Death in High Places - By Jo Bannister Page 0,69
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
NICKY HORN HONESTLY THOUGHT he’d misheard. “Sorry—weren’t we talking about Beth?”
So McKendrick spelled it out for him—reluctantly, because once the