Death in High Places

Chapter 8





TO NICKY HORN it seemed as if he’d accidently hit McKendrick’s off switch. The man froze where he sat, twisted round from the monitors, and the rigor went all the way from his eyes into the depths of his soul. For ten, maybe fifteen seconds—which is a lot longer than it sounds when you’re waiting—he didn’t move and he didn’t speak. He didn’t even blink.

Then he did. A moment later his voice returned as a hoarse croak. “Are you serious?”

Whatever Horn had expected—and he really hadn’t known what kind of reaction his declaration would provoke—it wasn’t that. His brows gathered in a troubled frown. “You think it’s something I’d joke about?”

“Patrick Hanratty cut his own rope.”

“Yes.”

“You said he wasn’t responding—that you thought he was dead. You thought he was dead, and when you couldn’t hold him any longer you cut the rope.”

“I lied.”

“Damn sure you lied to somebody about something,” snarled McKendrick. As his emotions defrosted, the one that thawed quickest was anger. “Why in God’s name should I believe you this time?”

The only answer Horn had was the simple one. “Because it’s the truth.”

“That not only was Patrick not dead, he was still conscious and functioning. That’s what you’re telling me? But instead of trying to save himself, he cut the rope and fell to his death. Why?”

Horn’s muscles were tense, his breath coming quicker. As if he were confessing something terrible, something that could bring down the sky. He wasn’t. But he’d lived with the lies so long that he almost felt as if he was. “Because if he hadn’t, he’d have pulled me off the mountain. I couldn’t save him. But he could save me. He died alone so I didn’t have to decide whether or not to die with him.”

It wasn’t so much disbelief that came flooding back into McKendrick’s face as rank incredulity. He said it again, with added emphasis. “Why? If that’s what happened, why did you tell people you cut him loose? Why would you tell a lie that made a coward of you? Why would you deny your friend his last act of courage?”

Horn gave an awkward little shrug. His voice was small. “I thought it was better. Kinder. I thought people—some people—his people—might call what he did suicide.”

McKendrick’s brow furrowed. He seemed to want to understand but was finding it uphill work. “It’s not my idea of suicide. I wouldn’t have thought it was anybody’s, even an Irish Catholic’s. Anyway, the Church takes a more compassionate view these days, and has done for twenty years. The Hanrattys could still have buried Patrick in the family plot even if on a strict interpretation his death could be considered suicide.”

“They never got the chance to bury him,” growled Horn. “He’s still out on the mountain somewhere under Anarchy Ridge. Did you know his dad sent an expedition to recover the body? He thought it would prove what actually happened, as distinct from what I said happened. The funny thing is, he was right, it would—only, not the way he thought.” But if it had been as funny as all that, you’d have expected at least one of them to be smiling.

McKendrick was still trying to get his head round it. “Hanratty thinks you murdered Patrick? That what happened wasn’t an accident?”

“He thought it was murder however it happened. Patrick died and I lived, and that made it my fault. On top of that, he was convinced I was covering something up. That what I told the authorities wasn’t what happened. And of course he was right—he was just wrong about what. He thought if he could recover the body he could prove it was more than just bad luck. I don’t know what he expected to find. That I’d knifed him in the ribs? That I’d bound him hand and foot with my second-best rope and pushed him off Anarchy Ridge? I don’t know. Anyway, by the time they climbed up there, too much snow had fallen and they couldn’t find him. He’s probably part of the glacier by now. But that’s all right. Patrick would rather be buried in a glacier than a churchyard. So would I.”

The silence went on and on—mountainous, glacial. Almost it became too big to break. Which was curious, because although these were matters of enormous import to Nicky Horn, McKendrick had no emotional investment in them. He was entitled to be surprised. But Horn was bewildered as to why a man who’d shown so little interest in what happened on Little Horse that he hadn’t recognized Horn’s face should be furious to learn now that what the dogs in the street knew to be true was, in fact, not. The anger, and the silence, said something else was going on in Robert McKendrick’s head.

Eventually Horn gritted desperately, “Say something.”

