never asked for your help, and maybe that was because he didn’t want it, but maybe it was for the same reason you won’t ask Beth—he didn’t want you to ruin your life rescuing him from his. For that you need someone you don’t care about. Someone you have a hold over, and someone with nothing to lose.
“What would you have done if Hanratty’s man hadn’t caught up with me just then? It was the perfect opportunity to put me in your debt—it could have been a while before you found another one as good. That’s why you were watching me. To find something I needed that you could provide, so when the time came I’d provide something you needed.
“It isn’t William’s life you want me to finish off, is it?” Nicky Horn’s voice was thin as paper. As if he were staring into an abyss. “When things get too hard—when the brain cells start to die, and first of all you can’t run a financial empire anymore, then you can’t keep the household accounts, then you can’t add two and two without using your fingers—you want to be able to pick up the phone and say, ‘It’s time,’ and have me come and put an end to yours.”
CHAPTER 12
HE COULDN’T BELIEVE what he was saying. All the same, he knew this time he’d got it right. Even he wasn’t sick enough to have dreamed it up if the clues weren’t there, if the tap-tap-tapping in his brain wasn’t the explanation trying to get itself heard.
But he expected McKendrick to deny it. The man volunteered nothing. He’d gone to considerable lengths, and no small amount of risk, to get his way on this, and to get it without anyone else knowing what he had in mind.
Robert McKendrick was a powerful man. He’d been a successful and powerful man in a cutthroat business for so long that it informed all his dealings, defined the very shape that he occupied in the world. Part of it was that he lied all the time. He told business competitors that he wanted things that he didn’t want, and had things that he didn’t have, and wasn’t interested in things he’d have sold his granny to get hold of. It was like a great game of charades, only without the rules. He thought nothing of lying—not when it was him doing it, not when it was a rival. It was how the game was played.
But that was when the other players were also successful and powerful men. He never lied to underlings, people of no consequence. He would have deemed it beneath him. He met Horn’s stare of godforsaken shock and said, “Yes.” Quite calmly. Not as if he was saying something that should have shook the heavens.
“No!” exclaimed Horn.
“I assure you,” said McKendrick solemnly, “you’ve finally got there. It may have taken you all morning, you may have gone all round the houses first, but you’ve finally got it right. William may not have thought far enough ahead to know what was going to happen to him and take steps to deal with it, but I did. I found you.”
“I mean, no,” stumbled Horn. “I won’t do it.”
McKendrick elevated an eyebrow at him. “You’ve already agreed. A contract exists.”
“I didn’t know then!”
“You knew what you were getting out of it. Your life—which, may I remind you, was entirely uninsurable at the point at which I stepped in. Was there anything you wouldn’t have given for it right then?”
“No. Yes! I don’t know. But I told you—I told you—I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“No one’s going to be hurt. I told you, it’s a victimless crime.”
“You want me to kill you! To put you to sleep, like an old dog that keeps peeing on the rug!”
“But I can’t be the victim if it’s my choice!” Then the exasperation melted out of his voice and McKendrick sighed. “Nicky, you’re a young man. When I was your age, I was afraid of death as well. I know better now. I saw my father reduced to a helpless shell. I saw the terror in his eyes. It never left him. Long after he’d forgotten who I was, after he’d forgotten who he was, he knew absolutely the horror of what was happening to him.
“People say that Alzheimer’s is harder on the family than on the patient.” McKendrick shook his head. “Don’t you believe it. My father suffered every day. He was frightened every day. He imagined things that weren’t real,