Death in High Places

by Jo Bannister

  “William does have a wife,” said McKendrick, “and two children. Margot lives in the States; I don’t know where the kids are now. They couldn’t cope with William’s illness. They were used to depending on him, couldn’t face the idea that he was going to be dependent on them. For everything, for the rest of his life.”

  “She left him?” It was none of his business, and Horn tried to keep his voice neutral.

  McKendrick gave a gruff chuckle. “Not exactly. She just went on holiday and hasn’t come back yet.”

  “When?”

  “About eight years ago.”

  Horn’s family had never been the conventional nuclear model, but it had been warm and close and he’d been into his teens before he realized it was unusual enough to raise eyebrows. But he’d cut himself off from them after Alaska. Not because they blamed him for what happened. All the Horns were fiercely loyal: matriarch Angela, she of the Velcro-fastened underwear, took as her mantra the Arab proverb “Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.” They’d have stood shoulder to shoulder with Nicky whatever he’d done: it was how they operated. It was his decision to stay away. If a man with a gun came to their door one day, he wanted them to be able to say with absolute honesty that they hadn’t heard from Nicky in years. Not because he thought they might betray him, but because he was genuinely afraid what Tommy Hanratty might do if he thought they could provide the information he wanted and wouldn’t.

  But he never stopped loving them and he never stopped missing them. Two of his sisters had families of their own now: he was an uncle. His mother had been starting to have trouble with her eyes. It weighed on him that she might be blind by now and he didn’t know. Sometimes he spent all night plotting how he might get in touch with one or another of them without leaving a trail; but in the cold, hard light of morning he always decided it simply wasn’t worth the risk. For himself he’d have taken it, but not for them. They had so much more to lose.

  So while to all intents and purposes he had no family now, it wasn’t long since he’d been an integral part of a close-knit clan whose members argued passionately and behaved irresponsibly and loved without reservation. And he couldn’t imagine any one of them turning their backs on another of them who fell ill.

  McKendrick saw him recoil and his tone softened. “It’s asking a lot, you know. William now isn’t the man that she married. You expect to grow old and stiff and doddery together—you don’t expect that one of you will jump the gun by thirty years. It sounds great, doesn’t it—all that in sickness and in health stuff. And if he’d fallen off his hunter and ended up in a wheelchair, or if he’d got cancer and gone bald and frail and left her a widow before she was fifty, I don’t doubt she’d have done her best for him and seen it through to the bitter end. Alzheimer’s is different. It doesn’t kill you. William could live into his nineties. But everything that made him William—that made Margot marry him and have two children with him—has gone. I never held it against her—well, not really, not for long—that she didn’t want to see him reduced like this.” He gave his brother a friendly grin that robbed the words of their sting.

  “Marriage is a matter of choice,” he went on pensively. “You choose someone to spend your life with. If they change, even if it’s not their fault, maybe it’s fair enough to consider all bets off. The family you’re born into is different. They have to take you as you are, for better or worse. If Margot finally gets a divorce, William will no longer be her husband. But he’ll always be my brother.” He looked at the man in the bed with a mixture of sorrow and affection. “I promised him this would be his home for as long as he lived.”

  A terrible thought occurred to McKendrick. “My God. You don’t suppose he”—a glance toward the window and the car at the bottom of the garden—“would kill the rest of us and leave William alive?”

  It was possible. Even a very cautious man could see no danger of being identified by William McKendrick. But it was plain, in Mack’s face and in his tone, that that was not the reassurance he sought. Horn told him what he needed to hear. “No. By the time he gets in here, he’ll just want to finish the job as quickly as he can and get out again. He won’t even ask himself why William’s still in bed.”

  The tall man nodded, relieved. He said in a low voice, “I’d kill him myself before I’d let that happen. Before I’d leave him to be nursed in a geriatric ward.”

  Horn believed him. He cleared his throat, changed the subject. “So if we can’t move William downstairs, how are we going to do this?”

  “I’ll stay here. We won’t make any noise, will we, Billy? You watch the monitors in the hall.”

  “I don’t know how to operate the security system.”

  “Beth does.”

  Horn had no wish to spend the last few hours of his life with someone who despised him. “Or Beth could sit with William.”

  “She can’t lift him on her own. I can. Except…” McKendrick looked at the bedside table, indicated a plastic device with an incongruous clown’s face. “There’s the baby monitor. We can keep the speaker with us. Then if she needs a hand, she can let me know.” His voice adopted the bright, cheery tone appropriate for addressing invalids. “That all right, Billy? If Beth comes and sits with you for a while?” There was no measurable alteration in the white-faced basilisk stare. “Good. Fine.”

  McKendrick headed back downstairs, Horn in his wake. All he could see of McKendrick was his back disappearing round the central column of the spiral stairway. It encouraged a kind of intimacy. He murmured, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  A shade unexpectedly, McKendrick stopped, pivoted on one heel, and looked back and upward, his gray eyes searching. “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry for all of this.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “No, I don’t think it is. But you wouldn’t be in danger if you hadn’t stopped to help me.”