McKendrick sucked in a deep breath that broke the spell. He glared at Horn, eyes sparking with a rage that all the peril Horn had brought to his door had not aroused him to. “What? What would you like me to say? That’s all right, then? That changes everything? I’m going to die—Beth’s going to die—for a lie?”

Horn avoided looking at him. “So suddenly I’m right and we’re all going to die?”

Instantly McKendrick was on his feet, looming, his height giving him a physical presence that Horn had hardly noticed when he was calm. He wasn’t calm now. His fists were clenched and shaking. Had he—the other one, the man outside—suspected that this dangerous man dwelled inside the well-suited executive who interrupted him at his work, and was that why in the alley he’d backed down rather than call McKendrick’s bluff? Because he knew—because it was his job to know—it wasn’t actually a bluff?

“Why?” McKendrick demanded a third time. There was a rattle in his voice like the rattle of a railway track with a train coming. “Why would you tell people that, if it wasn’t true?”

“I was trying to protect Patrick’s family,” mumbled Horn. “It was a hard thing to tell to them. They’re not climbers, they wouldn’t know that what he did made him a hero. They’d just know that, at a time when he still had an element of choice, he killed himself so that I could come home. I thought that would tear them apart. I thought it was better for them to resent a stranger than their own son.”

“Resent you? They sent a hit man after you!” yelled McKendrick, all restraint gone. “You didn’t think maybe that was the time to tell the truth?”

Horn shook his head stubbornly. “By then it was too late. We were way past the point where Tommy Hanratty was going to believe anything I said. Changing my story then wouldn’t have done me any good, but it would have harmed Patrick.”

“Patrick Hanratty died to save you having to! How was telling people that going to harm him?”

“Because…” Horn stopped abruptly. “You’re right. Other climbers would have respected him for it. Maybe most rational people would. But not the people closest to him. They’d have thought that he’d put what I needed above what they needed—that he’d made a conscious decision to throw away any chance of coming back to them. That he’d chosen me above them. It would have colored all their memories of him forevermore. His mother, his sister, even his thug of a father—they’d never have been able to think of him without resenting that choice. Without wondering how necessary it was. Whether we really were out of options, or if he’d just had enough and couldn’t take any more. Maybe that seems like a detail to you, but it wouldn’t to the Hanrattys and it wouldn’t to Patrick. Suicide wouldn’t be just a word to any of them.

“You can laugh at people religious enough to think less of someone who died saving a friend, or you can get angry and throw things, but the fact is that if I said Patrick cut his own rope, that family would have choices to make between their son and their beliefs. There was time to think about it while I was hiking in, and I didn’t see the need to put them through that. I owed Patrick better than the risk of being misunderstood.” Horn looked up then, his eyes hot. “I didn’t expect Hanratty to like me very much when he heard the story. But I sure as hell didn’t expect him to kill me!”

“There was an inquest,” remembered McKendrick. “Before you left Alaska. You lied to them?”

“I told the same story from the day I got back to civilization and reported Patrick’s death. I’d worked out all the details in my head, gone over it so often it almost felt like the truth. I told the same thing to the Alaskan coroner and again to the police here when I got home.” Horn dared a glance at McKendrick’s face, but nothing he saw there reassured him. He struggled on. “I thought I was doing the right thing. Every time I served it up, it went down a little easier. A time came when I half believed it myself. I knew there’d be criticism. I knew some people would think what I’d done—what I said I’d done—was beyond the pale. But I thought that was the worst I’d have to deal with. I thought I could weather the storm. For Patrick? He’d died for me—I could lie for him.”

“And now—now!—you feel this irresistible urge to set the record straight?”

“I owe you the truth. And I thought it was now or never.”

Incredibly, McKendrick started to laugh. Almost hysterically, thought Horn; as if these events mattered more to him than they had any right to. He was at a loss to explain the intensity of the man’s reaction.

“What?” Horn demanded at length. “What?”

“Sorry.” McKendrick wiped a hand across his eyes, cleared his throat and forced a little decorum back into his manner. “It’s just … this is so not how I expected to be spending today. Okay. You swear to me, this is the truth you’re telling now?” Horn nodded. “Have you tried to tell Hanratty?”

