The Sentence Is Death

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