  McKendrick thought for a moment. “I knew what I was doing. That there could be consequences. I never thought there could be consequences for Beth, but that isn’t your fault either.”

  Horn sucked in a deep breath. “I meant what I said. If you think it’ll do any good—if you think it might do some good—I’ll go out and meet him. Let what happens happen.”

  McKendrick was still regarding him with that pale, penetrating stare. He nodded. “I appreciate that. But I meant what I said too. I don’t want that to be how this ends. I suppose, I don’t want to die a coward.”

  “Most people get as far as thinking I don’t want to die and stop there.”

  McKendrick grinned. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I was a soldier when I was your age, and staying alive was high on my list of priorities too. Your perspective changes slightly as you get older. You accept that, like it or not, you’re not going to be here forever, and all you can try to do is leave the place tidy and face whatever comes next with courage and optimism.”

  “You think something comes next?”

  “How’s your physics?” Horn looked at him like a joiner. “One of the cornerstones is the idea that mass and energy are different facets of the same thing, and you can alter it but you can’t destroy it or make any more and the component parts are pretty much eternal. I imagine the component parts of me will be altered a fair bit by death, but the atoms at least will go on. It’s a kind of afterlife. And maybe the atoms will remember.” It was hard to tell from his expression if he was joking again.

  Either way, it all sounded rather implausible to Horn. But then, as a way of holding things together, he thought you couldn’t beat a dovetail. Even if he’d heard of it, the strong nuclear force would have left him unimpressed.

  “And then,” added McKendrick, “I’m not ready to buy what you’re selling. You think we’re all going to die. I think there’s a lot of ways this could end. I spent a lot of money on the security here. If one man, however expert and determined, can breach it in a few hours, I’m going to have serious words with the
company that installed it.”

  “Good luck with that,” muttered Horn to McKendrick’s descending back.

  They’d reached the front hall. Beth had overheard the tail end of their conversation. “The company that installed the security here,” she said pointedly, “advised you against squandering the goodwill of the local police by testing the speed of their response every few days.”

  “Well, that’s true,” admitted McKendrick. “Okay. We’ve got the Tablecloth of Truce flying over the battlements. And we’ve worked out a plan of campaign. Will you sit with William, Beth? Keep the phones with you—nip outside every few minutes and try for a signal. But be careful. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess we’ll be doing that. Keep low, behind the parapet.

  “I’ll man the screens, try to get some idea what he’s doing. I’ll have the baby monitor in here so if you need help upstairs, or if you see anything, or if you get a phone signal, you can let me know.”

  Beth nodded.

  “And the other thing we can do,” continued McKendrick, “is prepare some fallback positions. So if he gets inside the house, we can retreat and put some solid doors between us. Remember, that’s what this house was designed to do. Long before there were steel shutters—long before there was steel—it was laid out in such a way that the defenders would always have the advantage over the attackers. Using your house as a weapon may be a bit of a lost art, but we’ll get the hang of it. We have all the advantages—stone walls, steel shutters, CCTV, food and water. He has to make all the going. All we have to do is sit tight.”

  “For how long?”

  “As long as it takes. Until something changes.”

  “You mean,” said Beth flatly, “until he finds a way in and slits all our throats.”

  McKendrick regarded her coolly. “That would count, yes.”

  “And you’re going to let it happen?” She was looking at Horn.

  But McKendrick answered, and his tone left little room for argument. “No, Beth, he’s going to do what you’re going to do. You’re both going to do what you’re told. You’re going to go sit with your uncle William, and Nicky’s going to prepare some last-ditch defenses. Get together some things we can fight with if push comes to shove.”

  Horn thought that push would go a great deal further than shove but he’d already said so as clearly as he could. And maybe McKendrick was right. Maybe something would happen. Even hit men are only human: they get heart attacks, they get toothache, they get the trots. This was a good place to finish the job he’d been paid for, but if circumstances turned against him, he would know he could always find Horn again. He’d leave here before compromising his own safety or his client’s identity. Maybe McKendrick was right, and all they had to do was make it really difficult for him.

  Horn wished with all his heart that he could believe it. But he didn’t. He thought he was going to die today and take with him some people who didn’t deserve it. That was almost his biggest regret. He didn’t want to die; but he didn’t much want to go on living the way he had either. It left him with not much to lose. The McKendricks had more. If it was hardly worth the trouble of fighting for his own life anymore, something deep inside him told him it was worth fighting for them.

  Courage and optimism, McKendrick had said. A man could have a worse epitaph. “Do you have any guns? Shotguns, sporting guns—anything?”

  McKendrick shook his head. “Never saw much point in shooting at something that couldn’t shoot back.”

  Horn had to laugh. It was that or go mad. “I wish everyone felt the same way. What about the simple stuff—swords, spears, bows and arrows?”

  “Yeah, right,” began McKendrick in tones of vast scorn; but the words dried in his mouth. A look of surprised appreciation stole into his eyes. “Yes. Of course. To me it’s just medieval wallpaper, an apt way to decorate a castle, but that’s not what it was designed for. It was designed to kill people. The Great Hall, on the first landing. Take anything you can find.”