Horn’s eyebrows soared. “What’s the point? He already thinks I’m a killer and a coward—it’s not going to give him massive problems to think I’m a liar as well.”

McKendrick let his head rock back, and in the second before he turned away Horn saw his eyes glaze over, as if everything was changed utterly by what he’d heard—that a climber’s rope had been cut at one end rather than the other. “I need to think,” he muttered, heading for the stairs. “Watch the monitors. If you see anything, yell.”

“Believe it,” mumbled Horn.

* * *

Beth was coming down the steps from the tower. They met outside William’s room. “Trying the mobiles again?” asked McKendrick.

She nodded. “Still no joy. Which, of course, is why we have a landline—the mobiles have always been more miss than hit here.”

“You’d think, from the roof…”

She held them out. “You want to try?”

McKendrick blew out his cheeks. “No. The only way to get any higher than the turret is to climb the flagpole, and while I’m sure I could do that if I really wanted, I doubt if I could do it one-handed while dialing with the other.”

Beth gave a wan smile. “Supermack admits defeat?”

McKendrick smiled back but his manner was distracted. “Let’s just say I’m looking for a plan with a higher success-to-effort ratio.”

They went into William’s room. McKendrick gave his brother a friendly grin out of habit. The frozen man held him in an unwinking stare.

Beth had been sitting on the sofa. She put the phones down on the coffee table. McKendrick took the window seat. “What do you make of Nicky Horn?”

Beth’s eyes flew wide with indignation. “You’re asking me? You know what I think of him. You know why.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

She stared at him, hurt and uncomprehending. “Patrick was my friend. You know what it meant to lose him.”

“Patrick died where he did, how he did, because that’s where he chose to be. No one forced him to go to Alaska—I don’t think even Tommy Hanratty thinks Horn drove him up Anarchy Ridge at gunpoint. Which makes his death sad and regrettable, but I’m not sure it makes it a tragedy. And I don’t think it makes it Horn’s responsibility.”

“He cut Patrick’s rope! How much more responsible can you get?!”

“Suppose,” said McKendrick slowly, “just for a minute suppose, it all happened exactly as Horn told the inquiry. That Patrick fell, and he tried to pull him up, and he couldn’t. And Patrick wasn’t able to help. He might already have been dead, killed by the fall; or if he was still alive, he was hanging in space with an Alaskan blizzard howling round him. The warmest kit in the world wasn’t going to protect him from that forever. Isn’t the reality that, with just the two of them on the mountain, Patrick was dead the moment he slipped off the ridge?”

“Maybe he was,” Beth retorted furiously. “But he didn’t have to die alone.”

McKendrick’s head tilted as he tried to see into her soul. “Is that what you really believe? That it would have been better for both of them to die? That when Horn had done everything in his power to save his friend, and it wasn’t enough, he was honor-bound to stay there until he too froze to death?”

“Yes!”

“Would you have felt the same way if it was Patrick who came back?”

That seemed to jolt her. As if it was a question she’d never asked herself. Her lips moved, but for a moment no words came. When she found a voice, it was low. “That’s not fair. Patrick was my friend. Honestly? I wouldn’t have cared who died on the mountain if Patrick had come back.”

Her father was watching her with a degree of compassion that made her feel like a child again. She knew he was a tough man, she knew he was a clever man. She’d all but forgotten how much he loved her. “Beth—Patrick was more than just a friend, wasn’t he?”

She didn’t answer. But by then she didn’t have to. Her eyes had filled up in a way that, four years on, could only be explained one way.

McKendrick said softly, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because…” She hesitated on the brink, unable to say the killer words.

“What?”

“Because I loved him forever. Because I never loved anyone else like that, and never wanted to. Because nothing in the world mattered to me as much as Patrick—the sound of his footstep, the touch of his hand, the kindnesses, the silly grin, the way laughter danced in his eyes … I didn’t know you could love someone that much.”

Her father reached out a long-fingered hand and laid it over hers, a gentle comforting weight. Only four years too late. “I’m so sorry.”

