The Sentence is Death

by Anthony Horowitz

  Dave Gallivan knocked on the door and without waiting for an answer opened it and went in. We followed him into a bright, airy home, simply furnished with sisal mats on the floor, dried bulrushes in vases, photographs of caves and crevices on the walls. On one side, a door opened into a living room with an upright piano and a fireplace with more dried flowers in the hearth. A cat was lying asleep on a rug. We turned the other way and went into the kitchen, where Susan was standing, waiting for us with an enormous knife in her hand.

  For that reason, her first appearance struck me as quite menacing although in fact we had simply caught her preparing vegetables for dinner. There were chunks of carrot and potato spread out in front of her and as we came in she used the blade to sweep them off the chopping board and into a casserole.

  It had been five days since she had heard that she had lost not just her husband but her entire world and she was still in shock. She wasn’t just unsmiling. She barely seemed to notice that we had come into the room. She had a square face with skin the colour and texture of damp clay. Her hair was drab and lifeless. She was wearing a dress that was either too long or too short but looked just wrong, cut off at her calves, which were stout and beefy. She didn’t speak as Gallivan ushered us in but I could tell at once that she wished we weren’t there.

  ‘Sue – this is Mr Hawthorne,’ Gallivan announced.

  ‘Oh yes. I suppose you’ll be having some tea, will you?’

  I wasn’t sure if this was an invitation to make us some or a weary prediction as to what might be about to happen but it was uttered with an almost startling lack of enthusiasm.

  To my surprise, Hawthorne replied with alacrity. ‘A cup of tea. That would be lovely, Mrs Taylor.’

  ‘I’ll make it.’ Gallivan made his way over to the kettle. He clearly knew his way around the kitchen.

  Susan put down the knife and sat at the kitchen table. She was in her forties but looked a lot older, a punchbag of a woman whose every movement told us she’d had more than enough. We sat opposite her and she examined us for the first time.

  ‘I hope this won’t take too long,’ she said. She had a solid Yorkshire accent. ‘I’ve got to finish the supper and the girls will be home from school. The week’s been difficult enough already. I don’t want them to find you here.’

  ‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs Taylor,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘Did you ever meet my Greg?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’ve never met me, so don’t bother me with your condolences. I’ve got no use for them.’

  ‘We need to know what happened to him.’

  ‘You know what happened to him. He fell under a train.’

  Hawthorne looked apologetic. ‘That may not be the case …’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Her eyes flared briefly.

  Hawthorne examined her for a moment before continuing. ‘I don’t want to upset you, Mrs Taylor, but we haven’t discounted the possibility that he was pushed.’

  I was surprised that he had put it as baldly as that and I wondered what her reaction would be. She hadn’t had the time to come to terms with the fact that he was dead, let alone that he might have been murdered. It seemed insensitive even by his standards.

  In fact, she seemed remarkably unconcerned. ‘Who would want to do a thing like that?’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anyone who would want to hurt Greg. And nobody knew he was going to London except me. He didn’t even tell the girls.’

  ‘Why was he in London?’

  The kettle had boiled. Susan didn’t answer until Gallivan had made the tea and brought it over to the table. He had left the bags in the mugs with the little label attached by a thread hanging over the sides.

  ‘He was ill,’ she said. ‘He needed money.’

  ‘How ill?’ Again, Hawthorne wasn’t giving her any leeway.

  ‘Seriously ill. But don’t you be getting any wrong ideas. He was going to be all right. That was the reason he was there.’

  ‘So who did he go to see?’

  ‘Let me explain to you, Mr Hawthorne. I’ll tell it to you my way, if you don’t mind. It’ll make it easier for you and less painful for me if I don’t have to answer every one of your damn questions.’

  Hawthorne took out his cigarettes. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked.

  ‘You can smoke all you like. But not in my house.’

