Death in High Places - By Jo Bannister Page 0,37

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