The Woodcutter
The Woodcutter
Reginald Hill
A fast-moving, stunning new standalone psychological thriller – from the award-winning author of the Dalziel and Pascoe seriesWolf Hadda has lead a charmed life. From humble origins as a woodcutter’s son, he has risen to become a hugely successful entrepreneur, happily married to the girl of his dreams.A knock on the door one morning ends it all. Thrown into prison while protesting his innocence, Wolf retreats into silence. Seven years later prison psychiatrist Alva Ozigbo makes a breakthrough: Wolf begins to talk. Under her guidance he gets parole, returning to his rundown family home in rural Cumbria.But there is a mysterious period in Wolf’s youth when he disappeared from home and was known to his employers as the Woodcutter. And now the Woodcutter is back, looking for the truth – and revenge.
REGINALD HILL
THE WOODCUTTER
Copyright (#ulink_6c9f9744-e161-5211-a546-0c6ffbc92fb2)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollins 2010
Copyright © Reginald Hill 2010
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007343874
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007343898
Version: 2015-09-18
For John Lennard
a poet among critics
a true friend to writers
and a fountain of knowledge
who by imagining what he knows
helps us to know what we imagine
‘Insensé, dit-il, le jour où j’avais résolu de me venger, de ne pas m’être arraché le coeur!’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Alexander Dumas: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
Contents
Cover Page (#ud0b4896b-1392-57de-a954-d0ca9ffcc927)
Title Page (#ud300a2b5-502f-5b1f-b3ed-1935d3219e92)
Copyright (#u155dd043-6c93-54c6-bf0e-d9df8b135c55)
Epigraph (#u2b12fe6a-a9de-5c2f-8a5f-ced78e94d8d0)
PROLOGUE (#u7eced605-9994-5120-b967-f2b1929a7241)
1 (#u2508b0bd-ff94-57d1-92c0-f77d1bf19b69)
2 (#u1520ccb2-a9cf-5cd3-aee3-7bcb797fd650)
3 (#u458f7627-fa48-5d6f-a319-851d42e36a25)
BOOK ONE (#u64e7cd6c-d6d7-57a4-a684-9018ec23520b)
Wolf (#ubbd9f28f-0538-5ad4-ad9d-0ccf7505a6c6)
Elf (#u150b2397-7842-564c-b8dd-3bf03f2c52f5)
Wolf (#u40f7d1b9-123f-5349-b213-1c3481e1d1e1)
Elf (#u5b1cf695-7d82-501f-a8f9-02ce7db2960b)
Wolf (#uea7a1493-7722-50ad-9ac0-a786d1fced73)
Elf (#uab67b411-3d67-55a6-8059-cb6684683bc2)
Wolf (#u048d97f3-af4f-516a-98f3-f1aa3b89f710)
Elf (#litres_trial_promo)
Wolf (#litres_trial_promo)
Elf (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#litres_trial_promo)
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3 (#litres_trial_promo)
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BOOK THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
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BOOK FOUR the noise of wolves (#litres_trial_promo)
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BOOK FIVE a shocking light (#litres_trial_promo)
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BOOK SIX the world’s edge (#litres_trial_promo)
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8 (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE wait and hope (#litres_trial_promo)
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2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Reginald Hill (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_5fabb460-ee23-5fc8-9cd5-f05ca971b89e)
necessity
I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.
Shakespeare: Richard II (v.i)
1 (#ulink_1ca61b46-7f55-5043-a477-ff7cc1792cd3)
Summer 1963; Profumo disgraced; Ward dead; The Beatles’ Please please me top album; Luther King having his dream; JFK fast approaching the end of his; the Cold War at its chilliest; the Wind of Change blowing ever more strongly through Colonial Africa, with its rising blasts already being felt across the Gate of Tears in British-controlled Aden.
But the threat of terrorist activity is not yet so great that an eleven-year-old English boy cannot enjoy his summer holiday there before returning to school.
There are restrictions, however. His diplomat father, aware of the growing threat from the National Liberation Front, no longer lets him roam free, but sets strict boundaries and insists he is always accompanied by Ahmed, a young Yemeni gardener cum handyman who has become very attached to the boy.
In Ahmed’s company he feels perfectly safe, so when a scarred and dusty Morris Oxford pulls up alongside them with its rear door invitingly open, he feels surprise but no alarm as his friend urges him inside.
There are already two people on the back seat. The boy finds himself crushed not too comfortably between Ahmed and a stout bald man who smells of sweat and cheap tobacco.
The car roars away. Soon they reach one of the boundaries laid down by his father. The boy looks at Ahmed queryingly, but already they are moving into one of the less salubrious areas of the city.
Oddly this isn’t his first visit. The previous year, in safer times, having overheard one of the British clerks refer smirkingly to its main thoroughfare as The Street of a Thousand Arseholes, he had persuaded Ahmed to bring him here. The street in question had been something of a disappointment, offering the boy little clue as to the origin of its entertaining name. Ahmed had responded to his questioning by saying with a grin, ‘Too young. Later maybe, when you are older!’
Now the Morris turns into this very street, slows down, and almost before it has come to a halt the boy finds himself bundled out by the bald man and pushed through a doorway.
But he is not yet so frightened that he does not observe the number 19 painted on the wall beside the door.
He is almost carried up some stairs and taken into a room empty of furniture but full of men. Here he is dumped on the floor in a corner. He tries to speak to Ahmed. The young man shakes his head impatiently, and after that will not meet his gaze.
After ten minutes or so a new man arrives, this one wearing a European suit and exuding authority. The others fall silent.
The newcomer stands over the boy and stoops to peer into his face.
‘So, boy,’ he says. ‘You are the son of the British spymaster.’
‘No, sir,’ he replies. ‘My father is the British commercial attaché.’
The man laughs.
‘When I was your age, I knew what my father was,’ he says. ‘Come, let us speak to him and see how much he values you.’
He is dragged to his feet by the bald man and marched into another room where there is a telephone.
The man in the suit dials a number, the boy hears him speak his father’s name, there is a pause, then the man says, ‘Say nothing. I speak for the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen. We have your son. He will speak to you so that you know I do not lie.’
He makes a gesture and the boy is forced forward.
The man says, ‘Speak to your father so he may know it is you,’ and puts the phone to the boy’s mouth.
The boy chants, ‘Mille ani undeviginti.’
The man snatches the phone away and grabs the boy by the throat.
‘What did you say?’ he screams.
‘You said he had to know it was me,’ gabbles the boy. ‘It’s a song we sing together about Paddy McGinty’s Goat. Ask him, he’ll tell you.’
The man speaks into the phone: ‘What is this Ginty goat?’
Whatever is said to him seems to satisfy him and, at a nod from the man, the boy is dragged back to the first room.
Here he lies in the corner, ignored. Men come and go. There is an atmosphere of excitement as though everything is going well. Ahmed, who receives many congratulatory slaps and embraces, still refuses to look at him. He grows increasingly fearful and sinks towards despair.
Then from below comes a sudden outburst of noise.
First the splintering of wood as though a locked door is being broken down, then a tumult of upraised voices followed almost instantly by the rattle of small-arms fire.
All the men rush out. Left alone, the boy looks for a place to hide but there is nowhere. The room’s one window is too small for even a small eleven-year-old to wriggle through.
The din is getting louder, nearer. The door bursts open. The bald man rushes in with a pistol in his hand. The boy falls to the floor. The man screams something unintelligible and aims the weapon. Before he can fire, Ahmed comes in behind and jumps on his back. The gun goes off. The bullet hits the floor between the boy’s splayed legs.
The two men wrestle briefly. The gun explodes again.
And the bald man slumps against the wall, his hands holding his stomach. Blood seeps through his fingers.
Ahmed stands over him, clutching the pistol. Now at last his eyes meet the boy’s and he tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite work. Then he turns to the door that has been slammed shut in the struggle.
The boy cries, ‘Ahmed, wait!’
But the young Yemeni is already opening the door.
He hardly takes one pace over the threshold before he is driven back into the room by a hail of bullets that shatter his chest.
Their eyes meet once more as he lies on the floor. This time the smile makes it to his lips. Then he dies.
Folded in his father’s arms, the boy finally lets himself cry.
His father says, ‘You did well, you kept your head; the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, eh? And didn’t I tell you that doing your Latin homework would come in useful some day!’
Two years later his father will be killed when his car is blown up by a FLOSY bomb, so the boy never has the chance to sit down with him as an adult and ask what the subversives wanted him to do as the price of his son’s safety.
Nor what his answer would have been if his own young wits had not been quick enough to reveal the street and the building number where he was being held.
But before he went back to school he did ask how it was that his friend Ahmed, who had loved him enough to save his life and give up his own in the process, could have put him in that perilous position in the first place.
And his father had answered, ‘When love is in opposition to grim necessity, there is usually only one winner.’
He had not understood then what he meant. But he was to understand later.
2 (#ulink_c41e1dc6-97ef-5868-8018-39f9715ddf6d)
Autumn 1989; the world in turmoil; the Berlin Wall crumbling; Chris Rea’s The Road to Hell top album; Western civilization watching with bated breath the chain of events that will lead to the freeing of Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.
In a Cumbrian forest in a glade dappled by the midday sun, a man sits slumped against a twisted rowan, his weathered face more deeply scored by the thoughts grinding through his bowed head, his eyes fixed upon but not seeing the unopened flask and sandwich box between his feet. A little way apart, a second man stands and watches, his long brown hair edged wolf-grey, his troubled face full of a compassion he knows it is vain to express, while at his back a young girl too regards the sitting man with unblinking gaze, though her expression is much harder to read. And over the wide woodland tract, so rarely free of the wind’s soughing music above, and the pizzicato of cracking twigs below, a silence falls as if trees and sky and surrounding mountains too were bating their breath for fear of intruding on grief.
Three hundred miles to the south in an East London multi-storey car park, five hoodies who probably wouldn’t bate a breath if Jesus Christ crash-landed on St Paul’s in a chariot of fire are breaking into a car.
But they’ve done it once too often, and suddenly cops spring up all around as if someone had been sowing dragon’s teeth. The hoodies scatter and run, only to find there’s no place to run to.
Except for one. He heads for a ten-foot concrete wall with a one-foot gap at the top. To the cops’ amazement, he goes up the wall like a lizard. Then, to their horror, he rolls through the gap and vanishes.
They are on the fifth level and there’s nothing beyond that gap but a sixty-foot drop to the street below.
The cops radio down to ask their waiting colleagues to go round the back of the multi-storey and pick up the corpse.
A few minutes later word comes back – no corpse at the foot of the wall, just a young hoodie who tried to run off as soon as he spotted them.
At the station he tells them he is John Smith, age eighteen, no fixed abode.
After that he shuts up and stays shut up.
They print him. He’s not in the records.
His fellow hoodies claim never to have seen him before. They also claim never to have seen each other before. One of them is so doped up he’s uncertain whether he’s ever seen himself before.
Two are clearly juveniles. A social worker is summoned to sit in on their questioning. The other two have police records. One is eighteen, the other nineteen. The duty solicitor deals with them.
John Smith’s age they’re still not sure about, and something about the youth, some intangible aura of likeability, makes them share their doubts with the duty solicitor.
He starts his interview by pointing out to Smith that as a juvenile he would be dealt with differently, probably getting a light, non-custodial sentence. Smith sticks to his story, refusing to add details about his background though his accent is clearly northern.
The solicitor guesses he’s lying about his age and name to keep his family out of the picture. Hoping to scare the boy into honesty by over-egging the adult consequences of his crime, he turns his attention to the case against him and quickly perceives it isn’t all that strong. Identification via the grainy CCTV tape in the dimly lit multi-storey is a long way this side of reasonable doubt. And could anyone really have shinned down the sheer outer wall in under a minute as the police evidence claims?
As they talk, the boy relaxes as long as no questions are asked about his origins, and the solicitor finds himself warming to his young client. On his way home he diverts to take a photo of the outer wall of the multi-storey to show just how sheer it is. Next day he shows it to the boy, who is clearly touched by this sign of concern, but becomes panicky when told he has to appear before a magistrate that same morning. The solicitor assures him this is just a committal hearing, not a trial, but warns him that as he is officially an adult of no fixed abode, he will almost certainly be remanded in custody.
This is what happens. As the boy is led away, the solicitor tells him not to worry, he will call round at the Remand Centre later in the day. But he has other work to deal with that keeps him busy well into the evening. He remembers the boy as he makes his way home and eases his guilt with the thought that a night in a Remand Centre without sight of a friendly face might be just the thing Smith needs to make him see sense.
He talks to his wife about the boy. She regards him with surprise. He is not in the habit of getting attached to the low-life criminals who form his customary clientele.
He goes to bed early, exhausted. In the small hours when his wife awakens him, whispering she thinks someone is trying to break in through the living-room window, he reckons she must be having a nightmare as their flat is on the tenth floor of a high rise.
But when they go into the living room and switch on the light, there perched on the narrow window box outside the window is the figure of a man.
Not a man. A boy. John Smith.
The solicitor tells his wife it’s OK, opens the window and lets Smith in.
You said you would come, says the boy, half tearfully, half accusingly.
How did you get out of the Centre? asks the solicitor. And how did you find me?
Through a window, says the boy. And your office address was on thatcard you gave me, so I got in through a skylight and rooted around till I found your home address. I tidied up after, I didn’t leave a mess.
His wife, who has been listening to this exchange with interest, lowers the bread knife she is carrying and says, I’ll make a cup of tea.
She returns with a pot of tea and a large sponge cake which Smith demolishes over the next hour. During this time she gets more out of the boy than the combined efforts of her husband and the police managed in two days.
When she’s satisfied she’s got all she can, she says, Now we’d better get you back.
The boy looks alarmed and she reassures him, My husband’s going to get you off this charge, no problem. But absconding from custody’s another matter, so you need to be back in the Remand Centre before reveille.
We can’t just knock at the door, protests her husband.
Of course not. You’ll get back in the way you came out, won’t you, ducks?
The boy nods, and half an hour later the couple sit in their car distantly watching a shadow running up the outer wall of the Remand Centre.
Nice lad, says the wife. You always did have good judgment. When you get him off you’d better bring him back home till we decide what to do with him.
Home! exclaims the solicitor. Our home?
Who else’s?
Look, I like the lad, but I wasn’t planning to adopt him!
Me neither, says his wife. But we’ve got to do something with him. Otherwise what does he do? Goes back to thieving, or ends up flogging his arsehole round King’s Cross.
So when the case is dismissed, Smith takes possession of the solicitor’s spare room.
But not for long.
The wife says, I’ve mentioned him at the Chapel. JC says he’d like to meet him.
The solicitor pulls a face and says, King’s Cross might be a better bet.
The wife says, No, you’re wrong. None of that with a kid he takes under his wing. In any case, the boy needs a job and who else can we talk to?
The meeting takes place in a pub after the lunchtime crush has thinned out. To start with the boy doesn’t say much, but under the influence of a couple of halves of lager and the man, JC’s, relaxed undemanding manner he becomes quite voluble. Voluble enough to make it clear he’s not too big on hymn-singing, collection-box rattling or any of the other activities conjured up in his mind by references to the Chapel.
The man says, I expect you’d prefer something more active and out of doors, eh? So tell me, apart from running up and down vertical walls, what else is it that you do?
The boy thinks, then replies, I can chop down trees.
JC laughs.
A woodcutter! Well, curiously at the Chapel we do have an extensive garden to tend and occasionally a nimble woodcutter might come in handy. I’ll see what I can do.
The boy and the woman look at each other and exchange smiles.
And the man, JC, looks on and smiles benevolently too.
3 (#ulink_e5ce2bc9-c0e3-5d20-996c-30bf7115765d)
Winter 1991; Terry Waite freed; 264 Croats massacred at Vukovar; Freddy Mercury dies of AIDS; Michael Jackson’s Dangerous top album; the Soviet Union dissolved; Gorbachev resigns.
And in a quiet side street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, a man with a saintly smile relaxes in the comfortable rear seat of a Citroën CX. Through the swirling mist above the trees on the far side of a small park he can just make out the top three storeys of a six-storey apartment block. He imagines he sees a shadow moving rapidly down the side of the building, but it is soon out of sight, and in any case he is long used to the deceptions of the imagination on such a night as this. He returns his attention to Quintus Curtius’s account of the fall of Tyre, and is soon so immersed that he is taken by surprise a few minutes later when the car door opens and the boy slips inside.
‘Oh hello,’ he says, closing the book. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Piece of cake,’ says the boy. ‘Bit chilly on the fingers though.’
‘You ought to wear gloves,’ says the man, passing over a thermos flask.
‘Can’t feel the holds the same with gloves,’ replies the boy, drinking directly from the flask.
The man regards him fondly and says, ‘You’re a good little woodcutter.’
In the front of the car a phone rings. The driver answers it, speaking in French. After a while, he turns and says, ‘He’s on his way, JC. But there’s a problem. He diverted to the Gare d’Est. He picked up a woman and a child. They think it’s his wife and daughter. They’re in the car with him.’
