by Jo Bannister
He did as he was told and picked one. But first he crawled on his hands and knees to a handy bollard and hauled himself to his feet, and leaned against it to stop the world swaying. “You saved my life. Why?”
The man thought for a moment. “I suppose, because I hoped it was worth saving.”
The dull fear that had given way to tremulous hope was now yielding to a kind of uncomprehending rage, because none of this made any sense to Nicky Horn. When a large part of his world had collapsed about him, he’d consoled himself with the thought that—unlike most men—at least he knew how and why he would die. Now even that seemed to have been snatched from him. He felt he was owed an explanation. “You can’t know that! You don’t know me.”
The man moved a couple of paces closer. They stared at one another by the limited light reaching the side street. Horn saw a tall, rangy individual in a long, dark coat, short hair the color of moonlight. Narrow, clean-shaven face. A bit of an intellectual, you’d have said, if you hadn’t just seen him face down a hired killer.
For his part, the man saw someone physically and emotionally battered, with blood on his face and road dirt on his clothes, struggling to keep his feet both actually and metaphorically. A young man in his midtwenties, not tall but sturdy, strong. Dark hair, overdue a trim, falling in his face in rats’ tails courtesy of the rain. No coat, and no shoes. He didn’t look as if he’d fallen in the gutter. He looked as if he’d been living in it.
His voice was gruff, plainly well-educated, and laced in equal quantities with humor and irritation. “You’re—what?—twenty-six, twenty-seven years old? It doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that somewhere in the next fifty years you might do something of value to someone. In fact, you might make it a kind of New Life’s Resolution. That one day you’ll help someone else who has no one left to turn to.”
“He could have killed you!” Disbelief sent the words soaring. “I thought he was going to kill you.”
The man shook his head. “No one was paying him to kill me. And he couldn’t kill you and leave me standing here, so he couldn’t kill you either. Today. Tomorrow will be different. If I were you, I’d try to sort out my differences with whoever sent him.”
“I wish I could,” said Horn feelingly.
“Too much water under the bridge?”
“Too much blood.”
The man’s head was tilted to one side as he studied Nicky Horn, apparently unsure what to make of him. Something about the tilt was familiar. Yes—the mirror. The man in the car who met his eyes before looking away to check his mirror. “I’ve seen you before,” said Horn.
“That’s possible,” the man agreed negligently.
“Last night. Outside the sandwich bar.”
“Yes?”
“You live round here?”
“I was on my way home.”
Though Horn wasn’t on top form mentally, he could see the problem with that. “So what are you still doing here five hours later?”
The man chuckled, enjoying Horn’s confusion. “You’re accusing me of loitering? Of lowering the tone of the neighborhood? You wish I’d taken my cheese-on-rye and gone home?”
The whole tenor of the conversation was troubling Horn. It was as if the man was enjoying a joke at his expense. They’d both come close to dying, Horn closest, but the other man closer than he’d probably ever been before, and he thought it was funny.
Then he realized what the man had been doing here. The only possible explanation—for his presence in this run-down district, for the time he’d spent here, for his being on the street at three in the morning. It even explained the mood of recklessness that had led him to intervene in a situation he should have passed with an averted eye. “You were with a hooker.”
The man laughed out loud. “That’s right, Officer, you’ve got me bang to rights. Oh, the shame! Please don’t tell my wife. The shock would kill my mother.” He looked round. “Now, if we’ve got that out of the way, and if you’re not too embarrassed to be seen with an old curb-crawler, can I give you a lift anywhere?”
Horn blinked, waved a hand that was still not quite steady. “My room’s only up there…”
“Your room,” said the man evenly. “Your room where a hired killer found you. You’re planning on going back there, are you?”
“I…” If his head had been a bit clearer he wouldn’t have considered it. He didn’t own so many clothes that leaving them behind would be much loss. His toolkit was another matter. He needed it to work. If he couldn’t work, he couldn’t buy a new one. He also needed his boots. “I have to get a couple of things. If you can wait, I won’t be a minute. If you can’t, thanks anyway.” It wasn’t much to say to a man he owed his life to, but it was sincere.
The man shrugged. “I’ll wait.”
Horn got as far as the hallway. But the stairs defeated him. While he was regarding them owlishly, wondering if he’d wake the whole house by going up on his hands and knees, a hand on his shoulder moved him quite gently aside. “Tell me what you need.”
He was too grateful to argue. “The toolbag’s just inside the door. My jacket’s on the hook. My wallet’s in the pocket, and my boots are probably under the bed. Everything else I can leave.”
In fact the man took a moment longer and threw everything he could see into the haversack Horn used as a suitcase. He reappeared carrying it in one hand and the toolbag in the other, a combined load that would have made most men half his age think twice. But he passed Horn briskly and threw the gear onto the backseat of his car. “Get in.”
Horn did as he was told.
The man drove off immediately, without waiting for directions. They’d already pushed their luck further than it could be expected to stretch—anything they had to say to one another could be said as they drove. It was time to be somewhere else.
He crossed the center of town, cut through the park, circled a couple of roundabouts. With no sign of pursuit, he glanced at the young man in the seat beside him. “How’s the face?”
