Death in High Places (22 page)

Eyes haunted by guilt, McKendrick tore his gaze away from the young man's face and sought his daughter's on the monitor. The man was still standing behind her, showing little of himself besides his hands gripping her shoulders—firmly rather than tightly, no hint of panic or desperation, still comfortably in control.

Finally McKendrick steeled himself to do what needed doing. Circumstances had left him no choice. He glanced again at Horn. “I'm sorry.”

“Not your fault,” mumbled Horn, “not your problem. Do it.”

“I can't let him hurt her.”

“I know. Open the door.”

With one long finger already on the button, still he hesitated. “Although…”

Horn waited, but nothing followed. Bizarrely, he found himself growing impatient. “Although
what
?”

McKendrick was regarding the monitor with one of those intelligent, speculative looks that Horn imagined was the last thing seen by any number of CEOs before they went on gardening leave. “Although,” McKendrick repeated slowly, “actually he isn't hurting her, is he?”

“Yet,”
said Horn, underlining heavily. “He isn't hurting her
yet
.”

“Quite.” But other thoughts were marshaling behind his eyes. “I wonder why not.”

“What?”

“Okay,” said McKendrick quickly, “I could have put that better. But think about it. He knows we're watching these monitors—it's what they're for. He knows we know he's got Beth. Now, he might wait a minute while we wail and gnash our teeth a bit, but after that he's going to want to focus my attention. So why isn't he hurting her? Making her yell, and bleed? Why is he standing there as if he's got all the time in the world and doesn't mind how long I think about what to do next?”

“Because he has,” suggested Hood grimly, “and he doesn't?”

“Nobody's that safe. And a real professional should know it. Anything could happen. Someone could spot our tablecloth and come to investigate. Beth might get away from him. I might make a last stand with Grampa's old elephant gun—anything. To make sure I do what he wants me to do, he needs to keep driving events forward, not give me time to look for options. He took Beth because he reckoned the moment I saw that I'd open the front door and kick you down the steps. So why does he not care that I haven't done it yet? Why isn't he using the one very obvious advantage he holds to force me?”

“Maybe he's giving you time to come to terms with what you have to do.”

“He doesn't want me coming to terms with it,” said McKendrick, shaking his head insistently. “He wants me acting on raw emotion. That way he knows what I'll do—what any father would do. It's not in his interests to give me time to think. He should be hurting her by now. He doesn't have to kill her. He doesn't want me to think he's killed her. He just wants me to know that he's prepared to hurt her, and he'll keep hurting her until I give in.”

Nicky Horn had never known anyone like Robert McKendrick. Not even the man who'd paid someone to kill him. Tommy Hanratty was a thug, plain and simple, but when it came to coolheaded, coldhearted intellectual viciousness, the city gent took the biscuit every time. Horn's eyes were shocked. “Keep standing there,” he managed thickly, “and he probably will.”

Still McKendrick waited. “But I've
been
standing here, for a couple of minutes now. And I still haven't opened the door. So what he's got to reckon is that I've decided not to. That I'm calling his bluff. That I'm putting my integrity ahead of my daughter's safety.”

“It's not a question of integrity,” began Horn; but McKendrick hadn't finished, dismissed his interruption with a perfunctory movement of one hand and went on.

“A man like that must know a lot about human nature. He'll have been in this situation before. He must have come up against people who thought they could stand strong against the worst he could throw at them. And he knows they can't—that nobody can and nobody does. He knows they all fold the moment it becomes real. When it stops being a threat and becomes actual butchery. He knows I'm not going to hold to a principle once he starts chopping my daughter's fingers off.

“So why isn't he doing it?”

And when the question was put to him like that, Horn didn't know the answer either.

“Do you have a mobile phone?”

Horn's head was still reeling. He couldn't keep up with McKendrick's lightning forays into the heart of darkness. “Er—Beth has them.”

McKendrick shook his head. “She has ours. Have
you
got one—in your rucksack, maybe?”

“There's no signal.”

“Just answer the question. It's a very simple question, but it could be a matter of life and death. Specifically, yours. Do you have a mobile phone?”

“Yes. In my toolbag.” McKendrick threw him the heavy canvas bag as if it weighed nothing. Horn fumbled for the phone, turned it on. “See…”

But what they both saw was the signal indicator come up. Not strongly, but enough to make calls.

Horn didn't understand. “Why would mine work when yours wouldn't? Different network? Or maybe…” He couldn't think of an
or maybe.

McKendrick could. He put his hand out and Horn gave him the phone. But he didn't use it. He put it in his pocket.

Horn stared at him as if he were mad. “We can get help now. Call the police. Tell them we need help!”

McKendrick gave a weary, disappointed sigh. “Nicky—there's a reason the man Tommy Hanratty hired to kill you, the professional who was chosen because he wouldn't let anything stop him carrying out the contract, isn't killing my daughter slowly while I watch. He isn't hurting her, and he isn't going to hurt her, because they're on the same side.”

It had to be the shock, or maybe that combined with a little leftover concussion, because still Horn could make no sense of what McKendrick was saying. “You mean, they both hate my living guts?”

McKendrick breathed heavily at him. He really didn't want to put it into words. But he needed Horn to understand, so he was going to have to. Handy as the young man was halfway up a mountain, when it came to anything subtle or complex he was one chisel short of a tool kit. “I mean, they're both working for Tommy Hanratty.”

 

CHAPTER 14

N
ICKY HORN HONESTLY THOUGHT
he'd misheard. “Sorry—weren't we talking about Beth?”

So McKendrick spelled it out for him—reluctantly, because once the words were said, they couldn't be recalled. He'd been hoping to widen their options. Instead he'd narrowed them. Now he could call the police, he couldn't afford to. Whatever else he did and didn't want, his first priority was what it had always been: to protect his daughter.