Without any change of expression or tone the man says softly, ‘Parles Français, idiot!’
But his warning is too late.
The boy says, ‘What’s that about a wife and daughter? You said he lived by himself.’
‘So he does,’ reassures the man. ‘As you doubtless observed, it’s a very small flat. Also he’s estranged from his family. If it is his wife and daughter, and that’s not definite, he is almost certainly taking them to a hotel. Would you like something to eat? I have some chocolate.’
The boy shakes his head and drinks again from the flask. His face is troubled.
The man says quietly, ‘This is a very wicked person, I mean wicked in himself as well as a dangerous enemy of our country.’
The boy says, ‘Yeah, I know that, you explained that. But that doesn’t mean his wife and kid are wicked, does it?’
‘Of course it doesn’t. And we do everything in our power not to hurt the innocent; I explained that too, didn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ agrees the boy.
‘Well then.’
They sit in silence for some minutes. The phone sounds again.
The driver answers, listens, turns his head and says, ‘Ils sont arrivés. La femme et l’enfant aussi. Il demande, que voudrais-vous?’
The man said, ‘Dites-lui, vas’y.’
The boy’s face is screwed up as if by sheer concentration he can make sense of what’s being said. On the far side of the park the mist above the trees clears for a moment and the apartment block is visible silhouetted against a brightly starred sky.
A light comes on in one of the uppermost chambers. At first it is an ordinary light, amber against an uncurtained window.
And then it turns red. It is too distant for any sound to reach inside the well-insulated car, but in that moment they see the glass dissolve and smoke and debris come streaming towards them like the fingers of a reaching hand.
Then the mist swirls back and the man says, ‘Go.’
Back in their apartment, the boy goes to his room and the man sits by a gently hissing gas fire, encoding his report. When it is finished, he pours himself a drink and opens his History of Alexander the Great.
Suddenly the door opens and the boy, naked except for his brief underpants, bursts into the room.
He says in a voice so choked with emotion he can hardly get the words out, ‘You lied to me, you fucking bastard! They were still with him, both of them, it’s on the news, it’s so fucking terrible it’s on the British news. You lied! Why?’
The man says, ‘It had to be done tonight. Tomorrow would have been too late.’
The boy comes nearer. The man is very aware of the young muscular body so close he can feel the heat off it.
The boy says, ‘Why did you make me do it? You said you’d never ask me to do anything I didn’t want to do. But you tricked me. Why?’
The man for once is not smiling. He says quietly, ‘My father once said to me, when love and grim necessity meet, there is only one winner. You probably don’t understand that now any more than I did then. But you will. In the meantime all I can say is I’m very sorry. I’ll find a way to make it up to you, I promise.’
‘How? How can you possibly make it up to me?’ screams the boy. ‘You’ve made me a murderer. What can you do that can ever make up for that! There’s nothing! Nothing!’
And the man says, rather sadly, like one who pronounces a sentence rather than makes a gift, ‘I shall give you your heart’s desire.’
BOOK ONE (#ulink_4c49631f-6599-52b6-99a9-9358c755b277)
wolf and elf
After the hunters trapped the wolf, they put him in a cage where he lay for many years, suffering grievously, till one day a curious elf, to whom iron bars were no more obstacle than the shadows of grasses on a sunlit meadow, took pity on his plight, and asked, ‘What can I bring you that will ease your pain, Wolf?’
And the wolf replied, ‘My foes to play with.’
Charles Underhill (tr): Folk Tales of Scandinavia
Wolf (#ulink_02371732-0473-5487-a06e-e27fc3556b57)
i
Once upon a time I was living happily ever after.
That’s right. Like in a fairy tale.
How else to describe my life up till that bright autumn morning back in 2008?
I was the lowly woodcutter who fell in love with a beautiful princess glimpsed dancing on the castle lawn, knew she was so far above him that even his fantasies could get his head chopped off, nonetheless when three seemingly impossible tasks were set as the price of her hand in marriage threw his cap into the ring and after many perilous adventures returned triumphant to claim his heart’s desire.
Here began the happily ever after, the precise extent of which is nowhere defined in fairy literature. In my case it lasted fourteen years.
During this time I acquired a fortune of several millions, a private jet, residences in Holland Park, Devon, New York, Barbados and Umbria, my lovely daughter, Ginny, and a knighthood for services to commerce.
Over the same period my wife Imogen turned from a fragrant young princess into an elegant, sophisticated woman. She ran our social life with easy efficiency, made no demands on me that I could not afford, and always had an appropriate welcome waiting in whichever of our homes I returned to after my often extensive business trips.
Sometimes I looked at her and found it hard to understand how I could deserve such beauty, such happiness. She was my piece of perfection, my heart’s desire, and whenever the stresses and strains of my hugely active life began to make themselves felt, I just had to think of my princess to know that, whatever fate brought me, I was the most blessed of men.
Then on that autumn day – by one of those coincidences that only a wicked fairy can contrive, our wedding anniversary – everything changed.
At half past six in the morning we were woken in our Holland Park house by an extended ringing of the doorbell. I got up and went to the window. My first thought when I saw the police uniforms was that some joker had sent us an anniversary stripaubade. But they didn’t look as if they were about to rip off their uniforms and burst into song, and suddenly my heart contracted at the thought that something could have happened to Ginny. She was away at school – not by my choice, but when the lowly woodcutter marries the princess, there are some ancestral customs he meekly goes along with.
Then it occurred to me they’d hardly need a whole posse of plods to convey such a message.
Nor would they bring a bunch of press photographers and a TV crew.
Imogen was sitting up in bed by this time. Even in these fraught circumstances I was distracted by sight of her perfect breasts.
She said, ‘Wolf, what is it?’ in her usual calm manner.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and see.’
She said, ‘Perhaps you should put some clothes on.’
I grabbed my dressing gown and was still pulling it round my shoulders as I started down the stairs. I could hear voices below. Among them I recognized the Cockney accent of Mrs Roper, our housekeeper. She was crying out in protest and I saw why as I reached the half landing. She must have opened the front door and policemen were thrusting past her without ceremony. Jogging up the stairs towards me was a short fleshy man in a creased blue suit flanked by two uniformed constables.
He came to a halt a couple of steps below me and said breathlessly, ‘Wolf Hadda? Sorry. Sir Wilfred Hadda. Detective Inspector Medler. I have a warrant to search these premises.’
He reached up to hand me a sheet of paper. Below I could hear people moving, doors opening and shutting, Mrs Roper still protesting.
I said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’
His gaze went down to my crotch. His lips twitched. Then his eyes ran up my body and focused beyond me.
He said, ‘Maybe you should make yourself decent, unless you fancy posing for Page Three.’
I turned to see what he was looking at. Through the half-landing window overlooking the garden, I could see the old rowan tree I’d transplanted from Cumbria when I bought the house. It was incandescent with berries at this time of year, and I was incandescent with rage at the sight of a paparazzo clinging to its branches, pointing a camera at me. Even at this distance I could see the damage caused by his ascent.
I turned back to Medler.
‘How did he get there? What are the press doing here anyway? Did you bring them?’
‘Now why on earth should I do that, sir?’ he said. ‘Maybe they just happened to be passing.’
He didn’t even bother to try to sound convincing.
He had an insinuating voice and one of those mouths which looks as if it’s holding back a knowing sneer. I’ve always had a short fuse. At six thirty in the morning, confronted by a bunch of heavy-handed plods tearing my home to pieces and a paparazzo desecrating my lovely rowan, it was very short indeed. I punched the little bastard right in his smug mouth and he went backwards down the stairs, taking one of his constables with him. The other produced his baton and whacked me on the leg. The pain was excruciating and I collapsed in a heap on the landing.
After that things got confused. As I was half dragged, half carried out of the house, I screamed at Imogen, who’d appeared fully dressed on the stairs, ‘Ring Toby!’
She looked very calm, very much in control. Princesses don’t panic. The thought was a comfort to me.
Cameras clicked and journalists yelled inanities as I was thrust into a car. As it sped away, I twisted round to look back. Cops were already coming down the steps carrying loaded bin bags that they tossed into the back of a van. The house, gleaming in the morning sunlight, seemed to look down on them with disdain. Then we turned a corner and it vanished from sight.
I did not realize – how could I? – that I was never to enter it again.
ii
My arrival at the police station seemed to take them by surprise. My arrest at that stage can’t have been anticipated. Once the pain in my leg subsided and my brain started functioning again, I’d worked out that I must be the subject of a Fraud Office investigation. Personal equity companies rise on the back of other companies’ failures and Woodcutter Enterprises had left a lot of unhappy people in its wake. Also the atmosphere on the markets was full of foreboding and when nerves are on edge, malicious tongues soon start wagging.
So being banged up was my own fault. If I hadn’t lost my temper, I would probably be sitting in my own drawing room, refusing to answer any of Medler’s impertinent questions till Toby Estover, my solicitor, arrived. I would have liked to see Medler’s expression when he heard the name. Mr Itsover his colleagues call him, because that’s what the prosecution says when they hear Toby’s acting for the defence. Barristers may get the glory but there are many dodgy characters walking free because they were wise enough and rich enough to hire Toby Estover when the law came calling.
I was treated courteously – I even thought I detected the ghost of a smile on the custody sergeant’s lips when told I’d been arrested for thumping Medler – then put in a cell. Pretty minimalist, but stick a couple of Vettriano prints on the wall and it could have passed for a standard single in a lot of boutique hotels.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I hadn’t been wearing my watch when they arrested me. In fact I hadn’t been wearing anything but my dressing gown. They’d taken that and given me an off-white cotton overall and a pair of plastic flip-flops.
I was just wondering whether to start banging on the door and making a fuss when it opened and Toby came in. It was good to see him, in every sense. As well as having one of the smartest minds I’ve ever known, he dresses to match. Same age as me but slim and elegant. Me, I can make a Savile Row three-piece look like a boiler suit in twenty minutes; Toby would look good in army fatigues. In his Henry Poole threads and John Lobb shoes he looked smooth enough to talk Jesus off the Cross which, had he been in Jerusalem at the time, I daresay he would have done.
I said, ‘Toby, thank God. Have you brought me some clothes?’
He looked surprised and said, ‘No, sorry, old boy. Never crossed my mind.’
‘Damn,’ I said. ‘I thought Imo might have chucked a few things together.’
‘I think she may have other things to occupy her,’ he observed. ‘Let’s sit down and have a chat.’
‘Here?’ I said.
‘Here,’ he said firmly, sitting on the narrow bed. ‘Less chance of being overheard than in an interview room.’
The idea that the police might try to eavesdrop on a client/lawyer conversation troubled me less than the implication that it could contain something damaging to me.
I said, ‘Frankly, I don’t give a damn what they hear. I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘It’s certainly true that by now you’re unlikely to have anything you think may be hidden,’ he said sardonically. ‘I understand they are still searching the house. But it’s your computers we need to concentrate on. Wolf, we won’t have much time so let’s cut to the chase. I’ve had a word with DI Medler…is it true you hit him, by the way?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said with some satisfaction. ‘You’ll probably see the picture in the tabloids. I’d like to buy the negative and have it blown up for my office wall, if you can fix that. Did Imogen tell you the media were all over the place? There must have been a tip-off from the police. I want you to chase that up vigorously, Toby. There’s been far too much of that kind of thing recently and no one’s ever called to account…’
‘Wolf, for fuck’s sake, shut up.’
I stopped talking. Toby was normally the most courteous of men. OK, he’d heard me on one of my favourite hobby horses before, but there was an urgency in his tone that went far beyond mere exasperation. For the first time I started to feel worried.
I said, ‘Toby, what’s going on? What are the bastards looking for? For God’s sake, I may have cut a few corners in my time, but the business is sound, believe me. Does Johnny Nutbrown know about this? I think we ought to give him a call…’
Nutbrown was my closest friend and finance director at Woodcutter. He was mathematically eidetic. If Johnny and a computer calculation differed, I’d back Johnny every time.
Toby said, ‘Johnny’s not going to be any use here. Medler’s not Fraud. He’s on what used to be called the Vice Squad. Specifically his area is paedophilia. Kiddy porn.’
I laughed in relief. I really did.
I said, ‘In that case, the only reason I’m banged up here is because I hit the smarmy bastard. They’ve had plenty of time to realize they’ve made a huge booboo, and they’re just hoping the media will get tired and go away before I emerge. No chance! I’ll have my say if I’ve got to rent space on TV!’
I stopped talking again, not because of anything Toby said to me but because of the way he was looking at me. Assessingly. That was the word for it. Like a man looking for reassurance and not being convinced he’d found it.
He said, ‘From what Medler said, they feel they have enough evidence to proceed.’
I shook my head in exasperation.
I said, ‘But they’ll have squeezed my hard drive dry by now. What’s the problem? Some encryptions they haven’t been able to break? God, I’m happy to let them in for a quick glance at anything, so long as I’m there…’
Toby said, ‘He spoke as if they’d found…stuff.’
That stopped me in my tracks.
‘Stuff?’ I echoed. ‘You mean kiddy porn? Impossible!’
He just looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had taken on its forensic colouring.
‘Wolf, I need to be clear so that I know how to proceed. You are assuring me there is nothing of this nature, no images involving paedophilia, to be found on any computer belonging to you?’
I felt a surge of anger but quickly controlled it. A friend wouldn’t have needed to ask, but Toby was more than my friend, he was my solicitor, and that was how I had to regard him now, in the same way that he was clearly looking at me purely as a client.
I said, ‘Nothing.’
He said, ‘OK,’ stood up and went to the door.
‘So let’s go and see what DI Medler has to say,’ he said.
So hell begins.
iii
I’ll say this for Medler, he didn’t mess around.
He showed me some credit-card statements covering the past year, asked me to confirm they were mine. I said that as they had my name and a selection of my addresses on them, I supposed they must be. He asked me to check them more closely. I glanced over them, identified a couple of large items on each – hotel bills, that kind of thing – and said yes, they were definitely mine. He then drew my attention to a series of payments – mainly to an Internet company called InArcadia – and asked me if I could recall what these were for. I said I couldn’t offhand, which wasn’t surprising as I paid for just about everything in my extremely busy life by one of the vast selection of cards I’d managed to accumulate, but no doubt if I sat down with my secretary we could work out exactly what each and every payment covered.
He shuffled the statements together, put them in a folder, and smiled. His split lip must have hurt but it didn’t stop his smile from being as slyly insinuating as ever.
‘Don’t think we’ll need to involve your secretary, Sir Wilfred,’ he said. ‘We can give your memory a jog by showing you some of the stuff you were paying for.’
Then he opened a laptop resting on the table between us, pressed a key and turned it towards me.
There were stills to start with, then some snatches of video. All involved girls on the cusp of puberty, some displaying themselves provocatively, some being assaulted by men. Years later those images still haunt me.
Thirty seconds was enough. I slammed the laptop lid shut. For a moment I couldn’t speak. I looked towards Toby. Our gazes met. Then he looked away.
I said, ‘Toby, for God’s sake, you don’t think…’
Then I pulled myself together. Whatever was going off here, getting into a public and recorded row with my solicitor wasn’t going to help things.
I said to Medler, ‘Why the hell are you showing me this filth?’
He said, ‘Because we found it on a computer belonging to you, Sir Wilfred. On a computer protected by your password, in an encrypted program accessed by entering a twenty-five digit code and answering three personal questions. Personal to you, I mean. Also, the images in question, and many more, both still and moving, were acquired from the Internet company InArcadia and paid for with various of your credit cards, details of which you have just confirmed.’
The rest of the interview was brief and farcical. Medler made no effort to be subtle. Perhaps the little bastard disliked me so much he didn’t want me to cooperate! He simply fired a fusillade of increasingly offensive questions at me – How long had I been doing this? How deeply involved was I with the people behind InArcadia? Had I ever personally taken part in any of the video sessions? and so on, and so on – never paying the slightest heed to my increasingly vehement denials.
Toby sat there silent as a statue during all this and in the end I forgot my resolve not to have a public row and screamed, ‘For fuck’s sake, man, say something! What the hell do you think I’m paying you for?’
He didn’t reply. I saw him glance at Medler. Maybe I was so wrought up I started imagining things but it seemed to me Toby was looking almost apologetic as if to say, I really don’t want to be here doing this, and Medler gave him a little sympathetic smile as if to reply, yes, I can see how tough it must be for you.
I was at the end of my admittedly short tether. It was a toss up whether I took a swing at my lawyer or the cop. If I had to rationalize I’d say it made more sense to opt for the latter on the grounds that my relationship with him was clearly beyond hope whereas I was still going to need Toby.
Whatever, I gave Medler a busted nose to add to his split lip.
And that brought the interview to a close.
iv
My second journey to my cell was handled less courteously than the first.
The two cops who dragged me there then followed me inside were experts. I lay on the floor, racked with pain for a good half hour after the door crashed shut behind them. But when I recovered enough to examine my body, I realized there was precious little visual evidence of police brutality.
