‘Anyway, what came out at the inquest was exactly what Greg had already said to me. It was April and it had been warm. There had been two weeks of sunshine but that day the forecast was for rain. There’d even been talk of a storm but Greg looked at the clouds and he figured it was going to be localised, a long way off Old Ing Lane, which was where they started. Greg knew the weather. He wasn’t ever wrong. They went in before midday and should have been out by late afternoon. It’s a grade-four pot, if that means anything to you. Two miles long. A lot of pitches to navigate. Quite tricky in parts.
‘Well, when the storm broke, it broke right above them and the trouble was that the ground was hard-baked, which meant that the water came in all the faster. They knew they were in trouble pretty much straight away and they had a choice. They could climb up to higher ground or they could move as fast as they could and make it to the exit. The three of them decided to do that. There was one contortion they had to manage but after that it was fairly easy-going … a bit of crawling, a bit of stooping. But as long as they kept ahead of the water, they’d be all right.
‘So that’s what they did. They all agreed on it. But somehow, in the hurry to get out, Charlie Richardson got separated and left behind. The other two only noticed he wasn’t there when they reached the final passage with the exit just in front of them. So what are they to do? They can see daylight right in front of them. It would be madness to go back with the water rushing towards them. They shout for him but that’s a waste of time. He could be five metres away, but with the noise of the water and all the rest of it, he won’t hear them. So they decide to go back in. The path they’ve just taken has become a fast-flowing river with the water coming out towards them but it’s what they call a vertical crack …’
‘It’s very high but it’s narrow,’ Gallivan explained. ‘They can move above the flow, using their hips and their elbows, pinning themselves between the walls.’
‘It’s still dangerous,’ Susan Taylor added. ‘Because if they slip they’re going to get swept away. But the two of them fight their way back in and there’s still no sign of Charlie.’
She stopped herself as if there was no point telling any more.
‘They decided he must have missed the contortion altogether and continued straight into a tangle of different passageways. It’s like an underground maze.’
‘Spaghetti Junction,’ Gallivan said. That was the name that Davina Richardson had told us.
‘There was no way they could get back there so they made a second decision, which was to get back out and call for help.’
‘They went up to Ing Lane Farm.’ Gallivan picked up the story. ‘The farmer there is Chris Jackson and they knew that if he wasn’t in his wife would be. They went there and rang the police. They contacted me directly. I logged the call at five past five and called out the team. We were down Long Way Hole by seven.’
‘The police called me too.’ Susan lifted her cup of tea but it had gone cold. She grimaced and put it down again. ‘That’s when I knew there was something wrong. But it wasn’t until the next day that they found him …’
‘That’s enough,’ Gallivan growled. ‘You should read the inquest if you want to know more. It’s all out in the open. I think you should leave now.’
‘The girls will be back soon,’ Susan said. She reached for a tissue and I saw that her hand was trembling. Looking up, I realised she had begun to cry.
‘Wait for me outside.’ Gallivan went over to her.
Hawthorne stood up. ‘Thank you for seeing us, Mrs Taylor,’ he said. ‘We’ll find out what happened at King’s Cross station. I promise you that.’
She glanced up at him almost balefully, as if she actually blamed him. She had a point. His visit had only opened the wounds, forcing her to relive what had happened all over again. I nodded but said nothing. We left the room.
But we didn’t leave the house straight away. Making sure he wasn’t being seen, Hawthorne crossed the front hall and went into the living room. I followed him. The room was empty to the point of being austere. Apart from the fireplace and the piano there was a television, two sofas, a coffee table with a cactus in a pot and a few photographs of the family in happier times. A pair of French windows opened into the conservatory. The cat had curled up on one of the chairs. That was everything. There was nothing else.
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ I whispered.
‘You don’t see it?’ Hawthorne replied.
I waited for him to continue. He didn’t.
‘No,’ I said.
Hawthorne shook his head. ‘It’s right in front of your eyes, mate.’
