Death in High Places (11 page)

The tower was not central but offset to one side so that looking down he could see the leads of another roof, and below it again a wider one that had been turned into a terrace by the addition of a couple of bistro chairs and a table. The main entrance where McKendrick had left his car was on the south side, and there was another in the stone-flagged courtyard to the west, which Horn supposed was Beth's. He walked round the high parapet, looking for a third, and couldn't spot it.

And then he did. A dark green station wagon was drawn up against the boundary hedge a quarter of a mile away, all but invisible to anyone who hadn't a really good reason for looking, totally unmemorable to anyone lacking a really good reason to remember. Horn had such a reason. And that wasn't the car he'd been forced into six hours earlier. The first thing Hanratty's man had done after McKendrick interrupted him at his work was change his car. The consummate professional. The thought cheered Nicky Horn not at all.

McKendrick was attaching his mother-in-law's best supper cloth to the flag halyard with deft movements of his wrists and knots that Horn didn't recognize. Of course, when Horn tied a knot he was about to trust his life to it, not a nice bit of table linen. “Do this a lot, do you?”

McKendrick grinned. “Not as much as I do it on the boat.”

Horn nodded toward the distant car. “I'm guessing that doesn't belong to the bird-watching vicar.”

McKendrick peered where he was indicating. “You think that's our friend's?”

Horn strove to remain polite. “I'm pretty sure it will be.”

“I still don't know how the hell he got here.”

“He followed us. He just did it carefully.”

But McKendrick wouldn't have it. “I'd have known. It's a two-hour drive, and a lot of it's on roads that no one else uses, at least not in the early hours of the morning. He couldn't have kept us in sight without me seeing him, at least from time to time. I'm telling you, there was no one behind us.”

To Horn the answer was obvious. “There must have been. Unless you really did call him when we got here.”

McKendrick bent on him a look of disfavor, declining to dignify the accusation with a reply. He peered at the distant car. “Can you see him?”

“I don't expect to. Not till it's too late.”

McKendrick frowned at him. “You're a pessimistic son of a bitch, aren't you?”

“I'm a realist.”

McKendrick considered for a moment. “You climb, I sail. We've both been in more life-threatening situations than most people. We've both walked away from situations that could have killed us—that
should
have killed us. What's to say this won't be another one?”

“The sea isn't trying to kill you,” Horn reminded him, tight-lipped. “The mountains don't care if you live or die. Him out there: he cares. He cares enough to keep trying until he succeeds. He won't give up. He'll keep coming back till he finishes the job.”

“Believe that and you're as good as dead already.”

“I know,” said Horn, and it was in his eyes and in his voice that while he'd long ago reached the same conclusion, he had never come to terms with it. “Mr. McKendrick, I've been a dead man running since Tommy Hanratty realized the law wasn't going to give him the satisfaction he required. At first it was his own people, heavies off his payroll. It wasn't too hard staying ahead of them. They're not the sharpest knives in the drawer—most of them could be out-thought by a rubber duck. When Hanratty realized that as well, he got in a pro. And he's a whole different ball game. I'm still running. But I know I can't stay ahead of him forever.”

McKendrick regarded him thoughtfully. “Call me Mack.”

Somehow, that wasn't what Horn was expecting. “What?”

“Everyone calls me Mack. Even Beth. If we're going to die together, we might as well be on first-name terms.”

“Fine. Whatever.” It really wasn't Horn's highest priority just now. “You can call me…”

“Yes?” A small waiting smile.

“
Anything
but Anarchy Horn.”

They went back inside, down one flight of narrow stairs onto a corridor, stopped at a black oak door. “This is William's room.” But McKendrick didn't knock before they went in.

Invalids' rooms, whether in castles or cottages, have only two smells. Well-cared-for invalids smell of talcum powder; neglected invalids smell of urine. William McKendrick's room smelled of talcum powder.

