Death in High Places

by Jo Bannister

  They were running out of control again now. She looked at the haunted face of Nicky Horn and wondered at the volume of hatred her heart could hold. Her voice shook with it. “Someone told you he loved you. And you called him a freak.”

  “I’m not proud of it,” mumbled Horn, still avoiding the knives of her gaze.

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose,” she managed. “The man I loved put his heart and soul into your hands. And you tore them into shreds and threw away the pieces. How could you do that? Whatever else he was, he was your friend, and he found the courage to be honest with you. And you treated him as if he’d done something shameful. You knew him, you knew how easy it was to hurt him—you must have known what that would do to him!”

  “You’re not watching the monitors.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Horn protested weakly. “He didn’t give me a chance. I needed time to get my head round it.”

  But Beth in her prescience was following the unfolding scene where he would not tell or have her see. Her mouth rounded in a slow O. “But there was no time. No afterwards, when you’d both calmed down enough to talk about it sensibly. As soon as the sun was up you were back out on the mountain, with the worst pitch of the climb ahead of you. If the storm had eased up at all, it certainly wasn’t over, and you should have stayed in the tent. But you couldn’t, could you? Not after what had happened. You wanted to finish the climb and put it behind you. And Patrick thought he’d lost you forever. On top of that he thought that, when you got back, you’d tell everyone. He thought his father would find out.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” insisted Horn, white-faced. “If he’d only given me more time. I could have dealt with it, if I’d just had a bit more time…”

  “But you didn’t say that, did you? Nothing to reassure or comfort him. And when he fell—”

  “No,” he begged her, knowing what she was going to say.

  “When he fell,” she went on remorselessly, “you thought it wasn’t an accident. If he’d given me more time … You thought he wanted to die, up there on Anarchy Ridge, in the pristine tumult of the snow—and he wanted you to die with him.”

  “He fell,” whispered Horn. “He lost his footing. It was an accident…”

  “Was it?” She searched his tortured face, learning nothing. “I can see how you’d want to think it was an accident. But the horror that stalks your nightmares is that Patrick Hanratty threw himself off Anarchy Ridge and tried to take you with him, because of what you did to him.”

  “You’re not watching the monitors. Look at the goddamned monitors!”

  Beth blinked and looked around her uncertainly as if she hadn’t realized they were no longer alone.

  McKendrick was halfway down the stone steps, leaning over the iron rail. His face was dark with fury and he was stabbing a finger at the bank of screens. “I give you one job to do. One simple job—watch the monitors, call me if anything happens. And you’re so wrapped up in your own pathetic little melodrama you can’t even do that!”

  In the moment before Beth understood that her father wasn’t shouting at her, her eyes filled with tears. It was as if she was losing everything—first Patrick, now Mack—as if neither of them had ever cared for her as she’d needed to be cared for, as she’d cared for them. She ached to be held, not shouted at. She’d never felt so lonely in her life.

  Nicky Horn said, “I’m sorry, I—we…” His voice petered out as he took in what McKendrick was showing him.

  Two of the screens were already blank. A third view of the grounds broke up even as he stared at it.

  “He’s taking them out,” snarled McKendrick, though by then the others had caught up with him. “One by one, he’s taking them off-line.”

  He grabbed Horn by the shoulder and hauled him bodily out of the way, dropping into the chair in his place. His long, strong fingers played urgently over the console, calling up other views. A lot of them were blank too.

  Quick as it was in normal circumstances, most of Beth’s mind was caught in another place. “Is it a power problem…?”

  “Yes, it’s a power problem,” snarled McKendrick. “He’s finding the cameras one by one and cutting the power to them.”

  “I thought they were protected.”

  “They are protected. But not against someone like him. As our friend here keeps telling us, this is a professional.”

  And like a professional, he’d come equipped with a tool for every task. A moment before the next camera blanked, they actually saw him use the correct tool for neutralizing security cameras set high on unscalable walls.

