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 the 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 far 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.
Dave Gallivan knocked on the door and without waiting for an answer opened it and went in. We followed him into a bright, airy home, simply furnished with sisal mats on the floor, dried bulrushes in vases, photographs of caves and crevices on the walls. On one side, a door opened into a living room with an upright piano and a fireplace with more dried flowers in the hearth. A cat was lying asleep on a rug. We turned the other way and went into the kitchen, where Susan was standing, waiting for us with an enormous knife in her hand.
For that reason, her first appearance struck me as quite menacing although in fact we had simply caught her preparing vegetables for dinner. There were chunks of carrot and potato spread out in front of her and as we came in she used the blade to sweep them off the chopping board and into a casserole.
It had been five days since she had heard that she had lost not just her husband but her entire world and she was still in shock. She wasn’t just unsmiling. She barely seemed to notice that we had come into the room. She had a square face with skin the colour and texture of damp clay. Her hair was drab and lifeless. She was wearing a dress that was either too long or too short but looked just wrong, cut off at her calves, which were stout and beefy. She didn’t speak as Gallivan ushered us in but I could tell at once that she wished we weren’t there.
‘Sue – this is Mr Hawthorne,’ Gallivan announced.
‘Oh yes. I suppose you’ll be having some tea, will you?’
I wasn’t sure if this was an invitation to make us some or a weary prediction as to what might be about to happen but it was uttered with an almost startling lack of enthusiasm.
To my surprise, Hawthorne replied with alacrity. ‘A cup of tea. That would be lovely, Mrs Taylor.’
‘I’ll make it.’ Gallivan made his way over to the kettle. He clearly knew his way around the kitchen.
Susan put down the knife and sat at the kitchen table. She was in her forties but looked a lot older, a punchbag of a woman whose every movement told us she’d had more than enough. We sat opposite her and she examined us for the first time.
‘I hope this won’t take too long,’ she said. She had a solid Yorkshire accent. ‘I’ve got to finish the supper and the girls will be home from school. The week’s been difficult enough already. I don’t want them to find you here.’
‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs Taylor,’ Hawthorne said.
‘Did you ever meet my Greg?’
‘No.’
‘And you’ve never met me, so don’t bother me with your condolences. I’ve got no use for them.’
‘We need to know what happened to him.’
‘You know what happened to him. He fell under a train.’
Hawthorne looked apologetic. ‘That may not be the case . . .’
‘What are you saying?’ Her eyes flared briefly.
Hawthorne examined her for a moment before continuing. ‘I don’t want to upset you, Mrs Taylor, but we haven’t discounted the possibility that he was pushed.’
I was surprised that he had put it as baldly as that and I wondered what her reaction would be. She hadn’t had the time to come to terms with the fact that he was dead, let alone that he might have been murdered. It seemed insensitive even by his standards.
In fact, she seemed remarkably unconcerned. ‘Who would want to do a thing like that?’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anyone who would want to hurt Greg. And nobody knew he was going to London except me. He didn’t even tell the girls.’
‘Why was he in London?’
The kettle had boiled. Susan didn’t answer until Gallivan had made the tea and brought it over to the table. He had left the bags in the mugs with the little label attached by a thread hanging over the sides.
‘He was ill,’ she said. ‘He needed money.’
‘How ill?’ Again, Hawthorne wasn’t giving her any leeway.
‘Seriously ill. But don’t you be getting any wrong ideas. He was going to be all right. That was the reason he was there.’