I banged at the door till a constable appeared and told me to shut up. I demanded to see Toby. He went away and came back a few minutes later to say that Mr Estover had left the station. I then said I wanted to make the phone call I was entitled to. How entitled I was, I’d no idea. Like most people my knowledge of criminal law was garnered mainly from TV and movies. The cop went away again and nothing happened for what felt like an hour. I was just about to launch another assault on the door when it opened to reveal Medler. His nose was swollen and he had a couple of stitches in his lip. In his hand was a grip that I recognized as mine. He tossed it towards me and said, ‘Get yourself dressed, Sir Wilfred.’
I opened the bag to see it contained clothing.
I said, ‘Did my wife bring this? Is she here?’
He said, ‘No. She’s gone to stay with a Mrs Nutbrown at her house, Poynters, is it? Out near Saffron Walden.’
I sat down on the bed. OK, so Johnny Nutbrown’s wife, Pippa, was Imogen’s best friend, but the notion that she was running for cover without even attempting to contact me filled me with dismay. And disappointment.
It must have showed, for Medler said roughly, as though he hated offering me any consolation, ‘She had to go. Your daughter was being taken there. The press would have been sniffing round her school in no time. They’re already camped outside your house.’
‘Yes, and whose fault is that?’ I demanded.
‘Yours, I think,’ he said shortly.
I didn’t argue. What was the point? And if Imo and Ginny needed to seek refuge, there were few better places than Poynters. Johnny had bought the half-timbered Elizabethan mansion a couple of years earlier. It must have cost him a fortune. I recall saying to him at the time, I’m obviously paying you too much! He claimed it had once belonged to the Nutbrowns back in the eighteenth century and he’d always known it would come back. The great thing in the present situation was that it was pretty remote and Pippa, who was a bit of a hi-tech nerd, had installed a state-of-the-art security system.
I tipped the clothes he’d brought on to the bed. The jacket trousers and shirt weren’t a great match, which meant they hadn’t been selected by Imogen. Presumably Medler or one of his minions had flung them together. I ripped off the paper overall.
Medler stood watching me.
‘Looking for bruises?’ I said.
He didn’t reply and I turned my back on him. As I pulled on my underpants, there was a brief flash of light. I looked round to see Medler holding a mobile phone.
‘Did you just take a photo?’ I demanded incredulously.
I got that knowing smirk, then he said, ‘That’s a nasty scar you’ve got on your back, Sir Wilfred.’
‘So I believe,’ I said, controlling my temper again. ‘I don’t see a lot of it.’
A man doesn’t spend much time watching his back. Perhaps he ought to. The scar in question dated from when I was thirteen and running wild in the Cumbrian fells. I slipped on an icy rock on Red Pike and tobogganed three hundred feet down into Mosedale. By the time I came to a halt, my clothing had been ripped to shreds and my spine was clearly visible through the torn flesh on my back. Fortunately my fall was seen and the mountain rescue boys stretchered me out to hospital in a relatively short time.
First assessment of the damage offered little hope I would ever walk again. But gradually as they worked on me over several days, their bulletins grew cautiously more optimistic, till finally, much to their amazement, they declared that, while the damage was serious, I had a fair chance of recovery. Six months later, I was back on the fells with nothing to show for my adventure other than a firm conviction of my personal immortality and a lightning-jag scar from between my shoulder blades to the tip of my coccyx.
Was it legal for Medler to take a photo of my naked body without my permission? I wondered.
Whatever, I was determined not to let him think he had worried me, so I carried on dressing and when I was finished I said, ‘Right, now I’d like to phone my wife.’
‘First things first. Sergeant, bring Sir Wilfred along to the charge room.’
Things were moving quickly. Too quickly, perhaps. Arrest, questioning, police custody, these were stages a man could come out of with his reputation intact. There were time limits that applied. Eventually that moment so beloved of TV dramatists would arrive when a solicitor says, ‘Either charge my client or let him go, Inspector.’
But Medler was pre-empting all that.
Foolishly when I realized I was being charged with assault on a police officer in the execution of his duty, I felt relieved. I took this to mean they were still uncertain about their child pornography case. I’d passed through disbelief and outrage to indignation. Either the cops had made a huge mistake or someone was trying to drop me in the shit. Either way, I felt certain I could get it sorted. After all, wasn’t I rich and powerful? I could pay for the best investigators, the best advisors, the best lawyers, and once they got on the case I felt confident that all these obscene allegations would quickly be shown for the nonsense they were.
After the formalities were over, I was about to re-assert my right to call Imogen when Medler took the wind out of my sails by saying, ‘Right, Sir Wilfred, let’s get you to a phone.’
He took me to a small windowless room containing a chair and a table with a phone on it.
‘This is linked to a recorder, I take it?’ I said mockingly.
‘Why? Are you going to say something you don’t want us to hear?’ he asked.
He always slipped away from my questions, I realized.
But what did I expect him to say anyway?
I sat down and Medler went out of the door. It took a few seconds for me to recall the Nutbrowns’ Essex number. I dialled. After six or seven rings, a woman’s voice said cautiously, ‘Yes?’
‘Pippa? Is that you? It’s Wolf.’
She didn’t reply but I heard her call, ‘Imo, it’s him.’
A moment later I heard Imogen’s voice saying, ‘Wolf, how are you?’
She sounded so unworried, so normal that my spirits lifted several degrees. This was not the least of her many qualities, the ability to provide an area of calm in the midst of turbulence. She was always at the eye of the storm.
I said, ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry, we’ll soon get this nonsense sorted out. How about you? Is Ginny with you? How is she?’
‘Yes, she’s here. She’s fine. We’re all fine. Pippa’s being marvellous. There’ve been a couple of calls from the papers. I think that once they realized I’d gone, and Ginny had been taken out of school, they started checking out all possible contacts. They really are most assiduous, aren’t they?’
She sounded almost admiring. I was alarmed.
‘Jesus! What did Pippa say?’
‘She was great. Pretended not to have heard anything about the business, then drove them to distraction by asking them endless silly questions till finally they were glad to ring off.’
‘Good. But it means you’ll have to keep your heads down in case they send someone to take a look for themselves. I blame that little shit Medler for this, he obviously alerted the press in the first place…’
She said, ‘Perhaps. But it was Mr Medler who suggested I got Ginny out of school, then helped smuggle me out of the house without the press noticing.’
This got a mixed reaction from me. Naturally I was pleased my family were safe, but I didn’t like having to feel grateful to Medler. Still, I comforted myself, it was good to know that Imogen’s powers of organization included the police.
I said, ‘I’m glad to hear Medler’s got a conscience. And if the media turn up mob-handed at Pippa’s door, we’ll definitely know who to blame, won’t we?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’ll know who to blame. Wolf, I need to ring off now. I’m expecting a call. I rang home to let them know what was going on. I didn’t want them to start hearing things through the media. I spoke to Daddy but Mummy was out. She’s expected back for lunch, so Daddy said he’d get her to ring me then.’
I bet she’ll enjoy that! I thought savagely. My mother-in-law, Lady Kira Ulphingstone, had never been my greatest fan, though things improved slightly after the birth of Ginny. I suspect she vowed to herself that her granddaughter wasn’t going to make the same ghastly mistake as her mother, and she was clever enough to know that pissing me off all the time might put Ginny outside her sphere of influence. So superficially she thawed a little, but underneath I knew it was the same impenetrable permafrost.
My father-in-law, Sir Leon, on the other hand, though he was a Cumbrian landowner of the old school with political views that erred towards the feudal, had demonstrated the pragmatism of his class by making the best of a bad job. Unlike my own father, Fred. He and Sir Leon had been united in absolute opposition to the marriage, the difference being that Fred’s disapproval survived the ceremony. I can’t blame Dad. After putting him through the wringer by vanishing for five years with only the most minimal attempt at contact, I’d returned, and while he was still trying to get his head round that, I had once more set my will in opposition to his. Any hope of getting back to our old relationship had died then and things had never been the same between us since. That had been the highest price I paid for my fairy-tale happy ending. For fourteen years I had judged it a price worth paying. I was wrong. And though I didn’t know it yet, I was never going to get the chance to tell him so.
I said, ‘Well, we can’t have Mummy getting the engaged signal, can we? But if the journalists start bothering them up there, do try to stop Leon setting the dogs on them. Listen, you couldn’t give Fred a ring, could you? The bastards are likely to have him in their sights too. I’d do it myself soon as I get out of here, but I’m not sure how long that will take.’
‘I asked Daddy to make sure Fred knows,’ she said.
God, she was efficient, I thought admiringly. Even at moments of crisis, she took care of all the details.
She went on, ‘You’re expecting to be out…when?’
‘I don’t know exactly, but it can’t be long,’ I said confidently. ‘You know Toby. He’s helped get serial killers, billion-dollar fraudsters and al-Qaeda terrorists off. I’m sure he can sort out my bit of bother.’
I was exaggerating a bit, less about Toby’s CV than my confidence in his ability to sort out my problem. I recalled the way he’d looked at me. Perhaps he was just too high powered for something like this.
‘Is he there with you now?’ said Imogen.
‘No, he left after…after my interview.’
I hesitated to tell Imogen that I’d assaulted Medler a second time. She’d find out soon enough, but no need to give her extra worry now.
‘Then I’ll hear from you later,’ she said.
‘Of course. Listen, don’t ring off, I’d like a quick word with Ginny.’
There was a pause then she said, ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. She’s very bewildered by everything that’s happened, naturally. So I gave her a mild sedative and she’s having a rest now.’
I said, ‘OK. Then give her my love and tell her I’ll see her very soon.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Wolf.’
‘Bye,’ I said. ‘I love you.’
But she’d already rung off.
I put the phone down. The fact that Imogen hadn’t felt it necessary to refer to the monstrous allegations being made against me should have been a comfort. But somehow I didn’t feel comforted.
Medler came into the room a moment later, confirming my suspicion he’d probably been listening in.
I said, ‘Look, I need to get Mr Estover back here so that he can speed up whatever rigmarole you people put me through before my release.’
He said, ‘We’ve kept Mr Estover in the picture. He’ll be waiting at the court.’
I said, ‘The court? Which court?’
He said, ‘The magistrate’s court. The hearing’s in half an hour.’
And again, I was relieved!
Magistrate’s court, assault charge, slap on the wrist, hefty fine,
I could be out in a couple of hours organizing my own super-investigation into what the fuck was going on here.
‘So what are we hanging about for?’ I said. ‘Let’s go!’
v
When we reached West End Magistrates Court, the media were already there in force.
I looked at Medler and said, ‘I expect they were just passing, huh?’
He said wearily, ‘You’d better get used to it. You’re in the system now and the system is accessible. Wherever you’re headed, there’ll always be someone ready to make a quick buck by tipping the mob.’
Curiously, this time I believed him.
Inside I was shown into a small windowless room furnished with two chairs and a table. Toby was waiting there. He quickly disabused me of my notion that I’d be in and out in the time it took to sign a cheque.
He said, ‘You’re being charged with assaulting a police officer in the execution of his duty and occasioning actual bodily harm. The magistrate can deal with this himself or decide it’s serious enough to commit you to the Crown Court for a jury trial.’
I said, ‘Which is best for me? I mean, which will get me on my way home quickest?’
He regarded me gloomily and said, ‘There are problems either way. The magistrate has the power to jail you for six months…’
‘Six months for hitting a cop?’ I interrupted. ‘There’s people murder their mothers and get less than that, especially when they’ve got you on a retainer!’
He ignored the flattery and said. ‘If on the other hand the beak decides you’re a Crown Court job, then the question of bail arises. Medler would certainly oppose it.’
‘On what grounds?’ I demanded.
‘On the grounds that you are being investigated on more serious charges and that, with your wealth and international connections, there’s a serious risk you might abscond.’
This incensed me as much as anything I’d heard on this increasingly surreal day.
‘Abscond? Why would I? From what, for God’s sake? From these ludicrous kiddy-porn allegations? Give me twenty-four hours to have those properly investigated and they’ll vanish like snow off a dyke. And how the hell can Medler claim they’re more serious anyhow? You said I could get six months for punching his stupid face. That pop singer they sent down for having child abuse images on his computer only got three months, didn’t he?’
Toby said, ‘There have been developments. I’m far from sure exactly what’s going on, but they’ve raided your offices. Also we’re getting word that simultaneous raids are being carried out on your other premises worldwide, domestic and commercial.’
I think that was the moment when I first felt a chill of fear beneath the volcano of anger and indignation that had been simmering inside me since I met Medler coming up my stairs.
I sank heavily on to a chair.
‘Toby,’ I said, ‘what the fuck’s going on?’
Before he could answer, the door opened and Medler’s face appeared.
‘Nearly done, Mr Estover?’ he said.
‘Give us another minute,’ said Toby.
Medler glanced at me. What he saw in my face seemed to please him.
He gave me one of his smug smiles and said, ‘OK. One minute.’
It was the smile that provoked me to my next bit of stupidity. To me it seemed to say, Now you’re starting to realize we’ve really got you by the short and curlies!
I said to Toby, ‘Give me your mobile.’
He said, ‘Why?’
I said, ‘For fuck’s sake, just give it to me!’
In the Observer profile when I got my knighthood, they talked about what they called my in-your-face abrasive manner. When I read the draft, I rang up to request, politely I thought, that this phrase should be modified. After I’d been talking to the feature writer for a few minutes, he said, ‘Hang on. Something I’d like you to listen to.’ And he played me back a tape of what I’d just been saying.
When it finished, I said, ‘Jesus. Print your piece the way it is. And send me a copy of that tape.’
I made a genuine effort to tone down my manner after that, but it wasn’t easy. I paid my employees top dollar and I didn’t expect to have to repeat anything I said to them. That included solicitors, even if they happened to be friends.
I thrust my hand out towards Toby. It took him a second or two, but in the end he put his mobile into my palm.
I thumbed in 999.
When the operator asked, ‘Which service?’ I said, ‘Police.’
Toby’s eyes widened.
When he heard what I said next, it was a wonder they didn’t pop right out of their sockets.
‘The Supreme Council of the People’s Jihad has spoken. There is a bomb in West End Magistrate’s Court. In three and a half minutes all the infidel gathered there will be joining their accursed ancestors in the fires of Hell. Allahu Akbar!’
Toby’s face was grey.
‘For God’s sake, Wolf, you can’t…’
‘Shut up,’ I said, putting the phone in my pocket. ‘Now we’ll see just how efficient all these new anti-terrorist strategies really are.’
They were pretty good, I have to admit.
Within less than a minute I heard the first sounds of activity outside the door.
Toby said, ‘This is madness. We’ve got to tell them…’
I poked him hard in the stomach.
It served a double purpose. It shut him up and when the door opened and Medler said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here,’ I was able to reply, ‘Mr Estover’s not feeling well. I think we ought to get a doctor.’
‘Not here, outside!’ commanded Medler.
I got one of Toby’s arms over my shoulder and began moving him through the door. I looked appealingly at Medler. He didn’t look happy, but to give him credit he didn’t hesitate. He hooked Toby’s other arm over his shoulder and we joined the flood of people pouring down the corridor towards the exit.
To create urgency without causing panic is no easy task and I think the police and court officers did pretty well. But of course the last people to get the message are very aware that there’s a large crowd between them and safety, and they want it to move a lot faster than it seems to be doing. Two men dragging a third along between them forms a pretty effective bung and all I had to do as the lobby came in sight was to cease resisting the growing pressure behind me and let myself be swept towards the exit on the tide.
I don’t know at what point Medler realized I was no longer with him. I didn’t look back but burst out of the building into the sunlight to be confronted by a uniformed constable who shouted at me. For a second I thought my escape was going to be very short lived. Then I realized that what he was shouting was, ‘Get away from the building! Run!’
I ran. Everyone was running. I felt a surge of exhilaration. It must feel like this to start a marathon, I thought. All those months of training and now the moment was here to put your fitness to the test.
My marathon lasted about a quarter of a mile, firstly because I was now far enough away from the court for a running man to attract attention and secondly because I was knackered. I still tried to keep reasonably fit but clearly the days when I could roam twenty miles across the Cumbrian fells without breaking sweat were long past.
I was beginning to feel anything but exhilarated. My sense of self-congratulation at getting away was being replaced by serious self-doubt. What did I imagine I was going to do with my freedom? Head up to Poynters to see Imogen and Ginny? That would be the first place Medler would set his dogs to watch. Or was my plan to set about proving my innocence like they do all the time in the movies? I’d need professional help to do that and no legitimate investigator was going to risk his licence aiding and abetting a fugitive. OK, the promise of large sums of money might make one or two of them bend the rules a little, but only if they believed I still had easy access to large sums of money.
And now I came to think about it, I didn’t even have access to small sums of money. In fact, I had absolutely nothing in my pockets except for Toby’s phone. I was an idiot. I should have made him hand over his wallet as well!
My horizons had shrunk. Without money I wasn’t going anywhere I couldn’t reach on my own two feet. The obvious places to lay my hands on cash – home in Holland Park, my offices in the City – were out because they were so obvious.
Well, as my Great Aunt Carrie was fond of saying, if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain. Probably saying that would get you stuck on the pointed end of a fatwa nowadays. But Carrie lived all her life in Cumberland where they knew a lot about the intractability of mountains and bugger all about the intractability of Islam.
