The Sentence is Death

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘Then what—’

  Hawthorne held up a hand. ‘I don’t want to have to say it all twice, mate. Let’s wait until we get there.’

  I hadn’t heard Hawthorne tell the driver our destination but had noticed that we had crossed the Euston Road and were heading north. I assumed that we were going back to Pryce’s house in Fitzroy Park … full circle, as it were. But we went up Archway and turned right on to Shepherds Hill and when I paid the fare – a £30 journey, including tip – I was somehow unsurprised.

  Davina Richardson opened the door to us. She looked very anxious. ‘I hear they’ve arrested Adrian. Is it true?’ she demanded.

  Hawthorne nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. Adrian would never have hurt anyone. He’s just not that sort of person. And anyway, he couldn’t have. I told you. He was here with me!’

  ‘Do you think we could come in, Mrs Richardson?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. I’m sorry …’

  We followed her back through the kaleidoscopic interior and into the kitchen where we had first sat together. She was already hitting the wine. There was a bottle of rosé and a glass out on the table and next to it a packet of cigarettes. She had also been munching her way through a tube of Pringles. She looked even more of a mess than she had on the last two occasions. It had been a while since her husband had died, but this had been followed by the loss of her closest friend and now her lover was in jail. She was surrounding herself with anything she could use to prop herself up.

  ‘Is Colin in the house?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘Yes. He’s upstairs. Don’t worry – he won’t disturb us. He’s plugged into his computer.’

  We arranged ourselves around the table. Davina took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘I’ll do anything I can to help you,’ she said. ‘I know it’s a mistake about Adrian. I’ve told everyone. He was here that evening with me.’

  ‘Are you quite sure about that, Mrs Richardson?’ Hawthorne locked into her in the way he did so well, leaving her no room for manoeuvre. ‘We’re talking about the evening of Sunday the twenty-seventh of October. That was the day after the clocks had gone back to winter time.’ He glanced at the grandmother clock beside the door. ‘Are you sure you remembered to change them on Saturday night?’

  ‘Of course I did!’ She stared at the clock, then brought her cigarette up to her mouth, unable to disguise the shake in her hand. ‘I’m sure I did!’

  ‘But you did mention to my friend here that you might have forgotten.’ My friend. Hawthorne meant me.

  ‘Did I say that?’ Everything about Davina – her long chestnut hair, her scarf, her sparkly jersey, her entire frame – seemed to be collapsing in on itself.

  ‘That’s what I thought you said.’

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe I left them until Monday. I really don’t remember.’

  I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. I thought Hawthorne had dismissed out of hand everything I had told Cara Grunshaw. That included the breakdown of Lockwood’s alibi. But now it seemed that he was agreeing with at least that part of what I’d said, getting Davina to admit what I had already worked out for myself, meaning that Lockwood could have committed the crime after all.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ Davina wailed. She looked exhausted, close to tears. ‘Yes. I did forget the clocks. I always forget them and Colin shouts at me when he’s late for school. But what difference does it make? Adrian went straight home. He called me later.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About an hour after he’d gone.’

  ‘On your mobile or on your landline?’ Hawthorne was still at his most aggressive. ‘You know that we’ll check?’

  ‘Maybe he called me the next day. I can’t tell you. I don’t know anything any more.’ She poured herself some more wine and took a large swig.

  Hawthorne allowed a brief pause. When he continued, he was a little gentler. ‘The reason we’re here, Mrs Richardson, is to help Mr Lockwood. He’s been arrested by DI Grunshaw but I don’t think he did it.’

  ‘You don’t?’ Something between hope and fear stirred in her eyes.

  ‘Would you like me to explain to you what I think happened … the way I see it? Then there’ll be a few questions and I can leave you alone.’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Right.’

  He glanced at me, then began.

