The Sentence Is Death

‘He killed himself!’ I said. What other answer could there be?

‘That’s right, Tony, but first he rang his friend Dave Gallivan. He said he wanted to tell him about what had really happened at Long Way Hole, but that was just making mischief. He already knew he wasn’t going to see Dave again. He had decided on his plan. You see, he had a £250,000 life insurance policy.’

Of course. Susan Taylor had told us that. She’d made a grim joke that he wouldn’t be able to use the money to pay for the operation that could save him.

‘Gregory was afraid that if he killed himself, he would lose out on his life insurance. Maybe there was a suicide clause in the contract. Normally there’s a two-year waiting period – but who knows? He didn’t want it to look like suicide in order to protect the payment, so he set about sending a series of messages that everything was fine, he was going to live and that life was a bed of roses.

‘He rang his wife with a message of comfort and joy and invited her to dinner at the Marton Arms the following night. But here’s the question. Why did he call her at the time when he knew she would be taking their daughter to dance class? Could it be that he didn’t want her to answer? That he couldn’t trust himself to lie to her and that anyway he needed the message to be recorded, so that she could play it to the police?

‘He also invited Dave to have a drink with him on the Monday. He even went so far as to take a selfie of himself smiling on Hornsey Lane, one minute away from the so-called Suicide Bridge in Highgate. What’s that if it isn’t signalling to the world “I’m not going to commit suicide!”? And finally he buys a big, fat book at the railway station because he wants us to think that he’s going to start it on the train even though it’s the third part in a series he’s never read . . . In fact, he doesn’t read books at all because I was in his house and I saw for myself. No books. No shelves.’

‘He killed himself,’ Davina repeated, emptying the last of the wine.

‘But before he killed himself, he pressed the self-destruct button,’ Hawthorne said. ‘What exactly was he doing in Hornsey Lane, five minutes from here?’

‘You said! He took a selfie . . .’

‘He did more than that. He came to this house. He told you the truth about Long Way Hole.’

There was a heavy silence, punctuated by the sound of movement; perhaps a breeze blowing a curtain. Hawthorne looked up briefly but there were just the three of us in the room and he dismissed it.

‘You can’t know that,’ Davina muttered.

‘When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’ Hawthorne replied.

‘He came here?’ I was so stunned by this piece of information, or deduction, or whatever it was, that I blurted the words out helplessly.

‘On his way back to King’s Cross station. Yes. He told Mrs Richardson what had really happened to her husband. My guess is that Richard Pryce, her dearest friend and the godfather to her child, had left his friend to drown. Is that right, Mrs Richardson?’

Very slowly, Davina nodded. A single tear traced itself down the side of her cheek.

‘They lied about the flood,’ she said. ‘Charlie never got separated from them. It was just like you said. He got stuck at the contortion and they could have easily reached him but they were too scared. Richard was the worst of them. He persuaded Greg to get out. They could actually hear my Charlie screaming but they abandoned him. They saved their own skins and he drowned.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ Hawthorne said and I thought that for once he actually meant it.

‘Don’t ask me any more questions. I’ll tell you the rest.’

This was a very different Davina Richardson. It was as if something had snapped inside her. She just wanted it to be over.

‘I know the truth now and it’s that Richard betrayed us,’ she said. ‘He looked after us. He gave us money. He got me work. He pretended to be my friend. But all along he’d been lying to us. He knew perfectly well what had happened at Long Way Hole. If he hadn’t been such a coward, Charlie would still be alive. I’m not stupid, Mr Hawthorne. I know that everything he did for Colin and me was an expiation. He was trying to buy his way out of his guilt. But in a way that made it worse. I think I would have respected him more if he’d simply ignored us.

‘When Greg Taylor told me what he’d done, I knew I had to kill him.’ She got up and went to the fridge. She spent a moment looking for another bottle of wine but there weren’t any more. She opened a cupboard and found some vodka. She brought that to the table. ‘I don’t think I’m an evil person. I’m just empty. Can you understand that? I’ve lived the past six years with a great big hole in my life and I suppose I’ve allowed it to consume me. I didn’t want to see Greg. When he turned up at the door, I couldn’t believe it was him. He was a stranger to me. After he left, I knew exactly what I was going to do.