  “A slingshot?” exclaimed Horn. “A kid’s slingshot?”

  But it wasn’t a child’s toy, though the man could have passed it off as a present for a young nephew if it had been found in his possession. It had a pistol grip of carbon fiber and yellow power-bands that owed nothing whatever to Granny’s knicker elastic, and it fired ball bearings that flew like bullets. Not the kind of slingshot to make little girls cry on school playgrounds—more the giant-killing kind. The steel projectile didn’t just break the tempered glass at the front of the camera, it trashed the delicate mechanism behind. A split second after they saw him take aim, the picture went black.

  “Answers one question,” muttered Horn unsteadily, shaken not even so much by this development as at the specters Beth had raised. “He hasn’t gone home.”

  McKendrick snapped like an overstrained hawser, the recoil threatening to take off limbs and heads. He was out of the chair in one fast, fluid movement, and one of those long-fingered hands that somehow wasn’t as soft as a pen pusher’s should have been gripped the front of Horn’s clothes, lifted him onto his toes, and slammed him back against the stone wall hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.

  “You worthless piece of trash,” McKendrick yelled into his startled face, “you think this is funny? You bring a killer to my door, and you think it’s something to joke about?” The fist that wasn’t pinning Horn to the wall backhanded him across the mouth, spraying blood. “Laugh at that. Go on, let’s hear you. Laugh at that.” He struck again, and then again. “Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with? I buy and sell people like you every day!” He hit Horn once more, for luck.

  “Mack. Mack!” Beth was dragging on his sleeve like a child. Except that she wasn’t: she was using all her strength to try to restrain him. But all her strength was no match for all of his. “Please! That’s enough.”

  Time flies when you’re having fun. McKendrick hadn’t been counting, but if he’d been asked to guess, he’d have said maybe he slapped Horn two or three times over six or seven seconds. When Beth’s urgent demands recalled him to himself, he found that somehow rather more time, and rather more fists, had flown than he’d realized. Horn was hanging almost unconscious from his left hand. Blood from his mouth and nose covered Horn’s shirtfront, and McKendrick’s hand to the wrist, and spattered the monitors and the floor. When—days from now, perhaps even weeks—the police came looking for them, they’d assume the massacre started here, in the hall. And in a way they’d be right.

  McKendrick hadn’t meant to beat the younger man senseless, but he was a long way from forgiving him, even after the rage had passed. He opened his fist and watched with cold dislike as Horn slid down the wall, his strong young limbs rubbery, his wits scattered.

  Beth hadn’t forgiven him either, and she had more of a grudge to hold. But it’s easier to hate someone you’ve never met, whose secrets you’ve never heard, than someone you’ve watched taking a hammering and choosing not to fight back. Horn didn’t see the first blow coming, she thought, and toward the end he was incapable of fending them off, much less returning them. But in between there was half a minute where he stood and took it, his own fists hanging loose at his sides, making no attempt to defend himself. For all the world, thought Beth, as if he’d been waiting four years for this; as if through all his despair he’d clung to the hope that somebody beating the crap out of him for
what had happened would somehow make it easier to bear.

  Shocked by the violence—it’s one thing to hear of men beating one another witless, quite another to witness it—and the whirlpool of her own feelings, she stood staring down at Horn, her lips parted as if on a question, waiting for him to move. To get up, to say something, to ask for help—anything. When he didn’t, wordlessly she turned and went into the kitchen.

  She returned with a wet cloth. First she dropped it on his chest. But he made no attempt to do anything with it, so after a moment she took it back and, bending, cleaned the worst of the blood from his face. Then she tipped his head forward and laid the cold wet of it on the back of his neck.

  When she straightened up, his eyes were watching her.

  McKendrick turned his back on Horn as something beneath contempt, transferring his attention—belatedly, it could be argued—to the monitors. Most of them were now reporting nothing. Such pictures as remained were scenic postcard shots of pleasant terraces and rolling acres. Perhaps the visitor hadn’t been able to reach the cameras, or perhaps he hadn’t seen much need to.