“I should have told you.”

“I shouldn’t have needed telling. Then, or since.”

“You understand, then? Why…”

“Of course I do. Quite apart from anything Horn did or didn’t do on Anarchy Ridge, you blamed him for taking Patrick away from you. For taking him somewhere you couldn’t go, and coming back without him. The point is not that Patrick was doing what he wanted to do. The point is, he wasn’t doing what you wanted him to do.”

“No.” There was a note of relief in her sigh. Finally, a little understanding …

“If he’d come back—”

She interrupted swiftly, smothering the question at birth. “Who knows? People’s feelings change. It might just have been one of those college things that burned out when we moved on and our horizons widened.”

“But you don’t think so.”

Her gaze was lowered, her tone at once soft and unyielding. “I know what I felt.”

McKendrick rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I should never have brought him here. Horn. It was stupid—thoughtless. I should at least have kept you out of it.”

Now she looked at him curiously. “You could have stayed out of it yourself.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing. I didn’t anticipate any of this. Not that someone would come here. And not what you’ve just told me. I wish to God I’d done things differently.”

Beth gave an odd, affectionate little chuckle. “It’s so unlike you, somehow. Acting on impulse. You’re always so … calculating. Sorry. Does that sound rude?”

“Not rude. Not exactly flattering either,” said McKendrick ruefully.

“It’s true though. Usually you have all the details of the deal lined up before you pick up the phone. You know what you’ll say, and what the other party’ll say, and what your response will be. And you have contingencies ready in case he says something else. It’s a pity, really, that when you finally do the human thing and reach out on the spur of the moment to help someone in trouble, it’s someone who isn’t worth saving and it’s liable to get us all killed.”

He’d known her all her life, and half of his. Today he was learning things about her that stunned him to the marrow of his bones. One was the harshness of her view of him.

But maybe she was right. Their predicament was entirely of his making, and he hadn’t even the excuse she credited him with—a spontaneous act of philanthropy. It had happened because he was doing what he always did, what his daughter knew he always did—playing both sides of the chessboard.

He couldn’t tell her that. He diverted the conversation down the other avenue. “You think Horn’s right, then? We’re not going to walk away from this?”

For a moment she hesitated; then she shook her head. “No, I don’t. The only one who’s in any danger here is him. He wants us to think otherwise because he hopes we’ll be scared enough to protect him.” She managed a wan smile. “How about you? Are you updating your will?”

Though he didn’t share her analysis, he did share her conclusion. “No. For one thing there’s no need—it all comes to you. But don’t hold your breath. I’m not ready to part with it just yet.”

Beth’s smile turned impish. “You reckon we can keep him out, then—Tommy Hanratty’s hit man?”

“I think so. Long enough for him to think the balance of risk and reward is shifting. He isn’t Henry the Fifth at Harfleur—he isn’t going to lose a kingdom if he can’t breach the walls. Horn is a job to him, that’s all. If he can’t do it today, he’ll do it next week. He won’t risk his own safety literally banging his head against a stone wall.”

“Horn thinks he will.”

“Nicky Horn is an exhausted, frightened young man who’s been on the run for four years. His judgment shouldn’t be relied on.”

“He isn’t exaggerating about Tommy Hanratty,” Beth said quietly. “He’s a seriously vicious man. Patrick was terrified of him. If he wants Horn dead, sooner or later, one way or another, it’s going to happen. You can’t save him. All you can do is try to keep him from dying here, and it’s not worth antagonizing someone like Hanratty to do that. Possibly not for anyone; certainly not for Horn.”

McKendrick drew a deep breath. He was going to have to tell her. She had persuaded herself that, even if it wasn’t lawful, even if the morality of it was suspect, there was a kind of justice in Nicky Horn’s dying at the will of Patrick Hanratty’s father. She needed to know that her feelings about Horn were predicated on a lie. Somewhat to his dismay, McKendrick found he couldn’t guess how she would react. If she would believe Horn’s latest account. If believing would add to her grief or ease it. A man should know his daughter well enough to know if he was bringing her balm or brimstone. It troubled him that they had so many secrets from one another. He’d only ever wanted what was best for her. He was afraid now that he didn’t know her well enough to judge.