It was a big room, and because it occupied one corner of the castle its mullioned windows commanded views on two sides. Under one was a comfortable sofa with a coffee table and a scattering of magazines. The second had been converted to French windows that opened onto the little terrace Horn had seen from the tower. Inside the door to the left was a large oak armoire, to the right a chest of drawers with a television on top of it, at the foot of the bed a big carved blanket-box. It was a high bed, higher than normal, and not Jacobean oak but painted metal festooned with power lines. A hospital bed. It had been positioned close to the French windows, for the air and the view.

As he looked, at first Horn thought the bed was empty. The sheets seemed too flat to conceal a human being. Nevertheless, that was where William McKendrick was: in his high hospital bed, sitting up against his starched white pillows, gazing out of his French window with the distant preoccupation that the very clever sometimes share with the almost vegetative.

For another moment Horn wasn't sure which camp the other McKendrick belonged in. Then Mack left Horn's side and, taking a tissue, wiped a strand of drool from his brother's perfectly shaven jaw. He said softly, “This is my brother William. Someone to see you, Billy.”

Horn hesitated in the doorway, feeling awkward. “Won't he mind…?”

Robert McKendrick smiled and shook his head. “William likes visitors. His social circle isn't what it once was. I'm sure he's bored to death seeing the same old faces all the time.”

William McKendrick's eyes were a pale and faded blue, and Horn was not convinced that they saw anything at all. Or, if they saw, that his brain made any sense of the image. He looked at Horn with the same uncritical incomprehension that Horn had once looked at a painting by Picasso.

Horn swallowed. “Was it a stroke?”

Mack shook his head again. “Alzheimer's disease. Senile dementia.”

“He doesn't look old enough.”

“He was unlucky,” said McKendrick distantly. “It started while he was in his early fifties. The peak of his career. He was a barrister.” He smiled at the man in the bed, who smiled back hesitantly as if wondering if that was the expected response. “The terror of the Old Bailey, weren't you, Billy? Horace Rumpole had nothing on you. And then this started.”

Horn wasn't sure how much he was expected to contribute. “How old is William now?”

“He's sixty-two. He's ten years older than I am.”

“And how long…?” Horn didn't finish the sentence, aware that it verged on the impertinent.

“Has he been like this? Completely locked in, about three years. But he's been ill for nearly ten, and every one of those years took away more of his past and his personality. It's a cruel disease, Nicky. Most illnesses can only threaten your present and your future. Dementia steals both the past and the person who lived it.”

“I'm sorry,” said Horn, though he was aware it didn't go far. He looked again at the man in the bed, trying to fathom how much of him was left. “Does he understand what we're saying?” He meant, Should we be talking in front of him?

“I'm not sure,” said McKendrick honestly. “There's a lot that passes him by. On the other hand, he knows where he is—if we have to move him he becomes terribly distressed. I stopped taking him for hospital appointments. They weren't doing him any good, and being in a strange place upset him. So now we do what we can for him here, and what we can't do doesn't get done.”

“You look after him?” Even with all the equipment, it was hard to overestimate the scale of the commitment.

“He has a nurse who comes in by day.” McKendrick saw Horn's eyes widen, anticipated his next question. “Usually. I gave him the week off. I knew I was going to be around, it seemed a good chance.” He lifted narrow shoulders in a rueful shrug. “Not necessarily the best call ever. Except, of course, from the nurse's point of view.”

Horn nodded slowly. “And that's it, is it? That's everyone in the house? No more surprises? William doesn't have a wife and six children that you haven't got round to mentioning yet?”

“William
does
have a wife,” said McKendrick, “and two children. Margot lives in the States; I don't know where the kids are now. They couldn't cope with William's illness. They were used to depending on him, couldn't face the idea that he was going to be dependent on them. For everything, for the rest of his life.”

“She left him?” It was none of his business, and Horn tried to keep his voice neutral.

McKendrick gave a gruff chuckle. “Not exactly. She just went on holiday and hasn't come back yet.”

“When?”

“About eight years ago.”