“Sore,” admitted Horn.
“There’s ibuprofen in the glove box. It might help a bit.”
A double brandy might have helped more, but even if one had been on offer Horn couldn’t have risked dulling his rattled wits any further. He took the ibuprofen, struggling to swallow it with no water and teeth too painful to chew.
“Is there somewhere you can go where you’ll be safe?”
Horn grinned mirthlessly into the night, a savage slash of white across his face. “Not for long.”
“This has happened before?”
“Oh yeah.”
“So it’ll happen again.”
Horn nodded.
“But you’re still alive.”
“Born lucky, I guess,” muttered Horn.
“You were lucky tonight. What about next time?”
Horn gave a sigh of infinite weariness and let his aching head rock back against the headrest. “Who knows? Who cares?”
The man went on looking at him almost too long for someone driving a car. Then he cranked his eyes back to the road. “Do you want to tell me what it’s all about?”
Horn shook his head, wished he hadn’t. “Not particularly.”
The man breathed in and out a few times, with mounting annoyance. “You can’t just say that and then expect me to leave you at a bus stop. Whatever’s brought you to this point, there has to be a way forward. What about the police?”
“It’s not a police matter,” said Horn.
“Somebody’s trying to kill you. That makes it a police matter!”
“Just … let me out near the motorway. I’ll hitch. I’ll break the trail. I’ll be all right.”
“How long for?”
Horn managed a grim little chuckle. “The rest of my life.”
He knew all the roads in and out of this town, as he’d known all the roads in and out of every town where he’d broken his endless journey. The car missed two turnings for the motorway. “Where are
we going?”
The man didn’t look at him. “My place.”
“No.”
“Till I can figure out what to do with you.”
“No,” Horn said again, with as much insistence as he could muster. “It isn’t safe.”
“You know somewhere better?”
“I don’t mean for me!”
The man considered for a moment. “It’s probably safer than you think. It was designed to keep people out. It’ll do for what’s left of tonight.”
They drove for what seemed like hours. Not so much oblivious of the danger on his heels as unable to do much about it, Horn slept for a lot of it, his sore head rocking gently against the headrest. When he woke, disturbed by the sudden grate of gravel under the wheels, sunrise was painting the horizon with streaks of oyster and pink. And silhouetting …
He sat up straighter, knuckled his eyes, and looked again. It was still there, and still what he’d first thought. Which went some way to explaining the last thing the man had said to him before he fell asleep, although it made everything else that had happened even more incomprehensible. Chills played up and down his spine. He said in a harsh, flat voice, “Who the hell lives in a castle?”
The man chuckled complacently. “Rich people. Welcome to Birkholmstead—this Englishman’s home.”
“You’re rich?”
“Rich enough.”
So much to lose … “Am I supposed to know who you are? Royalty—a duke or something?”
The man laughed. “I’m not famous. The only way you’d know my name is if you study the financial pages very closely.”
“What is your name?”
“Robert McKendrick.”
“And you’re, what, a banker?”
“Near enough.”
Horn looked at the castle again. All right, it wasn’t a big castle, but you couldn’t have described it as anything else. It was constructed of honey-colored stone and rose from a compact footprint up through five stories. The front door was at head height—a powerful defense when the place was built, now approached by a broad flight of steps. Beyond a wide graveled terrace there were gardens. “I thought the stock market had pretty much crashed.”
There was something ruthless about McKendrick’s grin. “Lose a lot of your portfolio, did you?”
Horn bristled. He wasn’t stupid. There was a reason he was living out of a haversack. Even if there hadn’t been, it would have been offensive for a man who lived the way this one did to look down his nose at someone who didn’t. “I never went in for investments. I didn’t trust the bastards in charge.”
McKendrick laughed again, but he didn’t argue the point. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. “Almost seven. Beth’ll be up by now. Or if she isn’t, she will be in a minute.” He blew the horn as the drive curved along the front of the house.
“Is Beth your wife?”
“My daughter.”
After the car came to a halt Horn stayed where he was, slumped in the leather embrace of the passenger seat. When McKendrick got out, he made no move to follow. “You shouldn’t have brought me to your home. To your family’s home.”
The older man made a dismissive gesture, half irritable shrug, half impatient shake of the head. “I told you, you’re safe here.”
Horn’s patience snapped. He owed this man a lot, but there’s more than one way to repay a debt. One is to be meek and agreeable and do what you’re told. Another is to do what’s right. “And I told you,” he shouted, “I’m not safe anywhere. And you’re not safe while I’m here. Neither’s your daughter. Maybe you’ve some kind of a death wish, maybe you’re entitled to gamble with your own life, but you’re not entitled to gamble with someone else’s. Your own daughter’s, for God’s sake!
“Mr. McKendrick, I’m grateful for what you did. But I don’t want your death on my conscience, and I sure as hell don’t want your daughter’s!” Finally Horn got out of the car, hauled his bags off the backseat. He looked around. All he could see were fields. “Tell me where we are and I’ll make my own way from here.”
