Death in High Places

by Jo Bannister

  The man didn’t trust himself to speak. He nodded. Even that was a falsehood; but his eyes, staring whitely up at Horn, acknowledged that he was in the hands of an expert. He trusted Horn to take care of him.

  “The molding’s right in front of you. Look down and you’ll see it. Feel for it with your feet.”

  Horn knew when he’d found it from the easing of the weight on his arms and the pressure on his chest. They weren’t there yet. But they were getting there.

  “I need my right hand. I’m going to let go of your left wrist, and I want you to put your hand flat against the wall. Don’t worry about locking on, just put your hand against the wall.”

  Feeling Horn release his grip, the man shuddered with fear. But his feet were firm on the drip-molding, and his right wrist was secure in Horn’s left hand. He reached out quite tentatively at first, stroking the weathered stone. Then he pressed his hand flat against it, as if he thought that what let geckos scuttle up walls might work for him too.

  With his free hand Horn felt for the crack he’d seen, began excavating it. He opened his penknife with his teeth and dug the strong, short blade again and again into the ancient mortar.

  When the hole was as deep as the blade could reach, he stopped. “You’re going to think this can’t possibly hold you. But it will. Do you believe me?”

  The man, who’d been able to see what Horn was doing better than Horn could, shook his head. No.

  “Your feet will carry your weight. What this is for is to stop you barn-dooring—coming away from the wall. Dig three fingers as far in as they’ll go, then bend the joints as much as you can. Bend them till it hurts. Have you done that?”

  The man nodded. Yes.

  “I’ve still got you—you’re not going to fall. Now, without straightening your fingers, try to pull your hand out of the crack.”

  He did as he was told. “Ow.”

  “Exactly. As long as you don’t straighten your fingers, you can’t fall. Now I’m going to let go.”

  “No!”

  But Horn wasn’t asking permission. He kept his left hand close in case the man began to swing, but he didn’t. Carefully Horn reached across his body and put the penknife into the man’s right hand. Right here and now, he saw no problem with giving a weapon to a professional killer. “You saw what I did. Find another crack and open it up. Crimp your fingers the same way. All you have to do is not fall off for about three minutes. Can you do that?”

  A whine. “I don’t know…”

  “Well, we’re going to find out.” Horn might have accepted the human obligation to save this man if he could, but he didn’t have to be nice to him as well. “I can climb this rope but I doubt if you can, so don’t try. When I tell you, take one hand out of the wall, wrap the rope round your chest, and knot it. Nothing fancy, just lots of knots—anything you can tie with one hand. I’ll pull you up.”

  Shakily: “Can you do that?”

  “Anybody’s guess.” Horn shrugged, though he was pretty sure he could. No gale was blowing here, no cold was sapping his strength, and he could find something much better than snow to brace himself against. And they were only three meters below the parapet. If Patrick had been only three meters below Anarchy Ridge, the lives of both of them would have panned out quite differently.

  Almost the hardest part was freeing his legs from the man’s embrace without pushing him off the wall. Once he was clear, Horn went up the rope like an old horse climbing a hill—not quickly, not easily, but plugging away till he got there. A last effort and he rolled over the parapet onto the terrace.

  For long moments he just lay there gasping, like a stranded fish. From the bed inside the open window William McKendrick was watching him with interest.

  Time pressed, but Horn needed more rope. As soon as he could move, he untied it from the bed leg and belayed it round him. Finally he leaned over the parapet.

  “I’m sending the rope back down. Don’t grab for it—wait till you feel it against you. Then take one hand, wrap it round you twice and tie the end in as many knots as you can. It’ll pull tight, but a cracked rib won’t kill you.”

  At last the man asked what he hadn’t dared ask before. “Why are you doing this?”

  Horn was damned if he knew the answer. “I think, because I’m better than you are.”