  ‘I don’t want to upset you any more than you’ve been upset already, Mrs Richardson, but this all starts with your husband’s death at Long Way Hole all those years ago. You’ve got to admit, it’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? Gregory Taylor travels two hundred miles from Ribblehead in Yorkshire. He hasn’t been to London for years. He meets up with his old mate, Richard. And little more than twenty-four hours later, they’re both dead in mysterious circumstances. Now, you’re not going to tell me there’s no connection, are you? I mean, what would be the odds of that happening?’

  ‘I read about Gregory in the newspapers,’ Davina said. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘I don’t think it was an accident,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘You mean … he was murdered?’ I said. Again, I was confused. I was sure we had both dismissed the idea.

  ‘No, Tony. He didn’t fall. He wasn’t pushed. He killed himself. I would have thought that had been obvious all along.’

  ‘But … why?’

  ‘I’ll have a cigarette, if you don’t mind,’ Hawthorne said, helping himself to one of Davina’s. He went through the ritual: taking one out, rolling it through his fingers, lighting it. The air was full of smoke. ‘I’ve kept saying to you, you’ve got to find the pattern that works,’ he said, addressing me. ‘It doesn’t work if he was murdered. It doesn’t work if he tripped up and lopped his own head off. But if you start with suicide, everything falls neatly into place.’

  ‘He had no reason to commit suicide!’

  ‘If you believe what he told his wife, that’s true. But let’s start with the idea that he might have been lying.’

  Hawthorne blew out smoke and watched it disperse in the air in front of him.

  ‘This is my version of events,’ he said. ‘Gregory Taylor has been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is about as bad as it gets. He needs an operation or his brain is going to shut down. He’s broke, living in Yorkshire, but he has got one rich friend – Richard Pryce. The two haven’t seen each other for six years. They’ve barely spoken since the day they managed to get another mate of theirs killed, but even so, Gregory, urged on by his wife, gets it into his head that now, in his hour of need, Richard will help him.

  ‘Now let’s suppose what really happened was that Richard Pryce told him to sod off. I don’t know why, but somehow that scenario doesn’t seem to surprise me. Let’s imagine that on the Saturday afternoon when the two of them meet at Heron’s Wake – which is, incidentally, one of the stupidest names I’ve ever heard for a house – Richard says quite categorically that he won’t help, that he doesn’t want anything to do with Gregory and asks him to leave.’

  ‘But why would he do that?’ Davina asked. ‘Neither of them were to blame for the accident. There was an inquest. Richard and I talked about it. The two of them did what they could to save Charles. They could have got themselves killed. They didn’t see each other again because they were so upset about what had happened, but you’re making it sound like they hated each other.’

  ‘Maybe they did,’ Hawthorne said. ‘Because maybe they weren’t telling the truth about what really happened. And let me tell you this, Mrs Richardson. When people keep secrets, those secrets have a nasty way of festering. They can turn into poison. They can kill.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Hawthorne sighed and tapped ash. ‘We may never know what happened at Long Way Hole because the only three witnesses are dead now, and anyway it was all a long time ago. But I can tell you for a fact that the story Gregory Taylor and Richa
rd Pryce told doesn’t add up. Their mate Dave Gallivan, the man who led the rescue attempt, knew it too. He went to the inquest but he decided not to raise his suspicions. The cause of death was clear enough and he didn’t want to upset anyone’s feelings.

  ‘But here are some of the questions they could have asked. One: your husband missed Drake’s Passage and continued into Spaghetti Junction, which was on higher ground. So why didn’t he just wait there until the floodwater had passed? It wouldn’t have been very nice, but he could have sat there for twenty-four hours until someone came and found him.

  ‘The bigger question is number two. According to the local farmer, Chris Jackson, it started raining heavily at four o’clock. He looked out of his window and he saw a little stream just outside the house. He called it a conditions marker. And at four o’clock it wasn’t a little stream, it was a gushing river, already spelling out death to anyone who was trapped underground. One hour later, there was a knock on his door and Gregory Taylor and Richard Pryce arrived with their tale of woe.