Whenever Hawthorne saw anything or worked something out, he deliberately kept it from me as if the whole thing was some sort of game. This is often the case in detective stories and I always find it infuriating, but I knew only too well that there was nothing I could do. We left the living room and tiptoed back out into the street. As soon as we were outside, he lit a cigarette.
‘Did you really have to be so hard on her?’ I said.
Hawthorne looked genuinely surprised. ‘Was I?’
‘She was upset.’
‘She was nervous.’
Had she been nervous? I didn’t think so. I certainly hadn’t seen it. And what did she have to be nervous of? As I turned these thoughts over in my head, I remembered the one thing I knew that Hawthorne probably didn’t. It came from having lived in Crouch End for sixteen years and although it almost certainly wasn’t relevant, I decided to share it. At least it allowed me to contribute something to the day.
‘You know that photograph she showed us,’ I said.
‘The one he sent his wife?’
‘I happen to know where it was taken.’ I paused for effect. ‘That’s Hornsey Lane in Highgate. It’s about a minute away from Suicide Bridge.’
‘Suicide Bridge?’
‘It’s what everyone calls it. Hornsey Lane Bridge. If he wanted to commit suicide, he could have jumped off – but what’s really interesting is that it’s only a five-minute walk from Davina Richardson’s house.’
Hawthorne took this in. ‘That is interesting,’ he agreed. ‘But I’ll tell you something that interests me even more.’
‘What’s that?’
‘King’s Cross station. W. H. Smith. Why did he buy that book?’
11
At the Station Inn
I thought we might go back to the hotel after Ingleton but first of all Hawthorne wanted to visit the entrance to Long Way Hole. I didn’t see how it could help but I was just grateful he wasn’t suggesting we kit up and drop into the cave system ourselves. Dave Gallivan drove us in his Land Rover, which was so beaten-up that I was nervous the whole thing would collapse when we drove over the next bump or a cattle grid. Hawthorne sat in the front. I was in the back, hemmed in between plastic barrels, ropes and backpacks, looking out through windows streaked and splattered with mud.
The railway line had slashed through the countryside but the roads allowed us to weave our way across it more gently. Everything – the cottages and farmhouses, streams and bridges, woodland and hills – looked even lovelier at close quarters. Gallivan gave us an occasional commentary but his observations seemed almost deliberately prosaic, as if he felt uncomfortable having a writer with him in the car.
‘That’s Whernside. It’s the tallest of the three peaks. And that’s Ingleborough. If you look up there, that ridge is carboniferous limestone. Those are Swaledale.’ (He was pointing at a flock of sheep.) ‘They’ve been grazing here two hundred year or more.’
Sitting next to him, Hawthorne had the best view, but again he showed no interest, sinking into his seat, saying nothing.
A rough lane forked off from the road and we followed it into the glorious green emptiness of the Dales, finally stopping at a gate built into a drystone wall. Apart from the crunch of our feet on the gravel, there was barely a sound as we walked away from the car, through the gate and up another track. It had be
en sunny when we were in Ingleton but now the weather was closing in and it occurred to me that this must have been what it looked like when Richard Pryce, Charles Richardson and Gregory Taylor had set out on their last trip. There was still plenty of blue sky but far away the clouds were rubbing up against each other, throwing dark shadows across the fields, broken only by the light slanting down in godlike shafts.
We came to a stream that bubbled cheerfully along until it reached a stone ledge where it suddenly spilled over and became a waterfall. It was impossible to see how deep it was but it seemed to continue into the very bowels of the earth. A hill rose up ahead with the dark mouth of a cave, surrounded by ivy and moss, looking very much like something out of a story designed to frighten children. This was where the three men had begun their descent, allowing themselves to be swallowed up by the dark.
‘Where’s the exit?’ Hawthorne asked.
Gallivan pointed. ‘Two miles east. Round the back of Drear Hill. You want to go there?’
