The Sentence is Death

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘Did you ever talk about any of this with Gregory Taylor?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘Of course I talked to him. Apart from the fact that we were mates, it was my job as duty controller. But he wasn’t there when the other man died. He and Pryce had already gone on ahead. What was going on in Richardson’s head right then? Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘Why didn’t all three of them wait in Spaghetti Junction? If you say it was safer there.’

  ‘Maybe they should have done. But Greg told me he was afraid that once they went in, they’d never find their way out. And he had a point. I’ve been in there and it’s a bloody nightmare.’ Gallivan sighed. ‘Anyway, it’s easy enough to be wise after the event. They heard the water coming and they wanted out. I might have made the same decision if I’d been with them.’

  There was a long silence. I became aware that I was the only one who was still eating. I put down my knife and fork.

  ‘There is one other thing you might want to know,’ Gallivan added. ‘Greg rang me from London, the day he died.’

  ‘The Saturday?’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘That’s right. Saturday afternoon. He was on his way to the station. He said he wanted to talk to me about Long Way Hole – about what really happened.’

  ‘Is that what he said? Were those his exact words?’

  ‘That’s right. He said he’d been thinking about it and there was something he wanted to get off his chest. We arranged to meet here, at this very pub, on Monday night. Seven o’clock.’

  ‘But he never got home.’

  ‘He went under that train and that was it.’

  There was a moment of clarity that came to me in much the same way as water must have come rushing through Long Way Hole. It was suddenly obvious. Gregory Taylor knew something that nobody else did. Something had happened just before the fatal accident. He had wanted to tell Dave Gallivan. But he had been killed before he could get home.

  He had been murdered. And that was the reason.

  I said as much to Hawthorne later that evening after Gallivan had left but, annoyingly, he didn’t seem quite so sure. ‘It doesn’t quite stack up, mate. If he made the call on the way to the station and someone overheard him, they’d have had to be with him, and according to his wife he was on his own.’

  ‘He could have met someone in London.’ I thought about the time frame. ‘It could have been Davina Richardson. We know he was near her home.’

  ‘What? And you think she followed him to King’s Cross station and pushed him under a train?’

  ‘Why not? If she blamed Richard Pryce and Gregory Taylor for the death of her husband, she could have killed both of them.’

  ‘But she didn’t blame them. She’d forgiven Pryce and she hadn’t seen Taylor for six years. We don’t even know if she saw him the day he died.’

  ‘Presumably you’re going to ask her.’

  Hawthorne gave me his most reasonable smile. ‘Of course we’ll ask her. You liked her, didn’t you ?’

  ‘She seemed nice enough.’

  ‘And she had a son who read your books!’

  ‘Unlike your son. Yes!’

  There was one other odd development that evening. We’d finished early as we had a seven o’clock start the next morning and we were about to go up to our rooms when a man came into the pub. I noticed him standing by the door, looking at us, puzzled. He was late thirties, fair-haired, short and quite slender, wearing a hoody and jeans. He hesitated, then came over to us and I assumed that he had recognised me and was going to say something about my books.

  But actually it was Hawthorne he thought he knew. ‘Billy!’ The single word was somewhere between a statement and a question. Hawthorne looked up at him but showed no recognition at all and now the man doubted himself. ‘It’s Mike,’ he said. ‘Mike Carlyle.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mate.’ Hawthorne shook his head. ‘My name’s not Billy. And I don’t know any Mike Carlyle.’

  The man was completely thrown. He had recognised the face and he thought he knew the voice too. ‘You weren’t in Reeth?’

  ‘No. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just up from London. I’ve never been to anywhere called Reeth.’

  ‘But …’ He wanted to continue but Hawthorne hadn’t just been definitive. He’d been almost hostile. ‘I’m sorry,’ the man stammered. He was still staring at Hawthorne. He couldn’t bring himself to leave.

  Hawthorne picked up his glass of water. ‘No problem.’ I could hear the steel in his voice. It was also there in his eyes.

  ‘Sorry.’ The man got the message. He didn’t just back away. If he’d come here for a pint, he’d changed his mind. He left the way he had come.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ Hawthorne said.

  I wanted to ask him what had just happened. Had he once been known as William or Billy or had it simply been a case of mistaken identity? These things happen. But somehow I was sure there was more to it than that and that somehow Mike Carlyle was connected to the strange mood Hawthorne had been in all day.

  Hawthorne left without saying another word and he didn’t mention it again when we met for breakfast the next morning, or on the train all the way back to London.

  12

  The Haiku

  I could tell things were still going wrong as soon as I walked into the Foyle’s War production base later that same day. Jangling phones, printers churning out fresh paperwork, accountants staring desperately into computer screens, runners chasing around as if being chased themselves, a sense of tightly controlled panic … All that was normal. It was the silence that worried me, the way everyone avoided my eye as I made my way into Jill’s office.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  She was standing at her desk (she never sits), just ending a phone call, checking her emails and dictating a note to her assistant, all at the same time. As she has often told me, only women know how to multitask. ‘Nothing you need to worry about,’ she said.

  ‘No. Tell me!’

  ‘We’ve lost a location,’ she said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The chase. All of it.’ It was a rare moment of action in the series, with Foyle and Sam being tracked through London streets by an armed Russian assassin. ‘The police have withdrawn permission,’ she went on. ‘They won’t even give us a sensible reason.’

  ‘What did they say?’ I asked. There was an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  ‘I don’t know. It was something about a murder inquiry. It sounds completely unlikely. They say someone’s been killed and they’ve had to cordon off a whole load of streets. There’s nothing we can do. They won’t let us shoot there.’