  “We’ve lost our edge,” said McKendrick tightly.

  “Not much of an edge,” ventured Beth. She was walking on eggshells. She’d never seen her father roused to such fury, was wary of provoking a fresh outburst. “The only time we saw him was as he shot out that camera.”

  It was true, but it wasn’t much comfort. “So if he could avoid being seen till now, why do the cameras suddenly matter? What’s he about to do that’s different?”

  There was only one possible answer, “He’s going to try to come in here,” said Beth.

  “Right.” McKendrick’s glance was glacial. As if, at least for this moment, how he felt about Horn was how he felt about her too. “And while he was planning how and where and when, the two people who were supposed to be looking out for him, who were entrusted with all our lives, were arguing about which of them was a dead mountaineer’s best bitch!” Nothing in his tone, or his face or his eyes suggested he found a kind of black humor in the situation. Beth knew that he was deathly serious. And he still had Nicky Horn’s blood on his knuckles.

  She swallowed nervously. “What do you want to do?”

  McKendrick returned his attention to the screens and didn’t favor her with a look again. “I don’t see we have much choice. We defend ourselves as best we can.”

  “We can still give him up,” she ventured. “If it really is him or us. No one would blame us.”

  McKendrick glanced scornfully at Horn, then his gaze came back in a double take. Until that moment he hadn’t realized how much damage he’d done. Or that he had thereby limited their options, already narrow, even further. “Like that? You still think he can make a run for it? Beth, he’d need a head start of about half a day. Even then he might not get past the bottom of the garden.”

  “Maybe how far he gets isn’t the important thing. Maybe the important thing is whether the man outside keeps trying to get inside after he’s got what he came for.”

  “And maybe,” said Nicky Horn through clenched teeth, “you should stop talking about me as if I was dead already.”

  Beth looked at him almost as if she were seeing him clearly for the first time. However much it might have suited her to think otherwise, he wasn’t a monster. He’d made mistakes, he’d told lies. He’d been stupid and naïve. But the fact was, whichever of them cut the rope, Patrick Hanratty would not be alive today whatever Nicky Horn had or hadn’t done. It was a waste of time and effort to go on hating him when mere pointed dislike was all he was worth.

  She eyed him speculatively. In an odd way, giving up the hatred freed her to think more clearly. To focus on the priorities. “You know something, Horn? This is your lucky day. You had your shot at being a hero and you blew it. Now you can have something most people never get—a second chance. You can save my life, and Mack’s, and Uncle William’s. All you have to do is what you should have done, and know you should have done, and probably wish you’d done, four years ago.”

  “Is that what you want?” he asked, hollow-eyed. “If it is, I’ll do it.”

  “Yes,” said Beth.

  “No,” said McKendrick.

  Almost, Horn seemed more tired than anything. He was weak and dazed from the beating, he was afraid of the man outside, and talking about what had happened on Anarchy Ridge had reopened wounds he’d thought half healed. But the tiredness was more disabling than any of that. A man could die of such tiredness. “Make your minds up,” he said. “Let me know when you have.”

  The fanatic glint was back in McKendrick’s eye, the iron in his voice. “You want to die for what you did? You think that’ll even the score? Tough. I didn’t bring you here to die. You’ve had four years to get yourself killed, and you couldn’t manage it even with someone trying hard to help you. Now you’re in my house and you’ll play by my rules. Dying is the easy option. I’ve something else in mind for you. After it’s done, you can die if you want to. But right now you’ll fight for your life as if it was something of value, because you may be the only thing standing between my daughter and a man who’d kill her to protect his reputation. Is that clear? You belong to me. You’ll do what I tell you to do.”

