will you go?”
“I’m not telling you that!” Horn cranked out a thin smile. “I don’t know yet. Somewhere I’ve no reason to go—that’s always the best. Hanratty will look for someone else to take the contract, but there’ll be no trail to pick up. It’ll take him months to find me again.”
“But he will?”
“Oh, yes. Eventually.” There was an unbearable fragility to his smile. “Unless something happens first. Tommy Hanratty may have a change of heart. Slightly more likely, he may have a heart attack and his widow decide she has better uses for his money than paying a hit man. It’s a head start. I’ll settle for that.”
McKendrick, his arm protective around his daughter’s shoulder, regarded Horn for a long time before reaching a decision and nodding. “All right. Get on your way. Take his car—I’ll tell the police I never saw it so I can’t give them a description. And you’re going to need money. I keep a few thousand in the safe—if you’ll sit with Beth for a minute, I’ll go and get it. Call me when that’s gone and I’ll send you some more.”
Horn shook his head. “I don’t want your money.”
“You mightn’t want it. You’re going to need it.”
“No more than I did last week, and I managed fine then. I can earn what I need, as long as I can stop running long enough. There’s plenty of casual work around for a tradesman.”
“Then … I won’t see you again?” McKendrick was surprised by the regret in his own voice.
“Unless they pull me out of a ditch somewhere and slap my face on the front of your newspaper.” Horn was making a joke, but both men knew it could happen exactly like that.
For some minutes they drank the coffee and said nothing more. Finally Horn went to go. But he paused in the doorway and looked back. “What will you do about … the other thing? You know I’m not going to do it, don’t you?”
McKendrick nodded—carefully, Beth had gone to sleep on his shoulder. “I know that now. You were never a good choice. But then, you were never the man you were meant to be. The man you claimed to be.”
“You understand why? Why all the lies?”
“Not really,” said McKendrick honestly. “I can imagine doing what you did, I just can’t imagine doing it for the reason you did it.” He lapsed into a reflective silence as the echo of what he’d said caught up with him. Horn had embarked on the lie that was going to get him killed in a misguided effort to be kind. Kindness was the bit McKendrick couldn’t get his head round.
He blinked and changed the subject. “I’ll need to rethink everything now. What if it’s not me who’s going to get ill, who’s going to need looking after? I can’t opt out if Beth’s going to need me.”
Nicky Horn nodded, and stole a last troubled look at the damaged girl sleeping on her father’s shoulder. Then he turned through the entrance hall and down the steps, past the dead man on the gravel, and out across the grass to where his car was parked under the hedge. Horn never broke his stride and never looked back, and he felt his burden lighten with every step.
* * *
Two years passed. Robert McKendrick made a point of reading those bits of the newspaper that didn’t directly relate to business, but he never saw anything that suggested that Tommy Hanratty had caught up with Nicky Horn or that time had caught up with Hanratty.
Beth’s face healed well. But McKendrick remained deeply anxious about her state of mind. He took her—protesting but resigned, humoring him—to see their doctor. Of course, McKendrick was less than candid about the reason for his concerns. He talked about the vagueness, the lapses of memory, the loss of focus that he’d witnessed in his daughter since the siege of Birkholmstead, and he reminded the GP of the family history hanging like Damocles’s sword over all the McKendricks.
It wasn’t enough—in truth, it was nowhere near enough—for a responsible GP to diagnose Alzheimer’s dementia in a woman of twenty-six. He thought post-traumatic stress a much likelier explanation, and suggested that time and perhaps counseling would effect a cure. McKendrick demanded referral to a consultant; but she agreed with the GP. She saw nothing in Beth’s manner or behavior—at least, the behavior she’d been told about—to justify even considering early-onset dementia.
McKendrick wouldn’t be comforted. He knew in his bones