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than common. He’d never wasted much time fretting about his antecedents. “I never knew my father.”
    She laughed with a kind of savage delight. “You mean, you’re a bastard in more ways than one.”
    â€œThat’s right,” he said calmly. “My mother was the local bike—anyone could get on and give her a run round. And she never could read a bloody calendar—I’ve got three sisters and a brother. Funny thing is, though, she looked after us. She loved us. All I meant to my father was that he had to find another hooker. Even if I knew his name, why would I want to use it?”
    He could have left it at that. Beth was looking chastened, almost a little ashamed, and he already knew her well enough to know that was a victory in itself. He didn’t have to add, casually but with the sort of perfect timing that ensured the dart got clean under the skin, “Anyway, what do you suppose your father was doing in a red-light district at three in the morning? Advising the prostitutes on their share holdings?”
    He was pretty sure he’d told her something she didn’t know. Perhaps he’d told her something she didn’t need to know. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped for a moment before she regained control. “Like I’m going to believe you!”
    Horn shrugged. “It’s nothing to me if he spends his nights trawling the back streets of Black Country towns sixty miles from where he lives. He’s not my father. At least”—he gave a sharklike grin—“I don’t think he is. But if he was, I probably wouldn’t look down my nose at people who owe their existence to men exactly like him.”
    â€œMy father doesn’t use prostitutes!” she shouted in his face. “He doesn’t need to use prostitutes. Look at him—look at how we live. You think women don’t queue up for a chance with him?”
    â€œYou explain it, then,” said Horn, aware he’d found the chink in her armor but not particularly happy with the advantage it gave him. “I know what I was doing there—I was living there. I know what the man with the gun was doing there—he was looking for me. What was McKendrick doing there?”
    She had no answer. She didn’t know and couldn’t imagine what would take him to such a place at such a time. She didn’t believe it was the need for no-strings-attached sex. Not because the idea was anathema to her but because it was so wildly improbable. She wouldn’t have been horrified if it turned out to be the truth, but she would have been astonished. If Robert McKendrick had wanted no-strings-attached sex, he could have got it a lot closer than sixty miles away. There were country clubs and golf clubs within five miles of the castle where they’d have drawn lots.
    So it wasn’t that. In Beth McKendrick’s experience, things that improbable didn’t happen; but sometimes it was in someone’s interests to make it look as if they happened. She said slowly, the words putting themselves together and in the process shaping the unfledged notion in her head, “None of this is entirely real, is it?”
    Horn barked a surprised laugh. He knew from the tightness of the skin, the still exquisite tenderness of the nerves of his teeth, that his face was swollen out of shape. “It felt pretty real. Especially the bit where I was looking down the barrel of a gun. And the bit where he rattled every tooth in my head—I don’t think I imagined that.”
    But she was chewing her lip pensively. “Nor do I. I think that whoever set this up wanted to make it seem real. To both of you—you and Mack.”
    She’d lost him. “Set what up?”
    â€œSomeone wanted to bring you two together. Someone clever, and with money to spend on making it happen. That hit man—whether he was a real one or just a good actor—wouldn’t come