Hawthorne shook his head. Scanning the horizon, he picked out a white-painted farmhouse, isolated, surrounded by grass. ‘Who lives there?’
‘That’s the man I told you about. Chris Jackson. That’s Ing Lane Farm.’
‘Will he be in?’
‘He might be. You want to talk to him?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Suit yourself.’
We didn’t walk. We went back to the car and drove through the gate and on along an even rougher track, the tyres spitting out stones and dust. I wondered if we were on the roof of Long Way Hole. This whole expedition seemed a little pointless to me. Did Hawthorne think that something suspicious had happened when the three men had gone caving together? It would be a good place to commit murder, far underground. At least there would be no need to bury the body. Suppose Richard and Gregory had murdered Charles Richardson. Someone had found out and had taken revenge, bludgeoning one of the killers and pushing the other under a train. It was a reasonable enough supposition. But why now? And why would three old university friends who only saw each other occasionally for adventure holidays have suddenly come to blows?
We reached the farm, which was about a mile away to the north, resting against the side of the hill like an old man, with discarded pieces of farm machinery and plastic sacks of animal feed piled up all round. Once again it was Dave Gallivan who knocked on the door but this time he waited until it was opened by a wiry, whip-thin man with grey hair and a straggling moustache, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He was ex-army. I could see it before he spoke a word. It was in the way he stood, the tattoos on his arms, the hardness of his eyes.
‘’Ey up?’ I won’t try to replicate the Yorkshire dialect – it will look ridiculous on the page – but those were his first two words as he carefully examined us.
Gallivan explained who we were and why we’d come.
‘You’d best come inside then.’
The front door led straight into the kitchen, which had a stone floor and nothing of comfort. We sat at the table. He didn’t offer us tea.
‘I knew there were going to be trouble that day,’ he told us. ‘The rain came bucketing down that afternoon and I feared the worst. I took a look out of the window at the stream that runs out the back. It’s bone dry half the year round, but, four o’clock, there was water gushing along. That stream’s a marker if ever there was one.’
‘A conditions marker,’ Gallivan added. ‘There are plenty of them around here. You know not to go caving if there’s so much as a trickle.’
‘That’s what I said to Barbara.’ He glanced upwards, which was presumably where his wife was to be found. ‘I just hoped there was no one stupid enough to be underground. But then, an hour later, there’s a knock at the door and two men come in – in a terrible state, soaking wet, one of them with a bloody nose. It took me a minute or two to recognise Greg Taylor. I didn’t know the chap who was with him. Anyway, they told me what had happened down at Long Way Hole. They’d been trying to fight their way back in to find their friend and they were beside themselves with worry. I got Barbara to make them a drink while I called the police.’
‘Did the two of them say anything more while they were here?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘They said a lot of things but not a lot of it made much sense. The rain was still coming down and we were waiting for cave rescue to arrive. I’ll tell you something, though. Greg was the worse of the two of them. The other chap was silent. He was sitting there like he was haunted or something. But Greg? “This is my fault.” That’s what he said. “This is my fault. This is my fault.” He said it over and over. There was no stopping him.’
‘What happened then?’
‘A police car came and took them away. By that time, Dave and his team were doing what they could, although it was already too late. The last I saw, Greg was staring out of the window like a dead man. But he weren’t the one that died that day.’
‘He’s dead now,’ Gallivan muttered.
‘Aye. So I hear. Maybe it was his reckoning. Who can say? It catches up with us all in the end.’
We had dinner at the Station Inn that evening in a cosy room with low ceilings and varnished beams. A single railway line had been set along the floor next to the bar, acting as a footrest. I could imagine the place heaving in the summer but it was very quiet that evening. In one corner there was a massive fruit machine that sat there like an alien invader, blinking and flickering, but nobody played it. A plump Labrador dog slumbered in its basket.
