Smash hit

“He was tired and looking his age,” Janice told the inquiry. “He became very much more taciturn, tense, withdrawn.”

Dr Kelly had met Andrew Gilligan two months before. He knew what he had told the journalist, he knew what Mr Gilligan had made of it, he knew that to MPs he had denied being the BBC correspondent’s source, and he knew that the Prime Minister himself was incandescent and determined to see the truth established. Dr Kelly had not told the truth: he knew that, too.

The angry swish of traffic grows more insistent as the bridleway begins a long, slow climb into a high, narrow footbridge over the road. This will have felt like a Rubicon, leaving his village behind.

But what will there have been to return to? Lord Hutton spoke yesterday of the inevitability of full discovery, once the news media grow hungry. Dr Kelly will have known that, now his name was out, his centrality must eventually become clear. Could he trust Andrew Gilligan to protect him: a man he had heard distorting (as he believed) what he had said? Now the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee was making its own inquiries, and could hear evidence in confidence. What might Gilligan say to them in camera? A tremendous sense of inevitability must have settled on David Kelly.

After the footbridge the bridleway becomes a long grey lane with no turning, flanked by high hedgerows on both sides. Over it cross powercables. “Danger — High Tension” says the notice at the pylon’s foot. What would you be thinking, in his shoes? Horses poke their uncomprehending heads over the gate. You turn left into Barn Ground then right into Cow Lane.

Here David Kelly met the last person to remember seeing him, his neighbour, Ruth Absalom. They exchanged a friendly word, she remembers, and he carried on. Richer men’s houses are glimpsed through holly and yew. Here the pub, the Blue Boar, is thatched. There’s a seat by the pond, but what would have been the point of resting?

Do you, on a journey like this, rehearse the arguments? Yes, you spoke out of turn to a journalist. But no, you didn’t quite say what the world now says you said — or didn’t mean it like that. Yes, you did deny the whole conversation. Or sort of. Actually you said you couldn’t have been the source of that report because it wasn’t what you said. Your head aches. How often have you picked through the tortured justifications at night with your wife asleep beside you, and besides who’s going to be interested in splitting hairs when the tabloids come to call? It’s too late now, you’ve made up your mind and you never were a man to quit a settled course.

“We have an old, battered ride-on mower,” his wife told the inquiry. Dr Kelly used to mow the lawn and fields with it. “That was a seven-hour job and he made himself stick at it all day, with just breaks for water and food.”

What David Kelly started, David Kelly finished.

North of Longworth comes a long, straight track between fields. The countryside is prettier now. You can see Harrowdown Hill across a field: a little knoll, forested in ash and oak. You turn sharp right by an isolated house. Now the track heads directly up to one flank of that knoll. The destination is clear. For the first time, David Kelly was looking at the place where he knew he would die.

The track roughens and steepens. The wood approaches. You need to go through a gate or duck a wire fence to enter it, for the track skirts the trees to their right. Here you must pause to choose your way in. It is your last chance to think again. Carry on and the track takes you down to the water meadows by the Thames. Turn round and it is only 20 minutes home to Westfield and your friends and family. Or you can go into the wood.

David Kelly went into the wood. He walked, as I would do, until the going became too thick with briars and there was no way forward. Then he sat down, as I would do, by a tree. From his pocket came the Coproxamol tablets, for his wife’s arthritis, and the knife he had owned since childhool.

What was in his thoughts? His wife? His daughters, Rachel, Ellen and Sian? His Baha’i faith and his mentor Mai Pederson? The country he had served with such distinction and his immense achievements as a weapons scientist? The government ministries where he had been so undervalued, he believed, and whose managers might now turn against him? Tomorrow’s newspapers he would never see? His own mother’s suicide, 40 years ago? Professor Keith Hawton, an expert in psychiatry, told Lord Hutton he thought that fear of public disgrace was what had unbalanced David Kelly’s mind. Pride drove him, and stopped him seeking help. He was not, echoed Hutton, “an easy man to whom to give advice”.

Sitting myself by a tree on Harrowdown Hill last week, I instantly understood how to him there would be no going back now, no counselling, no confession, no disgrace, no future.

I felt in my pocket for the imaginary knife and painkillers, and knew that what came next would be the easiest part.

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