d never glanced up that alley. But since you did, and we can’t change what’s happened and we probably can’t change what’s going to happen, it also matters to me that you don’t die thinking you threw it all away—all this, everything you’ve worked for—on trash.

“I want you to know the truth. I never meant to tell a soul. I meant to take it to my grave. But then, I never expected to be taking other people with me. I want you to know.”

McKendrick genuinely had no idea what was coming. “Know what?”

“I didn’t do it. I didn’t cut Patrick’s rope. Patrick cut it himself.”