The Sentence is Death

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘Well, it turned out that the poor guy had made it about two thirds of the way up the platform before he’d slipped over the side, straight into the path of the oncoming train. He might have been lucky. He might just have been injured – badly. But I’m afraid it wasn’t like that. He’d fallen across both rails and he’d lost both his legs and he’d been decapitated, so he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.’

  My iPhone was on low battery and I was writing all this down. He waited for me to catch up. Both McCoy and Salim knew I was a writer and they were enjoying talking to me. It’s funny how many people are keen to have their work described in books.

  ‘My first job was to clear the area. There were a lot of people screaming. A couple of them had been sick. There was one woman in shock. And of course there were the usual perverts filming the whole thing on their mobile phones. Most of them were wearing football kit – scarves, hoodies, beanies … that sort of thing. It was hard to tell who was who. I started to move people back and I told them not to leave the immediate area. We’d need to take names and addresses, witness statements and all the rest of it. By now, quite a few more officers had arrived and I knew BT Central Control were on to it. The London Ambulance Service and the Air Ambulance Service would be on the way. My biggest worry was that someone was going to have a heart attack. It’s happened before and it just makes everything twice as complicated.

  ‘We managed to get a cordon up and we had the environment under control, but now we had to get the deceased out from under the train. And we only had forty-five minutes.’

  ‘Why was that?’ I asked. I was fascinated by the whole procedure.

  ‘It’s the cost,’ Salim explained. ‘When this sort of thing happens, we have to clear the platforms and keep the trains running. We can’t afford to hang around.’

  ‘Was it you who got the body out?’ Hawthorne asked.

  Salim nodded. ‘Yeah. You get a fifty-quid bonus if you’re up for that and I’m saving up for a holiday with my mum. It could have been worse. The train hadn’t been moving very fast so there were no body parts flying into the air or anything like that. And there was no need for a specialist unit to lift up the train. The driver was pretty shaken up but I got him to shunt the train back and it was fairly easy after that. We got the body out and I bagged up the hands and all the rest of it. After that, DC McCoy arrived and he took over.’

  McCoy did the same now.

  ‘There wasn’t a lot left for me to do,’ he said. ‘I got the dead man’s ID from his wallet and I got the North Yorkshire police to send round a couple of PCs to inform the widow. She was at home with two young daughters and I didn’t want her to hear it over the phone. She left for London straight away and I actually saw her the day after. Susan Taylor. Totally shocked. Couldn’t believe it had happened. Her husband hadn’t been well and the two of them had financial difficulties, which is to say they were skint like everyone else, but there was no history of depression. In fact, she said his trip had been a big success. The two of them had booked a restaurant, planning a celebration on Sunday night.’ He drew a breath. ‘Well, that didn’t happen.’

  ‘What was he doing in London?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘Seeing a friend.’

  Hawthorne waited for more information, then saw that McCoy had nothing more to add.

  ‘That’s all she told me,’ he explained. ‘I interviewed her: she was staying at the Holiday Inn off the Euston Road. But I couldn’t get much sense out of her. The poor woman was in pieces. Her husband under a train! The two of them had been married twenty years. She had to ID the body and that was horrible for her. I’d already decided it was an unexplained. I didn’t think there was anything much she could add.’

  ‘An unexplained?’ I jotted down the word.

  ‘We have three classifications. Unexplained, explained and suspicious. There was certainly nothing suspicious as far as I could see, but even with the CCTV images there was no obvious reason why Mr Taylor had taken that fall.’

  ‘There was that witness statement,’ Salim reminded him.

  ‘What was that?’ Hawthorne asked.

  McCoy glanced at Salim, perhaps a little annoyed that he’d been contradicted by a junior officer. ‘Just before he fell, Taylor cried out. It was only two words. “Look out!” But quite a few people heard him.’

  ‘Someone had bumped into him?’

  ‘They’d have had to bump into him pretty hard to project him out like that. He was almost horizontal when he hit the tracks. At the same time, quite a few of the people waiting for that train had had their fair share of booze. You know what it’s like after a football game.’

  ‘Could he have been deliberately pushed?’

  ‘Nobody saw anything. They just heard him shout and then it was over. But we’ve got the CCTV images. You can look for yourself.’ McCoy had a laptop computer. He swung it round so we could see the screen. At the same time, he explained: ‘The first thing I did when I got to the station was to call up Alpha Victor in Victoria. They had the images downloaded to me in no time. Thanks to them, we were able to follow him back to the Starbucks and the newsagent. We saw him arrive at the station.’

  ‘How did he get there?’

  ‘He took the Tube down from Highgate.’

  Highgate. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  ‘Here …’ McCoy hit the button.

  The images we manufacture on television and the big screen are nothing like the real thing. The pictures recorded at King’s Cross Station were indistinct and grainy, as if a layer of dust had deposited itself on the lens. The camera was in the wrong position, too high up and at an oblique angle. The colours were muted, slightly off-kilter. The navy and gold of the Leeds United football strip, for example, were more nightfall and French mustard. Gregory Taylor’s death was seen at its most mundane, stripped of any art or excitement. Here one minute, gone the next.

  At first, I couldn’t see the train, just a large crowd, many of them football supporters, milling around.

  ‘That’s Taylor there,’ McCoy said.

  Sure enough, a blurry figure was making its way along the outside of the platform, close to the edge but not so close as to put himself in danger. He wasn’t in a hurry. There was no sound with the image and he was very small and far away but I got the impression that he was politely asking people to allow him to pass. Then three things happened almost simultaneously. Gregory Taylor disappeared from sight, swallowed up by the crowd just as the bright red Virgin train appeared. It had been moving quite slowly in real life but it seemed to take no time at all to reach the edge of the screen. Then Gregory fell in front of it. His back was to the camera but even if we’d been able to see it, it would have been impossible to make out any expression on his face. He was little more than a paint stroke, brushed across the canvas. He plunged down and disappeared a second time. The train continued implacably, crushing him. There was a few seconds’ delay before people realised what had just happened. Then the crowd recoiled, forming a pattern like an exploding sun. I could easily imagine the screams.

