by Jo Bannister
He blinked and changed the subject. “I’ll need to rethink everything now. What if it’s not me who’s going to get ill, who’s going to need looking after? I can’t opt out if Beth’s going to need me.”
Nicky Horn nodded, and stole a last troubled look at the damaged girl sleeping on her father’s shoulder. Then he turned through the entrance hall and down the steps, past the dead man on the gravel, and out across the grass to where his car was parked under the hedge. Horn never broke his stride and never looked back, and he felt his burden lighten with every step.
* * *
Two years passed. Robert McKendrick made a point of reading those bits of the newspaper that didn’t directly relate to business, but he never saw anything that suggested that Tommy Hanratty had caught up with Nicky Horn or that time had caught up with Hanratty.
Beth’s face healed well. But McKendrick remained deeply anxious about her state of mind. He took her—protesting but resigned, humoring him—to see their doctor. Of course, McKendrick was less than candid about the reason for his concerns. He talked about the vagueness, the lapses of memory, the loss of focus that he’d witnessed in his daughter since the siege of Birkholmstead, and he reminded the GP of the family history hanging like Damocles’s sword over all the McKendricks.
It wasn’t enough—in truth, it was nowhere near enough—for a responsible GP to diagnose Alzheimer’s dementia in a woman of twenty-six. He thought post-traumatic stress a much likelier explanation, and suggested that time and perhaps counseling would effect a cure. McKendrick demanded referral to a consultant; but she agreed with the GP. She saw nothing in Beth’s manner or behavior—at least, the behavior she’d been told about—to justify even considering early-onset dementia.
McKendrick wouldn’t be comforted. He knew in his bones that what he was seeing in his daughter was the start of what he’d already been through with his father, his mother and his brother. That the events at Birkholmstead were not the start of Beth’s problems but a result of them. She’d tried to get someone killed. Four years after Patrick Hanratty died on Anarchy Ridge, she was still so consumed by hatred that she conspired with his father to accomplish the death of the man they held responsible. Any way you looked at it, that was not the act of a rational woman. To McKendrick, it was clear evidence that what should have been an imperforate barrier in her head—dividing the real from the unreal, memories from dreams, the world of experience from that of the imagination—had begun to leak, allowing the contents from either side to mix and meld.
In the end he did what, ten years earlier, he’d done about his brother: he stopped making medical appointments but trusted to his own ability to care for her by love and by instinct. For weeks at a time their lives were calm, pleasant and uneventful. Sometimes McKendrick experienced a momentary panic that she wasn’t where he thought she was, but the gardens were extensive and McKendrick always caught up with her before Beth reached the hedge.
Once he found her standing in the courtyard, staring up at the little terrace outside William’s window. Puzzled, she asked, “Who was it that fell?”
McKendrick said, “Someone we didn’t know,” and that seemed to satisfy her. They never again discussed what had happened.
Much later Beth complained, only half jokingly, that he kept her a prisoner in his castle like jealous fathers of old. McKendrick responded, entirely seriously, that he was trying to keep her safe.
She looked at him oddly. “I know what you think. That I’m losing my mind.”
“No,” he replied quickly, and part of him meant it. “But we have … history. We have to be careful.”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” she wondered quietly, “that maybe it’s you? That what happened to Granddad and Uncle William is now happening to you? That when it comes to keeping us safe and secure, you’ve lost all sense of proportion? You keep me locked away in this ivory tower as if the world outside was a dark and dangerous place. But Mack, what you’re afraid of isn’t out there—it’s in here, with us. It’s part of us.
“Yes, we have a history. And maybe you’re right to be afraid—maybe our history is also our future. But you can’t keep it out with stone walls and steel shutters, and most people would consider it insane to try. If there’s something wrong—with either of us—we need to face up to that and deal with it. And I’m willing to, and I don’t think you are.”
That night in the silent dark he mulled over what she’d said. He’d have liked to dismiss it as wrongheaded, perhaps symptomatic of her illness, but he couldn’t entirely. Maybe she was right. Maybe what she did was bad rather than mad—an outrageous demonstration of hate-fueled rage but not in any clinical sense psychotic. If that was the case, what he thought of as caring for her was a punishment worse than any the law would have imposed. Imprisoned for conspiracy and attempted murder, at least she’d have had the prospect of release and the hope of making a normal life afterward. Locked up here, with him and William, normality was an impossible dream. If she wasn’t sick now, inevitably his treatment of her would chip away at her personality until her illness became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So he hoped to God he was right. And, even in the darkness and the silence, on balance he still believed that she was the one on whom the family curse was now descending. That she was the firework with the blue touch paper already lit, and if he lowered his guard for a moment something terrible would happen to her. Perhaps he had to believe it. But that didn’t mean he was wrong.
The reality was, they were both standing on the frozen lake, wondering where the ice was thinnest, where the thaw would begin. And whether, when the summer was come, there would be any ice left anywhere.
* * *
And then, two years down the line, as he dutifully scanned the uninteresting bits of his newspaper, the name Hanratty leaped out at him.
The thing about glaciers is, they move. Everyone knows this; and still, when things fall into glaciers and turn up years later and miles away, everyone seems surprised.
The glacier that had cut Anarchy Ridge into an overhang moved faster and traveled farther than most and, aided by a bit of global warming, reached the end of its travels in a little over six years. The ice cliff at its front broke down and melted on the banks of the Little Horse River, and one autumn morning a couple of hunters found the body of a young man in lime-green climbing gear lying on a gravel spit, his top-of-the-range boots still encased in ice. His knife was attached by its lanyard to his wrist, and all that was left of his rope was what was round him and half a meter more. It took no time at all to identify him as Patrick Hanratty.
A reporter braver than the others went to interview the deceased’s father. Tommy Hanratty, massive and threatening even in a black-and-white photograph, stared unwinking into the camera and professed no surprise at all to learn that his son had cut his own rope to save the life of his climbing partner.
McKendrick made inquiries, but he never learned what happened to Nicky Horn after that. He never heard that he was finally living in peace and security somewhere. At the same time, and perhaps more significantly, he never heard that he’d died.
Also by Jo Bannister
Liars All
Closer Still
Flawed
Requiem for a Dealer
Breaking Faith
The Depths of Solitude
Reflections
True Witness
Echoes of Lies
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DEATH IN HIGH PLACES. Copyright © 2011 by Jo Bannister. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bannister, Jo.
Death in high places / Jo Bannister.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: �
��Two friends embark on a climb of treacherous Anarchy Ridge but only one will make it down alive. Unjustly blamed for his friend’s haunting death, the other must run for his life as a mourning father seeks revenge”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-312-57353-9
1. Mountaineering accidents—Fiction. 2. Fathers—Fiction. 3. Revenge—Fiction. 4. Assassins—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.A497D43 2011
823'.91—dc22
2011009109
First Edition: August 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-7217-8
First Minotaur Books eBook Edition: August 2011