I took out Toby’s phone and rang Johnny Nutbrown on his mobile.
When he answered I said, ‘Johnny, it’s me. Meet me in twenty minutes at the Black Widow.’
I thought I was being clever when I said that. No reason why anybody should be listening in to Johnny, but even if they were, unless the Met was recruiting Smart Young Things, even less reason for them to know this was how habitués referred to The Victoria pub in Chelsea. Not that I was ever a Smart Young Thing, but Johnny had taken me there once and been greeted as an old chum by the swarming Dysons, i.e. vacuums so empty they don’t even contain a bag. I’d committed the place to my memory as somewhere I’d no intention of visiting again.
Circumstances change cases. It’s being nimble on your feet that keeps you ahead of the game in business and in life.
I soon realized that I was going to need to be exceedingly nimble on my feet if I was going to make the Widow in twenty minutes. Being chauffeured around in an S-class Merc tends to make you insensitive to distances. Might have done it if I’d started running again but neither my legs nor my need for discretion permitted that. Not that it mattered. Johnny would wait. In fact, come to think of it, he too would be hard pushed to make it through the lunchtime traffic in much under half an hour.
I took thirty-five minutes. As I entered the crowded bar my first thought was that we were going to have to find somewhere a lot quieter to have a chat. I couldn’t see Johnny. At six feet seven, he was usually pretty easy to spot, even in a crowd, but I pushed a little further into the room just to make sure.
No sign, but I did notice a man at the bar, not because he was tall, though he was; nor because he had the kind of face that defies you to make it smile, though he did. No, it was just that somehow he looked out of place. That is, he looked like an ordinary guy who’d just dropped in for a quick half in his lunch break. Except that this was the kind of bar that ordinary guys in search of a quick half reversed out of at speed. He was raising a bottle of Pils to his mouth. As he did so his gaze met mine for a moment and registered…something. Maybe he’d just realized how much he’d had to pay for the Pils. He drank, lowered his head, and I saw his lips move. Nowadays everyone knows what men speaking into their lapels are doing.
I didn’t turn back to the main door. If I’d got it right, the guys he was talking to would be coming in through there pretty quickly. Instead I followed a sign reading Toilets and found myself in a deadend corridor. I peered into the Gents. Windowless. I pushed open the door of the Ladies. That looked better. A frosted-glass pane about eighteen inches square. There was a bin for the receipt of towels. I stood on it and examined the catch. It didn’t look as if it had been opened in years and the frame was firmly painted in place. I stepped down, picked up the bin and hit the glass hard. Cheap stuff, it shattered easily. Behind me I heard a door open. I swung round but it was only a woman coming out of one of the cubicles. I’ll say this for the Dysons, they don’t do swoons or hysterics.
She said, ‘About time they aired this place out.’
I rattled the bin around the frame to dislodge the residual shards, put the bin on the floor once more, stood on it and launched myself through the window. As I did so, I heard another door open and male voices shouting.
I felt my trousers tear, then my leg, so my clear-up technique hadn’t been all that successful. I hit the ground awkwardly, doing something to my shoulder. I was dazed but able to see that I was in a narrow alley. One way it ran into a brick wall, the other on to a busy street. I staggered towards the street.
Behind me, voices. Ahead, a crowded pavement. I could vanish into the crowd, I told myself. I glanced back. Two men coming very quick. I commanded my legs to move faster and the old in-your-face-abrasive technique worked.
I erupted on to the pavement at a fair rate of knots, decided that turning left or right would slow me down, so kept on going.
The thing about London buses is you can wait forever when you want one in a hurry, but if you don’t want one…
I saw it coming, even saw the driver’s shocked face, almost saw the number…
Then I saw no more.
Elf (#ulink_9bebba79-4fe5-518e-9990-5c56236fe297)
i
‘It’s…interesting,’ said Alva Ozigbo cautiously.
Wolf Hadda smiled. It was like a pale ray of winter sunshine momentarily touching a dark mountain. In all the months she’d been treating him, this was only the second time she’d seen his smile, but even this limited observation had hinted at its power to distract attention from the sinister sunglasses and the corrugated scars, inviting you instead to relate to the still charming man beneath.
Charm was perhaps the most potent weapon a pederast could possess.
But it was a weapon Hadda could hardly be conscious of possessing or surely he would have brought it out before now to reinforce his lies?
He said, ‘I remember interesting. That’s the word they use out there to describe things they don’t understand, don’t approve of, or don’t like, without appearing ignorant, judgmental or lacking in taste.’
She noted the intensity of out there.
She said, ‘In here I use it to describe things I find interesting.’
They sat and looked at each other across the narrow table for a while. At least she presumed he was looking at her; his wrap-around glasses made it difficult to be certain. She could see herself reflected in the mirrored lenses, a narrow ebon face, its colouring inherited from her Nigerian father, its bone structure from her Swedish mother. Also her hair, straight and pale as bone. Many people assumed it was a wig, worn for effect. She was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved sweater that neither obscured nor drew attention to her breasts. Don’t be provocative in your dress, the Director had advised her when she started the job. But no point in over-compensating. If you turned up in a burka, they’d still mentally undress you.
Did Hadda mentally undress her? she wondered. Up to their last session she’d have judged not. But what had happened then had stayed with her for the whole of the intervening seven days.
It had started in the usual way. She was already seated at her side of the bare wooden table when the door on the secure side of the interview room opened. Prison Officer Lindale, young and compassionate, had smiled and nodded his head at her, then stood aside to let Wilfred Hadda enter.
He limped laboriously into the room and sat down on the basic wooden chair that always seemed too small for him. Her fanciful notion that his rare smile was like wintry sunshine on a mountain probably rose from the sense of mountainous stillness he exuded. A craggy mountain, its face bearing the scars of ancient storms, its brow streaked with the greyish white of old snows.
It was well over a year since their first meeting, and despite her own extensive research that had been added to the file inherited from Joe Ruskin, her predecessor at Parkleigh, she did not feel she knew much more about Hadda. Ruskin’s file was in Alva’s eyes a simple admission of failure. All his attempts to open a dialogue were simply ignored and in the end the psychiatrist had set down his assessment that in his view the prisoner was depressed but stable, and enforced medication would only be an option if his behaviour changed markedly.
Alva Ozigbo had read the file with growing exasperation. The system it seemed to her had abandoned Hadda to deal with his past himself, and the way he was choosing to do it was to treat his sentence as a kind of hibernation.
The trouble with hibernation was when the bat or the hedgehog or the polar bear woke up, it was itself again.
Hadda, she read, had never admitted any of his crimes, but unlike many prisoners he did not make a thing of protesting his innocence either. According to his prison record, verbal abuse simply bounced off his monumental indifference. Isolation in the Special Unit had meant that there was little opportunity for other prisoners to attack him physically, but on the couple of occasions when, hopefully by accident, the warders let their guard down and an assault had been launched, his response had been so immediate and violent, it was the attackers who ended up in hospital.
But that had been in the early days. For five years until Alva’s appointment in January 2015 he had been from the viewpoint of that most traditional of turnkeys, Chief Officer George Proctor, a model prisoner, troubling no one and doing exactly what he was told.
The Chief Officer, a well-fleshed man with a round and rubicund face that gave a deceptive impression of Pickwickian good humour, was by no means devoid of humanity, but in his list of penal priorities it came a long way behind good order and discipline. So when he concluded his verdict on Hadda by saying, ‘Can’t understand what he’s doing in here’, Alva was puzzled.
‘But he was found guilty of very serious crimes,’ she said.
‘Yeah, and the bugger should be locked up for ever,’ said Proctor. ‘But look around you, miss. We got terrorists and subversives and serial killers, the bloody lot. That’s what this place is for. Hadda never done any serious harm to no one.’
It was a point Alva would usually have debated fiercely, but she had already wasted too much time beating her fists against Proctor’s rock-hard shell of received wisdom and inherited certainties. Also she knew how easy it would be for him to make her job even harder than it was, though in fairness he had never done anything to block or disrupt what he called her tête-à-têtes, which he pronounced tit-a-tits with a face so blank it defied correction.
After a year in post, she wasn’t sure how much good she’d done in relation to the killers and terrorists, but as far as Hadda was concerned, she felt she’d made no impression whatsoever. They brought him along to see her, but he simply refused to talk. After a while she found that her earlier exasperation with what she had judged to be her predecessor’s too easy abandonment of his efforts was modifying into a reluctant understanding.
And then one day when she turned up at Parkleigh, the Director had sent for her.
‘Terrible news,’ he said. ‘It’s Hadda’s daughter. She’s dead.’
Alva had studied the man’s file so closely she did not need reminding of the facts. The girl, Virginia, had been thirteen when her father was sentenced. She had never visited him in prison. A careful check was kept of prisoners’ mail in and out. He had written letters to her c/o his ex-wife in the early days. There had been no known reply and the letters out had ceased though he persevered with birthday and Christmas cards.
Joe Ruskin had recorded that Hadda’s reaction to any attempt to bring up the subject of his relationship with his daughter had been to stand up and head for the door. Grief or guilt? the psychiatrist speculated. Hadda’s predilection for pubescent girls had led the more prurient tabloids to speculate whether she might have been an object of his abuse, but there had been no suggestion of this either in the police investigation nor in the case for the prosecution. Ruskin had demanded full disclosure of all information relevant to the man’s state of mind and crimes, but nowhere had he found anything to indicate that details had been kept secret to protect the child.
Now the Director filled in the details of Ginny’s life after her father’s downfall.
‘Her mother sent her to finish her education abroad, out of the reach of the tabloids. Her grandmother, that’s Lady Kira Ulphingstone, has family connections in Paris, and that’s where the girl seems to have settled. She was, by all accounts, pretty wild.’
‘With her background, why wouldn’t she be?’ said Alva. ‘How did she die?’
‘The worst way,’ said the Director. ‘There was a party in a friend’s flat, drugs, sex, the usual. She was found early this morning in an alley behind the apartment block. She’d passed out, choked on her own vomit. Nineteen years old. What a waste! Alva, he’s got to be told. It’s my job, I know, but I’d like you to be there.’
She’d watched Hadda’s face as he heard the news. There’d been no reaction that a camera could have recorded, but she had felt a reaction the way you feel a change of pressure as a plane swoops down to land, and you swallow, and it’s gone.
He hadn’t been wearing his sunglasses and his monoptic gaze had met hers for a moment. For the first time in their silent encounters, she felt her presence was registered.
Then he had turned his back on them and stood there till the Director nodded at the escorting officer and he opened the door and ushered the prisoner out.
‘I’ve put him on watch,’ said the Director. ‘It’s procedure in such circumstances.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Procedure.’
He looked at her curiously.
‘You don’t think he’s a risk?’
‘To himself, you mean? No. But there has to be some sort of reaction.’
There was, but its nature surprised her.
He started talking.
Or at least he started responding to her questions. He was always reactive, never proactive. Only once did he ask a question.
He looked up at the CCTV camera in the interview room and said, ‘Can they hear us?’
She replied, ‘No. As I told you when we first met, the cameras are on for obvious security reasons, but the sound is switched off. This is a condition of my work here.’
The question had raised hopes that in the weeks that followed were consistently disappointed. He began to talk more but he never said anything that came close to the confessional. References to his daughter were met by the old blankness. She asked why he hadn’t applied to go to the funeral. He said he wouldn’t see his daughter there but he would see people he didn’t want to see. What people? she asked. The people who put me here, he said. But he didn’t even assert his innocence with any particular passion. Again the mountain image came into her mind. Climbers talk of conquering mountains. They don’t. Sometimes the mountain changes them, but they never change the mountain.
But she persevered and after a few more months of this, there came a session when, as soon as he came into the room, she had felt something different in him. As the door closed behind Prison Officer Lindale, she got a visual clue as to what it was.
Usually when he sat down, he placed his hands palm up on the table, the right one black gloved, the left bare, its life and fate lines deep etched, as though he expected his fortune to be read.
This day his hands were out of sight, as though placed on his knees.
She said, ‘Good morning, Mr Hadda. How are you today?’
He said in his customary quiet, level tone, ‘Listen, you black bitch, and listen carefully. I have a shiv in my hand. Show any sign of alarm and I’ll have one of your eyes out before they can open the door.’
Shock kept her brave. Only once had she been attacked, shortly after she’d started work here. A client (she refused to talk of them as prisoners), a mild-mannered little man who hadn’t even come close to the kind of innuendo by which some of the men tried to imply a sexual relationship with her, suddenly lunged across the table, desperate to get his hands on some part of her, any part of her. The best he’d managed was to brush her left wrist before the door slid open and a warder gave him a short burst with a taser.
Since then there’d been no trouble. Only Alva knew how frightened she’d been. When Parliament passed the Act a year ago permitting prison officers to carry tasers after the great Pentonville riot of 2014 she had been one of those who protested strongly against it. Now her certainty that if she pushed back her chair and screamed, the taser would be pumping 50kV into Hadda’s back long before the shiv could get anywhere near her eyes, gave her the strength to respond calmly, ‘What is it you want, Mr Hadda?’
He said, ‘What I want is to fuck you till you faint, but we don’t have time for that. So I’ll have to make do with you kicking your left shoe off, stretching your leg under the table, placing your bare foot against my crotch, and rubbing it up and down till I come.’
The part of her mind not still in shock thought, You poor sad bastard! You’re banged up with all the other deviants. Can’t you find someone in there to service you?
She was still wondering if she could bring this situation to a conclusion without testing what level of voltage was necessary to subdue a mountain when Hadda smiled – that was the first time – and placed his empty hands palm up on the table and said, ‘I think if they were going to come they’d have been here by now, don’t you agree?’
It took a second or two to get it. He’d been testing her assurance that the watching officers could not hear what was being said. Her mind was already exploring the implications of this, and she did not realize that her body was shaking in reaction until the door slid open and Officer Lindale said, ‘You OK, miss?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just got something stuck in my throat.’ And subsumed her trembling into a bout of coughing.
He said, ‘Like some water, miss?’
She shook her head and said, ‘No thanks. I’ll be OK.’
When the door was closed again, Hadda said, ‘Sorry about my little charade. What you need is a stiff brandy. I suggest we cut this session short so you can go and get one.’
She was still struggling with the after-effects of the shock and now she had to adjust to the new tone of voice in which he was addressing her.
Somehow she managed to keep her own voice level as she replied, ‘No, if you’re so keen to be sure we’re not being listened to, I presume that means you’ve got something you’d like to say.’
‘Not now,’ he said. ‘What I’ve got is something for you to read. OK, I’m convinced you’re telling the truth when you say there’s nobody listening to us. Now I’d like your reassurance that nobody else will read this or anything else I give to you.’
As he spoke, he pulled from his prison blouse a blue school exercise book.
This was a shock different in nature from the threat of a shiv attack but in its way almost as extreme.
With many of her clients, she suggested that if they felt like putting any of their feelings or thoughts down on paper before their next meeting, this could only be to the good. Nobody but herself would see what they wrote, she assured them, an assurance some took advantage of to lay before her in graphic detail their sexual fantasies.
Hadda had simply blanked her out when she first suggested he might like to write something. She’d repeated the suggestion over several weeks, then at last she had given up.
So this came completely out of the blue. It should have felt like a breakthrough, but she didn’t have the energy to exult.
She realized Hadda was right. What she wanted to do now was get away to somewhere quiet and have a stiff drink.
She said, ‘I promise you. No one will read anything of yours, unless you give permission. All right?’
‘It will have to be,’ he said, handing her the book.
She took it and held it without attempting to open it.
‘And this is…?’ she said.
‘You keep saying you want to understand how I ended up in here. Well, this is the story. First instalment anyway.’
She stood up, glanced at one of the cameras, and said as the door opened, ‘I look forward to reading it.’
Then she’d headed straight back to her flat, had the longed-for stiff drink after which, rather to her surprise, she was violently sick.
When she was done, she had a very hot shower. Dried and wrapped in a heavy white bathrobe, she sat at her dressing table and stared back at herself out of the mirror.
Behind her, through the open door into the living room, she could see the exercise book lying on a table where she’d thrown it on entering the flat.
Opening it was going to be the first step on a journey that could take her to some very dark places. No darker, she guessed, than many others she’d visited already. But somehow going there in the company of Wilfred Hadda seemed particularly unappealing.
Why was that? she asked herself.
Not because of any horrors that might possibly be revealed. They came with the territory. So it must have something to do with the man they would be revealed about.
This was a measure of his power. This was why she must be on her guard at all times, not against the physical threat which he had used to test her assurance of confidentiality, but against a much more insinuating mental and emotional onslaught.
She recalled her father’s words when she told him about the job offer.
‘Elf,’ he had boomed, ‘you sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew?’
‘Trust me,’ she had replied. ‘I’m a psychiatrist.’
And they had shared one of those outbursts of helpless laughter that had her mother looking at them in affectionate bewilderment.