As McKendrick watched him over the top of the car, an odd combination of expressions flickered across his face. Surprise and annoyance, because he wasn’t used to being contradicted. In spite of that, a reluctant respect because of course it would have been easier for Horn to accept his reassurances and stay. Something like grim amusement, as if they were playing a game of which only one of them knew the rules. And perhaps just a little human sympathy, because whatever else his visitor was, he was scared and hurt, and lonely, and a long way from anything or anyone he dared think of as home.
McKendrick’s tone softened. “Let me show you something.” He had a second fob on his key ring, beside the one that locked his car. He pointed it at the front of the castle and thumbed the button. Immediately a metallic sound, quiet and purposeful, surrounded the house, and Horn was astonished to see steel shutters fall behind the windows. All the windows on the ground, first, and second floors. Within about ten seconds the little castle was locked down.
“I do take my security seriously,” McKendrick said. “If I’d thought for one moment that helping you would compromise my daughter’s safety, I’d have turned my back on you and walked away without a second glance. Do you believe me?”
Horn did. But he was no closer to understanding. “Then why—?”
He was interrupted by a furious shout from a window immediately above the lockdown. “What the hell’s going on? Mack, is that you?”
Immediately McKendrick raised his voice in contrite reply. “Sorry, Beth, I didn’t mean to scare you. Just testing. We’re coming in now.” He thumbed the fob again, and the steel shutters rolled quietly back into their casements. He led the way up the stone steps to the heavy oak front door. After a moment’s hesitation Horn followed.
But as McKendrick reached for it, the door flew open and a young woman stood barring it with her body and her fury. Her eyes blazed. She was barefoot on the stone flags, and her long chestnut hair and the dressing gown she’d pulled loosely over her pajamas were tossing in the dawn wind. She looked like a recruiting poster for the Home Guard.
“What the holy hell are you playing at?” she yelled, beside herself with anger, oblivious of the stranger hovering warily in the background. “It’s seven o’clock in the morning! I’m here on my own. What am I supposed to think when the house goes to DEFCON Three?” Finally she noticed they had company. It did nothing for her temper, or her voice, which soared like an eagle. “And who the blue blinding blazes…?”
And there she stopped. Dead; as if one of them had slapped her. Her expression froze, except that her eyes saucered with an incredulity so absolute that for a moment it drove the anger out. But only a moment. When it surged back, it came like a tsunami, and she hauled her dressing gown about her and spun on her bare heel and disappeared wordlessly back into the castle, her whole vanishing body stiff with fury and disbelief.
“I don’t think she was expecting company,” said McKendrick with masterly understatement. “Come inside. Let’s see what we can do for your face.”
There were no suits of armor. Horn was vaguely disappointed. His only experience of how the rich lived was gleaned from country-house mysteries on late-night TV, and he was sure that suits of armor figured prominently. And not so much computer screens and an exercise bicycle.
McKendrick saw where Horn was looking and grinned. “Not very appropriate, I know. But then, where in a fourteenth-century castle would be?”
When they were inside, McKendrick keyed numbers into a pad, automatically, as if he did it all the time. Horn didn’t try, but he was fairly sure that if he’d wanted to leave then he wouldn’t have been able to. He followed the master of Birkholmstead through the stone-flagged hallway into a surprisingly small and comfortable sitting room.
McKendrick pointed at a sofa. “Park yourself, I’ll get the kettle on.” He disappeared through another door, from which came the unmistakable sounds of crockery. But he
returned with not a breakfast tray but a first-aid kit.
In truth, there wasn’t much that needed doing. The blood from Horn’s nose had dried on his face, and he looked better once that was cleaned off. The bruising along his jaw was already purpling, and nothing but time would resolve it. “Any broken teeth?”
Horn explored carefully. “I don’t think so.”
“In that case, coffee will do as much good as anything.” McKendrick took away the first-aid kit and came back with breakfast—a pot of coffee, toast, marmalade. Three cups. “Beth’ll be down in a minute.”
He supposed McKendrick knew his own daughter, but Horn hadn’t got the impression she was in any hurry to meet him formally. He took the coffee and let the bitter steam work its magic in his throbbing sinuses.
Finally McKendrick said what Horn had been expecting him to say for the last four hours. “Whether or not you want to tell me what’s going on, you owe me an explanation.”
“Because you saved my neck?”
“It isn’t a good enough reason?”
It wasn’t a bad one. Horn could still have refused to answer. He’d been accused of a lot of things in the last few years—rudeness was hardly a blip on the radar. But the man had saved him, at considerable risk to himself, and Horn had always had a strong sense of fair play. Even if it had only delayed the inevitable, McKendrick’s intervention earned him something.
Still Horn hesitated. He wasn’t fabricating a lie: he was trying to shape a couple of tidy sentences that would outline the history between Hanratty and himself without going into all the gory details. It was taking time because he hadn’t even tried to put it into words for years, since policemen stopped asking questions about it.
Finally he said, “Someone died. On a mountain. His father blames me.”
The thin brow above McKendrick’s hawkish eye climbed. “So he sent a hit man after you?”
Horn gave a weary shrug. “He’s not a very nice man.”
“No, really?” McKendrick’s voice dropped a tone. “Is he right? Was it your fault?”
Horn was too tired to lie. “Probably.”