  She stared moodily at her tea, then picked up her cup and sipped without removing the bag. I did the same. Gallivan had added a couple of spoonfuls of sugar without asking. He was hovering over the kettle, leaving the three of us grouped at the table.

  ‘When I first met him, Greg was an accountant,’ she began. ‘He did all right for himself. He was working in a big firm in Leeds and he was climbing the ladder, if you know what I mean. I had bar work and that’s how the two of us met. We went out. We got married. We had kids. But he was never happy in the city. He loved being out on the Dales – hiking, birding, sleeping out under the stars. And not just on the Dales. Underneath them. He was a caver through and through. He was coming here every other weekend and to hell with what I had to say about the matter, so in the end it made sense to sell up and move here. He took a job at Atkinsons, even though it was less well paid.’

  ‘They’re a builders’ merchant,’ Gallivan muttered from the side.

  ‘That’s right. He was their finance manager.’

  ‘Do you have a photograph of your husband?’ I asked. I had no idea what he looked like and I thought it would be useful to know, if she was going to talk about him.

  She glanced at me as if I had offended her, then nodded very briefly. Gallivan came over to the table, carrying a photograph in a plastic frame. It showed a large, smiling man with a rugby player’s face, complete with broken nose. He was wearing a brightly coloured anorak. At least half the picture was taken up by his beard, which seemed to be exploding out of his face. He was grinning and making a thumbs up to the camera: one of life’s celebrants.

  ‘We scraped by, Greg and I. We weren’t rich, but you don’t need money in a place like this. I’m not complaining. We had our friends. June and Maisie – our two girls. And of course the Dales. I work three days a week at the nursing home. Ingleton’s not a bad place once you get used to it. Too many tourists in the summer and you can’t move in the high street, but that’s the same all over the Dales. We liked it best in the winter. You should see this place in the snow. It’s beautiful.

  ‘Then Greg got ill. It started about six months ago and of course we didn’t think anything of it at first. He was having difficulty walking, particularly up and down stairs. I persuaded him to go to the doctor but she just said he had a touch of arthritis in his knees and packed him off with anti-inflammatory pills … silly cow. But then it was in his arms and his neck. Greg tried not to say too much about it but it just got worse and worse. His neck was the worst part of it. He started getting bruises on his skin. He had trouble breathing. We went back to the doctor and this time she sent us down to Leeds, but it was still a while before they were able to diagnose what he had.’

  She paused. Her eyes looked into the middle-distance.

  ‘It’s called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The first time I heard it, it sounded like double Dutch but that’s its name. EDS for short. He always referred to it as Ed. “Ed’s here.” That’s what he’d say. Greg always tried to make a joke about everything.’

  ‘He did that,’ Gallivan agreed.

  ‘But this was nothing to laugh about. There wasn’t anything funny at all. Ed was going to kill him. It was as simple as that. His neck was dislocating, which meant that his brainstem couldn’t function. Another few months and he’d have been bedridden. He’d have seizures. He’d become paralysed. And then he’d die.’

  She had a way of turning experiences into sound bites. She had compartmentalised her husband’s slow death in exactly the same way as her courtship and marriage. This followed by this and then that.

  ‘EDS had a cure,�
�� she went on. ‘There was some support group that got in touch with us and they told us about it … an operation. It would fuse all the vertebrae together so that his neck would be stabilised. It would save his life. The trouble was, you couldn’t get it on the NHS. It was too expensive and too complicated. Greg would have to go to Spain. The doctors out there had had a lot of success but it wasn’t going to be cheap. With the flights and the treatment and the hospital and everything else, it would cost him £200,000.

  ‘We didn’t have anything like that. We’ve got this house but there’s a mortgage on it and Greg was never any good at saving money, which is strange because money was what his work was all about. He did have a life insurance policy worth a quarter of a million pounds: he’d taken it out when he was in Leeds. But that was no bloody good at all because he’d have to die first to claim it. So what was the point in that?’