But now, alone, in her mind’s eye she conjured up an image of the menacing bulk of Parkleigh Prison printed against the eastern sky and shuddered at the thought of driving towards it in the morning.
ii
Parkleigh Prison was built in the 1850s on a marshy greenfield site in Essex just outside London. As if determined that it would be to penology what cathedrals were to religion, its architect incorporated into the design a single massive tower, visible for miles around in that flat landscape, a reassurance to the virtuous and a warning to the sinful.
Rapidly overtaken by the capital’s urban sprawl, it continued pretty well unchanged until the 1980s when even the Thatcher hardliners had to accept it was no longer fit for purpose. Closed, it languished as a menacing monument to Victorian values for a decade or more. Everyone expected that eventually the building would be demolished and the site redeveloped for housing, but then it was announced, in the face of considerable but unavailing local protest, that under the Private Finance Initiative, Parkleigh was going to be refurbished as a maximum-security category A private prison.
It would be a prison for all seasons, enthused the developers. Outside dark and forbidding enough to please the floggers and hangers, inside well ahead of the game in its rehabilitatory structures and facilities.
Its clientele was to be category A prisoners, those whom society needed to be certain stayed locked up until they had served out their usually lengthy sentences. In 2010 Wolf Hadda was sent there to popular acclaim. Five years later he was joined by Alva Ozigbo, to far from popular acclaim.
There were two main strikes against her.
As a psychiatrist, she was too young.
And as a woman, she was a woman.
Outwardly Alva treated such objections with the contempt they deserved.
Inwardly she acknowledged that both had some merit.
At twenty-eight she was certainly a rising star, a rise commenced when she’d worked up her PhD thesis on the causes and treatment of deviant behaviour into a book with the catchy title of Curing Souls. This attracted attention, mainly complimentary, though the word precocious did occur rather frequently in the reviews. But it was a chance meeting that brought her to Parkleigh.
Giles Nevinson, a lawyer friend who hoped by persistence to become more, had invited her to a formal dinner in the Middle Temple. While she had no intention of ever becoming more, she liked Giles. Also, through his job with the Crown Prosecution Service, he was a useful source of free legal advice and information. So she accepted.
Giles spent much of the dinner deep in conversation about the breeding of Persian cats with the rather grand-looking woman on his left. As he explained later, it was ambition rather than ailurophilia that caused him to neglect his guest. The other woman was Isa Toplady, the appropriately named wife of a High Court judge rumoured to be much influenced by his spouse’s personal opinions.
Alva, obliged to turn to her right for conversational nourishment, found herself confronted by a slightly built man in his sixties, with wispy blond hair, pale blue eyes, and that expression of rather vapid benevolence with which some painters have attempted to indicate the indifference of saints to the scourges they are being scourged with, arrows they are being pierced with, or flames they are being roasted with.
He introduced himself as John Childs and when he heard her name, he said, ‘Ah, yes. Curing Souls. A stimulating read.’
Suspecting that, for whatever reason, he might have simply done a little basic pre-prandial homework, she tried him out with a few leading questions and was flattered to discover that not only had he actually read the book but he did indeed seem to have been stimulated by it.
Some explanation of his interest came when he told her that he had a godson, Harry, who was doing A-level psychology and hoping to pursue his studies at university. Childs then set himself to pick Alva’s brain about the best way forward for the boy. It is always flattering to be consulted as an expert and it wasn’t till well through the dinner that she managed to turn the conversation from herself to her interlocutor.
His own job he described as a sort of Home Office advisor, I suppose, a vagueness that from any other nationality Alva would have read as an attempt to conceal unimportance, but which from this kind of Englishman probably meant he was very important indeed.
When they parted he said how much he’d enjoyed her company, and she replied that the feeling was mutual, realizing, slightly to her surprise that this was no more than the truth. He was certainly very good to talk to, meaning, of course, that he was an excellent listener!
Next morning she was surprised but not taken aback when he rang to invite her to take tea with him in Claridge’s. Curious as to his motives, and also (she always tried to confront her own motivations honestly) because she’d never before been invited to take tea at Claridge’s, she accepted. The hotel lived up to her expectations. Childs couldn’t because she had none. They chatted easily, moving from the weather through the ghastliness of politicians to more personal matters. She learned that he came from Norfolk yeoman stock, lived alone in London, and was very fond of his godson, whose parents, alas, had separated. Childs had clearly done all he could to minimize the damage done to the boy. He seemed keen to get her approval for the way he’d responded to the situation, and once again Alva enjoyed the pleasure of being deferred to.
Later she also had a vague feeling with no traceable source that she was being assessed.
But for what? The notion that this might be an early stage of some rather old-fashioned seduction technique occurred and was dismissed.
Then a couple of days later he asked her to lunch at a Soho restaurant she didn’t know. When on arrival she found she had to knock to get admittance, the seduction theory suddenly presented itself again. Might this be the kind of place where elderly gentlemen entertained their lights-of-love in small private rooms decorated in high Edwardian kitsch? If so, what might the menu consist of?
She knocked and entered, and didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed when she was escorted into an airy dining room with very well spaced tables. Any residual suspicions were finally dissipated by the sight of a second man at the table she was led towards.
Childs said, ‘Dr Ozigbo, hope you don’t mind, I invited Simon Homewood along. Homewood, this is Alva Ozigbo that I was telling you about.’
‘Dr Ozigbo,’ said the newcomer, reaching out his hand. ‘Delighted to meet you.’
Not as delighted as me, she thought as they shook hands. This had to be the Simon Homewood, Director of Parkleigh Prison, whose liberal views on the treatment of prisoners, widely aired when appointed to the job six years earlier, had met with scornful laughter or enthusiastic applause, depending on which paper you read.
Or maybe, she deflated herself as she took her seat, maybe it was another Simon Homewood, the Childs family trouble-shooter, come to cast an assessing eye over this weird young woman bumbling old John had taken a fancy to.
One way to settle that.
‘How are things at Parkleigh, Mr Homewood?’ she enquired.
He smiled broadly and said, ‘Depends whether you’re looking in or out, I suppose.’
The contrast with Childs couldn’t have been stronger. There was nothing that you could call retiring or self-effacing about Homewood. In his late thirties with a square, determined face topped by a thatch of vigorous brown hair, he fixed her with an unblinking and very unmoist gaze as he talked to her. He asked her about her book, prompted her to expatiate on her ideas, outlined some of the problems he was experiencing in the management of long-term prisoners, and invited her opinion.
Am I being interviewed? she asked herself. Unlikely, because if she were, it could only be for one job. Ten days previously, the chief psychiatrist at Parkleigh Prison, Joe Ruskin, had died in a pileup on the M5. She’d had only a slight acquaintance with the man, so her distress at the news was correspondingly slight and soon displaced by the thought that, if this had happened four or five years later, she might well have applied to fill the vacancy. Parkleigh held many of the most fascinating criminals of the age. For someone with her areas of interest, it was a job to die for.
But at twenty-eight, she was far too young and inexperienced to be a candidate. And they’d want another man anyway. But she enjoyed the conversation, in which Childs took little part, simply sitting, watching, with a faintly proprietorial smile on his lips.
At the end of lunch she excused herself and made for the Ladies. Away from the two men, her absurdity in even considering the possibility seemed crystal clear.
‘Idiot,’ she told her reflection in the mirror.
As she returned to the table she saw the two men in deep conversation. It stopped as she sat down.
Then Homewood fixed her with that gaze which probably declared to everyone he spoke to, You are the most interesting person in the room, and as if enquiring where she was spending her holidays this year, he said, ‘So how would you like to work at Parkleigh, Dr Ozigbo?’
iii
Fortified with a large scotch and water accompanied by a bowl of bacon-flavoured crisps, Alva at last felt up to opening Hadda’s exercise book.
She went through the narrative three times, the first time swiftly, to get the feel of it; the second slowly, taking notes; the third intermittently, giving herself plenty of time for reflection and analysis.
She was as disappointed at the end of the third reading as she had been by the first.
The narrative had panache, it was presented with great clarity of detail and emphatic certainty of recollection, it rang true.
All of which meant only one thing: Wilfred Hadda was still in complete denial.
This was not going to be easy, but surely she’d never expected it would be?
She knew from both professional experience and wide study how hard it was to lead some men to the point where they could confront their own crimes. When child abuse was involved, the journey was understandably long and tortuous. At its end was a moment of such self-revulsion that the subconscious decided the cure was worse than the disease and performed gymnastics of Olympic standard to avoid it.
This was why the narrative rang so true. Hadda wasn’t trying to deceive her. He’d had years to convince himself he was telling the truth. Plus, of course, so far as the events described were concerned, she knew from her close reading of all the trial and associated media material, he never deviated from the known facts. Only the implied motivation had changed. He was a man of wealth and power, used to getting his own way, and while he clearly had a very sharp mind, he was a man whose physical responses were sometimes so urgent and immediate that reason lagged behind. It wasn’t outraged innocence that made him assault Medler but the challenge to his authority. And once he realized that, by doing this, he had provided the police with an excuse for keeping him in custody while they delved into his private business at their leisure, he had made a desperate bid to get within reach of the sources of wealth and influence he felt could protect him.
The important thing was that her relationship with Hadda had advanced to the point where he clearly wanted to get her on his side. She knew she had to proceed very carefully from here on in. To let him see how little credit she gave to his account would almost certainly inhibit him from writing any more. There was still much to be learned even from evasions and downright lies.
As she drove towards Parkleigh next morning, she found herself wondering as she did most mornings why she wasn’t feeling a lot happier at the prospect of going to work. Was it cause or effect that, when she met older, more experienced colleagues, particularly those who had been close to her predecessor, Joe Ruskin, she had to bite back words of explanation and apology? What had she to feel sorry for? She hadn’t been responsible for the lousy driving that killed him!
As for explanation, she still hadn’t explained things satisfactorily to herself. Had she been deliberately sought out or was she just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time? After the euphoria of being offered the post died down, she’d asked Giles very casually who’d invited John Childs to the dinner. Not casually enough, it seemed. His barrister sensors had detected instantly the thought behind the question and he had teased her unmercifully about her alleged egotism in imagining she might have been headhunted. Next day he had renewed the attack when he rang to say that Childs had been the guest of the uxorious Mr Justice Toplady, whose cat-loving wife was always on the lookout for elderly bachelors to partner her unmarried sister.
‘Though that might be described as the triumph of hope over experience,’ he concluded.
‘That sounds rather sexist even for a dedicated male chauvinist like yourself,’ said Alva.
‘Why so? I refer not to the sister’s unattractiveness, although it is great, but Childs’ predilections.’
‘You mean he’s gay?’
‘Very likely, though in his case he seems to get his kicks out of moulding and mentoring personable young men, then sitting back to watch them prosper in their adult careers. Geoff Toplady was one such, I believe, and he’s certainly prospered. Word is that he’ll be lording it in the Court of Appeal by Christmas. Oh yes. Hitch your wagon to John Childs and the sky’s the limit.’
‘Meaning what? That he’s buying their silence?’
‘Good Lord, what a mind you have! Still, if you spend your time dabbling in dirt, I suppose some of it must stick. No, on the whole Childs’ young men seem to be very positively heterosexual types, and the fact that most of them seem perfectly happy to continue the relationship in adult life suggests that he never tried to initiate them into the joys of buggery as boys. A form of sublimation, I expect you’d call it.’
‘Giles, if you don’t try any analysis, I won’t try any cases,’ said Alva acidly, stung more than she cared to show by the dabbling-in-dirt crack. ‘Would Simon Homewood have been one of his mentored boys?’
‘I believe he was. Of course, it could be Childs is going blind and mistook you for a testosteronic young man in need of a helping hand. Whatever, you simply hit lucky, Alva. No subtle conspiracy to take a closer look at you. Even the seating plan at these do’s is purely a random thing so you don’t get all the nobs clumping together.’
Alva didn’t believe the last – nothing lawyers did was ever random – but she more or less accepted that fate alone had been responsible for her advancement. Which, she assured herself, she didn’t mind. The world was full of excellent young psychiatrists; far better to be one of the lucky ones!
Still it would have been nice to be headhunted! Or perhaps she meant it would have made her feel more confident that she was the right person in the right job.
She met Chief Officer Proctor as she went through the gate. He greeted her with his usual breezy friendliness, but as always she felt those sharp eyes were probing in search of the weakness that would justify his belief that this wasn’t a suitable job for a woman.
She put all these negative thoughts out of her mind as she sat and waited for Hadda to be brought into the interview room.
His face was expressionless as he sat down, placing his hands on the table before him with perhaps a little over emphasis.
Then he let his gaze fall slowly to the exercise book she’d laid before her and said, ‘Well?’
And she said, with a brightness that set her own teeth on edge, ‘It’s very interesting.’
And this led to the brief exchange that ended with them trying to outstare each other.
This was not how she’d planned to control the session.
She said abruptly, Tell me about Woodcutter Enterprises.’
Her intention was to distract him by focusing not on his paedophilia, which was her principal concern, but on the fraudulent business activities that had got him the other half of his long sentence.
He looked at her with an expression that suggested he saw through her efforts at dissimulation as easily as she saw through his, but he answered, ‘You know what a private equity company is?’
She nodded and he went on, ‘That’s what Woodcutter was to start with. We identified businesses that needed restructuring because of poor management and organization which often made them vulnerable to take-over as well. When we took charge, we restructured by identifying the healthy profit-making elements and getting rid of the rest. And eventually we’d move on, leaving behind a leaner, healthier, much more viable business.’
‘So, a sort of social service?’ she said, smiling.
‘No need to take the piss,’ he said shortly. ‘The aim of business is to make profits and that’s what Woodcutter did very successfully and completely legitimately.’
She said, ‘And you called yourselves Woodcutter Enterprises because you saw your job as pruning away deadwood from potentially healthy business growth?’
He smiled, not the attractive face-lightening smile she had already remarked upon but a teeth-baring grimace that reminded her that his nickname was Wolf.
‘That’s it, you’re right, as usual. And eventually as time went by with some of our more striking successes we retained a long-term interest, so anyone saying we were in for a quick buck then off without a backward glance ought to check the history.’
Interesting, she thought. His indignation at accusation of business malpractice seems at least as fervent as in relation to the sexual charges.
She said, ‘I think the relevant government department has done all the checking necessary, don’t you?’
For a moment she thought she might have provoked him into another outburst, but he controlled himself and said quietly, ‘So where are we now, Dr Ozigbo? I’ve done what you asked and started putting things down on paper. I’ve told you how things happened, the way they happened. I thought someone in your job would have an open mind, but it seems to me you’ve made as many prejudgments as the rest of them!’
The reaction didn’t surprise her. The written word gave fantasy a physical existence and, to start with, the act of writing things down nearly always reinforced denial.
‘This isn’t about me, it’s about you,’ she said gently. ‘I said it was very interesting, and I really meant that. But you said it was just the first instalment. Perhaps we’d better wait till I’ve had the whole oeuvre before I venture any further comment. How does that sound, Wilfred? May I call you Wilfred? Or do you prefer Wilf? Or Wolf? That was your nickname, wasn’t it?’
She had never moved beyond the formality of Mr Hadda. To use any other form of address when she was getting no or very little response would have sounded painfully patronizing. But she needed to do something to mark this small advance in their relationship.
He said, ‘Wolf. Yes, I used to get Wolf. Press made a lot of that, I recall. I was named after my dad. Wilfred. He got Fred. And I got Wilf till…But that’s old history. Call me what you like. But what about you? I’m tired of saying Doctor. Sounds a bit clinical, doesn’t it? And you want to be my friend, don’t you? So let me see…Your name’s Alva, isn’t it? Where does that come from?’
‘It’s Swedish. My mother’s Swedish. It means elf or something.’
The genuine non-lupine smile again. That made three times. It was good he doled it out so sparingly. Forewarned was forearmed.
‘Wolf and elf, not a million miles apart,’ he said. ‘You call me Wolf, I’ll call you Elf, OK?’
Elf. This had been her father’s pet name for her since childhood. No one else ever used it. She wished she hadn’t mentioned the meaning, but thought she’d hidden her reaction till Hadda said, ‘Sure you’re OK with that? I can call you madam, if you prefer.’
‘No, Elf will be fine,’ she said.
‘Great. And elves perform magic, don’t they?’
He reached into his tunic and pulled out another exercise book.
‘So let’s see you perform yours, Elf,’ he said, handing it over. ‘Here’s Instalment Two.’
Wolf (#ulink_dfa4ce0e-3dc5-57eb-9eb6-cac22ff67149)
i
You open your eye.
The light is so dazzling, you close it instantly.
Then you try again, this time very cautiously. The process takes two or three minutes and even then you don’t open it fully but squint into the brightness through your lashes.
You are in bed. You have wires and tubes attached to your body, so it must be a hospital bed. Unless you’ve been kidnapped by aliens.
You close your eye once more to consider whether that is a joke or a serious option.
Surely you ought to know that?
It occurs to you that somehow you are both experiencing this and at the same time observing yourself experiencing it.
Neither the observer nor the experiencer is as yet worried.
You open your eye again.
