game turns nasty enough, if it comes to a choice between one person dying and two people dying, we may have to cut ourselves loose so that someone else can live. But that’s it—you only ever cut your own rope. Whatever the consequences, you never cut someone else’s. You haven’t the right.”
“Is that—I don’t know—an unwritten rule? Something all climbers agree on?”
“Maybe not all. But it’s the sort of thing you discuss in the bar at the end of a long hard climb, and everyone I ever climbed with, everyone whose opinion I respected, felt that they’d rather die than kill someone else.”
“Maybe,” McKendrick suggested softly, “it’s a conclusion that’s easier to come to in the bar at the end of a climb than halfway up a mountain in a howling gale.”
“No doubt. That’s why you talk about these things first. You take your decisions when you’re safe and warm and calm, so you don’t have to take them when you’re frantic and freezing and scrambling on the edge of an abyss. All you have to do then is remember and act on them.”
“And cut your own rope if you have to.”
“If you have to,” she agreed grimly. “If there’s no way back that doesn’t involve ending someone else’s life. It’s a risk sport, Mack. If you’re not prepared to take the risks, you shouldn’t be on the mountain. You shouldn’t be on someone’s rope if you’re prepared to kill them with it.”
“So cutting your own rope wouldn’t count as suicide?”
She snorted a derisive laugh. “Of course not. Among climbers it’s the ultimate act of courage.”
“I wonder if climbers’ families see it that way.”
She became aware that the conversation had changed, was no longer about what she thought and felt, wasn’t sure what it was about now. She looked at him sideways, one eyebrow higher than the other. “Mack?”
It was one of those now-or-never moments. McKendrick steeled himself. “Horn says Patrick cut his own rope. When he couldn’t climb back, and Horn couldn’t lift him, and it was a choice of one or both of them staying on the mountain, Patrick found the courage to cut his own rope. Horn edited the facts to spare his family’s feelings.”
Beth’s expression had frozen on her face. McKendrick hurried on. “Of course, he’d no idea the trouble he was getting himself into. He thought that, from their point of view, the easiest thing to deal with was if Patrick died in the fall and Horn had to leave his body behind. So that’s what he said.
“He thought he was doing the right thing, Beth. He came up with a story that allowed Patrick’s family to grieve without reservation, in the hope that the people whose opinion mattered most to him would understand. He was questioned in Alaska; he was questioned again when he got back to England. He stuck to the account he’d worked out. There was no way of proving anything different, no reason to suspect he was lying. No witnesses, no forensics—as long as he didn’t blink, the authorities had to accept what he told them.”
Still no response from his daughter. Not from her lips and not from her eyes. McKendrick sighed. “What he didn’t allow for was the fact that Patrick’s family was headed not just by a grieving father but by a grieving thug of a father. He didn’t have to accept what he was told simply because there was no evidence to the contrary. And he didn’t have to nurse his doubts in the darkness of his own soul, powerless to do anything about them. He did what he was in a habit of doing whenever somebody crossed him. He set about making Horn pay.”
It was amazing to McKendrick—alarming, even—that he’d been able to get the story out without interruption. He’d expected to have to fend off furious interjections and battle to the end through his daughter’s distress and disbelief. Her silent stare unnerved him. But he didn’t want to prompt her. He wanted to give her all the time she needed to absorb what he’d said and make sense of how she felt about it.
Finally she favored him with a cool smile and said calmly, “Well, he saw you coming, didn’t he?” As if he’d been sold a racehorse with four left feet.
“I think it’s the truth,” he managed, suddenly defensive.
She shook her head bemusedly. “For a hardheaded businessman, you’re a mug for a sob story. Of course it isn’t the truth. We know what the truth