Death in High Places - By Jo Bannister Page 0,66

think he was just unlucky.”

“You weren’t there,” whispered Nicky Horn. “I’d give anything—anything—to believe that. But I don’t. I can’t. Five hours earlier he said he loved me, and I called him a freak. They were almost the last words we said to one another.”

“You were taken by surprise.”

“I didn’t have to humiliate him! I didn’t have to rip everything from him—our friendship, his dignity, everything. He thought he’d lost the lot. He thought I despised him. And I didn’t! That was the first lie—the worst lie. I didn’t feel the way he felt, but if it had been two other guys we’d been talking about I wouldn’t have reacted like that. I don’t know why I said what I did. If we’d had one more day I could have told him—apologized, told him everything would be all right. We’d have finished the climb and gone home friends.

“Why did I do that?” By now the tears were falling openly, streaking Horn’s face. He made no effort to dash them away. McKendrick thought that he genuinely wanted an answer. That it had taken him four years to even ask the question, and now he needed an answer. “Why would I tear him apart like that?”

“Because,” said McKendrick with an uncharacteristic gentleness, “you’re only human. You make mistakes too. It was just bad timing all round. If it had happened back in England, he’d have gone out to drown his sorrows, and after the hangover had worn off he’d have been working out what he needed to do to get his life back on track. It happens all the time: people we love turn out not to love us. You get over it.

“But it didn’t happen in England. It happened on a mountain ridge in the middle of one of the world’s great wildernesses, with a gale howling in his ears. And mountains do things to people, don’t they? Beth’s talked about it. You can see so far, you feel so small.… The sea’s like that too. It sucks you in. People say they sail in order to leave their problems behind, but I don’t think that’s what it is. When you’re out there like a flyspeck on the map, surrounded by nothing but the elements, your values change. Everything’s either very, very close or very far away. It’s hard to keep a sense of perspective.

“Yes, you handled it badly. But so did Patrick. He shouldn’t have cornered you with this when there was nowhere for you to retreat. He should have known it could only end with at least one of you being hurt.”

“We were days from civilization,” Horn remembered. He was talking now almost as if he were asleep, a heartaching monotone. “I thought he couldn’t face the long hike back. When you’re climbing, your mind’s full to bursting and you put the personal stuff on the back burner. But walking back, hour after hour, after he’d reached out to me and I’d bitten his hand off at the wrist … I thought he couldn’t face it. I thought he’d decided stepping off into the whiteout was a better option.”

Against the habit of a lifetime, McKendrick found himself feeling what this young man had felt. Empathy. It’s a terrible idea in business, to feel for the people you’ve just shafted. “Nicky, you’re never going to know exactly what was going through Patrick’s head. But you know he was a good man, and a good friend. You know he’d looked after you every other time you’d climbed together, as you’d looked after him. Even if he was hurt, even if he was upset, why would he suddenly turn into someone else? If he’d fallen twelve hours earlier, you wouldn’t even have asked yourself if there was something more to it.”

“I thought—I think—I thought I’d killed him. Was responsible for his death. As surely as if I had cut the rope.” But if Horn couldn’t decide on the tense, that meant he was no longer sure. He’d felt so guilty about Patrick Hanratty’s death that he’d lied, and gone on lying even after he realized it could cost him his life. Now this tall man, this stranger, this cold man whose heart was a battlefield, was telling him he’d been mistaken. It was just an accident. Perhaps it was just an accident all along.

But if that was so … Horn shook his head. He couldn’t begin to come to terms with what that meant. That he’d spent four years running, and was