  He’d thought that climbing the rope would be the hardest part. But this was: pulling up a man who was essentially a dead weight on a beardy old rope that hadn’t been designed for the job when it was new. But climbers are good at ignoring pain. Bracing his feet against the parapet, Horn ignored the protests of his chafed hands and went on pulling, often just centimeters at a time, belaying the slack off around himself and counting a triumph every time the rope bit into his shoulder. Each bite was a bit more rope he wouldn’t have to pull again, a bit more old rope no longer in danger of breaking.

  Braced against the parapet he couldn’t see the load he was hauling, could only imagine how long this felt to be taking to the man below. But he heard no complaints, nor did he expect to. This was hard on both of them; but only one of them had no alternative, and he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

  All the same, Horn was beginning to wonder if something peculiar had happened to the rope—if it was slowly stretching under the weight so that, however long he pulled at it, he would never reach the man on the end. But then between one haul and the next, a hand appeared at a crenel of the parapet.

  Which didn’t mean the job was done. A last major effort was required of both of them. But it was the light at the end of the tunnel, and Nicky Horn spared himself a moment to catch his breath and look forward to a time without twelve stone on a thin rope digging into his shoulder.

  The first he knew that they were not alone was when Robert McKendrick walked past him.

  They say great minds think alike, and McKendrick had had the same thought as Hanratty’s mechanic. He’d armed himself with a chef’s knife from the kitchen. Now he bent and applied it where the rope came through the gap in the wall.

  Horn let out a strangled yell but there was nothing he could do. The octopus could have held Hanratty’s man with two of its arms and fought off McKendrick with the others, but all Horn could do was hold the rope tight, and shout breathless abuse, and watch with shock-dilated eyes as McKendrick’s knife sawed at the rope.

  All Horn’s effort, all his climber’s skill and strength that it had taken to get them to this point, went for nothing in the few seconds it took McKendrick to cut an old rope with a sharp knife. When it parted, Horn measured his length on the terrace and so never saw Hanratty’s man fall; but he heard him. He heard the low, mournful wail as he fell, and the terrible, terribly final thump as he came to earth.

  McKendrick looked over the parapet and nodded with every appearance of satisfaction. Then he put the knife down carefully on top of the wall, where no one could hurt himself with it.

  CHAPTER 17

  MCKENDRICK EXTENDED a hand to help him up. Horn shrank from it as if it still held the murder weapon. He went on staring at the older man with appalled, incredulous eyes while his skin crawled and his exhausted body shook. When he could get a word out, it was “Why?”

  McKendrick shrugged negligently and took his hand back. “What do you mean, why? He was going to kill you. He meant to kill all of us.”

  “He wasn’t going to kill anybody hanging on a rope twenty meters off the ground!”

  “But you weren’t going to leave him there, were you? He’d taken money to kill you. As soon as he was able to, he’d have tried again.”

  “No.”

  McKendrick grinned—humorless, a shark’s grin. “Gave you his word, did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believed him.”

  “I was prepared to take the chance.”

  McKendrick turned away with a disparaging sniff. “Well, I wasn’t.”

  “No one asked you to! He let you go. You could just have driven away.”

  “A
s a matter of fact, we couldn’t. He’d fixed the car so it wouldn’t start. Nicky, he never meant for any of us to get away. He was just splitting us up so he could deal with us one at a time.”

  Which put a slightly different complexion on things, even in Horn’s raging heart. “That was … before…” he said uncertainly.

  “Before? Before he cut my daughter’s face to shreds? Before he followed you up here with a gun in his hand? Or do you mean, before you tied a bit of old rope round your middle and threw yourself off a castle wall because you couldn’t see any other way that gave you even that much chance of surviving the day? Don’t fool yourself, Nicky. It was him or us. It was always going to be him or us. It was better that it was him.”

