The Sentence Is Death

‘Have you stopped our production team filming in Hackney?’

There was a brief pause, an intake of breath, then . . . ‘Are you phoning me to ask me that? Who the fuck do you think you are?’

‘I’m phoning you to give you information!’ I cut in quickly. I didn’t want her to go on shouting at me.

‘What information?’ The voice was utterly disembodied. It wasn’t just the phone line. It didn’t seem to be connected to a human being.

‘We’ve just been to Yorkshire . . . Hawthorne and me. It may be that Pryce’s murder is connected to a caving accident that happened there six years ago.’

I felt horrible betraying Hawthorne, but if it was a choice between him and Jill what else could I do? The production had to come first. But even as I spoke, I was choosing my words carefully, determined not to give too much away.

‘We know about the accident.’ Now she sounded flat, bored, but I wondered if she was telling the truth. She certainly hadn’t been to Ingleton ahead of us. Susan Taylor would have said.

‘A man called Gregory Taylor fell under a train at King’s Cross station on Saturday, the day before Richard Pryce was murdered,’ I went on. ‘Hawthorne thinks that he knew something about what happened and that maybe he was pushed. Someone didn’t want him to talk.’

This wasn’t true. It was actually my own theory and although Hawthorne hadn’t completely dismissed it, he most certainly hadn’t accepted it either. It seemed a reasonable bone to throw Grunshaw’s way. If she did decide to check up on it, she might discover that we had arranged to see Davina Richardson again that very afternoon.

‘Gregory Taylor’s got nothing to do with the fucking case,’ Grunshaw said. I hated the way she swore all the time. Hawthorne was almost as bad but somehow she made it uglier and more personal.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘You don’t ask the questions! And if you do ask them, don’t think I’m going to fucking answer them. Hawthorne’s in Yorkshire?’

‘We were there yesterday.’

‘He’s wasting his time. What else can you tell me?’

I tried to think of everything that had happened, searching for something innocuous. ‘Someone broke into Adrian Lockwood’s office the week before the murder,’ I said. ‘There may be a connection.’

‘We know about that too.’ I didn’t need to see the contempt on her face. I could hear it in her voice. ‘Don’t ring me again until you’ve got something I actually want to hear.’

‘Someone has stopped us filming—’ I tried again.

She wasn’t having any of it. The phone went dead.

For a while I sat there, doing very little. I couldn’t focus on my work, not after that conversation with Grunshaw. But slowly I came to a resolution. Thinking about her and the way she was treating me, I was more determined than ever to solve the case myself. In fact, Hawthorne was almost as bad as her and it occurred to me how much it would satisfy me to put a finger up to both of them and find the killer on my own. That would certainly be one way to get them both off my back.

Ignoring all the activity around me, I opened my laptop and quietly set about typing up all my notes from the meetings in Yorkshire. I produced hard copies on the office printer, then laid the pages out – chapter by chapter – so that I could read everything that had happened in sequence, up to the point where I was now. My hope was that I could work out where I might be heading next.

The first question. Was this one murder or two? Had Gregory Taylor been pushed under a train, had he fallen – or had he jumped?

If he had been killed, then the two deaths had to be related. Hawthorne had said as much when he was interviewing Susan Taylor: 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. I had written it down, word for word, in my notebook. He had said much the same thing to me outside Euston station: It’s not a coincidence. So if Richard Pryce and Gregory Taylor had been targeted for the same reason, then everything went back to the accident and the killer surely had to be one of the two widows: Davina Richardson or Susan Taylor. Both of them had been in London on the day, although Davina had an alibi. She had been with Adrian Lockwood around the time the murder had taken place.

And then there was Dave Gallivan’s extraordinary revelation: He said he wanted to talk to me about Long Way Hole – about what really happened. But if Taylor had been killed to stop him from talking, surely that ruled out Davina and Susan? Might there be someone else – perhaps Chris Jackson, the farmer we’d met in Yorkshire, or someone involved in what had happened – who urgently wanted to keep him silent?