  ‘According to Susan Taylor – Gregory’s wife – he and Richard were trying to get out of the cave after the flood started. We know that they still had to cover another four hundred yards – which is about a quarter of a mile. But then they noticed that Charles had been left behind and being the heroes that they were, they fought their way back in. They looked for Charles. They shouted for him. But there was nothing they could do. They got out of the cave and went for help. Ing Lane Farm was almost two miles away and even though they must have been pretty exhausted they had to hike there on foot.

  ‘So let’s do the maths. Four o’clock the rain is gushing down. Let’s be generous and say they continued through the cave system for fifteen minutes before they noticed Charles Richardson was missing and so they would have had to spend fifteen minutes getting back in again. Let’s give them ten minutes looking for their friend. They give up and decide to go for help. It’s about thirty minutes to the exit. And how long do you reckon it takes them to get to Ing Lane Farm without a car? Shall we say another thirty minutes? That adds up to one hundred minutes. But Dave Gallivan at the local cave rescue team logs the call at five past five. That’s just sixty-five minutes after the flooding. In every sense, it doesn’t add up!’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Davina said. She had been pulling heavily on the wine while Hawthorne talked. The bottle only had a couple of inches left.

  ‘There was no rescue attempt,’ Hawthorne said, flatly. ‘Whatever happened in Long Way Hole, nobody tried any heroics and Greg and Richard both knew it. That was why they never saw each other again. Every time they looked at each other, they had to confront the truth.’

  ‘They killed Charlie?’

  ‘They left him behind. They didn’t even try to help him. So now let’s go back to Sunday the twenty-seventh. Gregory was desperate. Without the money for his operation, he was going to die. Richard threw him out. So what did he do?’

  ‘He killed himself!’ I said. What other answer could there be?

  ‘That’s right, Tony, but first he rang his friend Dave Gallivan. He said he wanted to tell him about what had really happened at Long Way Hole, but that was just making mischief. He already knew he wasn’t going to see Dave again. He had decided on his plan. You see, he had a £250,000 life insurance policy.’

  Of course. Susan Taylor had told us that. She’d made a grim joke that he wouldn’t be able to use the money to pay for the operation that could save him.

  ‘Gregory was afraid that if he killed himself, he would lose out on his life insurance. Maybe there was a suicide clause in the contract. Normally there’s a two-year waiting period – but who knows? He didn’t want it to look like suicide in order to protect the payment, so he set about sending a series of messages that everything was fine, he was going to live and that life was a bed of roses.

  ‘He rang his wife with a message of comfort and joy and invited her to dinner at the Marton Arms the following night. But here’s the question. Why did he call her at the time when he knew she would be taking their daughter to dance class? Could it be that he didn’t want her to answer? That he couldn’t trust himself to lie to her and that anyway he needed the message to be recorded, so that she could play it to the police?

  ‘He also invited Dave to have a drink with him on the Monday. He even went so far as to take a selfie of himself smiling on Hornsey Lane, one minute away from the so-called Suicide Bridge in Highgate. What’s that if it isn’t signalling to the world “I’m not going to commit suicide!”? And finally he buys a big, fat book at the railway station because he wants us to think that he’s going to start it on the train even though it’s the third part in a series he’s never read … In fact, he doesn’t read books at all because I was in his house and I saw for myself. No books. No shelves.’

  ‘He killed himself,’ Davina repeated, emptying the last of the wine.

  ‘But before he killed himself, he pressed the self-destruct button,’ Hawthorne said. ‘What exactly was he doing in Hornsey Lane, five minutes from here?’

  ‘You said! He took a selfie …’

  ‘He did more than that. He came to this house. He told you the truth about Long Way Hole.’

  There was a heavy silence, punctuated by the sound of movement; perhaps a breeze blowing a curtain. Hawthorne looked up briefly but there were just the three of us in the room and he dismissed it.

  ‘You can’t know that,’ Davina muttered.

  ‘When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’ Hawthorne replied.

  ‘He came here?’ I was so stunned by this piece of information, or deduction, or whatever it was, that I blurted the words out helplessly.

