The Sentence Is Death

So I felt an almost childish excitement the next day when Hawthorne and I turned up at the offices of the British Transport Police at Euston station. Here was a small, nondescript door that I must have passed dozens of times without noticing, tucked away in a distant corner just past the Left Luggage Office and opposite the entrance to platforms 16–18. Of course it was going to be disappointing on the other side but that wasn’t the point. It was somewhere I had never been.

The door opened into a reception area where we were greeted by a tired-looking woman in uniform, sitting behind a wire-mesh screen. Hawthorne gave her the name of our contact, Detective Constable James McCoy, and almost immediately he appeared, a thickset, square-jawed man with a military haircut and – jeans, sweatshirt, anorak – civilian clothes.

‘Mr Hawthorne?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on through . . .’

We filled in a form and another door buzzed open, taking us into a maze of narrow corridors and tiny offices that extended much further than I would have thought possible. Everything was remarkably shabby. We followed a blue carpet covered in all manner of stains past a softly vibrating drinks dispenser and on round another corner. Some of the rooms were hardly bigger than cupboards. A criminal being interviewed there would be able to touch knees with the officer who had arrested him. We passed an incident room and I glimpsed half a dozen men and women examining printouts and transferring the contents to the whiteboards that surrounded them. Forget modern technology. This might be the front line against crime and terrorism but it was all resolutely old-fashioned, with chunky Hewlett Packard computers on Formica-covered desks and a whole crowd of cheap swivel chairs. There were no windows. This really was a world apart.

Hawthorne had arranged the meeting. I hadn’t needed to tell him about the newspaper article. He’d seen it himself and had called me that same evening. I hadn’t spoken to Cara Grunshaw either. I hadn’t forgotten the way she had threatened me but I’d decided to leave any further contact for at least a week, by which time, hopefully, Hawthorne would have solved the case anyway. Or maybe I would. I was still quite attracted to the idea that I would be the one who made sense of it all and that when the suspects were gathered together in one room in the final chapter, I’d be the one doing the talking.

There was a second man waiting for us in the statement room. This was a uniformed officer, barely out of his twenties, who had been brought across to talk to us. His name was Ahmed Salim and he had been the first to deal with the body. I was puzzled to find myself in Euston, incidentally, when the death had happened in King’s Cross, but apparently there was no CID division there. As McCoy explained, he was responsible for all incidents north of the Central line, travelling as far as Stratford East and Chelmsford. He had now been put in charge of the inquiry into Gregory Taylor’s death.

This, according to the two men, was what had happened.

Gregory Taylor had come to London on the morning of Saturday 26 October, one day before Richard Pryce had died. He had taken an early train from Horton-in-Ribblesdale – there is no station in Ingleton – and was now on his way back home. The station was unusually crowded for a Saturday. There had been a football match that day – Leeds vs Arsenal – and the platform was jammed with supporters. Normally, Virgin won’t allow passengers through the ticket barrier until the train has pulled in, but they change the rules when there’s a major disruption and as it happened there had been a signal failure at Peterborough and the service was running late. So there were up to four hundred people waiting as the train drew in.

Taylor reached the platform at twelve minutes past six. He was in no hurry. He had bought himself a coffee at Starbucks and a thick doorstop of a book at W. H. Smith. This was Prisoners of Blood, the third volume in the Doomworld series by the bestselling author Mark Belladonna. By coincidence, I knew the series because I’d recently been approached by Sky to adapt it for TV. Doomworld had been compared (unfavourably) to Game of Thrones, which was then in its third season. It was a fantasy version of England in the time of King Arthur, weaving magic and mystery with really quite extreme levels of violence and pornography. The Daily Mail had branded the books ‘pure porn poison’, which the publishers had cheekily reprinted on the cover. I’d read about half of the first volume but I hadn’t really enjoyed it and it had been an easy decision to turn the show down.

The third volume had just arrived in the shops and it was on special offer. Taylor bought it and received a free Kit Kat and a bottle of water.