Hawthorne had asked Gallivan to join us and the three of us sat at a table by the window with views across to another viaduct, a sister to the one I had seen at Ingleton. We had been served gigantic portions of steak and kidney pudding which Hawthorne ate warily, as if he was suspicious of the contents. Gallivan and I had pints of Yorkshire bitter. As usual, Hawthorne had water.
We talked generally for a while – tourism, caving, local gossip – but there was only one reason Hawthorne would have invited Gallivan along and that was because there was something he wanted to know, and sure enough it wasn’t long before he pounced.
‘So maybe you can tell me what it is you’re hiding, Dave?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Gallivan stopped, his fork halfway to his mouth.
‘When we were with Susan Taylor, she mentioned you were at the inquest.’
‘I was.’
‘You told them there was nothing suspicious, nobody to blame.’
‘That was the truth.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Gallivan said nothing, so Hawthorne went on. ‘You were uncomfortable with her and you’re uncomfortable now. I didn’t spend twenty years in the police not to notice when someone’s lying to me. What is it you’re not telling us?’
‘There’s nothing …’
‘Two people are dead, Dave. Your mate Greg went under a train. The last person he saw got bludgeoned to death twenty-four hours later. It may be connected to what happened here and I need to know.’
‘All right!’ Gallivan put his fork down. His eyes flared. ‘I didn’t want to talk about it in front of her and I’m not sure I want to tell you now. There’s no proof. Nothing. It’s just a feeling.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, Charlie Richardson may not have been a professional but he was an experienced caver. He knew what he was doing. So I never understood how he could have been so bloody stupid. The simple fact of the matter is that there was no reason for him to die.’
Now that he had started, the food was forgotten. It was as if he had been waiting to tell his side of the story ever since the accident had occurred. His eyes were bleak as he went back. ‘Gregory Taylor leads them into the cave. Richard Pryce is next. Charlie Richardson brings up the rear. Of course, they don’t know it yet, but the rain has been pouring down above ground. By the time they realise what’s happening, it’s too late. A flood pulse has formed and it’s heading their way.’
‘How would they know if t
hey can’t see it?’ I asked.
‘They can hear it. It’s a sort of booming and a mumbling … the worst sound in the world and it’s all around them, getting louder and louder. And very soon they can feel it. The rain has made its way through, coming off the cracks and the stalactites.’ He dismissed me angrily, turning back to Hawthorne. ‘They have to make a decision fast. They’ve got maybe ten minutes. A quarter of an hour at most. So they decide to keep going and, as you know, Richardson misses Drake’s Passage – that’s the name of the contortion – and continues into Spaghetti Junction. It’s easily enough done, particularly if you’re in a hurry. But here’s what I don’t understand.’ He tapped his finger on the table for emphasis. ‘Once he was there, why didn’t he just stay where he was? He could have found higher ground and sat it out until all the water had passed through. The worst that would have happened was that he’d have been left on his own in the dark and might have had to wait for us to come and find him.’
‘Maybe he panicked,’ I suggested.
Gallivan shook his head. ‘An experienced caver doesn’t panic. He had plenty of battery power. More than that, he was carrying a safety bag.’ He explained what it was before we could ask. ‘It’s made of waterproof fabric. You pull it over your head and sit inside. It keeps you warm while you wait to be rescued. But Charlie allowed it to kill him.’
‘How was that?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘That was how he got stuck. The safety bag was attached to his caving harness by a short rope and it got caught in the contortion as he dropped down. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ He made a shape with his hands, a narrow tube running vertically. ‘He leaves Spaghetti Junction and finds his way back to Drake’s Passage. He drops down, trying to catch up with the others, but the bag gets stuck. He’s got his full weight on the cord and there’s nothing he can do. He’s got no purchase to climb up again without his mates there to assist him. The silly bugger isn’t carrying a knife, so he can’t cut the rope and he’s left dangling. When the pulse hits, he drowns.’ He paused. ‘That was how I found him. Maybe he’d been knocked out first. That would have been a mercy.’
The Sentence is Death Page 13