You’re getting used to the brightness. In fact the observer notes that it’s nothing more than whatever daylight is managing to enter the room through the slats of a Venetian blind on the single window.
The only sound you can hear is a regular beep.
This is reassuring to both of your entities as they know from the hospital soaps it means you’re alive.
Then you hear another sound, a door opening.
You close your eye and wait.
Someone enters the room and approaches the bed. Everything goes quiet again. The suspense is too much. You need to take a look.
A nurse is standing by the bedside, writing on a clipboard. Her gaze moves down to your face and registers the open eye. Hers round in surprise.
It is only then that it occurs to you that they usually come in pairs.
You say, ‘Where’s my other eye?’
At least that’s your intention. To the observer and presumably to the nurse what comes out sounds like a rusty hinge on a long unopened door.
She steps back, takes a mobile out of her pocket, presses a button and says, ‘Tell Dr Jekyll he’s awake.’
Dr Jekyll? That doesn’t sound like good news.
You close your eye again. Until you get a full report on the spare situation, it seems wise not to overtax it.
You hear the door open and then the nurse’s voice as she assures the newcomer that your eye was open and you’d tried to talk. A somewhat superior male voice says, ‘Well, let’s see, shall we?’
A Doubting Thomas, you think. Feeling indignant on the nurse’s behalf you give him a repeat performance. He responds by producing a pencil torch and shining it straight into your precious eye.
Bastard!
Then he asks, ‘Do you know who you are?’
You could have done with notice of this question.
Does it mean he has no idea who you are?
Or is he merely wanting to check on your state of awareness?
You need time to think. Not just about how you should respond tactically, but simply how you should respond.
You are beginning to realize you’re far from certain if you know who you are or not.
You check with your split personality.
The observer declares his best bet is that you’re someone called Wilfred Hadda, that you’ve been in an accident, that leading up to the accident you’d been in some kind of trouble, but no need to worry about that just now as it will probably all come back to you eventually.
The experiencer ignores all this intellectual stuff. You’re a one-eyed man in a hospital bed, he says, and all that matters is finding out just how much of the rest of you is missing.
You make a few more rusty hinge noises and Dr Jekyll demonstrates that the tens of thousands spent on his training have not been altogether misused by saying, ‘Nurse, I think he needs some water.’
He presses a button that raises the top half of the bed up to an angle of forty-five degrees. For a moment the change of viewpoint is vertiginous and you feel like you’re about to tumble off the edge of a cliff.
Then your head clears and the nurse puts a beaker of water to your lips.
‘Careful,’ says Jekyll. ‘Not too much.’
Bastard! He’s probably one of those mean gits who put optics on spirit bottles so they know exactly how much booze they’re giving their dinner guests.
When at last you get enough liquid down your throat to ease your clogged vocal cords, you don’t try to speak straight away. First you need a body check.
You try to waggle fingers and toes and feel pleased to get a reaction. But that means nothing. You’ve read about people still having pain from a limb that was amputated years ago. With a great effort you raise your head to get a one-eyed view of your arms.
First the left. That looks fine. Then the right. Something wrong there. You’re sure you used to have more than two fingers. But a man can get by on two fingers. Missing toes would be more problematical.
You say, ‘Feet.’
Jekyll looks blank but the nurse catches on quickly.
‘He wants to see his feet,’ she says.
Jekyll still looks puzzled. Perhaps he had a hangover when they did feet on his course. But the nurse slowly draws back the sheet and reveals your lower body.
The Boy David it isn’t, but at least everything seems to be there even if your left leg does look like it’s been badly assembled by a sculptor who felt that Giacometti was a bit too profligate with his materials. There’s a tube coming out of your cock and someone’s been shaving your pubic hair. So far as you can see, your scrotum’s still intact.
You try for something a little more complicated than wiggling your toes but an attempt to bend your knees produces nothing more than a slow twitch and you give up.
You say, ‘Mirror.’
Nurse and doctor exchange glances over your body.
They’re both wearing name tags. The nurse is called Jane Duggan.
The doctor claims to be Jacklin, not Jekyll. A misprint, you decide.
Jekyll shrugs as if to say he doesn’t care one way or the other, mirrors are a nurse thing.
Nurse Duggan leaves the room. Jekyll takes your pulse and does a couple of other doctorly things you’re too weak to stop him from doing. Then Jane comes back in carrying a small shaving mirror.
She holds it up before your face.
You look into it and observer and experiencer unite in a memory of what you used to look like.
You never were classically handsome; more an out-of-doors, rough-hewn type.
Rough-hewn falls a long way short now. You look as if you’ve been worked over by a drunken chain-saw operator.
Where your right eye used to be is a hollow you could sink a long putt in.
Out of your left eye something liquid is oozing.
You realize you are starting to cry.
You say, ‘Fuck off.’
And to give Nurse Duggan and Dr Jekyll their due, off they fuck.
ii
It turns out you have been in a coma for nearly nine months.
During the next nine you come to regard that as a blessed state.
There is some good news. You’ve slept through another lousy winter.
Your memories are as fragmented as your body. You’ve little recall of the accident, but someone must have described it in detail for later you know exactly what happened.
It seems you’d been very unlucky.
Normally in the middle of the day Central London traffic proceeds at a crawl. Occasionally, however, there occur sudden pockets of space, stretches of open road extending for as much as a hundred metres. Most drivers respond by standing on the accelerator in their eagerness to reconnect with the back of the crawl.
You’d emerged in the middle of one of these pockets. The bus had lumbered up to close on thirty miles an hour. You were flung through the air diagonally on to the bonnet of an oncoming Range Rover whose superior acceleration had got him up to near sixty. From there you bounced on to a table set on the pavement outside a coffee shop, and from there through the shop’s plate-glass window.
By this time your body was in such a mess that it wasn’t till they got you into an ambulance that someone noticed there was a coffee spoon sticking out of your right eye.
Both your legs were fractured, the left one in several places. You also broke your left arm, your collarbone, your pelvis and most of your ribs. You suffered severe head trauma and fractured your skull. And you’d left half of your right hand somewhere in the coffee shop, but unfortunately no one handed it in to Lost Property.
As for your internal organs, you get the impression the medics crossed their fingers and hoped.
Not that it can seem to have mattered all that much. Until you opened your eye, the smart prognosis was that sooner or later you’d have to be switched off.
At first you have almost as little concept of the passage of time as in your coma. You exist in a no-man’s land between waking and sleeping, and the pain of treatment and the pain of dreams merge indistinguishably. Brief intervals of lucidity are occupied with trying to come to terms with your physical state. You are totally self-centred with your mental faculties so fragmented that information comes in fluorescent flashes, making it impossible to distinguish between memory and nightmare. So you do what non-nerds do when a computer goes on the blink: you switch off and hope it will have put itself right by the time you switch on again.
But though you have no sense of progress, progress there must be for eventually in one of the lucid intervals you find that you’re certain you have a wife and family.
But no one comes visiting. Your room is not bedecked with get-well cards, you receive no bouquets of flowers or bottles of bubbly to mark your return to life. Perhaps the nursing staff are hoarding them, is your last lucid thought before drifting off into no-man’s land once more.
Next time you awake, you have a visitor. Or a vision.
He stands at the end of your bed, a fleshy little man wearing a beach shirt with the kind of pattern you make on the wall after a bad chicken tikka. You think you recognize his sun-reddened face but no name goes with it.
He doesn’t speak, just stands there looking at you.
You close your eye for a second. Or a minute. Or longer.
When you open it again, he’s gone.
But the space he occupied, in reality or in your mind, retains an after-image.
Or rather an after-impression.
Though still unable to separate memory from nightmare, you’ve always had a vague sense of some unpleasantness in the circumstances leading up to your accident. But even if real, you don’t feel that this is anything to worry about. It’s as if a deadline had passed. OK, you regret not being able to meet it, but once it has actually passed, your initial reaction is simply huge relief that you no longer have to worry about it!
But the appearance of Medler destroyed this foolish illusion.
Medler!
There, you remember the name without trying, or perhaps because you didn’t try.
And with the name come other definite memories.
Medler, with his sly insinuating manner.
Medler whose mealy-mouth you punched. Twice.
Medler who raided your house, drove your wife and child into hiding, accused you of being a paedophile.
That at least must be sorted out by now, you reckon. Even the slow creaky mills of the Met must have ground the truth out of that ludicrous allegation after all these months.
Nurse Duggan comes in. You ask her how long since you came out of your coma.
She says, ‘Nearly a fortnight.’
‘A fortnight!’ you echo, looking round at the flowerless, card-less room.
She takes your point instantly and smiles sympathetically. She is, you come to realize, a truly kind woman. And she’s not alone. OK, a couple of the nurses treat you like dog-shit, but most are thoroughly professional, even compassionate. Good old NHS!
Nurse Duggan now tries to soothe your disappointment with an explanation.
‘It’s not policy to make a general announcement until they think it’s time.’
Meaning until they’re sure your resurgence hasn’t just been a fleeting visit before you slip back under for ever. But surely your nearest and dearest, Imogen and Ginny, would have been kept informed of every change in your condition? Why weren’t they here by your bedside?
You take a drink of water, using your left hand. The two fingers remaining on the right come in useful when words fail you in conversation with Dr Jekyll, but you’re a long way from trusting a glass to their tender care.
Your vocal cords seem to be getting back to full flexibility, though your voice now has a sort of permanent hoarseness.
You say, ‘Any phone calls for me? Any messages?’
Nurse Duggan says, ‘I think you need to talk to Mr McLucky. I’ll have a word.’
She leaves the room. Mr McLucky, you assume, is part of the hospital bureaucracy and you settle back for a long wait while he is summoned from his palatial office. But after only a few seconds, the door opens and a tall, lean man in tight jeans and a grey sweat-shirt comes in. About thirty, with a mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth in a long lugubrious face, he doesn’t look like your idea of a hospital administrator.
You say, ‘Mr McLucky?’
He says, ‘Detective Constable McLucky.’
You stare at him. You feel you’ve seen him before, not like Medler, much more briefly…across a crowded room? Later you’ll work out this was the out-of-place drinker in the Black Widow who alerted you to the fact that the police were waiting for you.
You say, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
He says, ‘My job.’
You say, ‘And what is your job, Detective Constable McLucky?’
He says, ‘Making sure you don’t bugger off again, Sir Wilfred.’
You would have laughed if you knew which muscles to use.
You say, ‘You mean you’re sitting outside the door, guarding me? How long have you been there?’
‘Since you decided to wake,’ he says. ‘The nurse said you wanted to talk to me.’
He has a rough Glasgow accent and a manner to go with it.
You say, ‘I wanted to know if there’s been any messages for me. Or any visitors. But I’m not clear why this information should come through you.’
He says, ‘Maybe it’s something to do with you being in police custody, facing serious charges.’
It comes as a shock to hear confirmed what Medler’s visit has made you suspect, that nothing has changed in the time you’ve spent out of things.
You are wrong there, of course. A hell of a lot of things have changed.
You feel mad but you’re not in a position to lose your rag, so you say, ‘Messages?’
He shrugs and says, ‘Sorry, none.’
That’s enough excitement for one day. Or one week. Or whatever period of time it is that elapses before you feel strong enough to make a decision.
You get Nurse Duggan to summon DC McLucky again.
You say, ‘I’d like to make a phone call. Several phone calls.’
He purses his lips doubtfully, an expression his friends must find very irritating. You want to respond with some kind of legalistic threat, but a man not yet able to wipe his own arse is not in a position to be threatening. The best you can manage is, ‘Go ask DI Medler if you must. That will give him time to make sure all his bugs are working.’
He says laconically, ‘Medler? No use asking him. Early retirement back in January. Bad health.’
That confirms what you suspected. You were hallucinating. Funny thing, the subconscious. Can’t have been much of an effort for it to have conjured up Imo in all her naked glory, but instead it opted for that little shit.
You squint up at McLucky, difficult as that is with one eye. He still looks real.
You say, ‘Please,’ resenting sounding so childish. But it does the trick.
McLucky leaves the room. You hear his voice distantly. You presume he is ringing for instructions.
Then a silence so long that you slip back into no-man’s land. As you come out of it again, you wouldn’t be surprised to find you’d imagined DC McLucky too.
But there he is, sitting at the bedside. Has he been there for a minute or for an hour? Seeing your eye open, he picks up a phone from the floor and places it on the bed.
‘Can you manage?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ you say. It might be a lie.
He goes out of the room.
You pick up the phone with difficulty, then realize you can’t recall a single number. Except, thank God, Directory Enquiries. Asking for your own home number seems a sad admission of failure, so you say, ‘Estover, Mast and Turbery. Solicitors in Holborn.’
They get the number and put you through. You give your name and ask for Toby. After a delay a woman’s voice says, ‘Hello, Sir Wilfred. It’s Leila. How can I help you?’
Leila. The name conjures up a picture of a big blonde girl with a lovely bum. Rumour has it that when Toby enters his office in the morning, his mail and Leila are both lying open on his desk. You’ve always got on well with Leila.
‘Hi, Leila,’ you say. ‘Could you put me through to Toby.’
‘I’m sorry, Sir Wilfred, but I can’t do that,’ she says.
‘Why not, for God’s sake? Isn’t he there?’ you say.
‘I mean I’ve consulted Mr Estover and he does not think it would be appropriate to talk with you,’ she says, sounding very formal, as if she’s quoting verbatim.
‘Not appropriate?’ You can’t raise a bellow yet, but you manage a menacing croak. ‘So when did sodding lawyers start thinking it wasn’t appropriate to talk to their clients?’
She says, still formal, ‘I’m sorry, Sir Wilfred, I assumed it had been made clear to you that you are no longer Mr Estover’s client.’
Then her voice changes and she reverts to her usual chatty tone, this time tinged with a certain worrying sympathy.
‘In the circumstances, it wouldn’t really be appropriate, you must see that.’
You get very close to a bellow now.
‘What circumstances, for fuck’s sake?’
‘Oh hell. Look, I’m sorry,’ she says, now sounding really concerned. ‘I just assumed you’d know. It shouldn’t be me who’s telling you this, but the thing is, Toby’s acting for your wife in the divorce.’
Elf (#ulink_3f0bd1e2-46ce-5eb1-b5be-9bbfcffb38de)
i
Now this really was interesting, thought Alva Ozigbo.
He’d moved from the first person past to the second person present.
Did this bring him closer or move him further away?
Closer in a sense. The first instalment had been a pretty straightforward piece of storytelling. The detail he recalled, the emotional colouring he injected, all suggested this was a version of that distant morning frequently rehearsed in his mind. In fact, rehearsed was the mot juste. Like a dedicated actor, he had immersed himself so deeply in his role of innocent victim that he was actually living the part.
She’d done some serious research since she took over Hadda’s case. In fact, when she looked at her records, she was surprised to see just how much research she’d done. She’d turned her eye inwards to seek out the reason for this special interest. Like her analysis of Hadda, that too was still work in progress.
She recalled Simon Homewood’s advice when she had started here on that dark January day in 2015. It had surprised her.
‘Many of them will tell you they are innocent. Believe them. Carry on believing them as you study their cases. Examine all the evidence against them with an open, even a sceptical mind. You understand what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, but I don’t understand why you’re saying it,’ she’d said.
He smiled and said, ‘Because that’s what I do with every prisoner who comes into my care at Parkleigh. Until I’m absolutely convinced of their guilt, I cannot help them. I want it to be the same for you.’
‘And how often have you not been convinced?’ she’d asked boldly.
‘Twice,’ he said. ‘One was freed on appeal. The other killed himself before anything could be done. I am determined that will never happen again.’
So she’d gone over the evidence against Hadda in the paedophile case with a fine-tooth comb. And she’d persuaded Giles Nevinson of the prosecutor’s office to do the same. ‘Tight as a duck’s arse,’ he’d declared cheerfully. ‘And that’s water-tight. Why so interested in this fellow?’
‘Because he’s…interesting,’ was all she could reply. ‘Psychologically, I mean.’
Why did she need to add that? How else could she be interested in a man like this, a convicted sexual predator and fraudster with a penchant for violence? It was on record that in his early days at Parkleigh he’d come close enough to ‘normal’ prisoners for them to attempt physical assault. His crippling leg injury limited his speed of movement, but he retained tremendous upper body strength and he had hospitalized one assailant. Transfer to the Special Wing had put him out of reach of physical attack, and verbal abuse he treated with the same massive indifference as he displayed to all other attempts to make contact with him. In the end a kind of contract was established with the prison management. He made no trouble, he got no trouble.
He also got no treatment. While he wasn’t one of those prisoners who staged roof-top demonstrations to protest their innocence or had outside support groups mounting appeals, he never took the smallest step towards acknowledging his guilt. Perhaps it was this sheer intractability that caught her attention.
With the Director’s permission, she had visited Hadda’s cell at a time he and all the other prisoners were in the dining hall. Even by prison standards it was bare. A reasonable amount of personalization was allowed, but all that Hadda seemed to have done to mark his occupancy was to Blu-Tack to the wall a copy of a painting that looked as if it had been torn out of a colour supplement. It showed a tall upright figure, his right hand resting on a lumberjack’s axe, standing under a turbulent sky, looking out over a wide landscape of mountains and lakes. Alva studied it for several minutes.
