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

up against something you can’t deal with. Hell, it’s why we went out. He could have stayed with the university climbing club and got really good on indoor walls and the routes that figure in the guidebooks, the ones where you’re likely to meet someone’s mom on the way down. He could have done that with you, couldn’t he? But he didn’t want to. It wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to be up there at the sharp end, finding routes and making them, and for that neither you nor any of his university friends were good enough. For that he needed me.
    â€œYou know why? Because I’m good.” There wasn’t much pride in the way he said it: mostly it was bitterness. “I’m strong, and I’m savvy, and I don’t give up easily. I can take the pain, and the exhaustion, and still want to go on—still find some way of going on. Patrick was the same. Apart from the university thing, of course. He talked posher than me. He was cleverer than me. But up there, where the wind and the ice don’t much care about your accent or the letters after your name, we were pretty much alike. Most of the time”—the most fractional of catches—“I knew what he was thinking, what he was going to do next.
    â€œWe hardly talked when we were climbing. We didn’t have to. I always knew what he was going to try because it was always what I’d have done in the same situation.” He took a moment then to get the words in the right order. “That’s what I did on Anarchy Ridge. I did what he’d have done for me in the same situation. I did my best. I held him for as long as I could. When I couldn’t hold him anymore, and the only alternative was dying with him, I let him go.”
    He moistened his bruised lips. “If you think you can make me feel worse about that, you’re wrong. If you think you can make me wonder if it was the right decision, you’re wrong about that too. I know it was the right decision. If I’d been hanging on his rope, it’s what I’d have wanted Patrick to do. I’d have wanted him to do everything in his power to save me—and when it wasn’t enough, I’d have wanted him to save himself. To survive. To get home and tell people what happened. That I’d got the death I wanted. That I’d rather have lived, but if I had to die, that was the place to do it. That I never wanted to be buried anywhere other than a mountain glacier.
    â€œMind,” he added as a sarcastic footnote, “I never went to university. I don’t think you can do a PhD in joinery. Pity, really. Maybe if I’d got a PhD, I’d behave more like an officer and a gentleman, and see the point of having two people dead on a mountain when you could just have one.”
    It was the most talking Horn had done since McKendrick had met him. It was the nearest thing to eloquence he’d heard from him. It made him view Horn in a rather different light. It didn’t make him change his mind about anything, though.
    It had more of an effect on Beth. She’d gone very white. Now a flush of pink stole up her cheeks. She opened her mouth to reply but no words came. As if, McKendrick thought critically, she were willing to beat a cowering dog but not one that might snap back.
    But he remembered how upset she’d been by Patrick Hanratty’s death. She’d hardly talked about it—they had never, thought McKendrick ruefully, been great talkers—but first the news and then the details that emerged over the following weeks had swept the feet from under her. As if she and young Hanratty had been better friends than he’d realized.
    She stood frozen, staring at Horn’s battered, embattled face as if he’d stepped out of one of her nightmares and she didn’t know what to do about him. Then she clamped her jaw shut, turned abruptly and left the room, slamming the door behind her so that the air