‘That’s what you’d expect – but you couldn’t be more wrong,’ Susan replied, tartly. ‘He was a good man, Richard Pryce. Maybe he blamed himself for what had happened at Long Way Hole. Like I told you, my Greg blamed himself too. But they had never blamed each other. They made the decision to get out of there together and everyone agreed it was the right decision.’
She looked to Dave Gallivan for confirmation but he was still looking away.
‘Greg had arranged to see him at his home up in Hampstead,’ she continued. ‘That would have been about lunchtime. Richard had said he’d be on his own. Well, I don’t know the long and the short of it, but he took Greg in like the six years had never happened and they were the best of friends again. He listened to what Greg had to say and he agreed not just to pay £20,000 or £50,000 but to put his hand in his pocket for the whole lot. That was the sort of man he was. He was a saint.’
‘How do you know this, Mrs Taylor?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘Greg telephoned me.’ She looked him straight in the eye, at the same time rummaging in her pocket. Finally, she took out a mobile phone and laid it on the table. ‘I was driving when he called. I take June to her dance class on Saturday afternoons. He should have remembered that. So he left a message.’
She reached out and touched a couple of buttons. We had seen the dead man’s picture. Now we heard his voice.
‘Hello, love. I’ve just left. Richard was fantastic. I can’t believe it. He took me into his house – you should have seen it, by the way – and we had a cup of tea and . . . anyway, he says he may be able to pay for the whole thing. All of it. Can you believe it? It’s like he wants to make up for what happened all those years ago. I told him how much it was going to cost but he says his company has a fund for just this sort of thing and—’ The voice broke off. ‘I’m heading back to King’s Cross now. I’ll call you when I’m on the train or you try me. Let’s go out Sunday night. Over to the Marton Arms. We’ve actually got something to celebrate. I’ll talk to you later. All right? I love you.’
There was a faint click and silence.
‘The police took a recording of that,’ Susan said. ‘I never want to lose it. We spoke again when he arrived at the station but that’s the last memory I have of his voice. And he sent me this . . .’
She spun the phone round to show us a photograph that Gregory Taylor had taken – a selfie. He was standing on a road that I immediately recognised. It was Hornsey Lane in Highgate. The Hornsey Lane Bridge, which runs high above the Archway Road, was just behind him. He was smiling.
‘That’s the one thing that consoles me in all this,’ Susan went on. ‘When he died, he couldn’t have been happier. He was on top of the world. He thought he was going to be all right.’
Those words set off another thought in my head. Gregory Taylor wasn’t going to be all right. The operation would never happen. Could that be why Pryce was killed? Could it actually have been to prevent the payment being made?
Hawthorne seemed to be thinking along the same lines. ‘Your husband was in a good mood when he was on his way home,’ he said. ‘So what do you think happened at King’s Cross?’
‘That’s your job to find out,’ Susan replied. ‘I have no idea and the police won’t show me the CCTV. But they say there were a lot of Leeds supporters on the platform. They’d been drinking.’ She clutched her telephone as if it was a sacred relic containing the ashes of the man she had loved. For the first time I saw tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t even want to think about it. And now I’ve told you everything that happened, so if you don’t mind . . .’
Gallivan stepped forward as if to show us out but Hawthorne wasn’t moving. ‘You had to go down to London,’ he said.
‘I went there on Sunday morning. I met a police officer, a man called McCoy. Dave here looked after the girls.’
‘You identified the body.’
‘They showed me photographs, yes.’
‘When did you get back?’ There could only be one reason why Hawthorne was asking her this. Susan Taylor had been in London when Richard Pryce was killed! But there was no possible way she could have had anything to do with it. That made no sense at all.
‘I stayed over until Monday. They put me up in a hotel near the station. A horrible place – but it was too late to catch the train.’
‘What did you do on Sunday night?’
‘I went dancing and then out to dinner.’ She scowled. ‘What do you think I did? I sat on my own and counted the hours until I could leave.’
She would have seen us out then and there but Hawthorne still hadn’t finished with her. ‘There is one more thing, Mrs Taylor,’ he said. He was completely unapologetic. ‘I need to ask you about Long Way Hole.’
‘I can tell you about that,’ Gallivan said.
‘I’d like to hear it from Mrs Taylor.’
‘It was six years ago.’
‘You said that Richard Pryce and your husband never blamed each other. But maybe someone else did.’
Her eyes started. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘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.’
Susan Taylor glanced at her watch, then signalled to Gallivan. She wasn’t happy about it but she would give us a little more time.
‘I can only tell you what Greg told me but I suppose that’s what you want to know. It was a weekend in April. The two of them – Richard Pryce and Charlie Richardson – had come up from London. They all stayed at the Station Inn over at Ribblehead. Greg took a room there too. It was a waste of money really. It’s only twenty minutes from here. But it meant the three of them could drink together and they did quite a bit of that, I’m sure. All boys together. Reliving the old days. All that nonsense.’
‘Did you meet Richard Pryce?’
‘Of course I met him, a few times. I didn’t warm to him if you want the truth. Too much of a smooth-talker for my taste. Greg never brought him here. I think he was ashamed of the house, which is just rubbish, but we’d go out for dinner at the Marton Arms or wherever. I saw him at the inquest too. But we didn’t speak – not then. I wasn’t speaking to anyone.
‘Anyway, what came out at the inquest was exactly what Greg had already said to me. It was April and it had been warm. There had been two weeks of sunshine but that day the forecast was for rain. There’d even been talk of a storm but Greg looked at the clouds and he figured it was going to be localised, a long way off Old Ing Lane, which was where they started. Greg knew the weather. He wasn’t ever wrong. They went in before midday and should have been out by late afternoon. It’s a grade-four pot, if that means anything to you. Two miles long. A lot of pitches to navigate. Quite tricky in parts.
‘Well, when the storm broke, it broke right above them and the trouble was that the ground was hard-baked, which meant that the water came in all the faster. They knew they were in trouble pretty much straight away and they had a choice. They could climb up to higher ground or they could move as fast as they could and make it to the exit. The three of them decided to do that. There was one contortion they had to manage but after that it was fairly easy-going . . . a bit of crawling, a bit of stooping. But as long as they kept ahead of the water, they’d be all right.
‘So that’s what they did. They all agreed on it. But somehow, in the hurry to get out, Charlie Richardson got separated and left behind. The other two only noticed he wasn’t there when they reached the final passage with the exit just in front of them. So what are they to do? They can see daylight right in front of them. It would be madness to go back with the water rushing towards them. They shout for him but that’s a waste of time. He could be five metres away, but with the noise of the water and all the rest of it, he won’t hear them. So they decide to go back in. The path they’ve just taken has become a fast-flowing river with the water coming out towards them but it’s what they call a vertical crack . . .’