as if it still held the murder weapon. He went on staring at the older man with appalled, incredulous eyes while his skin crawled and his exhausted body shook. When he could get a word out, it was “Why?”
McKendrick shrugged negligently and took his hand back. “What do you mean, why? He was going to kill you. He meant to kill all of us.”
“He wasn’t going to kill anybody hanging on a rope twenty meters off the ground!”
“But you weren’t going to leave him there, were you? He’d taken money to kill you. As soon as he was able to, he’d have tried again.”
“No.”
McKendrick grinned—humorless, a shark’s grin. “Gave you his word, did he?”
“Yes.”
“And you believed him.”
“I was prepared to take the chance.”
McKendrick turned away with a disparaging sniff. “Well, I wasn’t.”
“No one asked you to! He let you go. You could just have driven away.”
“As a matter of fact, we couldn’t. He’d fixed the car so it wouldn’t start. Nicky, he never meant for any of us to get away. He was just splitting us up so he could deal with us one at a time.”
Which put a slightly different complexion on things, even in Horn’s raging heart. “That was … before…” he said uncertainly.
“Before? Before he cut my daughter’s face to shreds? Before he followed you up here with a gun in his hand? Or do you mean, before you tied a bit of old rope round your middle and threw yourself off a castle wall because you couldn’t see any other way that gave you even that much chance of surviving the day? Don’t fool yourself, Nicky. It was him or us. It was always going to be him or us. It was better that it was him.”
Horn, blinking, shook his head. As if there were stuff in there that he wanted to dislodge. As if there were a hope in the world that shaking his head would be enough to do it. It wasn’t so much that a man had died. It wasn’t even how he’d died. It was that the man who’d killed him hadn’t so much as broken sweat over the decision. It might have been something he’d worked out at his desk, with the profit-and-loss accounts by his elbow. It was what made sense, what the situation required. And Robert McKendrick was, Horn had come to understand, a good choice for doing what a situation required, whether it was closing a factory or firing a CEO or cutting a man’s rope when he was a hand’s span from safety. Not a lot of sentimentality with McKendrick, not a lot of breast-beating. Just, do what’s needed and move on.
Horn had thought he was a hard man until he got to know McKendrick.
Horn hauled himself to his feet—the hand wasn’t offered again—and freed himself from the rope. He made himself look over the parapet.
And the mess on the gravel wasn’t the most upsetting thing he saw. “Mack—what’s she doing?”
* * *
McKendrick, aided by familiarity and spurred by fear, took the steps three at a time, reckless of a fall. Horn followed more slowly, but not much. By the time he reached the front hall McKendrick had got the door open and was reaching for the girl who knelt on the gravel.
“Beth. Beth! What are you doing? Come away…”
“He’s hurt,” she explained patiently. “He fell.” She brushed off her father’s hand and continued trying to sit Hanratty’s man up against the wheel of the car. He was too heavy, and also too dead—it was like moving twelve stone of wet concrete in a sack. When she got his shoulders off the ground, his broken head tipped back, or forward, or sideways, and took the slack torso with it. Time and again the dead man hit the ground. Time and again, with the kind of bemused perseverance of someone who doesn’t know quite what they’re doing and so doesn’t know how to stop, Beth leaned over him, as oblivious of his blood as she was her own, and tried to prop him up.
McKendrick turned to Horn with fear stretching his eyes. Horn had wondered what it would take to fracture his inhuman cool, and this was the answer. McKendrick’s lips quivered and words babbled out. “She’s … she’s not well … tired … hurt … Help me. Help me get her inside. She needs … she needs … she needs to sit down. Beth! Come inside. She needs a doctor. Call the doctor! Can we? The phones