He wasn’t anything like the man I remembered. Well, he was only a lad really, nineteen, when we first met. He was very polite. He invited me in. He offered me a cup of tea. But when I told him why I was there, he refused to help. He said that in view of what had happened, he didn’t think it was appropriate for him to involve himself in my affairs. Words like that. The strange thing is that over the years I think he’d persuaded himself that I was to blame. Well, I’d been the one who’d seen the storm clouds. That had all come out at the inquest and it was a matter of public record that I was the one who gave the go-ahead. (He even used those words … I wanted to punch him when I heard them coming out of his mouth.) But somehow he’d managed to conflate everything so that it was as much my decision as his to leave Charlie behind. Well, I could write more. I could write until the cows come home. But the bottom line is he threw me out.
This is the difficult part, Susan. This is the bit I don’t want to write. And it’s why you’re going to have to wait six long months until you finally learn the truth.
I’m going to kill myself. You know I’m no good as an invalid. I don’t like doctors and pills and all the hospital rubbish and I don’t like you and the girls seeing me sitting there, suffering. I want you to remember me how I was – the good and the bad bits – and not as an invalid, in pain. I’ve worked out what I’m going to do and I’m going to make certain it looks like an accident so those insurance weasels will be sure to pay out.
But first of all I’m going to tell Davina Richardson what really happened to her husband. Richard may breathe a sigh of relief when he hears I’m gone but I don’t see why he should get away with it. She doesn’t live too far from here and I just called her on her home line and she’s in. We didn’t speak. But we will. I’m going to make her promise not to tell anyone I’ve been there and then she’ll do the dirty work for me. Bring Richard down and wipe that lawyer’s smile off his face.
I don’t want to end writing about Richard. When you pulled that first pint for me back in Leeds, I knew straight off that you were the girl for me. You were beautiful then and you’re beautiful now. I know we’ve had our ups and downs, but that’s true of every marriage and, sitting here, I remember only the good bits. Our two girls, to start with. But that visit to Skye. Running the Three Peaks. Coniston Water. That weekend we had in Paris when we lost the passports. All the laughter. I hope you get married again, love. You should. You’re the best.
Try to forgive me for what I have to do.
Your loving husband,
Greg.
*
The letter was sent to Gwendolyn James in Huddersfield. She passed it on to the police. It is reproduced here by kind permission of Susan Taylor, Gregory Taylor’s widow.
Acknowledgements
One of the stranger aspects of writing about my investigations with Daniel Hawthorne is that I end up having to thank people who actually appear in the book … though not all of them. As will have become clear, some of them made my life very difficult while others have demanded that I change their names or remove them altogether: one of them has even gone so far as to threaten me with lawyers, although I would say my depiction of her is entirely accurate.
It would have been impossible to write The Sentence is Death without two men in particular. Dave Gallivan, who led the rescue team into Long Way Hole, spoke to me at length about his work. Chris Jackson went one stage further. He actually took me caving – an experience I enjoyed much more than I expected. We went through Drake’s Passage and he showed me the actual spot where Charlie Richardson died. Later on, he read the manuscript and drew my attention to a number of technical errors. I very much enjoyed meeting both of them and won’t forget our steak and kidney pie at the Station Inn in Ribblehead.
Graham Hain, the forensic accountant at Navigant, is also mentioned in the book. Although he had never met Richard Pryce, he gave me some brilliant insights into the way a high-end divorce might work. Alex Woolley, a solicitor at Winkworth Sherwood, and Ben Wooldridge, a barrister at 1 Hare Court, were both generous with their time and provided me with a complete legal backdrop. Any mistakes, of course, are mine.
Vincent O’Brien, the managing director of Octavian Vaults and Andy Wadsworth, the Vaults Custodian, introduced me to a business I didn’t even know existed … They look after ten thousand private collectors from thirty-nine countries. I’d also like to thank Detective Constable James McCoy and everyone at Euston station’s British Transport Police for allowing me to see them at work. As I say in the book, these secret worlds never fail to excite me.
A special thank you to Vivek Gohil, who lives with (rather than suffers from … a distinction he made clear to me) Duchenne muscular dystrophy. I wanted to write sensitively about the condition and, for obvious reasons, I couldn’t really approach Kevin Chakraborty. Vivek is an incredibly inspiring young man – and he has a nice mum too. Thanks also to Jane Mathews, the Senior Press Officer at Muscular Dystrophy UK, for introducing us.
Selina Walker and the team at Penguin Random House have been a total pleasure to work with, as ever. My wonderful family, Jill Green and my sons, Nicholas and Cassian, are endlessly supportive even as they see their privacy being shredded, word by word. I have a terrific agent in Hilda Starke, helped by her assistant, Jonathan Lloyd. My own assistant, Alison Edmondson, helped organise my life and introduced me to most of the people on this acknowledgements page. And finally, I suppose, I have to thank Daniel Hawthorne, who first approached me to write this series. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
16 August 2018
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Epub ISBN: 9781473539372
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Copyright © Anthony Horowitz, 2018
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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Century
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ISBN 9781780897097 (hardback)
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The Sentence is Death Page 28
