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When Charlie Kelly first messaged saying he wouldn’t make it home that night, his partner wasn’t happy. It was September 6, 2023, a Wednesday, and the 56-year-old, a keen hillwalker, had left the house that he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, near the Scottish city of Stirling, before she went to work. His plan was to climb Creise, a 1,100-meter-high peak overlooking Glen Etive, the remote Highland valley made famous by the James Bond film Skyfall.

The weather was unusually mild for the season, and Kelly thought he might even have time to “bag” a second Munro, as the Scottish mountains above 3,000 feet are known. In his time off work as a forensic psychologist for the Scottish Prisons Service, he had been ticking off the peaks steadily. “He had this book he would mark them in,” Kennedy remembers. “But we were due to go on holiday in two and a half weeks, so this was the last Munro he was going to do before the winter set in.”

Hiking wasn’t something that Kennedy was particularly keen on herself. When the pair had first met four and a half years previously, they’d bonded over a shared love of Celtic Football Club, and their “extremely quirky” sense of humor. She’d fallen in love with Kelly’s brain—his encyclopedic knowledge of all things football, Robert the Bruce, and Doctor Who. He loved the fact that she laughed at “his terrible jokes,” she says. But he also appreciated the fact that she encouraged him in passions they didn’t share. “One of the last things he said to me the night before was, ‘You let me be me,’” she says.

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