He said, “Will you answer me one question honestly?” She nodded. “What if Patrick had cut Nicky Horn’s rope?”

Beth frowned. “I told you that already. If only Patrick had come home, I’d have felt sorry for Patrick.”

McKendrick knuckled his eyes. “Then surely to God you can understand—”

She didn’t let him finish. “You asked for an honest answer and that was it. Patrick was the only one I cared about—Patrick, right or wrong. If he’d pushed Horn off the mountain because he wanted his climbing boots, I’d still have sided with Patrick. Nicky Horn could go to hell in a handcart and I wouldn’t have broken a nail to save him—and that’s not just now, that’s always. It’s no use asking me for an unbiased opinion, I’m not capable of giving one. I loved one of them. I didn’t give a damn about the other, until he ruined my life.

“But if you’re asking whether it’s ever all right for one climber to cut another’s rope, the answer’s no, and that doesn’t alter regardless of who lives and who dies. We all carry a knife. We all know that if the game turns nasty enough, if it comes to a choice between one person dying and two people dying, we may have to cut ourselves loose so that someone else can live. But that’s it—you only ever cut your own rope. Whatever the consequences, you never cut someone else’s. You haven’t the right.”

“Is that—I don’t know—an unwritten rule? Something all climbers agree on?”

“Maybe not all. But it’s the sort of thing you discuss in the bar at the end of a long hard climb, and everyone I ever climbed with, everyone whose opinion I respected, felt that they’d rather die than kill someone else.”

“Maybe,” McKendrick suggested softly, “it’s a conclusion that’s easier to come to in the bar at the end of a climb than halfway up a mountain in a howling gale.”

“No doubt. That’s why you talk about these things first. You take your decisions when you’re safe and warm and calm, so you don’t have to take them when you’re frantic and freezing and scrambling on the edge of an abyss. All you have to do then is remember and act on them.”

“And cut your own rope if you have to.”

“If you have to,” she agreed grimly. “If there’s no way back that doesn’t involve ending someone else’s life. It’s a risk sport, Mack. If you’re not prepared to take the risks, you shouldn’t be on the mountain. You shouldn’t be on someone’s rope if you’re prepared to kill them with it.”

“So cutting your own rope wouldn’t count as suicide?”

She snorted a derisive laugh. “Of course not. Among climbers it’s the ultimate act of courage.”

“I wonder if climbers’ families see it that way.”

She became aware that the conversation had changed, was no longer about what she thought and felt, wasn’t sure what it was about now. She looked at him sideways, one eyebrow higher than the other. “Mack?”

It was one of those now-or-never moments. McKendrick steeled himself. “Horn says Patrick cut his own rope. When he couldn’t climb back, and Horn couldn’t lift him, and it was a choice of one or both of them staying on the mountain, Patrick found the courage to cut his own rope. Horn edited the facts to spare his family’s feelings.”

Beth’s expression had frozen on her face. McKendrick hurried on. “Of course, he’d no idea the trouble he was getting himself into. He thought that, from their point of view, the easiest thing to deal with was if Patrick died in the fall and Horn had to leave his body behind. So that’s what he said.

“He thought he was doing the right thing, Beth. He came up with a story that allowed Patrick’s family to grieve without reservation, in the hope that the people whose opinion mattered most to him would understand. He was questioned in Alaska; he was questioned again when he got back to England. He stuck to the account he’d worked out. There was no way of proving anything different, no reason to suspect he was lying. No witnesses, no forensics—as long as he didn’t blink, the authorities had to accept what he told them.”

Still no response from his daughter. Not from her lips and not from her eyes. McKendrick sighed. “What he didn’t allow for was the fact that Patrick’s family was headed not just by a grieving father but by a grieving thug of a father. He didn’t have to accept what he was told simply because there was no evidence to the contrary. And he didn’t have to nurse his doubts in the darkness of his own soul, powerless to do anything about them. He did what he was in a habit of doing whenever somebody crossed him. He set about making Horn pay.”

