at that. Go on, let’s hear you. Laugh at that.” He struck again, and then again. “Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with? I buy and sell people like you every day!” He hit Horn once more, for luck.
“Mack. Mack!” Beth was dragging on his sleeve like a child. Except that she wasn’t: she was using all her strength to try to restrain him. But all her strength was no match for all of his. “Please! That’s enough.”
Time flies when you’re having fun. McKendrick hadn’t been counting, but if he’d been asked to guess, he’d have said maybe he slapped Horn two or three times over six or seven seconds. When Beth’s urgent demands recalled him to himself, he found that somehow rather more time, and rather more fists, had flown than he’d realized. Horn was hanging almost unconscious from his left hand. Blood from his mouth and nose covered Horn’s shirtfront, and McKendrick’s hand to the wrist, and spattered the monitors and the floor. When—days from now, perhaps even weeks—the police came looking for them, they’d assume the massacre started here, in the hall. And in a way they’d be right.
McKendrick hadn’t meant to beat the younger man senseless, but he was a long way from forgiving him, even after the rage had passed. He opened his fist and watched with cold dislike as Horn slid down the wall, his strong young limbs rubbery, his wits scattered.
Beth hadn’t forgiven him either, and she had more of a grudge to hold. But it’s easier to hate someone you’ve never met, whose secrets you’ve never heard, than someone you’ve watched taking a hammering and choosing not to fight back. Horn didn’t see the first blow coming, she thought, and toward the end he was incapable of fending them off, much less returning them. But in between there was half a minute where he stood and took it, his own fists hanging loose at his sides, making no attempt to defend himself. For all the world, thought Beth, as if he’d been waiting four years for this; as if through all his despair he’d clung to the hope that somebody beating the crap out of him for what had happened would somehow make it easier to bear.
Shocked by the violence—it’s one thing to hear of men beating one another witless, quite another to witness it—and the whirlpool of her own feelings, she stood staring down at Horn, her lips parted as if on a question, waiting for him to move. To get up, to say something, to ask for help—anything. When he didn’t, wordlessly she turned and went into the kitchen.
She returned with a wet cloth. First she dropped it on his chest. But he made no attempt to do anything with it, so after a moment she took it back and, bending, cleaned the worst of the blood from his face. Then she tipped his head forward and laid the cold wet of it on the back of his neck.
When she straightened up, his eyes were watching her.
McKendrick turned his back on Horn as something beneath contempt, transferring his attention—belatedly, it could be argued—to the monitors. Most of them were now reporting nothing. Such pictures as remained were scenic postcard shots of pleasant terraces and rolling acres. Perhaps the visitor hadn’t been able to reach the cameras, or perhaps he hadn’t seen much need to.
“We’ve lost our edge,” said McKendrick tightly.
“Not much of an edge,” ventured Beth. She was walking on eggshells. She’d never seen her father roused to such fury, was wary of provoking a fresh outburst. “The only time we saw him was as he shot out that camera.”
It was true, but it wasn’t much comfort. “So if he could avoid being seen till now, why do the cameras suddenly matter? What’s he about to do that’s different?”
There was only one possible answer, “He’s going to try to come in here,” said Beth.
“Right.” McKendrick’s glance was glacial. As if, at least for this moment, how he felt about Horn was how he felt about her too. “And while he was planning how and where and when, the two people who were supposed to be looking out for him, who were entrusted with all our lives, were arguing about which of them was a dead mountaineer’s best bitch!” Nothing in his tone, or his face or his eyes suggested he found a kind of black humor in the situation. Beth knew that he was deathly serious. And he