Death in High Places - By Jo Bannister Page 0,70

words were said, they couldn’t be recalled. He’d been hoping to widen their options. Instead he’d narrowed them. Now he could call the police, he couldn’t afford to. Whatever else he did and didn’t want, his first priority was what it had always been: to protect his daughter.

“That’s how he found us. She phoned him. At least, she phoned Hanratty, and he called his mechanic.” But euphemisms didn’t work with Horn. “His hit man.”

This time Horn understood what he was being told. But he thought McKendrick was wrong. He shook his head with conviction. “The phones weren’t working, remember? There was no signal. You kept taking them onto the roof to look for one, but they were dead.”

“There was never a problem with the signal,” sighed McKendrick. “Beth had the phones. Beth kept taking them upstairs and saying she’d had no luck. She didn’t want me to call for help. She wanted to give Hanratty’s man time to arrive.”

“But … he followed us. You said he followed us.”

“He didn’t.”

“You can’t know that. He’s a pro—this stuff is second nature to him. He could follow you from here to Timbuktu and you’d never see him.”

“It isn’t the same man.”

“No?” Horn looked at the monitor again, his head tilting to one side. He could only see part of the man’s face behind Beth’s head, but he thought perhaps McKendrick was right. “Okay, so there’s two of them.”

“No. Only one of them works for Tommy Hanratty. This one.” McKendrick nodded at the screen. He hesitated only a moment before putting the rest of his cards on the table. “The other one—the one who broke into your flat—was working for me.”

Anyone who does anything remotely dangerous, either as a living or for fun, knows that moment when everything changes. When the quarry turns and becomes the hunter; when the sea decides to swallow you; when the mountain has had enough and shrugs you off. If you’ve only ever read about it in books, you’d think that lightning reactions are what save you then. Snatch up the rifle, throw over the helm, slam in the ice ax. The truth is a little different. What usually saves you is freezing for the split second that prevents you from making a bad decision. It’s more important not to do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing.

Horn froze now. His muscles froze, locking his bones into a half crouch in front of the security screens. His expression froze, at the point that the tender green shoots of comprehension were pushing through the heavy clay of confusion. What remained active—what speeded up, in fact, fed by the electrical energy saved by temporarily closing down his body—was his mind. It raced. His eyes narrowed and darkened as the thoughts spun and connected and amassed information like the cogs of a Difference Engine.

So he didn’t say, “What?” again. He didn’t accuse McKendrick of making it up. He didn’t even take a swing at him, although he might have done if his muscles had unfrozen a little quicker. Instead he said in a low voice, “You hired someone to beat me up?”

“Yes.”

“You hired someone to break into my room while I was asleep, wave a gun at me and make me think I was going to die? Why?” But the answer was obvious. “So you could rescue me, and I’d owe you a favor.”

“Exactly so.” McKendrick didn’t sound as if he was confessing to something wicked. “That’s how I know he didn’t follow us here. He took his money and went home to his girlfriend, who’s called Stacey and has fifteen-month-old twin girls. He’s a bit-part actor, although he works as a nightclub bouncer at weekends. He says he’s going to marry Stacey and use the money as a deposit on a two-up two-down in Derby.”

“You paid someone to beat me up!”

“Yes. Yes, I did. Get over it.”

“I never did you any harm!”

“I know. I’d have offered you the money, but I didn’t think it would achieve the same result.”

Horn stared at him almost more in astonishment than anger. “You’ve got me killed! Between you, you and your crazy daughter, you’ve driven me out of a place where I was safe, at least for a while, and brought me here, and told the guy who wants me dead where to find me. I’m going to die here, not because I got tired and made a mistake but because you wanted the kind of help you can’t advertise for