  Cara Grunshaw. It had to be. That mention of a murder inquiry was a direct shot across my bows. I didn’t dare say anything to Jill but crept back to my desk, which was tucked away in a corner. The business card that Cara had given me was still in my pocket. I took it out and stared at it for a long time, then picked up the phone and dialled. It rang twice before she answered. I had hoped it would go straight to voicemail.

  ‘Yes?’ Her voice was curt, almost brutal.

  ‘This is Anthony—’

  ‘I know who it is. What do you want?’

  ‘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. Bu
t 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 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?

  But then again, the entire scenario, the accident at Long Way Hole, could be completely irrelevant. That was a worrying thought. Was I going to end up writing two or three chapters – the visit to Ribblehead, the Station Inn and all the rest of it – when actually it was a giant red herring and a complete waste of time? Hawthorne had almost suggested as much before we’d got on the train back to London. It doesn’t quite stack up, mate. Suppose I took the entire Yorkshire sequence out of consideration. Where did that leave me?

  Richard Pryce, a wealthy divorce lawyer, had been murdered in his own house. Just a few days before, Akira Anno, a woman he had deliberately set out to humiliate, had threatened to smash a bottle over his head and that was exactly how he had died. Then she killed him! Those were my words. I had spoken them to Hawthorne when he had first outlined the case and at the time the conclusion had seemed inescapable. Had she really been in a remote cottage near Lyndhurst on the Sunday evening? Hawthorne seemed to doubt it. And what about the secret income stream that Oliver Masefield had mentioned and which Richard had been investigating?

  And then there was her ex-husband, Adrian Lockwood. As far as I could see, he had no motive to kill his lawyer: Pryce had managed to get him exactly the divorce he wanted; indeed, he had rewarded him with that very expensive bottle of wine. It was also impossible for Lockwood to have committed the murder, at least on his own. He had been with Davina until just after eight o’clock in the evening. Pryce’s neighbour, the unpleasant Mr Fairchild, had seen someone approaching the house (holding a torch) around five to eight and there had been the timing of the telephone call too. There was no way he could have got there in time.

  Ignoring him, I turned to Stephen Spencer, Richard’s husband. He had almost certainly been lying when he said he was in Frinton with his sick mother and it did make me wonder. Why does nobody ever tell the truth when a murder has been committed? You’d have thought people would have fallen over themselves to co-operate – but no, not a bit of it. It was almost as if they were all queuing up to be suspects. So where was he? With another man … or with a woman? Richard Pryce had been talking about his will quite recently. Could Stephen have discovered he was about to be cut out?

  I thought about Davina Richardson. She had told us that she had forgiven Richard Pryce for his part in her husband’s death and I believed her. She had taken money from him and allowed him to become a second father to her son. She seemed to get many of her clients from him and she had even been redecorating his house. Was it possible that she was harbouring some secret hatred for him and if so, why? No one had ever suggested that he had been responsible for what happened at Long Way Hole. Quite the contrary. This is my fault. That was what Gregory Taylor had said – repeatedly – when he reached Ing Lane Farm. If she had any argument, it was with him.

  Finally, there was the man with the blue glasses and the rash or whatever it was on his face who had broken into Adrian Lockwood’s office. I still had no idea who he was but it seemed probable that he was the same man whom Richard Pryce had mentioned to Colin Richardson, Davina’s son. There was something wrong with his face. According to Colin, Pryce had been worried about the mystery man for some time. Suppose the man worked for Akira Anno? She knew that both Adrian and Richard Pryce were investigating her. She could have hired him to find out what they knew.

  When I next looked at my watch, a couple of hours had passed and I was still no nearer the truth. There were notes and scribbles everywhere: it’s funny how the surface of my desk always reflects the state of my mind. Right now, it was a mess. I snatched hold of a page and read: What are you doing here? It’s a bit late.

  Richard Pryce’s last words, overheard on the telephone by his husband, Stephen Spencer. But it had only been eight o’clock. So whoever had come to the door had arrived too late in another sense.

  I took out a red pen and underlined the words that had been spoken. I knew they were important. I just couldn’t figure out why.

  Hawthorne wasn’t there when I reached Davina Richardson’s house but it was only ten to
five: I had arrived a few minutes early. I was standing in the street looking out for him when the front door opened and Davina appeared on the doorstep, calling me in.

  ‘I saw you out of the window,’ she explained. ‘Are you waiting for your friend?’

  ‘He’s not exactly my friend,’ I said.

  ‘You said you were writing a book about him. Does that mean I’m going to be one of the characters?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want to be.’

  She smiled. ‘It doesn’t bother me at all. Why don’t you come in?’

  It was drizzling again – this horrible autumn weather. There seemed no point hanging around in the street so I followed her through the cluttered hallway and back into the kitchen. The smell of cigarette smoke was everywhere. I gave up cigarettes thirty years ago but even when I smoked it was never inside the house and I wondered how she lived with it. I sat down at the kitchen table, at the same time noticing that she had been reading Two Hundred Haikus by Akira Anno. There was a brand-new copy that had been left face down, with the pages fanning out.

  ‘Will you have some tea?’

  ‘Not for me, thank you.’

  ‘The kettle’s just boiled.’ She brought a plate of chocolate digestives to the table. ‘I shouldn’t really be eating these but Colin loves them and you know how it is once you’ve opened the packet …’

  ‘Where is Colin?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s doing his homework with a friend.’ She bit into a biscuit. By the time I left, she would have eaten four or five. She was wearing a baggy mohair jersey but I didn’t think she had chosen it to hide her shape. For all her apologies, she didn’t strike me as a woman who was particularly self-conscious. She was completely comfortable with who and what she was. I still didn’t know for certain that she had been having an affair with Adrian Lockwood, but if she had, I was sure she would have been better suited to him than Akira Anno. She would have looked after him like she looked after Colin – nagging him, cajoling him, but at the end of the day doing everything she could to make him happy.