The Sentence Is Death

Vincent O’Brien, the managing director of Octavian Vaults and Andy Wadsworth, the Vaults Custodian, introduced me to a business I didn’t even know existed . . . They look after ten thousand private collectors from thirty-nine countries. I’d also like to thank Detective Constable James McCoy and everyone at Euston station’s British Transport Police for allowing me to see them at work. As I say in the book, these secret worlds never fail to excite me.

A special thank you to Vivek Gohil, who lives with (rather than suffers from . . . a distinction he made clear to me) Duchenne muscular dystrophy. I wanted to write sensitively about the condition and, for obvious reasons, I couldn’t really approach Kevin Chakraborty. Vivek is an incredibly inspiring young man – and he has a nice mum too. Thanks also to Jane Mathews, the Senior Press Officer at Muscular Dystrophy UK, for introducing us.

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.