  ‘But he had a rich friend in London,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘That’s right. You’ve got there ahead of me. He’d been to Oxford University when he was nineteen and he made two good friends there … Richard Pryce and Charlie Richardson. Dicky and Tricky, he used to call them. They used to go caving together – that was how they met – and it became a sort of ritual, all the boys together. My Greg used to look forward to seeing them. It was the high point of the year. Most often they stayed in England but there were times they went to Europe and even to South America. And here’s the thing. They knew he couldn’t afford exotic holidays. But when they went long haul, they’d put their hands in their pockets just to help him out a little. None of them ever said as much and Greg didn’t like to talk about it – he was a Yorkshireman and he had his pride – but he would never have been able to do it without them.

  ‘That all came to an end when Charlie died at the Long Way Hole back in 2007. Richard was here for the inquest but he and Greg never saw each other after that. Maybe it was that they both felt guilty about what had happened and couldn’t look each other in the eye, although there was no reason for that as they were both exonerated. Dave here was a witness and he was the first person to tell them that no one had done anything wrong. It were just one of those things. An accident.’

  Gallivan had been watching her intently as she spoke, but, hearing his name, he turned away. It was as if he didn’t want to be involved.

  ‘It was me who persuaded Greg to go down to London and talk to Richard,’ she went on. ‘Richard had done all right for himself as a high-class lawyer. He had houses in London and in the country. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to give all the money but if he put his hand in his pocket he could get us started and somehow the two of us would find a way to raise the rest. Crowdfunding or something like that. Greg didn’t like the idea. He thought it was over as far as he and Richard were concerned. They hadn’t spoken for six years.’

  ‘He went down on the Saturday,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘That’s right. I drove him to the station myself. I’d told Greg in no uncertain terms – I’d divorce him if he didn’t get on that train. And I’d get Richard Pryce to represent me in court. He laughed at that even though it was hurting him to laugh by then. That was the last time I saw him, first thing in the morning, on the platform at Ribblehead. He was only going to be in London a few hours. I expected him home for tea.’

  ‘Richard Pryce refused to help,’ I said.

  I was quite sure that was what she would tell us. It was the only way this made any sense. Richard hadn’t wanted to provide the money. Greg had thrown himself under a train. And Susan had been in London the following day. Maybe she was the one who had killed Richard.

  ‘That’s what you’d expect – but you couldn’t be more wrong,’ Susan replied, tartly. ‘He was a good man, Richard Pryce. Maybe he blamed himself for what had happened at Long Way Hole. Like I told you, my Greg blamed himself too. But they had never blamed each other. They made the decision to get out of there together and everyone agreed it was the right decision.’

  She looked to Dave Gallivan for confirmation but he was still looking away.

  ‘Greg had arranged to see him at his home up in Hampstead,’ she continued. ‘That would have been about lunchtime. Richard had said he’d be on his own. Well, I don’t know the long and the short of it, but he took Greg in like the six years had never happened and they were the best of friends again. He listened to what Greg had to say and he agreed not just to pay £20,000 or £50,000 but to put his hand in his pocket for the whole lot. That was the sort of man he was. He was a saint.’

  ‘How do you know this, Mrs Taylor?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘Greg telephoned me.’ She looked him straight in the eye, at the same time rummaging in her pocket. Finally, she took out a mobile phone and laid it on the table. ‘I was driving when he called. I take June to her dance class on Saturday afternoons. He should have remembered that. So he left a message.’

  She reached out and touched a couple of buttons. We had seen the dead man’s picture. Now we heard his voice.

  ‘Hello, love. I’ve just left. Richard was fantastic. I can’t believe it. He took me into his house – you should have seen it, by the way – and we had a cup of tea and … anyway, he says he may be able to pay for the whole thing. All of it. Can you believe it? It’s like he wants to make up for what happened all those years ago. I told him how much it was going to cost but he says his company has a fund for just this sort of thing and—’ The voice broke off. ‘I’m heading back to King’s Cross now. I’ll call you when I’m on the train or you try me. Let’s go out Sunday night. Over to the Marton Arms. We’ve actually got something to celebrate. I’ll talk to you later. All right? I love you.’