  Horn, blinking, shook his head. As if there were stuff in there that he wanted to dislodge. As if there were a hope in the world that shaking his head would be enough to do it. It wasn’t so much that a man had died. It wasn’t even how he’d died. It was that the man who’d killed him hadn’t so much as broken sweat over the decision. It might have been something he’d worked out at his desk, with the profit-and-loss accounts by his elbow. It was what made sense, what the situation required. And Robert McKendrick was, Horn had come to understand, a good choice for doing what a situation required, whether it was closing a factory or firing a CEO or cutting a man’s rope when he was a hand’s span from safety. Not a lot of sentimentality with McKendrick, not a lot of breast-beating. Just, do what’s needed and move on.

  Horn had thought he was a hard man until he got to know McKendrick.

  Horn hauled himself to his feet—the hand wasn’t offered again—and freed himself from the rope. He made himself look over the parapet.

  And the mess on the gravel wasn’t the most upsetting thing he saw. “Mack—what’s she doing?”

  * * *

  McKendrick, aided by familiarity and spurred by fear, took the steps three at a time, reckless of a fall. Horn followed more slowly, but not much. By the time he reached the front hall McKendrick had got the door open and was reaching for the girl who knelt on the gravel.

  “Beth. Beth! What are you doing? Come away…”

  “He’s hurt,” she explained patiently. “He fell.” She brushed off her father’s hand and continued trying to sit Hanratty’s man up against the wheel of the car. He was too heavy, and also too dead—it was like moving twelve stone of wet concrete in a sack. When she got his shoulders off the ground, his broken head tipped back, or forward, or sideways, and took the slack torso with it. Time and again the dead man hit the ground. Time and again, with the kind of bemused perseverance of someone who doesn’t know quite what they’re doing and so doesn’t know how to stop, Beth leaned over him, as oblivious of his blood as she was her own, and tried to prop him up.

  McKendrick turned to Horn with fear stretching his eyes. Horn had wondered what it would take to fracture his inhuman cool, and this was the answer. McKendrick’s lips quivered and words babbled out. “She’s … she’s not well … tired … hurt … Help me. Help me get her inside. She needs … she needs … she needs to sit down. Beth! Come inside. She needs a doctor. Call the doctor! Can we? The phones were out—weren’t they? I can’t remember!”

  “Okay,” said Horn, as firmly as he could manage, “you’ve got to calm down right now. She’s in shock, and so are you. Yes, the mobiles are working. Let’s get you both inside, then I’ll call the police and an ambulance.”

  “Shock,” said McKendrick uncertainly, echoing Horn’s words. He looked at him beseechingly. “Are you sure?”

  Horn didn’t follow. “You don’t think she’s entitled? With everything that’s happened today? You don’t have to approve of what she did to understand what made her do it. Her feet haven’t touched the floor since you brought me here. She’s been on an emotional roller coaster. Four years’ worth of grief and anger made her do something appalling, something she must know in her heart was unforgivable. Then someone she thought was on her side took a knife to her face, and then she saw him fall from the roof and spill his brains right in front of her. Yeah, I’m pretty sure she’s in shock.”

  “Just shock?”

  Finally he realized what McKendrick was thinking, the specter that was haunting him. Comprehension hit Horn in the midriff like a mailed fist and his mouth went dry. “Of course,” he said, though all the certainty was gone. “She needs taking care of. A good night’s sleep, maybe a bit of sedation. Tomorrow she’ll be fine.”

  “Yes,” agreed McKendrick, and a tremor shook his voice. “Shock. Tomorrow she’ll be fine. William and I have pretty much the same genes, but Beth’s only got half of them. And she’s only twenty-six. It can’t—it couldn’t … It’s just shock.”

  He blinked and looked at Horn with a little more intelligence and a different kind of fear. “We can’t call the police.”

  “We have to. We can’t bury him among the rhododendrons!”

  “What will we tell them?”

  Horn shrugged. “The truth. That Tommy Hanratty hired him to kill me, that you tried to help me, that when it became a matter of survival we took him on. And won.”

  “I cut his rope.”

  “Yes. Well. A lot of people will think you did the right thing.” The fact that it was true didn’t make it any less ironic.

  “How do we explain him being here? I won’t tell them it was Beth!”