It was amazing to McKendrick—alarming, even—that he’d been able to get the story out without interruption. He’d expected to have to fend off furious interjections and battle to the end through his daughter’s distress and disbelief. Her silent stare unnerved him. But he didn’t want to prompt her. He wanted to give her all the time she needed to absorb what he’d said and make sense of how she felt about it.

Finally she favored him with a cool smile and said calmly, “Well, he saw you coming, didn’t he?” As if he’d been sold a racehorse with four left feet.

“I think it’s the truth,” he managed, suddenly defensive.

She shook her head bemusedly. “For a hardheaded businessman, you’re a mug for a sob story. Of course it isn’t the truth. We know what the truth is. It’s what he told the authorities in Alaska and again when he got back here. Do you think they wouldn’t have realized if he was lying to them? All their experience dealing with thieves and murderers, and they’re going to have the wool pulled over their eyes by a carpenter with a warped sense of right and wrong? Grow up, Mack. He said he cut Patrick loose because that’s what happened. He thought nobody could touch him for it. He’s come up with this other version because his back’s against the wall and he thinks you can help him, but only if he can convince you he’s worth helping. Well, maybe he has convinced you. He’ll have to try a lot harder to convince me.”

He’d expected her to resist the idea. He’d expected tears and tantrums. Her calm dismissal of Horn’s new account made him wonder if he’d accepted it too readily. “It seemed to make sense,” he mumbled lamely.

“What?” Her arrow-straight gaze almost knocked him off his seat. “That because the Hanrattys are Catholics they couldn’t be expected to see the difference between their son committing suicide as an act of despair and giving up his life to save his friend? How stupid do you think they are? No, don’t answer that—about as stupid as Horn thinks you are! Why do you think he waited until you were alone before he told you that? Because he knew I’d see it for what it is. I don’t claim to be a theologian, but doesn’t all that stained-glass commemorate martyrs of one kind or another? People who gave their lives to help other people? If the Catholic Church regarded them all as suicides, I don’t think they’d be up there in their windows.”

McKendrick had to admit that she was right. Even he, with less knowledge of religious dogma than he had of the dark side of the moon, could see all the difference in the world between despair and self-sacrifice. When you tried to analyze it, it made no sense. If Horn had misled the police about what happened, sparing the Hanrattys’ feelings wasn’t why. “You think he’s lying?”

She laughed out loud, a jarring discordance. “Of course he’s lying, Mack! It’s what he does, remember? Even on his own account, he’s lied to someone. Look. He had no reason to tell the police what he did if it wasn’t true. At best he was going to make himself unpopular, at worst it was going to get him into trouble. Whereas lying to you now just might buy him a bit more time. So which do you reckon is most likely? Patrick cut the rope and Horn said he did it? Or Horn cut the rope and toughed it out until it looked as though a different story would serve him better? We know what he does when he’s staring death in the face. Anything he can think of to keep himself safe a little bit longer. Do you really think that a man who left his best friend on Anarchy Ridge would draw the line at lying to someone he met a few hours ago?”

“I suppose not,” McKendrick muttered. A pit was in the middle of him where his heart had sunk. You couldn’t blame a man for doing anything he had to in the effort to survive. Still somehow he was terribly disappointed.

It took him another minute to realize that, actually, this was a good thing. A Nicky Horn who’d lied to protect his friend’s reputation wouldn’t be much use to him. What he needed for his purposes was the young man Beth and the world thought he was—someone who prized his own survival so highly he’d do whatever it demanded of him. Anarchy Horn. That lingering sense of disappointment was sheer sentimentality, and McKendrick had never been a sentimental man. His long jaw hardened. “Stupid of me,” he gritted. “You’re right, of course.”

“Of course,” she echoed softly. “So you’ll do as I ask? Stop protecting him?”

McKendrick’s eyes turned inward for a moment, searching his conscience, examining his hopes and plans. Beth hardly noticed that what he said was not an echo of what she’d said. “I have no desire to protect him,” he growled.