  There was a faint click and silence.

  ‘The police took a recording of that,’ Susan said. ‘I never want to lose it. We spoke again when he arrived at the station but that’s the last memory I have of his voice. And he sent me this …’

  She spun the phone round to show us a photograph that Gregory Taylor had taken – a selfie. He was standing on a road that I immediately recognised. It was Hornsey Lane in Highgate. The Hornsey Lane Bridge, which runs high above the Archway Road, was just behind him. He was smiling.

  ‘That’s the one thing that consoles me in all this,’ Susan went on. ‘When he died, he couldn’t have been happier. He was on top of the world. He thought he was going to be all right.’

  Those words set off another thought in my head. Gregory Taylor wasn’t going to be all right. The operation would never happen. Could that be why Pryce was killed? Could it actually have been to prevent the payment being made?

  Hawthorne seemed to be thinking along the same lines. ‘Your husband was in a good mood when he was on his way home,’ he said. ‘So what do you think happened at King’s Cross?’

  ‘That’s your job to find out,’ Susan replied. ‘I have no idea and the police won’t show me the CCTV. But they say there were a lot of Leeds supporters on the platform. They’d been drinking.’ She clutched her telephone as if it was a sacred relic containing the ashes of the man she had loved. For the first time I saw tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t even want to think about it. And now I’ve told you everything that happened, so if you don’t mind …’

  Gallivan stepped forward as if to show us out but Hawthorne wasn’t moving. ‘You had to go down to London,’ he said.

  ‘I went there on Sunday morning. I met a police officer, a man called McCoy. Dave here looked after the girls.’

  ‘You identified the body.’

  They showed me photographs, yes.

  ‘When did you get back?’ There could only be one reason why Hawthorne was asking her this. Susan Taylor had been in London when Richard Pryce was killed! But there was no possible way she could have had anything to do with it. That made no sense at all.

  ‘I stayed over until Monday. They put me up in a hotel near the station. A horrible place – but it was too late to catch the train.’

  ‘What did you do on Sunday night?’

  �
�I went dancing and then out to dinner.’ She scowled. ‘What do you think I did? I sat on my own and counted the hours until I could leave.’

  She would have seen us out then and there but Hawthorne still hadn’t finished with her. ‘There is one more thing, Mrs Taylor,’ he said. He was completely unapologetic. ‘I need to ask you about Long Way Hole.’

  ‘I can tell you about that,’ Gallivan said.

  ‘I’d like to hear it from Mrs Taylor.’

  ‘It was six years ago.’

  ‘You said that Richard Pryce and your husband never blamed each other. But maybe someone else did.’

  Her eyes started. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because like it or not, both of them have died in unusual circumstances almost within twenty-four hours of one another, Mrs Taylor. And Long Way Hole seems to be the one thing that connects them.’

  Susan Taylor glanced at her watch, then signalled to Gallivan. She wasn’t happy about it but she would give us a little more time.

  ‘I can only tell you what Greg told me but I suppose that’s what you want to know. It was a weekend in April. The two of them – Richard Pryce and Charlie Richardson – had come up from London. They all stayed at the Station Inn over at Ribblehead. Greg took a room there too. It was a waste of money really. It’s only twenty minutes from here. But it meant the three of them could drink together and they did quite a bit of that, I’m sure. All boys together. Reliving the old days. All that nonsense.’

  ‘Did you meet Richard Pryce?’

  ‘Of course I met him, a few times. I didn’t warm to him if you want the truth. Too much of a smooth-talker for my taste. Greg never brought him here. I think he was ashamed of the house, which is just rubbish, but we’d go out for dinner at the Marton Arms or wherever. I saw him at the inquest too. But we didn’t speak – not then. I wasn’t speaking to anyone.