“That's how he found us. She phoned him. At least, she phoned Hanratty, and he called his mechanic.” But euphemisms didn't work with Horn. “His hit man.”

This time Horn understood what he was being told. But he thought McKendrick was wrong. He shook his head with conviction. “The phones weren't working, remember? There was no signal. You kept taking them onto the roof to look for one, but they were dead.”

“There was never a problem with the signal,” sighed McKendrick. “Beth had the phones. Beth kept taking them upstairs and saying she'd had no luck. She didn't want me to call for help. She wanted to give Hanratty's man time to arrive.”

“But … he followed us. You said he followed us.”

“He didn't.”

“You can't know that. He's a pro—this stuff is second nature to him. He could follow you from here to Timbuktu and you'd never see him.”

“It isn't the same man.”

“No?” Horn looked at the monitor again, his head tilting to one side. He could only see part of the man's face behind Beth's head, but he thought perhaps McKendrick was right. “Okay, so there's two of them.”

“No. Only one of them works for Tommy Hanratty. This one.” McKendrick nodded at the screen. He hesitated only a moment before putting the rest of his cards on the table. “The other one—the one who broke into your flat—was working for me.”

Anyone who does anything remotely dangerous, either as a living or for fun, knows that moment when everything changes. When the quarry turns and becomes the hunter; when the sea decides to swallow you; when the mountain has had enough and shrugs you off. If you've only ever read about it in books, you'd think that lightning reactions are what save you then. Snatch up the rifle, throw over the helm, slam in the ice ax. The truth is a little different. What usually saves you is freezing for the split second that prevents you from making a bad decision. It's more important not to do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing.

Horn froze now. His muscles froze, locking his bones into a half crouch in front of the security screens. His expression froze, at the point that the tender green shoots of comprehension were pushing through the heavy clay of confusion. What remained active—what speeded up, in fact, fed by the electrical energy saved by temporarily closing down his body—was his mind. It raced. His eyes narrowed and darkened as the thoughts spun and connected and amassed information like the cogs of a Difference Engine.

So he didn't say, “What?” again. He didn't accuse McKendrick of making it up. He didn't even take a swing at him, although he might have done if his muscles had unfrozen a little quicker. Instead he said in a low voice, “You hired someone to beat me up?”

“Yes.”

“You hired someone to break into my room while I was asleep, wave a gun at me and make me think I was going to die?
Why?
” But the answer was obvious. “So you could rescue me, and I'd owe you a favor.”

“Exactly so.” McKendrick didn't sound as if he was confessing to something wicked. “That's how I know he didn't follow us here. He took his money and went home to his girlfriend, who's called Stacey and has fifteen-month-old twin girls. He's a bit-part actor, although he works as a nightclub bouncer at weekends. He says he's going to marry Stacey and use the money as a deposit on a two-up two-down in Derby.”

“You
paid
someone to beat me up!”

“Yes. Yes, I did. Get over it.”

“I never did you any harm!”

“I know. I'd have offered you the money, but I didn't think it would achieve the same result.”

Horn stared at him almost more in astonishment than anger. “You've got me killed! Between you, you and your crazy daughter, you've driven me out of a place where I was safe, at least for a while, and brought me here, and told the guy who wants me dead where to find me. I'm going to die here, not because I got tired and made a mistake but because you wanted the kind of help you can't advertise for in the
Tatler
! And all for nothing. I was never going to do what you wanted me to do. I was never the man you thought I was.”

McKendrick gave a sullen sniff. “Whose fault is that? All this could have been avoided if you'd been honest about what happened up that mountain.”

“I didn't want…! I was trying … I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings!”

McKendrick snorted. “You know what the road to hell's paved with, don't you?”

Horn shook his head in a kind of wonder. “That's your let-off, is it? Your get-out-of-jail-free card. I did something stupid. In the heat of a moment when I was shocked and, yes, embarrassed, I said things that hurt my friend, and one way or another—because he wanted to die, or because he wasn't concentrating on the climb and made a mistake—it cost him his life. And I lied to protect his reputation and his family's feelings. Maybe that
was
wrong. Maybe it was stupid. But it doesn't make you any less responsible for what's happened already and what's going to happen now.

“My life is going to end here.” McKendrick heard Horn's voice shake, and it wasn't with fear or even anger so much as the sheer enormity of it. The recognition that McKendrick's plotting was going to cost him everything. “Maybe it wasn't one of the great lives of all times. Maybe I didn't do anything very memorable with it—create a piece of great art, support a great cause, or just make a woman happy and raise a family. Maybe it was a life full of mistakes and regrets. But it was mine, the only one I was given. And you've thrown it away because you thought that one day you might need a dog—someone to come running when you whistled and jump through hoops in return for a biscuit. You killed me, Mr. McKendrick, as surely as if you'd cut my throat. And I didn't deserve that.”

McKendrick felt the flush travel up his cheeks in a way he had not for years—decades, even. Not because it was that long since he'd last done something wrong, even very wrong, but because when you reach a certain level in the business world you acquire a kind of fireproofing. People don't tell you what they think. They tell you what they think you want to hear; or what they think someone else wants you to hear; or what it may be necessary for you to understand. They talk about profit-and-loss accounts, the best interests of the shareholders, the corporate decision-making process. Sometimes, while they're talking about the corporate decision-making process and the best interests of shareholders, they reach down and rip the rug clean out from under you. But they never look you in the eye and say that you've done something bad. Something wicked. The people who would do that, because they've suffered as a result of your desires and ambitions, are never allowed through the foyer.

McKendrick responded as a petulant child might have done—a spoiled child unused to having his actions questioned. “Don't be such a drama queen. We'll sort this out.
I'll
sort it out. Nobody's going to die today.”