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.
“Patrick 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.
“But 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.
“We 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 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.
“You 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