  ‘On his way back to King’s Cross station. Yes. He told Mrs Richardson what had really happened to her husband. My guess is that Richard Pryce, her dearest friend and the godfather to her child, had left his friend to drown. Is that right, Mrs Richardson?’

  Very slowly, Davina nodded. A single tear traced itself down the side of her cheek.

  ‘They lied about the flood,’ she said. ‘Charlie never got separated from them. It was just like you said. He got stuck at the contortion and they could have easily reached him but they were too scared. Richard was the worst of them. He persuaded Greg to get out. They could actually hear my Charlie screaming but they abandoned him. They saved their own skins and he drowned.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Hawthorne said and I thought that for once he actually meant it.

  ‘Don’t ask me any more questions. I’ll tell you the rest.’

  This was a very different Davina Richardson. It was as if something had snapped inside her. She just wanted it to be over.

  ‘I know the truth now and it’s that Richard betrayed us,’ she said. ‘He looked after us. He gave us money. He got me work. He pretended to be my friend. But all along he’d been lying to us. He knew perfectly well what had happened at Long Way Hole. If he hadn’t been such a coward, Charlie would still be alive. I’m not stupid, Mr Hawthorne. I know that everything he did for Colin and me was an expiation. He was trying to buy his way out of his guilt. But in a way that made it worse. I think I would have respected him more if he’d simply ignored us.

  ‘When Greg Taylor told me what he’d done, I knew I had to kill him.’ She got up and went to the fridge. She spent a moment looking for another bottle of wine but there weren’t any more. She opened a cupboard and found some vodka. She brought that to the table. ‘I don’t think I’m an evil person. I’m just empty. Can you understand that? I’ve lived the past six years with a great big hole in my life and I suppose I’ve allowed it to consume me. I didn’t want to see Greg. When he turned up at the door, I couldn’t believe it was him. He was a stranger to me. After he left, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

  ‘Adrian Lockwood was here on Sunday evening and I deliberately made sure that the clocks hadn’t gone back. You see, later on I wanted him to be able to say t
hat I’d been here when Richard died. I drove over to Fitzroy Park. I left the car at the top of the street and walked down. I had a knife with me … in my handbag. I was going to stab him.’

  ‘You didn’t walk across the Heath?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was Richard Pryce on the phone when he opened the door?’

  ‘He may have had a phone in his hand. I don’t remember. He was surprised to see me but he invited me in. He pretended he was worried about me. I know now that everything he ever said and everything he felt about me was pretence. We went into the study and he asked me if something was the matter. I hated the way he looked at me, as if he cared about me. It enraged me. I can’t even tell you how I felt. That was when I saw the bottle of wine. I picked it up and hit him with it. I hit him quite a lot of times. I know the bottle smashed at one point and I used the end to cut him.’

  ‘What about the knife?’

  ‘I’d forgotten about it. Anyway, I didn’t want to use it. I knew it could be traced back to me.’ She stared into the middle distance. ‘The whole thing was so strange, Mr Hawthorne. When I killed him, I felt absolutely nothing. It was as if I wasn’t even in the room. It was like watching an image of myself on a television screen with the volume turned down. I didn’t even feel any anger or anything. I just wanted him to be dead.’

  ‘And what then? Why did you write the figure one eight two on the wall?’

  ‘I remembered the poem that Adrian had shown me. The one written by Akira Anno. I don’t know why – but those words spoke to me. They told the truth about Richard. He had whispered in my ear and in a way he had killed both of us. I decided I wanted to leave a message behind so I went and got a brush and painted that on the wall. It was a stupid thing to do but I wasn’t in my right mind.’

  Another long silence. She poured herself some vodka, using the same glass that had held the wine.

  ‘What do you think happens now?’ Hawthorne asked.

  Davina shrugged. It took her a while to find the next words. ‘Does anybody really need to know?’ she asked. ‘You’re not really a detective any more. Do you need to tell anyone?’