  “We don’t have to. He was a professional, it was his job to find me. He’d always managed it before, sooner or later. We don’t know how. You understand? We don’t know.”

  “What she did. Calling Hanratty. That wasn’t … rational.”

  “From where she was standing, maybe it was,” Horn argued weakly. “She’d hated me from a distance for years. Now she had the chance to hate me in person. And to do something about it.”

  They were heading up the front steps, the confused girl between them, talking over her head as if she were a child.

  For a moment McKendrick said nothing more. He seemed to be considering that. “All right. Anyone might think it was fate sending them an early Christmas present. Anyone might think, momentarily, of taking the revenge they’d dreamed of. But normal people don’t do it. They think about it, think how satisfying it would be, then reality intervenes and they don’t do it. But Beth did.”

  They sat her down in the little room beside the kitchen and McKendrick sat beside her, gently cleaning her ravaged face with his handkerchief. Beth smiled at him and he smiled back; but he could see in her eyes that she couldn’t quite remember how any of this had happened. Who had hurt her, and why, and what had become of him.

  Horn went through into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Before he called anyone he needed some caffeine, and he doubted it would do the others much harm either. The spoons he dropped in the saucers rattled like castanets.

  He put the tray on the low table and straightened up. “I can be away from here before the police arrive. You can tell them I cut the rope.” He did the feral grin. “They won’t need much convincing. Mention Anarchy Ridge to them and the whole thing will seem to make sense.”

  McKendrick appreciated the magnitude of what Horn was offering. “Won’t they come looking for you?”

  “Sure. But they won’t look very hard, they won’t find me, and they won’t be surprised. They know about Hanratty’s contract. They’ll know the guy outside, at least by reputation. Even if they caught up with me, what would they charge me with? Self-defense isn’t a crime. They’ll go through the motions, then they’ll move on to something more worthwhile.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’m not telling you that!” Horn cranked out a thin smile. “I don’t know yet. Somewhere I’ve no reason to go—that’s always the best. Hanratty will look for someone else to take the contract, but there’ll be no trail to pick up. It’ll take him months to find me again.”

  “But he will?”

  “Oh, yes. Eventually.” There was an unbearable fragility to his smile. “Unless somet
hing happens first. Tommy Hanratty may have a change of heart. Slightly more likely, he may have a heart attack and his widow decide she has better uses for his money than paying a hit man. It’s a head start. I’ll settle for that.”

  McKendrick, his arm protective around his daughter’s shoulder, regarded Horn for a long time before reaching a decision and nodding. “All right. Get on your way. Take his car—I’ll tell the police I never saw it so I can’t give them a description. And you’re going to need money. I keep a few thousand in the safe—if you’ll sit with Beth for a minute, I’ll go and get it. Call me when that’s gone and I’ll send you some more.”

  Horn shook his head. “I don’t want your money.”

  “You mightn’t want it. You’re going to need it.”

  “No more than I did last week, and I managed fine then. I can earn what I need, as long as I can stop running long enough. There’s plenty of casual work around for a tradesman.”

  “Then … I won’t see you again?” McKendrick was surprised by the regret in his own voice.

  “Unless they pull me out of a ditch somewhere and slap my face on the front of your newspaper.” Horn was making a joke, but both men knew it could happen exactly like that.

  For some minutes they drank the coffee and said nothing more. Finally Horn went to go. But he paused in the doorway and looked back. “What will you do about … the other thing? You know I’m not going to do it, don’t you?”

  McKendrick nodded—carefully, Beth had gone to sleep on his shoulder. “I know that now. You were never a good choice. But then, you were never the man you were meant to be. The man you claimed to be.”

  “You understand why? Why all the lies?”

  “Not really,” said McKendrick honestly. “I can imagine doing what you did, I just can’t imagine doing it for the reason you did it.” He lapsed into a reflective silence as the echo of what he’d said caught up with him. Horn had embarked on the lie that was going to get him killed in a misguided effort to be kind. Kindness was the bit McKendrick couldn’t get his head round.