The Sentence Is Death

‘It couldn’t have been murder. Only two people knew he was in London. Richard Pryce, the man he had come to see, and his wife. It’s just possible that Richard could have followed him to King’s Cross and pushed him under a train, but why would he do that? Gregory Taylor had a terminal illness and Richard had just agreed to pay for the operation that might save him. If he wanted to kill Gregory, all he had to do was refuse. And Susan Taylor had no reason to kill her husband either. Their marriage was happy enough and she’d been the one who’d sent him to London to get help. There was only one other person who might have had a grudge against him – Davina Richardson could have blamed him for the death of her husband. He had been the team leader at Long Way Hole. But she didn’t know he was coming to London and although it’s true he was close to Highgate station, there’s no evidence that the two of them met.

‘So was it suicide? That doesn’t make any sense either. Gregory Taylor came to London to get money for his operation and he rang his wife. We’ve heard the message and he’s ecstatic. Richard Pryce isn’t just going to pay £20,000 or £30,000, he’s going to pay the whole thing. Of course, Gregory could still be depressed. The operation may not succeed. He’s still ill. But everything in his behaviour suggests that this is a man who wants to live. He’s going to take his wife out to dinner to celebrate. He’s arranged to meet an old friend, Dave Gallivan, to talk about Long Way Hole . . . I suppose we’ll never know what he was going to say. He even buys a paperback with six hundred pages to read on the train!

‘It had to be an accident. It’s the only explanation that works. I’m sure you’ve seen the CCTV footage. He’s in a hurry. He wants to get home to celebrate with his wife. There’s a crowd of football supporters and someone pushes into him. He shouts, “Look out!” and he falls.’ I paused. ‘If he’d wanted to kill himself, would he have done it inside a station, with the train moving so slowly? The transport police didn’t think so and nor do I.’

Grunshaw and Mills were silent, gazing at me sullenly. At least I had their full attention.

‘There are only really six suspects in the murder of Richard Pryce,’ I went on. ‘And I’m not going to go through them all. The point is this. If Gregory Taylor had been murdered, then maybe Richard’s death would have been connected to what had happened at Long Way Hole all those years ago. But if you accept that it was an accident, then there’s a whole different shape that presents itself and that’s got to relate to Adrian Lockwood and Akira Anno and their divorce. That was where this all started – a threat in a restaurant. Akira couldn’t have made herself clearer. She despised Richard Pryce and she wanted to hurt him with a bottle of wine.

‘More than that, Akira was afraid of him because he was investigating her finances. She had a secret income stream that she hadn’t told anyone about. If Pryce had found out how she was earning her money that would have been a good reason to kill him. Of course, she’d had to have known he’d found out and that’s a problem because as far as we know, she had no idea.’

‘How was she earning the money?’ Mills asked.

I didn’t answer.

‘Let’s get to the night of the murder. These are the facts. It had been raining and there were a few puddles on the ground but otherwise it was dry. It wasn’t particularly dark – there was a full moon that night – but just before eight o’clock, one of the residents in Fitzroy Park, a man called Henry Fairchild, saw someone coming off Hampstead Heath, carrying a torch. That person rang the doorbell of Heron’s Wake and Richard let them in. But something else happened. They stepped off the path and into the flower bed, breaking some of the bulrushes and leaving a small indentation in the earth. There’s one other thing we need to remember. When Richard opened the door, he was talking to Stephen Spencer on his mobile phone. “What are you doing here?” he asked his visitor, which means he knew who it was. “It’s a bit late.”

‘That last remark is rather strange. It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday evening. True, winter time has just begun. But it’s not really very late at all. What does he mean?

‘I have to admit, I’ve thought about this for a long time. It puzzled Hawthorne too. But then I remembered something I’d seen when I was at Adrian Lockwood’s house. It was just a small detail but it somehow caught my eye. He was eating bilberries.’

‘This had better be going somewhere,’ Cara growled.

I ignored her.