Death in High Places

by Jo Bannister

  “What was his name? The boy who fell.”

  “Patrick.” Horn said it as if they’d been close.

  “And it’s his father who’s after you,” observed McKendrick. “Not the authorities. So the police accept that it was an accident but the father doesn’t. Why not?”

  Horn was going to tell him. It was a matter of public record, and nothing McKendrick did with the knowledge was capable of hurting Horn any more. But he didn’t get the chance.

  He hadn’t heard the door behind him open, but he heard it shut. When he looked round, Beth McKendrick, dressed now and with her hair pulled back into a thick, ragged bunch, was staring at him with undisguised disgust. “Because he did what no climber ever does,” she said, her voice vibrant with a chilly rage. “Ever. Not even to save his own neck.”

  Her head jerked and she glared at her father. “Don’t you know who he is? You bring him to our house, and you don’t even know who he is? One day you must try reading that bit of your newspaper wrapped round the financial pages.”

  McKendrick was looking between the two of them—the battered young man on his sofa, the angry young woman behind it—as if this development were nearly as fascinating as a Mexican standoff with a professional killer. “All right, tell me. Who is he?”

  Horn said, through tight lips, “My name’s Nicky Horn.”

  Beth gave a little snort of laughter with absolutely no amusement in it. “The tabloids called him Anarchy Horn. He’s the man who cut Patrick Hanratty’s rope.”

  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 a
nd 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 som
e 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?”