The Sentence Is Death

‘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.