Death in High Places (19 page)

But Horn was pretty sure this was his last chance to know what he was doing here and wouldn't be put off. “You chose me for this job because you thought I killed Patrick. That's what you want to believe—it suits you for me to be that man. Anyone else would be glad to think that Patrick Hanratty took the decision for himself, but you weren't. You were horrified. Why? If you don't need my help with William, what is it you want me to do that only a man with no morals would agree to?”

McKendrick smiled. He'd locked the anger away, and with it any chance that he might—inadvertently or in spite—say more than he wanted to. He was back in control, of himself if not the situation. “You're wrong,” he said, “and so are
they
. I have plenty of friends, and I don't need anyone to confess to. See this?” A glance around the kitchen encompassed by implication the whole castle and more. “I made this.” He didn't mean he built it stone by stone. “My father was a farmer. He called himself a gentleman farmer, but that just meant he was better at opening fêtes than milking cows, and he ended up having to sell the land to pay his debts. He was bankrupt and an invalid by the time he was sixty.

“What I have, I made from scratch.” McKendrick said it with a pride so adamant you could break your knuckles on it. “And I didn't do it by cultivating other people's opinions. I need someone to pour my heart out to like a seal needs roller skates. I've taken my own decisions since I was fifteen years old. I don't need someone to bounce them off, or talk them through with, and I certainly don't need anyone to advise me. And if by any chance I did, I could do so much better than you.

“All you need to know—all you're
going
to know—is that I have a use for you. When I'm ready, I'll tell you what I expect you to do. If one or both of us dies first, you're off the hook. Otherwise, you'll do what I tell you.”

And Nicky Horn thought there was nothing more he could do, nothing more he could say, to get at the truth. He thought he was going to die in ignorance. Robert McKendrick was like a man carved from marble: shiny, hard and impervious. A man quite capable of carrying his secrets to the grave if he chose to. There was no pressure Horn could exert to make him change his mind.

Perhaps it was in becoming a self-made man that he'd tempered such a degree of mental toughness. But probably he had the attitude first, and it was that which made it possible for him to succeed. Horn was the one who did battle with mountains. But he no longer kidded himself he was as tough as McKendrick.

He gave it one last try. “You haven't told Beth, either, have you? Why not? Because you know she won't approve? That she'd try to stop you?”

McKendrick's expression slammed shut almost audibly, like a vault door. “Leave Beth out of this. It has nothing to do with her.”

“It's why someone wants to break into her house and wipe out her family! Maybe you don't owe me one, but you sure as hell owe her an explanation. She deserves to know what she's going to die for.”

The way McKendrick rounded on him, Horn thought he was going to be hit again. He flinched involuntarily. But the only missiles McKendrick let fly were words. “I don't want to hear my daughter's name on your lips again. She is none of your business. You've hurt her too much already. I hurt her too, bringing you here. I didn't know how much, and anyway it needed doing, but from now on you keep away from her. I'll look after Beth. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut and do what you're damn well told.”

Horn's eyes had slipped out of focus as he replayed their conversations, this one and the earlier ones, the way he replayed climbs he'd made, seeing every tortuous step, every killing inch, in his mind's eye.

McKendrick thought he'd finally battered Horn into silence and thanked God for it. If Horn had kept picking away at him, sooner or later he'd have said too much—enough for Horn to put it together. His wild surmising had already brought him too close for comfort. McKendrick didn't want, by words said or unsaid, by a gesture or a look, to let Horn know where he'd been near and where wide of the mark.

McKendrick resumed his patrol of the ground floor, between the front door, the monitors, the sitting room, and the kitchen door. He went down into the undercroft and listened at the bare stone walls. He heard nothing. He was only a little reassured.

The third time he passed through the kitchen, Horn said, “How did your father die?”

McKendrick froze in his tracks. It might have been a lucky shot, it might have been nothing of the kind. “What?” His voice was choked with evasion.

“It's a simple enough question. You said he died bankrupt and an invalid. So what did he die of?”

“Old age.”

“Really? Because these days, lots of people your age still have their parents around. How old was he when he died?”

McKendrick didn't have to answer. Somehow, he felt he did. “Seventy-three.”

“But he was an invalid by the time he was sixty.”

McKendrick said nothing.

“What about your mother? Is she dead too?”

Briefly McKendrick shut his eyes. “Yes.”

Horn gave it a little more thought. Finally he said, “And William's been ill for years. It's the Alzheimer's, isn't it—it's like a family curse. Both your parents had it, and your older brother has it. And you're afraid it's going to happen to you too. Maybe you know it is—maybe you can feel it happening.

“That's what you can't tell Beth, and what you sure as hell can't ask for her help with. You don't want to go the way your parents went, the way William's going—dying by inches. That scares you more than anything on earth. More than a gunman in the street, even more than one at your door.

“But there is a way out, for someone determined enough to meet the problem head-on. William never asked for your help, and maybe that was because he didn't want it, but maybe it was for the same reason you won't ask Beth—he didn't want you to ruin your life rescuing him from his. For that you need someone you don't care about. Someone you have a hold over, and someone with nothing to lose.

“What would you have done if Hanratty's man
hadn't
caught up with me just then? It was the perfect opportunity to put me in your debt—it could have been a while before you found another one as good. That's why you were watching me. To find something I needed that you could provide, so when the time came I'd provide something you needed.

“It isn't William's life you want me to finish off, is it?” Nicky Horn's voice was thin as paper. As if he were staring into an abyss. “When things get too hard—when the brain cells start to die, and first of all you can't run a financial empire anymore, then you can't keep the household accounts,
then
you can't add two and two without using your fingers—you want to be able to pick up the phone and say, ‘It's time,' and have me come and put an end to yours.”