‘Like paintings, do you, miss?’ enquired Chief Officer Proctor, who’d escorted her into the cell.
‘I like what they tell me about the people who like them,’ said Alva. ‘And of course the people who paint them.’
If there were a signature on the painting, the reproduction wasn’t good enough to show it. She made a note to check and turned her attention to the rest of the cell. Only its emptiness said anything about the personality of its inmate. It was as if Hadda had resolved to leave no trace of his passing. She did find one book, a dog-eared paperback copy of The Count of Monte-Cristo. Seeing her looking at it, Proctor said sardonically, ‘It’s all right, miss. We check regularly under the bed for tunnels.’
Later in the prison library she asked for a record of Hadda’s borrowings and found there were none. Years of imprisonment with little but his own thoughts for company. He was either a man of great inner resources or of no inner life whatsoever.
Giles Nevinson during his trawl through the case files on her behalf had come up with an inventory of all the material removed from Hadda’s house at the time of the initial raid. It was the books and DVDs confiscated that she was interested in. There was nothing here that the prosecution had been able to use to support their case, but they suggested that, pre-accident, Hadda’s taste had been for the kind of story in which a tough, hard-bitten protagonist fought his way through to some kind of rough justice despite the fiendish plots and furious onslaughts of powerful enemies.
This could account for his choosing to present the police raid and its sequel in the form of the opening chapters of a thriller with himself as the much put-upon hero.
But in Alva’s estimate the form disguised its true function.
For Hadda this wasn’t fiction, it was revelation, it was Holy Writ! If ever any doubts about the rightness of his cause crept into his consciousness, all he had to do was refer back to this ur-text and all became simple and straightforward again.
But he hadn’t been able to keep it up when it came to writing about his emergence from the coma. Here the tight narrative control was gone. Even after the passage of so many years, that sense of confusion on waking into a new and alien landscape remained with him. His account of it was immediate, not historical. Hindsight usually allows us to order experience, but here it was still possible to feel him straining to make sense of blurred images, broken lines, shifting foci.
There was some shape. Each of the two sections climaxed at a moment of violent shock. The first, his recognition of physical change; the second, his discovery of his wife’s defection. Nowhere in his account of his waking confusion, nor in the aftermath of these systemic shocks, was there the slightest indication that he was moving out of denial towards recognition.
But these were early days. She was pretty certain she now had every scrap of available information about Wolf Hadda, but what did it add up to? Very little. The significant narrative of the mental and emotional journey that had brought him to Parkleigh could only come from within.
Her hope had to be that, by coaxing him to provide it, she might be able to lead him to a moment of self-knowledge when, like a mountain walker confronted by a Brocken Spectre, he would draw back in horror from the monstrous apparition before him, then recognize it as a projection of himself.
She liked that image, and it was particularly apt in Hadda’s case. From her study of his background she knew he’d grown up in the Lake District where his father had been head forester on the estate of his father-in-law, Sir Leon Ulphingstone. Lots of fascinating possibilities there. Perhaps the almost idealized figure in the painting on his cell wall was saying something about his relationship with his father. Or perhaps it was there as a reminder to himself of what he had been and what he now was.
With the help of an artistic friend, she’d identified the artist as the American, Winslow Homer. The painting was called The Woodcutter. She’d tracked down an image on her computer. It was accompanied by an old catalogue blurb.
In Winslow Homer’s painting, the Woodcutter stands looking out on a panorama of mountains and lakes and virgin forest. He is tall and muscular, brimful of youthful confidence that he can see no peak too high to climb, no river too wide to cross, no tree too tall to fell. This land is his to shape, and shape it he will, or die in the attempt.
She could see what the writer meant. And of course Woodcutter had been the name of Hadda’s business organization. Significant?
Everything is significant, her tutor used to reiterate. You cannot know too much.
I’m certainly still a long way from knowing too much about you, Wolf Hadda, she thought as she watched him limp slowly into the interview room. She’d wondered in George Proctor’s presence if it might not be possible to equip him with a walking stick. The Chief Officer had laughed and said, ‘Yeah, and I’ll put in a requisition for a supply of shillelaghs and assegais while I’m at it!’
He seemed even slower than usual today. As he settled on to his chair, she looked for signs that he was impatient to discuss the second episode. That would have been indicative; she wasn’t sure of what. But there were no signs, which was also indicative, though again she wasn’t sure what of.
His face was expressionless, the dark glasses blanking out his good eye. For all she knew, it could be closed and he could be asleep.
She said loudly, ‘How do you feel now about your disfigurement?’
If she’d thought to startle him by her sudden bluntness, she was disappointed.
He said reflectively, ‘Now let me see. Do you mean the Long John Silver limp, or the Cyclopean stare, or the fact that I’ll never play the violin again?’
She nodded and said, ‘Thank you,’ and made a note on her pad.
‘What for? I didn’t answer your question.’
‘I think you did. By hyperbole in respect of your leg and your eye. Silver was a murderous cutthroat who’d lost his entire leg, and the Cyclops were vile cannibalistic monsters. As for your hand, nothing in your file suggests you ever could play the violin, so that was a dismissive joke.’
‘Indicating?’
‘That you’re really pissed off by being lame and one-eyed, but you’ve managed to adapt to the finger loss.’
‘Maybe that’s because I don’t get the chance to play much golf in this place. Mind you, I’ll be able to cap Sammy Davis Junior’s answer when asked what his handicap was.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not into golf.’
‘He said, “I’m a black, one-eyed Jew.” I’d be able to say, I’m a one-eyed, one-handed, lame, paedophiliac fraudster.’
‘And how much of that would be true?’
He frowned and said, ‘You don’t give up, do you? Eighty per cent at most. The physical stuff is undeniable. As for the fraud, I walked some lines that seemed to get re-drawn after the big crash and I’m willing to accept that maybe I ended up on the wrong side of the new line. But I’m not in word or thought or deed a paedophile.’
She decided to let it alone. Accepting he might have been guilty of fraud had to be some kind of advance, though from her reading of the trial transcripts, the evidence against him here had looked far from conclusive. Perhaps his lawyer had got it right when he tried to argue that the huge publicity surrounding his conviction on the paedophilia charges made it impossible for him to get a fair hearing at the fraud trial. The judge had slapped him down, saying that in his court he would be the arbiter of fairness. But by all accounts Hadda had cut such an unattractive and non-responsive figure in the dock, if they’d accused him of membership of al-Qaeda, too, he’d probably have been convicted.
She knew how the jury felt. He had made no effort to project a positive image of himself. Even after he started talking to her, all she got was a sense of massive indifference. This in itself did not bother her. It was a psychiatrist’s job to inspire trust, not affection. But it did puzzle her if only because in jail her clients usually fell into two categories – those who resented and feared her, and those who saw her as a potential ally in their campaigns for parole.
Hadda was different. Though he had by now served enough time to be eligible for parole he had made no application nor shown the slightest interest in doing so.
Not of course that there was much point. A conviction like his made it very hard to persuade the parole board to release you back into the community, particularly when your application was unsupported by any admission of guilt or acceptance of treatment.
But at least he had started writing these narratives. That had to be progress.
And there was something about him today, something only detectable once he’d started talking. An undercurrent of restlessness; or, if that was too strong, at least a sense of strain in his self-control.
She said, ‘Wilfred…Wilf…’
Both versions of his name felt awkward on her lips, smacking of the enforced familiarity of the hospital ward or the nursing home. His expression suggested he was enjoying her problem.
She said, ‘…Wolf.’
He nodded as if she’d done well and said, ‘Yes, Elf?’
Her sobriquet came off his tongue easily, almost eagerly, as though she were an old friend whose words he was anxious to hear.
She said, ‘How do you feel about Imogen now?’
He frowned as if this wasn’t the question he’d been looking for.
‘About the fact that she divorced me? Or the fact that she subsequently married my former solicitor and friend, Toby Estover? Wonder how that worked out?’
He spoke casually, almost mockingly. A front, she guessed. And she also guessed he might have a pretty good idea how it had worked out. Modern prisons had come a long way from the Bastille and the Chateau d’If, where a man could linger, forgotten and forgetting, oblivious to the march of history outside. She’d checked on the happy pair, telling herself she had a professional interest. Estover was now, if not a household name, at least a name recognized in many households. He was so sought after he could pick and choose his clients, and the fact that he seemed to pick those involved in cases that attracted maximum publicity could hardly be held against him.
As for the lovely Imogen, she was certainly as lovely as ever. Alva had seen a recent photo of her in the Cumbrian churchyard where her daughter’s ashes were being placed in the family tomb. Not an event that drew the world’s press, but a local reporter had been there and taken a snap on his mobile. By chance he’d got a combination of light, angle, and background that lent the picture a kind of dark, brooding Brontë-esque quality, and the Observer had printed it for its atmospheric impact rather than its news value.
She said, ‘I just wondered what you feel when I mention her name?’
‘Hate,’ he said.
This took her aback.
He said, ‘You look surprised. That I should feel it, or that I should say it?’
‘Both. It’s such an absolute concept…’
‘It’s not a bloody concept!’ he interrupted. ‘It has nothing to do with intellectual organization. You asked what I felt. What else should I reply? Contempt? Revulsion? Anger? Dismay? A bit of all of those, I suppose. But hate does it, I think. Hate folds them all neatly into a single package.’
‘But what has she done to deserve this?’ she asked.
‘She has believed the lies they told about me,’ he said. ‘And because she believed them, my lovely daughter is dead.’
All Alva’s previous attempts to get him to talk about his daughter had been met with his mountainous blankness, but now for a moment she saw the agony that seethed beneath the rocky surface.
She said in her most neutral tone, ‘You blame her for Ginny’s death?’
He was back in control but within his apparent calm she sensed a tension like that intense stillness of air when an electric storm is close to breaking.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But not so much as I blame her bitch of a mother.’
She noted that, despite the intensity of the negative feelings he’d expressed about Imogen, he was reluctant to lay full responsibility for the girl’s death upon her. Whatever bonds there had been between him and his wife must have been unusually strong for this ambiguity of feeling to have survived.
‘You hold Lady Kira responsible?’
‘Oh yes. Everything tracks back to her. She never wanted me to have her daughter. And now she has helped deprive me of mine.’
‘And she did this, how? By helping with the arrangements for her to finish her education in France, out of reach of our prurient press?’
She deliberately let a trace of doubt seep into her voice, hoping to provoke further revelation of what was going on inside his mind, but all she succeeded in doing was bring down the defences even further.
He said indifferently, ‘If you’d ever met her, you’d understand.’
This for the moment was a dead end. Leave the mother-in-law, get back to the wife, she told herself.
She said, ‘If, as you claim, you are innocent, then someone must have framed you. Do you have any idea who?’
The question seemed to amuse him.
‘I have a short list of possibilities, yes.’
‘Is Imogen on it?’
The question seemed to surprise him. Or perhaps he simply didn’t like it. She really must find a way to get into this key relationship.
‘What does it matter?’ he demanded. ‘Which is worse? That she went along with a plot to frame me? Or that she actually believed I was guilty as charged?’
‘Be fair,’ said Alva. ‘The evidence was overwhelming; the jury took twenty minutes to find you guilty…’
‘Twelve strangers!’ he interrupted. ‘Twelve citizens picked off the street! In this world we’re unfortunate enough to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with a squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I’m sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.’
Wow! she thought as she studied him closely. That rolled off your tongue so easily, it’s clearly been picking up momentum in your mind for years!
His voice was still controlled, but his single eye sparkled with passion. What was it he said he felt about his ex-wife’s behaviour?
Contempt.
Revulsion.
Anger.
Dismay.
These were all necessary elements of that condition of self-awareness she was trying to draw him to. Perhaps by transferring these emotions away from himself to his ex-wife, he was showing her he was closer than she’d thought. His strained parallel with Mandela was also significant. A man of dignity and probity, imprisoned by a warped regime, and finally released and vindicated after long years to become a symbol of peace and reconciliation. It was as if Hadda’s denial could only be sustained by going to the furthermost extreme in search of supportive self-images.
Hopefully, if he continued far enough in that direction, he would eventually come upon himself unawares. And then it would be up to her to direct him away from self-hatred into more positively remedial channels.
Meanwhile it would be good if she could nudge him into a memory of Imogen in her fairy-tale princess phase. It was possible that by reliving that period when she had become the unique and obsessive object of his adoration, he might come to wonder whether it was in fact his idol that had fallen or himself.
Even if that admittedly ideal outcome didn’t materialize, this was the part of his life she had least information about, for there were few living sources but himself.
Now the passion had faded and he was looking at her assessingly.
He’s got something else for me, she thought. She knew how habit-forming this business of writing about your past could be. In many clients, it went beyond habit into compulsion. So of course since their last meeting he’d carried on writing.
But as what he wrote came closer to the most intimate details of his being, he naturally became less and less sure of sharing it with her.
So, show no eagerness. Do not press.
She said, ‘Wolf, time’s nearly up. I was wondering, is there anything I can get for you? Books, journals, that sort of thing? I should have asked before. Or something more personal. Something in the food line? Or proper linen handkerchiefs, silk socks, perhaps?’
He shook his head as if impatient at her change of subject, or perhaps at the silly notion that there could be something he might enjoy receiving, and said, ‘We were talking about Imo. I got to thinking about her after I wrote that last piece.’
She said, ‘Yes?’
He said, ‘That stuff about feeling hate, I mean it. Or part of me means it. But there’s also a part of me that hates me for feeling it. Does that make sense?’
She nodded and said gravely, ‘What wouldn’t make sense is for you not to feel it.’
That was the right answer. He pulled another exercise book out of his blouson.
‘You might like to see this,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the book. She opened it and glanced at the first page.
And she knew at once she’d got what she wanted.
Wolf (#ulink_f1d50f0d-8404-5c91-add3-6161e8be380b)
i
I was a wild boy, in just about every sense.
My mam, God bless her, died when I was only six. Brain fever, they called it locally. Probably some form of meningitis, spotted too late.
We had my dad’s Aunt Carrie living with us. Or rather we were living with her in her farmhouse, Birkstane. Up there in Cumbria they still expect the young to take care of the old. Not that Carrie can have been all that old when we moved in with her. Birkstane was all that remained, plus a couple of small fields, of her husband’s farm. Widowed in her mid forties, already in her early fifties she was getting a bit forgetful. Also she had arthritis which gave her mobility problems. Normally up there supportive neighbours would have kept her going quite happily till her dotage, but she was a bit isolated, several miles from Mireton, the nearest village, right on the edge of the Ulphingstone estate.
Dad was her only living relative so when word reached him that there was a social worker snooping around, he knew something had to be done. I was still in nappies at the time, so I can only speculate, but I suspect it suited him to move into Birkstane. As head forester to Sir Leon, Dad had a tied cottage on the estate but as I often heard him say later, only a fool lives in a house another fool can throw him out of any time he likes. Not that he thought Sir Leon was a fool. In fact they got on pretty well, and far from dividing them, my liaison with Leon’s daughter only brought them closer together.
They both thought it was a lousy idea.
But that was a long way in the future.
Everything seems to have worked fine to start with. Birkstane was almost as handy for Dad’s work as the tied cottage had been. Mam got to work on the old farmhouse and dragged it back from the edge of dereliction, while Carrie, in familiar surroundings with someone constantly present to keep an eye on her, got a new lease of life.
All this I picked up later. Like I say, I was so young that my memory of those early years in Birkstane is generally non-specific, but I know how blissfully happy I must have been, for I recall all too clearly how I felt when they told me Mam was dead. No, not when they told me; I mean when it finally got through to me that being dead meant gone for good, meant I would never ever see her again.
I was in my second year at school. It had taken a whole year for me to come to terms with the daily separation from Mam; this new and permanent separation was a loss beyond all reach of consolation. I was far too young and far too immersed in my own pain to observe what this blow did to my father, but as I have no recollection of him finding the strength to try and comfort me, I’d guess he too was rendered completely helpless by the loss. I suppose if I’d drawn attention to myself, someone might have tried to do something about me, but I think I must have moved in a bubble of grief through which everyone could see and hear me behaving apparently normally – in fact I suspect that many people observed what a blessing it was that I was clearly too young to take it all in and the best thing was for everyone to treat me as if nothing important had happened.
What they didn’t realize was that within that bubble I too was as good as dead, and as I slowly came back to life, I think I unconsciously resolved that never again would I be in a position where the loss of any single individual could cause me such pain.
Because there was still a woman in the house, no thought was given to the need to make any special arrangements for me. And because of Carrie’s apparent return to her old self during the five years of having us to live with her, nobody doubted that she was a fit guardian and housekeeper.