  ‘These are from the camera on the front of the train,’ McCoy said.

  The same sequence but seen this time from the driver’s point of view. The tracks stretched out ahead. The waiting passengers were over to the right. Then something – it could have been anything – scythed through the image. That was Gregory Taylor in the last second of his life. The driver might have hit the brakes but the train didn’t seem to slow down.

  I had just watched a man die.

  McCoy closed his laptop, folding the lid down. ‘The coroner at King’s Cross gave us permission to move the body and he was taken off to the nearest mortuary. I’ve handed the file to the Fatality Investigation Team and of course there’ll be an inquest. But in all honesty, I can’t see any evidence of foul play. I’m ninety per cent sure it was an accident. Just one of those things.’

  ‘Did he have enemies?’ Salim asked. ‘Is that why you’re investigating?’
r />   ‘He may have been involved in a murder that took place in Hampstead the next day,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘Well at least he’s one suspect you can cross off your list,’ Salim muttered, reflectively. ‘He wouldn’t have been up for anything.’

  We left the offices and walked out to the area in front of the concourse. As soon as we were in the fresh air, Hawthorne lit a cigarette. I could see him turning over everything he had just heard. There were times where he reminded me of a scientist on the threshold of a great discovery or an archaeologist about to open a tomb. He showed almost no emotion but I could feel his energy and excitement.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘He was in Highgate.’

  ‘Maybe he’d come to London to see Davina Richardson.’

  ‘Or Richard Pryce. You could walk to either of their places from the same station.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be a coincidence. He died almost exactly twenty-four hours before the murder.’

  ‘You’re right there, Tony. It’s not a coincidence.’

  He smoked his cigarette in silence. Euston is one of the ugliest stations in London and I felt grubby even standing there, surrounded by fast-food restaurants and concrete. Finally, Hawthorne spoke. ‘Ingleton.’ The way he spoke that single word, I got the impression he’d been there before. And that he hadn’t liked it.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Are you busy at the moment?’

  ‘You know I am.’

  ‘We’re going to have to go there.’ Again, he wasn’t enthusiastic.

  He finished his cigarette and we went into the ticket office and bought the tickets, leaving the next day.

  10

  Ingleton, Yorkshire

  Hawthorne wasn’t in a good mood when we met at King’s Cross station the next day – but then, of course, there was nothing unusual about that. When we were together his manner ranged from distant and off-putting to downright rude and I often thought that he had spent so long investigating murderers that some of their sociopathy had rubbed off on him. There were times when I wondered if he wasn’t simply playing the role of the hard-bitten detective … that he slipped into it just as he did his collection of white shirts and dark suits. Why was he so reluctant to tell me anything about himself? Why did he never talk about the films he had seen, the people he’d met, what he’d done at the weekend or anything outside the business that had brought us together? What was he afraid of?

  Even so, I had been hoping that this trip to Yorkshire would give him a chance to unwind. After all, we would be spending at least four hours in close proximity and surely we might bond over a Virgin coffee and a bacon sandwich? Some chance. As the train pulled out, he sat hunched up, gazing morosely out of the window. There was something in his manner, in those searching brown eyes of his and the tiny, old-fashioned suitcase that he had brought with him, that made me think of a child being evacuated in the war. When I asked him if he wanted something to eat, he just shook his head. I had bought us first-class tickets, by the way. I needed to work and I thought Hawthorne would appreciate the extra space. He hadn’t even noticed.

  It was clear that he didn’t want to leave London. Ten minutes later, when we had picked up speed and were rattling through the northern suburbs, he was still staring at the flats and offices that were already thinning out. The green spaces in between seemed to alarm him and it occurred to me that apart from one day in Kent, we had never left the city. I had never seen him wearing jeans or trainers. Did he even take exercise? I wondered.

  A ticket collector came along, and I used the interruption to tackle Hawthorne, albeit gently. ‘You’re very quiet,’ I said. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to a couple of days in the countryside. It’s nice to get out.’

  ‘You know Yorkshire?’

  ‘I was at university in York.’

  He knew that perfectly well. He knew everything about me. He must have meant something else by the question and, running it back, I picked up the dread in his voice and understood what he was implying. ‘You don’t like Yorkshire,’ I said.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  He hesitated. ‘I spent a bit of time there.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  He pulled a paperback book out of his pocket and slapped it down on the table, signalling that the conversation was at an end. I looked down and saw that he had chosen A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘Is that for your book club?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right.’ There was something else he wanted to tell me but we were another ten miles up the track before he forced it out. ‘They want you to come to the next session.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The book club.’ I looked blank so he added, ‘You’ve written about Sherlock Holmes. That last novel of yours. They want to know what you think.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering how they knew about me … I mean, the fact that you know me.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t tell them.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Hawthorne drew a breath. I could tell that he wanted a cigarette. ‘Someone saw you when you came into the building,’ he explained.

  ‘River Court?’

  ‘Yes. When you came up in the lift.’

  I remembered the young man in the wheelchair and there had also been the married couple I had met on the ground floor. I’ve occasionally been on TV and my photograph is on my book jackets. It’s possible they would have recognised me.

  ‘They asked me to ask you to come,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘Is that what’s worrying you? I’ll be happy to.’

  ‘I was worried that was what you were going to say.’

  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 th
e 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 high 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.