The Sentence Is Death

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.