Selina Walker and the team at Penguin Random House have been a total pleasure to work with, as ever. My wonderful family, Jill Green and my sons, Nicholas and Cassian, are endlessly supportive even as they see their privacy being shredded, word by word. I have a terrific agent in Hilda Starke, helped by her assistant, Jonathan Lloyd. My own assistant, Alison Edmondson, helped organise my life and introduced me to most of the people on this acknowledgements page. And finally, I suppose, I have to thank Daniel Hawthorne, who first approached me to write this series. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
16 August 2018
Appendix
A Letter from Gregory Taylor
26 October 2013
Dear Susan,
I’m writing this in a café on Hampstead Heath. I’ve just seen Richard and we’ve had our words and I’ve made my decisions and I want you to know right from the top that I don’t feel too bad. I love you so much. I love our two little treasures, June and Maisie. I wish things could have turned out another way but they haven’t and I’m not going to sit here and complain. I’ve bought myself a cup of tea and a giant Bakewell tart. It’s not as good as yours. It was raining a bit this morning but now it’s cleared up and there are kids out playing and dogs walking and all in all the world doesn’t look so bad a place.
If you’re reading this, it means I’m dead. That’s not something I ever thought I’d find myself writing, but it’s the truth and we both have to face up to it. I wish I could send this to you right away. I wish I could be with you to comfort you. But that’s not possible for reasons you’ll understand. It’ll be six months before you get this. I’m hoping everything goes as planned. I’m sending the letter to my sister Gwendolyn with instructions not to open it but to send it on to you next April. I hope that doesn’t creep you out! But I know you’ll understand why I have to do it this way.
It’s the insurance. You get a quarter of a million quid when I’m gone. That’s a big amount of money. Enough to look after you and the girls for the rest of your lives. Enough for you to move out of Ribblehead if that’s what you want. Maybe you’ll go back to Leeds. It was me who dragged you into the Dales in the first place and I often think that was selfish of me and no good came of it in the end. But with the money you can make the decisions. I hope you’ll be happy. That’s my only thought sitting here. You and the girls.
But you have to be very careful with this letter. You should destroy it after you finish reading it. Don’t show it to anyone. Don’t tell anyone . . . not even Dave. I haven’t looked at the policy but these insurance companies are full of weasels and they’ll find any excuse not to pay up. They’ve got to think I died in an accident. I’ll come to that in a minute. This isn’t easy for me. It’s not easy for you. But it’s the way it has to be.
I hope you will forgive me. You always were my one true love.
I have to take you back to April 2007. Yes, it all goes back to Long Way Hole. I have to tell you the truth. Don’t be angry with me, Sue. I didn’t tell you the truth then and I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Part of the reason was that whichever way I tried to swing it, it was my fault. I was in charge. I planned the excursion. And I was the one who said it was all right to go ahead. When I look back, I think that the only reason I did those trips was to hang on to something that had already gone. Richard and Charlie and me. We’d been close mates at Oxford and we’d had some wild times together and every year when we met we’d try to relive what we’d had, but we all knew that as we got older it was slipping away and each year there was a bit less of it and we all had to pretend a bit more. By the end, Richard was a big-shot lawyer. Charlie was doing all right for himself in marketing. But I’d ended up in the finance department of a little company nobody had ever heard of in the back of beyond. I never really felt comfortable when I was with them and it didn’t change no matter how much beer we drank.
I knew we shouldn’t have gone down Long Way Hole. That’s the truth of it. Looking at those clouds, cumulonimbus, I knew in my gut that we could be in trouble. The air was unstable. I had no doubt there was going to be a storm but I persuaded myself it was in the distance, that it wasn’t going to come our way. Maybe it was the fact that it was the one time I was in charge. Richard and Charlie both trusted me. There was an 18-metre pitch next to the waterfall. We set up the rig and went down.
We only had two miles to cover to the exit at Drear Hill, but you know Long Way. That first pitch to start off with and we had to set up a pull-down system as it was a through trip and we were coming out the bottom end. Then there’s a 35-metre waterfall pitch and a couple of awkward climbs and all that before you even reach Drake’s Passage and Spaghetti Junction. Not for the faint-hearted. But we were all OK as we set off. Lots of laughing and joking. Just like old times and all that.
I’m not going to go into all the details. You’re sick to death of it and I’ve only got so much time to finish this. But here’s the bottom line. I lied to you. I lied to the inquest. Charlie Richardson never got lost and he didn’t die the way we said.
What happened was that the storm hit us when we were about two-thirds of the way through. I was first, then Richard, then Charlie. We knew at once that we were in trouble. In all my years caving, I’d never experienced anything like it. First off, there was a change in air pressure. Our voices didn’t come out the same any more. And we could feel this sort of throbbing inside our ears and even in our bones. All the walls were glistening and water was dripping down, making its way through. That was just the start of it. There was this echoing sound, a rumbling that seemed to come out of the bowels of the earth, and all the time it was getting louder and louder until we had to shout to make ourselves heard. You’ve got to remember that we were 85 metres underground, on our own, and it was like the whole world was ganging up on us. We had to make a decision and we had to do it fast.
We had two choices. We could climb up into Spaghetti Junction and that’s what I would have done. We’d be on higher ground there and hopefully the floodwater would pass underneath. But the other two weren’t having it. Going in there, we knew we’d get lost. We’d have to sit there in the dark waiting for cave rescue and if the whole system flooded, who knew how long that would take? And we couldn’t be sure we’d be safe, even in Spaghetti Junction. If the water rose high enough, we could get trapped there. We’d have backed ourselves into a corner. We’d drown.
We only had minutes to make the decision. We knew the flood pulse was on its way. Do you have any idea of the power of the water coming through those tunnels? We could already feel it punching at us. The cave, the very air, was vibrating. Bits of stone were coming loose and raining down on us. It was terrifying.
You know what we decided. We decided to press on. If we could just get through Drake’s Passage, we figured we’d be all right. If we could get to the vertical crack, we could chimney ourselves up and let the water pass underneath. We might be stuck there a while but it still seemed the better option. The main thing was, it took us nearer the exit. That was what we all wanted. All three of us.
I went first. Then Richard. It wasn’t so difficult. A 3-metre drop, then a corkscrew round. The two of us made it through and now we’re crouching in a low passage, no room to stand, and we realise that Charlie hasn’t made it. He’s stuck. He’s shouting. We can hear his voice. ‘Guys! Guys!’ Then something else. We can’t make out the words because the water is so close. I’ve often told you that when you’re underground, water can sound like people’s voices. Well, right now it’s like the whole world is screaming at us.