 

CHAPTER 12

H
E COULDN'T BELIEVE
what he was saying. All the same, he knew this time he'd got it right. Even he wasn't sick enough to have dreamed it up if the clues weren't there, if the tap-tap-tapping in his brain wasn't the explanation trying to get itself heard.

But he expected McKendrick to deny it. The man volunteered nothing. He'd gone to considerable lengths, and no small amount of risk, to get his way on this, and to get it without anyone else knowing what he had in mind.

Robert McKendrick was a powerful man. He'd been a successful and powerful man in a cutthroat business for so long that it informed all his dealings, defined the very shape that he occupied in the world. Part of it was that he lied all the time. He told business competitors that he wanted things that he didn't want, and had things that he didn't have, and wasn't interested in things he'd have sold his granny to get hold of. It was like a great game of charades, only without the rules. He thought nothing of lying—not when it was him doing it, not when it was a rival. It was how the game was played.

But that was when the other players were also successful and powerful men. He never lied to underlings, people of no consequence. He would have deemed it beneath him. He met Horn's stare of godforsaken shock and said, “Yes.” Quite calmly. Not as if he was saying something that should have shook the heavens.

“No!” exclaimed Horn.

“I assure you,” said McKendrick solemnly, “you've finally got there. It may have taken you all morning, you may have gone all round the houses first, but you've finally got it right. William may not have thought far enough ahead to know what was going to happen to him and take steps to deal with it, but I did. I found you.”

“I mean, no,” stumbled Horn. “I won't do it.”

McKendrick elevated an eyebrow at him. “You've already agreed. A contract exists.”

“I didn't know
then
!”

“You knew what
you
were getting out of it. Your life—which, may I remind you, was entirely uninsurable at the point at which I stepped in. Was there anything you
wouldn't
have given for it right then?”

“No. Yes! I don't know. But I told you—I
told
you—I wouldn't hurt anyone.”

“No one's going to be hurt. I told
you,
it's a victimless crime.”

“You want me to
kill
you! To put you to sleep, like an old dog that keeps peeing on the rug!”

“But I can't be the victim if it's my choice!” Then the exasperation melted out of his voice and McKendrick sighed. “Nicky, you're a young man. When I was your age, I was afraid of death as well. I know better now. I saw my father reduced to a helpless shell. I saw the terror in his eyes. It never left him. Long after he'd forgotten who I was, after he'd forgotten who
he
was, he knew absolutely the horror of what was happening to him.

“People say that Alzheimer's is harder on the family than on the patient.” McKendrick shook his head. “Don't you believe it. My father suffered every day. He was frightened every day. He imagined things that weren't real, terrible things—that people were hurting him, plotting against him. It was impossible to comfort him. When all his memories had gone, when his ability to reason was gone, he still believed the increasingly bizarre outpourings of his dissolving brain.

“Of course he did. What choice did he have? Our whole lives depend on our ability to distinguish between what's real and what's not. We believe what we see and hear and can reasonably deduce. Things that we dream, or imagine, may seem real at the time but we can recognize the difference. You might dream about having a terrible argument with someone, but you don't stay mad at them after you've woken up. Dreams get filed in a different part of your brain. A healthy brain doesn't mix them up.”

He paused for a moment, organizing his thoughts. Marshaling his argument. “But the system depends on the brain functioning properly. Reporting accurately. Collecting the messages that come in from the senses and processing the information in a rational way.

“With dementia, gaps start appearing where previously there were connections. Things get lost or jumbled up. The brain screws up its filing system. It puts some things in the wrong file, and some things in the right file but with the wrong index card, and some things miss the drawer altogether and drop down the back of the cabinet. So when that knowledge is needed again, it may open the correct file but it's anybody's guess what's going to come out. It might be right. It might be nearly right. It might be absolute nonsense, but we go on believing the information in the filing cabinet because we have no choice. Inside ourselves, the brain is the only arbiter of what's what. There is no fallback position, no referee.

“It's like…” McKendrick hunted round for an analogy, something to explain the ineffable. Instinct guided him to one that might make sense to Horn. “It's like you're standing on a frozen lake. The lake has always been frozen and the ice has always been strong. But now as you stand on it, it starts to crack. At first it's just thin little lines that shoot out from under your feet. But then the cracks grow bigger, and the ice begins to groan, and the water starts seeping through. And you know what's going to happen: it's going to break up and throw you into the freezing lake and you're going to die. But—and this is the biggie, this is the killer—
there's nowhere else to stand
. As your brain changes, your perception of reality changes with it. Everything you know, everything you've ever known, is telling you that it's the rest of the world that's gone mad.

“So my father
knew
that people were hurting him. He knew that I was stealing all his money, and William wanted—you'll like this—William wanted to sell him to white slavers. He'd have been about sixty-eight at this point. Nothing would persuade him of the inherent unlikelihood of it. And he never got it wrong—it was never William stealing his money and me selling him to the slavers. It wasn't something he'd invented to hurt us—in his own mind it was real. We employed nurses to care for him, and we made sure he couldn't wander off. He thought we'd imprisoned him. He lived the last decade of his life in fear and misery.”

McKendrick stopped there, his face haunted, and Horn thought he wouldn't be able to go on. But after a moment he sucked in a deep breath and composed himself. “That decade turned him from a healthy middle-aged man to something stick-thin under a sheet, his skin so fragile the bones were in danger of poking through. By then he'd lost his ability to speak, to feed himself, to sit up, even to swallow. All he had left was the horror. One evening when I was sitting with him, he breathed out and didn't breathe in again. I can honestly say I've never been gladder in my life.