The Sentence Is Death

10 Ingleton, Yorkshire

Hawthorne wasn’t in a good mood when we met at King’s Cross station the next day – but then, of course, there was nothing unusual about that. When we were together his manner ranged from distant and off-putting to downright rude and I often thought that he had spent so long investigating murderers that some of their sociopathy had rubbed off on him. There were times when I wondered if he wasn’t simply playing the role of the hard-bitten detective . . . that he slipped into it just as he did his collection of white shirts and dark suits. Why was he so reluctant to tell me anything about himself? Why did he never talk about the films he had seen, the people he’d met, what he’d done at the weekend or anything outside the business that had brought us together? What was he afraid of?

Even so, I had been hoping that this trip to Yorkshire would give him a chance to unwind. After all, we would be spending at least four hours in close proximity and surely we might bond over a Virgin coffee and a bacon sandwich? Some chance. As the train pulled out, he sat hunched up, gazing morosely out of the window. There was something in his manner, in those searching brown eyes of his and the tiny, old-fashioned suitcase that he had brought with him, that made me think of a child being evacuated in the war. When I asked him if he wanted something to eat, he just shook his head. I had bought us first-class tickets, by the way. I needed to work and I thought Hawthorne would appreciate the extra space. He hadn’t even noticed.

It was clear that he didn’t want to leave London. Ten minutes later, when we had picked up speed and were rattling through the northern suburbs, he was still staring at the flats and offices that were already thinning out. The green spaces in between seemed to alarm him and it occurred to me that apart from one day in Kent, we had never left the city. I had never seen him wearing jeans or trainers. Did he even take exercise? I wondered.

A ticket collector came along, and I used the interruption to tackle Hawthorne, albeit gently. ‘You’re very quiet,’ I said. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No.’

‘I’m looking forward to a couple of days in the countryside. It’s nice to get out.’

‘You know Yorkshire?’

‘I was at university in York.’

He knew that perfectly well. He knew everything about me. He must have meant something else by the question and, running it back, I picked up the dread in his voice and understood what he was implying. ‘You don’t like Yorkshire,’ I said.

‘Not really.’

‘Why is that?’

He hesitated. ‘I spent a bit of time there.’

‘When?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

He pulled a paperback book out of his pocket and slapped it down on the table, signalling that the conversation was at an end. I looked down and saw that he had chosen A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘Is that for your book club?’ I asked.

‘That’s right.’ There was something else he wanted to tell me but we were another ten miles up the track before he forced it out. ‘They want you to come to the next session.’

‘Who?’

‘The book club.’ I looked blank so he added, ‘You’ve written about Sherlock Holmes. That last novel of yours. They want to know what you think.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering how they knew about me . . . I mean, the fact that you know me.’

‘Well, I didn’t tell them.’

‘I’m sure.’

Hawthorne drew a breath. I could tell that he wanted a cigarette. ‘Someone saw you when you came into the building,’ he explained.

‘River Court?’

‘Yes. When you came up in the lift.’

I remembered the young man in the wheelchair and there had also been the married couple I had met on the ground floor. I’ve occasionally been on TV and my photograph is on my book jackets. It’s possible they would have recognised me.

‘They asked me to ask you to come,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Is that what’s worrying you? I’ll be happy to.’

‘I was worried that was what you were going to say.’

Hawthorne opened his book and began to read while at the same time I took out a pen and started working on my script. In ‘Sunflower’, Foyle was asked to protect an ex-Nazi living in London at the end of the war and this led to his discovery of a massacre that had taken place in France. As usual, there were production problems. I had written a climax, a bloody execution in a field of brilliant yellow sunflowers, but this being October there were none growing anywhere in the UK. Plastic flowers wouldn’t work. CGI would be too expensive. So far, I had resisted attempts to change the title to ‘Parsnip’.

We changed trains at Leeds and from that point I found myself entranced by the increasingly beautiful countryside. The stations became smaller and more isolated and the landscape more unspoiled until by the time we reached Gargrave and Hellifield it was as if we’d arrived in another world, one perhaps imagined by Tolkien. An autumn sun was shining and the hills, as green and as rolling as I’d ever seen, were stitched out with drystone walls, hedgerows and sheep. It made me wonder why I spent ten hours a day, every day, in a room in the middle of a city when there was all of this only a few hours away.

None of it had any impact on Hawthorne. He continued to read his book and when he did look out of the window it was with a grim acquiescence, as if his very worst fears were being realised. My guess was that he had been here or somewhere nearby for part of his childhood. He’d said he’d spent ‘a bit of time’ in Yorkshire and since he had lived in London for at least the past twelve years – he had an eleven-year-old son in Gants Hill – it must have been a while ago. He definitely didn’t want to be here now. It was fascinating to see him so out of sorts.

We reached Ribblehead, a tiny station that seemed to have no reason to be there as, apart from the station house itself and a single pub/hotel, there were virtually no other buildings for as far as the eye could see. This was where we would be staying the night. We were the only people to get off the train, which chuffed off, leaving us on a long, empty platform with a single figure waiting for us at the far end. Hawthorne had made all the arrangements from London and I knew that he had been in contact with the local cave rescue team. The man waiting for us was called Dave Gallivan. He was the duty controller who had been called out when Charlie Richardson had gone missing in Long Way Hole and it had been he who had found the body.

We walked towards each other. The landscape was so huge and the station so deserted that I was reminded of cowboys in a Wild West film squaring up for a shoot-out. As we drew closer he revealed himself to be a pleasant-looking man in his fifties. He was tough and muscular, with thick, white hair and the ruddy complexion that comes from living life outdoors, particularly in the Yorkshire Dales with all their extremes of weather.

‘You Hawthorne?’ he demanded when he reached us.

‘That’s me.’ Hawthorne nodded.

‘You want to check into your room? You need the toilet or anything like that?’

‘No. We’re all right.’

‘Let’s go then.’

Nobody had asked me but I wasn’t surprised. Why would I have expected otherwise?

Ingleton was an attractive village that had managed to wrap itself into a rather less attractive town. It was built on the edge of what might have been a quarry with steps and ornamental gardens leading steeply down so that as we drove along the high street we were actually far above the tiled roofs and chimneys of many of the houses below. A huge viaduct, now disused, extended over to one side; looking at it, I wondered if the navvies who had sweated and sworn over its construction had had any idea that one day it would be considered beautiful. We continued past a café, two shops specialising in potholing books and equipment, and then, quite oddly, a disproportionately large nursing home that might have owed something to Sherlock Holmes. It reminded me that Doyle’s mother had once lived nearby and that the writer himself had come here often.

Susan Taylor lived about two minutes up the hill in a 1920s end-of-terrace house that had been vandalised with a modern front door, double-glazed windows and, projecting out of the back, a really nasty conservatory, but then driving through Ingleton it was clear that very few of the residents had any time for architectural niceties. There was something very masculine about the building – its solid walls, its very squareness – and yet it was now occupied by a widow and her two young daughters. Charlotte Brontë might well have used it as a setting for a novel. But she’d have had to turn a blind eye to the conservatory.

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 was 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.

‘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?’