  Horn took his toolbag with him. He assumed that, when you hung a morning star on the chimney breast, you relied on more than a picture hook and a bit of string to keep it there.

  All things are comparative. In one of the grander castles, Warwick or Arundel for instance, Birkholmstead’s Great Hall would have been little more than an anteroom. But it was the heart of McKendrick’s little fortress. It occupied virtually the whole of the first floor, with long lancet windows on two sides and a fireplace where you could have roasted an ox if you could have got it up the stairs.

  The views were nowhere near as spectacular as those from the tower, but then these windows weren’t for looking out of. They were narrow enough to exclude attackers but wide enough for an archer; narrow enough that glazing them, even in medieval times, would not have been prohibitively expensive; and narrow enough that the strong stone walls between them had no difficulty carrying the floors above.

  But even by the time Birkholmstead was built, no one of quality wanted to spend all day looking at a stone wall. They covered them with tapestries, with banners, with trophies—and with weapons. Great long pikes that were the foot soldier’s answer to a man on a galloping horse. The lance and saber that were the cavalryman’s riposte. Corselets of chain mail, long ago turned to rusty knitting that would never again ripple like liquid armor however much WD-40 was applied. And bows. Elegant six-foot shafts of English yew, once the most devastating weapon in the world, and ugly composite crossbows that were heavy to carry and took perilously long to reload but could be mastered by any fighting man with rudimentary training. And maybe even by scribes and carpenters, if the need was pressing enough.

  Much as he was drawn to the wood, Horn had to admit that none of these bows was ever going to fire again. The elegant longbows were warped and shriveled by the years, their strings long sundered, the ugly crossbows corroded to inaction. The quivers of cloth-yard shafts and punchy crossbow quarrels were fit only for decoration now, their points rusted together, their fletchings depredated by mites.

  The swords, the lances, the pikes—and yes, there was a morning star—might still have something to offer. Not much of an edge anymore, perhaps, but five feet of Damascus steel swung with enough determination would still break bones and rend flesh. Even a man used to dispensing instant murder from a weapon the size of his hand might hesitate for just long enough when confronted by someone trying to take his head off with a broadsword.

  With hacksaw and pliers, guiltily standing on furniture he knew to be priceless, Horn took them down from the walls and stacked them on the floor. Then he stood back, wondering how to deploy them.

  And while he was looking, a strange thought stole over him. In four years this was the first time, the very first time, that he’d considered fighting back. He’d hidden and he’d run, turn and turn about, until there was nowhere left to hide and nowhere to flee. But he still wouldn’t have thought of fighting if he hadn’t met Robert McKendrick. The ghost of a smile touched his lips. Every other challenge in his life he’d done battle with and, for the most part, defeated. Why had it taken a city slicker in an expensive suit to point out that he could fight this too? Maybe he couldn’t win, but he had nothing left to lose by trying. He didn’t have to accept his fate like a butcher’s beast. He could go down fighting—if not like a cornered lion, at least like a seriously pissed-off ferret. It was a better way to die, and he owed that to McKendrick. It was a pity he was going to repay the gift by annihilating his family.

  Except, of course, that he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to pull the trigger. He hadn’t hired the man who was going to pull the trigger. Nothing he had done justified what Tommy Hanratty was going to do to him. He hadn’t even done what Hanratty thought he’d done.

  He straightened up and, leaving the cache of ancient weapons on the floor, walked quietly back downstairs.

  McKendrick, flicking between cameras, barely looked up as Horn walked behind him. “Any luck?”

  Horn didn’t answer. “I need to
tell you something.”

  Then McKendrick looked round. He hadn’t imagined that odd note in the younger man’s voice: there was an odd look in his eyes too. Not just the stress, that had been there all along, but something new. Something suspended halfway between urgency and resignation: a curiously intense calm. Not so much the calm of resolution, more what you find in the hearts of hurricanes. “All right.”

  “I know you don’t really believe what I’m saying. That this is where it ends, and not just for me. I know you think that with a bit of effort and ingenuity there are other ways this could work out. And maybe you’re right. I hope you are. But just for the moment, will you humor me? Will you consider the possibility that you’re going to die today? You’re going to die, and Beth’s going to die, because you helped me when most people would just have kept walking.”

  Horn swallowed, but he wasn’t finished. McKendrick waited.

  “You didn’t know who I was when you took the decision to get involved. You knew nothing about me. So maybe it doesn’t too much matter to you that a lot of people wouldn’t have thought my skin worth saving. Not just not worth risking your life for—not worth getting your hands dirty for. But it matters to me. I know you wish you’d never glanced up that alley. But since you did, and we can’t change what’s happened and we probably can’t change what’s going to happen, it also matters to me that you don’t die thinking you threw it all away—all this, everything you’ve worked for—on trash.

  “I want you to know the truth. I never meant to tell a soul. I meant to take it to my grave. But then, I never expected to be taking other people with me. I want you to know.”

  McKendrick genuinely had no idea what was coming. “Know what?”

  “I didn’t do it. I didn’t cut Patrick’s rope. Patrick cut it himself.”

  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.