‘So who did he go to see?’
‘Let me explain to you, Mr Hawthorne. I’ll tell it to you my way, if you don’t mind. It’ll make it easier for you and less painful for me if I don’t have to answer every one of your damn questions.’
Hawthorne took out his cigarettes. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked.
‘You can smoke all you like. But not in my house.’
She stared moodily at her tea, then picked up her cup and sipped without removing the bag. I did the same. Gallivan had added a couple of spoonfuls of sugar without asking. He was hovering over the kettle, leaving the three of us grouped at the table.
‘When I first met him, Greg was an accountant,’ she began. ‘He did all right for himself. He was working in a big firm in Leeds and he was climbing the ladder, if you know what I mean. I had bar work and that’s how the two of us met. We went out. We got married. We had kids. But he was never happy in the city. He loved being out on the Dales – hiking, birding, sleeping out under the stars. And not just on the Dales. Underneath them. He was a caver through and through. He was coming here every other weekend and to hell with what I had to say about the matter, so in the end it made sense to sell up and move here. He took a job at Atkinsons, even though it was less well paid.’
‘They’re a builders’ merchant,’ Gallivan muttered from the side.
‘That’s right. He was their finance manager.’
‘Do you have a photograph of your husband?’ I asked. I had no idea what he looked like and I thought it would be useful to know, if she was going to talk about him.
She glanced at me as if I had offended her, then nodded very briefly. Gallivan came over to the table, carrying a photograph in a plastic frame. It showed a large, smiling man with a rugby player’s face, complete with broken nose. He was wearing a brightly coloured anorak. At least half the picture was taken up by his beard, which seemed to be exploding out of his face. He was grinning and making a thumbs up to the camera: one of life’s celebrants.
‘We scraped by, Greg and I. We weren’t rich, but you don’t need money in a place like this. I’m not complaining. We had our friends. June and Maisie – our two girls. And of course the Dales. I work three days a week at the nursing home. Ingleton’s not a bad place once you get used to it. Too many tourists in the summer and you can’t move in the high street, but that’s the same all over the Dales. We liked it best in the winter. You should see this place in the snow. It’s beautiful.
‘Then Greg got ill. It started about six months ago and of course we didn’t think anything of it at first. He was having difficulty walking, particularly up and down stairs. I persuaded him to go to the doctor but she just said he had a touch of arthritis in his knees and packed him off with anti-inflammatory pills . . . silly cow. But then it was in his arms and his neck. Greg tried not to say too much about it but it just got worse and worse. His neck was the worst part of it. He started getting bruises on his skin. He had trouble breathing. We went back to the doctor and this time she sent us down to Leeds, but it was still a while before they were able to diagnose what he had.’
She paused. Her eyes looked into the middle-distance.
‘It’s called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The first time I heard it, it sounded like double Dutch but that’s its name. EDS for short. He always referred to it as Ed. “Ed’s here.” That’s what he’d say. Greg always tried to make a joke about everything.’
‘He did that,’ Gallivan agreed.
‘But this was nothing to laugh about. There wasn’t anything funny at all. Ed was going to kill him. It was as simple as that. His neck was dislocating, which meant that his brainstem couldn’t function. Another few months and he’d have been bedridden. He’d have seizures. He’d become paralysed. And then he’d die.’
She had a way of turning experiences into sound bites. She had compartmentalised her husband’s slow death in exactly the same way as her courtship and marriage. This followed by this and then that.
‘EDS had a cure,’ she went on. ‘There was some support group that got in touch with us and they told us about it . . . an operation. It would fuse all the vertebrae together so that his neck would be stabilised. It would save his life. The trouble was, you couldn’t get it on the NHS. It was too expensive and too complicated. Greg would have to go to Spain. The doctors out there had had a lot of success but it wasn’t going to be cheap. With the flights and the treatment and the hospital and everything else, it would cost him £200,000.
‘We didn’t have anything like that. We’ve got this house but there’s a mortgage on it and Greg was never any good at saving money, which is strange because money was what his work was all about. He did have a life insurance policy worth a quarter of a million pounds: he’d taken it out when he was in Leeds. But that was no bloody good at all because he’d have to die first to claim it. So what was the point in that?’
‘But he had a rich friend in London,’ Hawthorne said.
‘That’s right. You’ve got there ahead of me. He’d been to Oxford University when he was nineteen and he made two good friends there . . . Richard Pryce and Charlie Richardson. Dicky and Tricky, he used to call them. They used to go caving together – that was how they met – and it became a sort of ritual, all the boys together. My Greg used to look forward to seeing them. It was the high point of the year. Most often they stayed in England but there were times they went to Europe and even to South America. And here’s the thing. They knew he couldn’t afford exotic holidays. But when they went long haul, they’d put their hands in their pockets just to help him out a little. None of them ever said as much and Greg didn’t like to talk about it – he was a Yorkshireman and he had his pride – but he would never have been able to do it without them.
‘That all came to an end when Charlie died at the Long Way Hole back in 2007. Richard was here for the inquest but he and Greg never saw each other after that. Maybe it was that they both felt guilty about what had happened and couldn’t look each other in the eye, although there was no reason for that as they were both exonerated. Dave here was a witness and he was the first person to tell them that no one had done anything wrong. It was just one of those things. An accident.’
Gallivan had been watching her intently as she spoke, but, hearing his name, he turned away. It was as if he didn’t want to be involved.
‘It was me who persuaded Greg to go down to London and talk to Richard,’ she went on. ‘Richard had done all right for himself as a high-class lawyer. He had houses in London and in the country. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to give all the money but if he put his hand in his pocket he could get us started and somehow the two of us would find a way to raise the rest. Crowdfunding or something like that. Greg didn’t like the idea. He thought it was over as far as he and Richard were concerned. They hadn’t spoken for six years.’
‘He went down on the Saturday,’ Hawthorne said.
‘That’s right. I drove him to the station myself. I’d told Greg in no uncertain terms – I’d divorce him if he didn’t get on that train. And I’d get Richard Pryce to represent me in court. He laughed at that even though it was hurting him to laugh by then. That was the last time I saw him, first thing in the morning, on the platform at Ribblehead. He was only going to be in London a few hours. I expected him home for tea.’
‘Richard Pryce refused to help,’ I said.
I was quite sure that was what she would tell us. It was the only way this made any sense. Richard hadn’t wanted to provide the money. Greg had thrown himself under a train. And Susan had been in London the following day. Maybe she was the one who had killed Richard.