Death in High Places by Jo Bannister Read Free Book Online Page A

hadn’t. “You knew him?”
    â€œYes, I knew him. We were at university together.” She said it with a kind of unconscious hubris. “We were both in the climbing club. He was way out of my league, but we did several routes together. And guess what? Every time we climbed— every time—the same number of people came down as went up.”
    Something changed in Nicky Horn’s eyes. It had been his last redoubt, the belief that other climbers—who understood and accepted the risks, who could imagine finding themselves in the same cruel quandary—might judge him less harshly than the general public, whose view of what happened was shaped by tabloid headlines consisting largely of exclamation marks. If he was wrong about that, then he was entirely alone—a pariah, unforgiven and unforgivable.
    The only way to survive with the whole world against you is to fight.
    He’d been running for four years. From Tommy Hanratty, but also from the past. Now there was nowhere left to go. This woman with her iron eyes had nailed his soul to the wall. She knew who he was, she knew the story of what he’d done—she thought she knew everything. But if there was nowhere left to hide, there was no reason left to try. In so far as he could be honest with anyone, he could be honest with her. It might not do much to salve her hatred of him, but that wasn’t the point. Hatred is a corrosive, like acid splashed on skin. Self-hatred is like injecting it into a vein. For once he wanted to stand up like a man and hit back, because if he didn’t he’d go to his grave without even trying to set the record straight. Or no, not that—setting the record straight was the last thing he wanted, he’d thrown his life away to avoid setting the record straight. But there were things he needed to say to someone, and she’d do.
    McKendrick saw him stiffen, the strong muscles drawing his sturdy, compact frame into a state of balanced tension. In such a state he could have crimped his fingertips on a ledge of rock and swung out over the void, feeling the fear but doing it anyway— knowing he could do it anyway. Adrenaline fed into his blood not in a wild rush but like fuel injected into a highly tuned engine, equipping him first to face his demons and then to deal with them. To conquer them or die trying.
    â€œPatrick Hanratty was my friend,” he said again. There was a tremor in his voice that McKendrick thought Horn was unaware of, that McKendrick attributed not so much to fear or even anger as the absolute need to get this said. Horn had taken everything Beth had to throw at him, and now it was his turn. There was the sense that he’d been waiting for it for a long time. “More than that, he was my climbing partner. You knew him at university? Wow, I’m impressed. I bet you went punting on the river and everything, didn’t you? I bet you wore matching scarves.
    â€œBut it wasn’t you he went to Alaska with. Or to Utah, or the Cascades, or even the Alps.” McKendrick almost fancied he felt a cold wind breathe through the little room as Horn spoke. “When the climbing was going to be hard, and dangerous, and he knew as we all do that if he fell there’d only be one chance for someone to catch him, it wasn’t you he wanted on his rope. It was me.
    â€œWe climbed in places where no one could help if it all went wrong—where no one would even know. And it did go wrong. Not once, but again and again. He owed his life to me more times than either of us could count, and I owed mine to him. And we never, ever wore matching scarves.”
    He sucked in a hard breath. “What happened on Anarchy Ridge wasn’t a fluke. It didn’t come out of nowhere and take us by surprise. When you climb the way we did, pioneering our own routes, our own mountains sometimes, every time you go out you know there’s a real risk you’re going to come