  McKendrick swiveled in his chair, brought Beth within the quadrant of his attack. “That goes for you too. I don’t want to hear any more about Patrick Hanratty—who loved him, who he loved, whether he jumped off Anarchy Ridge or was pushed. I don’t care. Do you understand? I don’t care. All I care about is getting us through this. All of us. Because whether you like it or not, Horn’s fate now is tied up with ours. Right now he needs me; soon enough I’ll need him. You don’t need to know why. You do need to know that this is how it’s going to be, and we’re not having this argument again. Now go find yourself something to fight with. We’re not going out with a whimper. If I’ve anything to do with it, we’re not even going out with a bang.”

  Beth looked at him as if she didn’t know him, as if they’d never met. But she didn’t argue. She nodded and headed up the stairs toward the Great Hall and the rusty pile of historical armaments Horn had amassed.

  Before she returned—with some kind of a halberd, waving it gingerly as if trying to work out how to use it—in his mind McKendrick had moved on to the next thing. “The walls, the doors, the shutters—that’s our first line of defense. That’s what’ll hold him back longest. Killing the cameras was so that we wouldn’t see where he’s going to make his assault. He knows it’ll take time and he doesn’t want us getting ready for him. But he’s figured out where our weak spot is and he’s going to start hitting it.”

  “How long have we got?”

  McKendrick shrugged. “If we left a window open, he’s probably on the stairs now. If he’s going to undermine a corner, it’ll be days. Anything else, somewhere in between. I wish we could see. If we could see where he is—or even where he isn’t—we could make an educated guess.”

  “What about the surviving cameras?”

  “They tell us he isn’t picking rosemary in the kitchen garden, he isn’t practicing croquet on the lawn, and he isn’t polishing the kitchen doorstep. That’s all they tell us.”

  “Listen,” said Horn.

  They both listened. Beth shook her head. “I can’t hear anything.”

  Horn still couldn’t look at her. “No, listen. We can’t see what he’s up to, but we’ll hear if he starts trying to dismantle a castle. Put your ear to the stonework and listen. He might be able to get in here unseen. He won’t be able to do it in silence.”

  McKendrick nodded. “Yes. Good. Beth, you’re the quickest. Well”—a hint of apology crept into his gaze—“right now you are. You take the upstairs. Set up a patrol route and listen at every wall, every window, for half a minute. Then on to the next. I’ll do the same down here. Hell, I’d better go down into the cellars too—who knows what he has in mind? But this building was built to keep people out, and the shutters actually came with a gu
arantee. We’ll get some warning. Once we know where he’s coming in, we can figure out where to fight, and where to retreat.”

  Beth was looking at the bare stones. “Nobody’s coming through there!”

  “There isn’t a prison in the world that’s never been broken out of,” said McKendrick shortly. “If you can break out of a prison, you can break into a fortress. And this is only a very small fortress. We need to be ready.”

  Convinced or not, she deferred to his authority. “All right. I’ll do the Great Hall, the bedrooms, the roofs.” She picked up the phones again. “And I’ll keep trying these. We may still get lucky.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said McKendrick, but not as if he had much faith in it.

  When she was gone, Horn put a hand out. McKendrick ignored it, turning his back. Horn sighed. “You can leave me here on the floor. Or you can help me up so I can listen at the kitchen door. Your choice.”

  McKendrick wanted to leave him where he was, bleeding on the floor. But common sense prevailed. He gripped Horn’s wrist and hauled him to his feet, and the way the younger man’s breath hissed in his teeth was some recompense.

  He steered Horn into the kitchen, hooked up a chair with his toe, located him against the wall between the back door and the shuttered window. “Call me if you hear anything. You shouldn’t—he’d have taken out the courtyard camera if he was going to be working out there.”

  But it was the only job Horn was currently capable of, so he listened assiduously at the kitchen wall. He heard nothing. McKendrick did a circuit of the rest of the ground floor, and down into the basement, with the same result. He orbited through the kitchen at regular intervals, like a long-period comet.