Death in High Places - By Jo Bannister Page 0,14

the point of a rather simple joke. “They never have. But they can’t prove anything different, so they have to accept it. So do you. Patrick’s death was an accident—misadventure, a combination of recklessness and bad luck. You can think what you like, but the inquest said I wasn’t responsible.”

“But his father,” murmured McKendrick, putting the pieces together quickly now, “was no more convinced by the findings of an Alaskan coroner than my daughter appears to be.”

“Tommy Hanrattty’s a criminal and a thug,” snarled Horn. “If I’d done everything I’ve been accused of doing, I’ll still be kept waiting at the gates of hell while Old Nick ushers Tommy Hanratty inside.”

“Is he serious? About killing you?”

Horn stared at McKendrick, wide-eyed with disbelief. “You were there last night. Did that guy look to you like he was kidding?”

“Well—no,” McKendrick said slowly. “I suppose he didn’t.”

Finally Beth seemed to realize that, consumed by her anger, she’d missed a large chunk of what was going on. “What guy? Where did you go last night? Where did you find … this”—she invested the word with infinite contempt—“and why did you bring it here?”

McKendrick summarized what had happened in a handful of brief, simplistic sentences that probably raised more questions than they answered. At least, the way Beth was looking at him didn’t suggest that now she understood any better. It took her a moment to find a voice. “You risked your life? For that?”

McKendrick shrugged. “I didn’t know who he was, then,” he said reasonably. “I’m not sure it would have made a difference if I had.”

She quite literally didn’t know what to say to him. She felt riven by betrayal but couldn’t tell him why. She might have tried but for the fear of what would come through if she opened the floodgates. All she could manage was a stunned expression and a few breathless, uncomprehending words. “You could have died. You could have died and left me alone. For that.”

Horn hauled himself stiffly off the sofa. “I get the message: you don’t want me here. Point me in the direction of anywhere I’ll have heard of and I’ll leave. You’ll never see me again and there’s no reason you should waste another thought on me, let alone an argument. Thanks for what you did,” he told McKendrick, “but she’s right, you shouldn’t have got involved. Do the”—he wiggled his thumb on an imaginary keypad—“thing with the locks and let me out.

“Just for the record, though,” he added, his gaze swiveling round to Beth, “Patrick Hanratty was my friend. My best friend. I did everything I could to save him. It wasn’t enough. Nothing I could have done would have been enough. If I could have bought his life with mine, I would have done.”

If he was looking for some hint of understanding, some glimmer of compassion, some brief acknowledgment of their shared humanity and the knowledge that everyone makes mistakes and it’s the intention by which an act should be judged rather than its consequences, then he’d come to the wrong counter.

Beth McKendrick’s lip twisted in a sneer of infinite disdain. “You think you’re your own harshest critic? Not while I’m alive you’re not. You think that anyone else, put in the same position, would have done as you did? Don’t flatter yourself. Patrick had a lot of friends, from a lot further back than you. Any one of us would have died on that mountain rather than leave him there.”

Everything else he’d expected—the sneer, the contempt, nothing new there—but that he hadn’t. “You knew him?”

“Yes, I knew him. We were at university together.” She said it with a kind of unconscious hubris. “We were both in the climbing club. He was way out of my league, but we did several routes together. And guess what? Every time we climbed—every time—the same number of people came down as went up.”

Something changed in Nicky Horn’s eyes. It had been his last redoubt, the belief that other climbers—who understood and accepted the risks, who could imagine finding themselves in the same cruel quandary—might judge him less harshly than the general public, whose view of what happened was shaped by tabloid headlines consisting largely of exclamation marks. If he was wrong about that, then he was entirely alone—a pariah, unforgiven and unforgivable.

The only way to survive with the whole world against you is to fight.

He’d been running for four years. From Tommy Hanratty, but also from the past. Now there was nowhere left to go.