Horn's family had never been the conventional nuclear model, but it had been warm and close and he'd been into his teens before he realized it was unusual enough to raise eyebrows. But he'd cut himself off from them after Alaska. Not because they blamed him for what happened. All the Horns were fiercely loyal: matriarch Angela, she of the Velcro-fastened underwear, took as her mantra the Arab proverb “Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.” They'd have stood shoulder to shoulder with Nicky whatever he'd done: it was how they operated. It was his decision to stay away. If a man with a gun came to their door one day, he wanted them to be able to say with absolute honesty that they hadn't heard from Nicky in years. Not because he thought they might betray him, but because he was genuinely afraid what Tommy Hanratty might do if he thought they could provide the information he wanted and wouldn't.

But he never stopped loving them and he never stopped missing them. Two of his sisters had families of their own now: he was an uncle. His mother had been starting to have trouble with her eyes. It weighed on him that she might be blind by now and he didn't know. Sometimes he spent all night plotting how he might get in touch with one or another of them without leaving a trail; but in the cold, hard light of morning he always decided it simply wasn't worth the risk. For himself he'd have taken it, but not for them. They had so much more to lose.

So while to all intents and purposes he had no family now, it wasn't long since he'd been an integral part of a close-knit clan whose members argued passionately and behaved irresponsibly and loved without reservation. And he couldn't imagine any one of them turning their backs on another of them who fell ill.

McKendrick saw him recoil and his tone softened. “It's asking a lot, you know. William now isn't the man that she married. You expect to grow old and stiff and doddery together—you don't expect that one of you will jump the gun by thirty years. It sounds great, doesn't it—all that
in sickness and in health
stuff. And if he'd fallen off his hunter and ended up in a wheelchair, or if he'd got cancer and gone bald and frail and left her a widow before she was fifty, I don't doubt she'd have done her best for him and seen it through to the bitter end. Alzheimer's is different. It doesn't kill you. William could live into his nineties. But everything that made him William—that made Margot marry him and have two children with him—has gone. I never held it against her—well, not really, not for long—that she didn't want to see him reduced like this.” He gave his brother a friendly grin that robbed the words of their sting.

“Marriage is a matter of choice,” he went on pensively. “You choose someone to spend your life with. If they change, even if it's not their fault, maybe it's fair enough to consider all bets off. The family you're born into is different. They
have
to take you as you are, for better or worse. If Margot finally gets a divorce, William will no longer be her husband. But he'll always be my brother.” He looked at the man in the bed with a mixture of sorrow and affection. “I promised him this would be his home for as long as he lived.”

A terrible thought occurred to McKendrick. “My God. You don't suppose he”—a glance toward the window and the car at the bottom of the garden—“would kill the rest of us and leave William alive?”

It was possible. Even a very cautious man could see no danger of being identified by William McKendrick. But it was plain, in Mack's face and in his tone, that that was not the reassurance he sought. Horn told him what he needed to hear. “No. By the time he gets in here, he'll just want to finish the job as quickly as he can and get out again. He won't even ask himself why William's still in bed.”

The tall man nodded, relieved. He said in a low voice, “I'd kill him myself before I'd let that happen. Before I'd leave him to be nursed in a geriatric ward.”

Horn believed him. He cleared his throat, changed the subject. “So if we can't move William downstairs, how are we going to do this?”

“I'll stay here. We won't make any noise, will we, Billy? You watch the monitors in the hall.”

“I don't know how to operate the security system.”

“Beth does.”

Horn had no wish to spend the last few hours of his life with someone who despised him. “Or Beth could sit with William.”

“She can't lift him on her own. I can. Except…” McKendrick looked at the bedside table, indicated a plastic device with an incongruous clown's face. “There's the baby monitor. We can keep the speaker with us. Then if she needs a hand, she can let me know.” His voice adopted the bright, cheery tone appropriate for addressing invalids. “That all right, Billy? If Beth comes and sits with you for a while?” There was no measurable alteration in the white-faced basilisk stare. “Good. Fine.”