The reality was very different. Her mobility problems made it hard for her to keep up with a wild young boy, and without my mam’s corrective presence, the old memory lapses (the result, it was later diagnosed, of early-onset Alzheimer’s) now became much more significant. As for Fred, my dad, he went out to work and rarely came home till it was time for his tea. This is the generic term we gave to the early evening meal. As Carrie got more forgetful, the combinations of food offered to us grew increasingly eccentric, but neither of us took much notice – me because I was too young to make comparisons, Dad because he prefaced the meal with a couple of bottles of strong ale and washed it down with another two before driving down to the Black Dog in Mireton. He successfully avoided the attention of the local constabulary by driving his old Defender along the forest tracks, which he knew like the back of his hand, and leaving it on the edge of the estate and walking the last quarter mile to the Dog.
Sorry, I’ve gone on a lot more than I intended about all this early trauma stuff and I know all you really wanted was an account of how me and Imogen got together. But I started off trying to explain the kind of youngster I was, and to understand that, you need to know the rest.
To cut a long story short, because of my instinctive reluctance to get close to anybody and because of the almost total lack of any meaningful supervision at home, I ran wild. Literally. Every free moment I had I spent roaming the countryside. Some streak of natural cunning made me realize the dangers of too much truancy, and I trod a line between being an internal nuisance and an external problem. But I usually turned up late and when I could I bunked off early. As I said, Aunt Carrie was ill-equipped physically or mentally to cope with me. Indeed, as I grew older and wiser, if that’s the right word, a combination of self-interest and I hope fondness for the old lady made me cover up for her as best I could.
Of course my behaviour did not go unremarked, but unlike in the towns where suspicion of child neglect prompts people either to look the other way or at best to ring Social Services anonymously, in the countryside they deal with such problems in-house, so to speak. Looking back, I see that I was probably watched over much more carefully than I understood then. The postman was the eyes and ears of the district, the vicar dropped by a couple of times a week, and there was a steady stream of local ladies who found a reason to call on Carrie, and help with a bit of tidying up. Also for some reason I never really understood, everyone, teachers and locals alike, seemed ready to show a remarkable degree of tolerance towards my aberrant behaviour.
Maybe I’d have turned out better if someone had been ready to skelp my ear a bit more frequently!
Sir Leon was another one who missed the chance to sort me out. I remember when I was eight or nine I got caught by his game-keeper. I was never a serious poacher, though if the odd trout or rabbit came my way, I regarded it as the peasant’s tithe. The day I got caught peering into Sir Leon’s newly stocked tarn, it was the fact that I had no criminal intent that made me vulnerable. I was stretched out on the bank, raptly viewing the tiny fry at their play, when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and I was hauled upright by Sir Leon’s head keeper.
When he realized who he’d got, he threw me into his pick-up and drove me through the forest to where my father was supervising a gang of loggers. Sir Leon was there too, and after the situation had been explained, he stared down at me and said, ‘This your brat then, Fred? What’s your name, boy?’
‘Wilf,’ I blurted.
‘Wilf?’
Then he squatted down beside me, ran his fingers through my hair, opened my mouth and peered in like he was checking out a horse, then winked at me and said, ‘Sure you don’t mean Wolf? Looks to me like you’ve been suckled by wolves. That might explain things! Suckled by wolves, and here’s me thinking they were all dead.’
He stood up, laughing at his own joke, and everyone else laughed, except me and Dad.
Thereafter every time Sir Leon saw me he called me Wolf and gradually the name stuck. I rather like the notion of being suckled by wolves, maybe because Sir Leon with his long nose and great mane of grey-brown hair looked like he might have a bit of wolf in him too. His name, Ulphingstone, certainly did.
Dad, however, hadn’t cared to be shown up in front of his workers and his boss. That night he stayed home and paid me more attention than I think he had since Mam died, and he didn’t much like what he saw. When I responded surlily to his remonstrations, he skelped me round the left ear, and when I responded angrily to that, he skelped me round the right.
After that I was obliged to mend my ways for a while, but as well as developing a taste for the wild life, I was already well grounded in the art of deception, and I continued on my independent way pretty much as before, only taking a little more care.
I suppose I was a bit of a loner, but that was through choice. At junior school I never had any problem getting on with the other boys; in fact most of them seemed keen to be friends with me, but I always felt myself apart from them. Maybe it was because I didn’t give a toss about who was going to win the Premier League, maybe it was something deeper than that. A lot of the girls were keen to be friendly too, but I reckoned they were a waste of space. At least with the boys you could run around and jump on top of each other and have a bit of a wrestle. It was a long time before I realized you could do that with girls too.
Then came secondary school. There was the usual bullying, but I’ve always had a short fuse. Neither size nor number made any difference – if you messed with me, I lived up to my name and reacted like a wild beast, wading in with fists, feet, teeth, and head till someone lay bleeding on the schoolyard floor. Eventually the physical bullying stopped, but there were still scores to settle. One day, aged about twelve, I found someone had broken into my locker and sprayed car paint all over the stuff I kept there. I had a good idea who it was. Next morning I smuggled in the cut-down lumber axe my dad was teaching me to use and I demolished my chief suspect’s locker and everything in it. All the kids thought I’d be expelled or at least excluded for that, but the Head just settled for giving me a long lecture and getting Dad to pay for the damage.
I didn’t get a lecture from Fred, but an ear-ringing slap which he made clear wasn’t for damaging the other boy’s gear but for ruining a perfectly good axe!
After that, helped by the fact that I got bigger and stronger every month, I was left strictly alone by the would-be bullies. I wasn’t thick, I did enough work to keep my head above water, and for some reason the teachers cut me a lot of slack. I never sucked up to any of them but most of them seemed to like me and I suspect I got away with stuff another kid might have been pulled up for. I never made any particular friends because the kind of thing I liked to do away from school, I liked to do alone. But I was always one of the first to get picked when my class was split up for schoolyard games.
The only significant contacts I made was age thirteen when I had my accident. You must have heard about my accident, Elf, the one that left me with the scars on my back that the bastards at my trial tried to claim established I was in those filthy videos. It was a real accident, not carelessness or anything on my part. A boulder that had been firmly anchored for a couple of thousand years decided to give way the same moment I put my weight on it. I fell off on to a sheet of ice and went bouncing and slithering down the fellside for a couple of hundred feet, and when the mountain rescue team reached me, they reckoned I was a goner. Didn’t I mention this in one of my other scribblings? I think I did, so you’ll know that fortunately there was no permanent damage and a few months later I was back on the fells with nothing worse than a heavily scarred back.
But what the experience did do was let me see close-up what a great bunch of guys the mountain rescue team was. They were really good to me. I was too young to join officially, but none of them objected when I started hanging out with them, and a couple of them really took me under their wing and taught me all about proper climbing.
Mind you, I did sometimes have a quiet laugh when they roped me up to do some relatively easy ascent that I’d been scampering up like a monkey all by myself for years, but I was learning sense and kept my gob shut.
Now at last we’re getting to Imogen.
I was fifteen when I first saw her, she was – is – a year younger.
I knew Sir Leon had a daughter and I daresay I’d glimpsed her before, but this was the first time I really noticed her.
Like I said, after that first encounter with Sir Leon, whenever our paths crossed he greeted me as Wolf and always asked very seriously how the rest of the pack was getting on. I’d grunt some response, the way boys do. Once when Dad told me to speak proper, Sir Leon said, ‘No need for that, Fred. The boy’s talking wolf and I understand him perfectly,’ then he grunted something back at me, and smiled so broadly I had to smile back as if I’d understood him. After that he always greeted me with a grunt and a grin.
There was of course no socialization between us peasants and the castle, not even in the old feudal sense: no Christmas parties for the estate staff, no village fêtes in the castle grounds, nothing like that. Sir Leon was a good and fair employer, but his wife, Lady Kira, my dear ma-in-law, called the shots at home.
Scion of a White Russian émigré family, Kira was more tsarist than her ancestors in her social attitudes. She believed servants were serfs, and anything that encouraged familiarity diminished efficiency. For her the term servant covered everyone in the locality. In her eyes we all belonged to the same sub-class, related by frequently incestuous intermarriage, and united in a determination to cheat, rob and, if the opportunity rose, rape our superiors.
I don’t think anyone actually doffed their cap and tugged their forelock as she passed, but she made you feel you ought to.
So when Sir Leon suggested to my dad I might like to come up to the castle one summer day to ‘play with the young ‘uns’ as he put it, we were both flabbergasted.
It turned out they had some house guests who between them had five daughters and one son, a boy of my own age, and Sir Leon felt he needed some male company to prevent his spirit being crushed by the ‘monstrous regiment’ (Sir Leon’s phrase again).
I didn’t want to go, but Dad dug his heels in and said that it was time I learnt some manners and Sir Leon had always been good to me and if for once I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d make bloody sure I didn’t do what I wanted for the rest of the summer holidays and lots of stuff like that, so one bright sunny afternoon I clambered over the boundary wall behind Birkstane and walked through the forest to the castle.
As castles go, it’s not much to write home about, no battlements or towers, not even a moat. It had been a proper castle once, way back in the Middle Ages, I think, but somewhere along the line it got bashed about a bit, whether by cannon balls or just general neglect and decay I don’t know, and when the family started rebuilding, they downsized and what they ended up with was a big house.
But that’s adult me talking. As I emerged from the trees that day, the building loomed ahead as formidable and as huge as Windsor!
Everyone was scattered around the lawn in front of the house. With each step I took, it became more apparent that the Sundaybest outfit that Dad had forced me to wear was entirely the wrong choice. Shorts, jeans, T-shirts abounded, not a hot tweed suit in sight. I almost turned and ran away, but Sir Leon had spotted me and advanced to meet me.
‘Uggh grrr,’ he said in his pretended wolf-speak. ‘Wolf, my boy, so glad you could make it. You look like you could do with a nice cold lemonade. And why don’t you take your jacket and tie off – bit too hot for them on a day like this.’
Thus he managed to get me looking slightly less ridiculous by the time he introduced me to the ‘kids’.
The girls, ranging from eleven to fifteen, more or less ignored me. The boy, stretched out on the grass apparently asleep, rolled over as Sir Leon prodded him with his foot, raised himself on one elbow, and smiled at me.
‘Johnny,’ said Leon, ‘this is Wolf Hadda. Wolf, this is Johnny Nutbrown. Johnny, why don’t you get Wolf a glass of lemonade?’
Then he left us.
Johnny said, ‘Is your name really Wolf?’
‘No. Wilf,’ I said. ‘Sir Leon calls me Wolf.’
‘Then that’s what I’ll call you, if that’s all right,’ he said with a smile.
Then he went and got me a lemonade.
I got no real impression of Johnny from that first encounter. The way he looked, and moved, and talked, he might have been a creature from another planet. As for him, I think even then he was as unperturbed by everything, present, past or future, as I was to find him in later life. He took the arrival of this inarticulate peasant in his stride. I think he was totally unaware that I’d been brought along to keep him company. I can’t believe that being the sole boy among all those girls had troubled him for a moment. That was Sir Leon imagining how he might have felt in the same circumstances.
A tall woman, slim and athletic with a lovely figure and a face whose features were almost too perfect to be beautiful came and looked at me for a second or two with ice-cold eyes, then moved away. That was Lady Kira. The ice-cold look and the accompanying silence set the pattern for most of our future encounters.
I’ve little recollection of any of the other adults. As for the girls, they were just a blur of bright colours and shrill noises. Except for Imogen. Not that I knew it was Sir Leon’s daughter to start with. She was just part of the blur until they started dancing.
Most of the adults had moved off somewhere. Johnny, after two or three attempts at conversation, had given up on me and gone back to sleep. The girls had got hold of a radio or it might have been a portable cassette player, I don’t know. Anyway it was beating out the pop songs of the time and they started dancing. Disco dancing, I suppose it was – it could have been classical ballet for all it meant to me – the music scene, as they term it, was an area of teenage life that entirely passed me by.
But presently as they went through their weird gyrations, one figure began to stand out from the half-dozen, not because she was particularly shapely or anything – in fact she was the skinniest of the lot – but because while the others were very aware of this as a competitive group activity, she was totally absorbed in the music. You got the feeling she would have been doing this if she’d been completely alone in the middle of a desert.
The difference eventually made itself felt even among her fellow dancers, and one by one they slowed down and stopped, till only this single figure still moved, rhythmically, sinuously, as though in perfect harmony not only with the music but with the grass beneath her feet and the blue sky above, and the gently shimmering trees of the distant woodland that formed the backdrop from my viewpoint. Unlike the others, she was wearing a white summer dress of some flimsy material that floated around her as she danced, and her long golden hair wreathed about her head like a halo of sunbeams.
I was entranced, in the strictest sense of the word; drawn into her trance; totally absorbed. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it meant something hugely significant to me. I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted to sit here and watch this small and still totally anonymous figure dancing forever.
Then Johnny who, unseen by me, had woken and sat up, said, ‘Oh God, there goes Imo again. Turn on the music and it sets her off like a monkey on a stick!’
His tone was totally non-malicious, but that didn’t save him.
I punched him on the nose. I didn’t even think about it. I just punched him.
Blood fountained out; one of the remaining adults – maybe it was Johnny’s mother – had been looking our way, and she screamed. Johnny sat there, stock-still, staring down at his cupped hand as it filled with blood.
I just wanted to be as far away from all this as I could get.
Again without thought, I found myself on my feet and heading as fast as I could run towards the welcome shelter of the distant woodland.
My shortest line took me past Imogen. She had stopped dancing and her eyes tracked me towards her and past her and I imagined I could feel them on me still as I covered the couple of hundred yards or so to the sanctuary of the trees.
That is my first memory of Imogen. I think even then, uncouth and untutored though I was, I knew I was hers and she was mine forever.
Just shows how wrong you can be, eh, Elf?
ii
I’ve just read over what I’ve written.
It strikes me this is just the kind of stuff you want, Elf. Childhood trauma, all that crap.
Except maybe I haven’t made it clear: I enjoyed my childhood. It was a magical time. Do you read poetry? I don’t. Rhyme or reason, isn’t that what they say? Well, I’m a reason man. At school I learnt some stuff by rote to keep the teachers happy but I also learnt the trick of instant deletion the minute I’d spouted it. The only bit that’s stuck doesn’t come from my schooldays but from my daughter, Ginny’s.
It was some time in that last summer, ‘08 I mean, it was raining most of the time I recall, perhaps that’s why Ginny got stuck into her holiday assignments early.
At her posh school, they reckoned poetry was important, and one of the things she had to do was write a paraphrase of some lines of Wordsworth. She assumed because I was a Cumbrian lad, I’d know all about him. A father doesn’t like to disappoint his daughter, so I glanced at the passage. A lot of the language was daft and he went all round the houses to say something, but to my amazement I found myself thinking, this bugger’s writing about me!
He was talking about himself as a kid, the things he got up to, climbing steep cliffs, moonlight poaching, going out on the lake, but the lines that stuck were the ones that summed it all up for him.
Fair seed-time had my soul and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.
That was me. I don’t mean fear of being clouted or abused, anything like that. I mean the kind of fear you feel when you’re hanging over a hundred-foot drop by your fingernails or when the night’s so black you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you hear something snuffling in the dark, the fear that makes your sense of being alive so much sharper, that lets you feel the lifeblood pounding through your heart, that makes you want to dance and shout when you beat it and survive!
Do you know what I’m talking about, Elf? Or are you stuck in all that Freudian clart, where everything’s to do with sex, even if you’re dealing with kids before they know what sex is all about?
Me, I was never much interested in sex, not even after my balls dropped. Maybe I was leading such a physical life, I was just too knackered. Of course my cock stood up from time to time and I’d give it a pull and I enjoyed the spasm of pleasure that eventually ensued. But I didn’t have much time for the dirty jokes and mucky books and boasting about what they’d done with girls that most of my schoolmates went in for.
Not that I didn’t have the chance to learn on the job, so to speak. Despite me ignoring them as much as I could, most of the girls seemed more than willing to be friendly, but I couldn’t see any point in wasting time with them that I could have spent scrambling up a wet rock face!
So what you’d likely call significant sexual experience didn’t come my way until…well, let me tell you about it.
Or rather, let me tell myself. I’m not at all sure I shall ever let you see this, Elf, which means I can be completely frank as I’m reserving the right to tear it all to pieces, if that’s what I decide.
So let’s go back to me taking off into the woods, leaving Imogen staring after me, Johnny Nutbrown bleeding from the nose, his parents puce with indignation, Sir Leon hugely disappointed and Lady Kira flaring her nostrils in her favourite what-did-you-expect expression.
Of course I’m just guessing at most of that, apart from Johnny’s nose. What I’m certain I left behind was the jacket and tie I’d taken off at Sir Leon’s suggestion.
He came round to Birkstane with them that evening.
I was in my bedroom. Naturally I’d said nothing about the events of the day to either Dad or Aunt Carrie, just muttered something in reply to their question as to whether I’d had a good time.
I heard the car pull up outside and when I looked out and recognized Sir Leon’s Range Rover, I thought of climbing out of the window and doing a bunk.
Then I saw there was still someone in the car after Sir Leon had climbed out of the driver’s seat.
It was Imogen, her pale face pressed against the window, staring up at me.
For a moment our gazes locked. I don’t know what my face showed but hers showed nothing.
Then Dad roared, ‘Wilf! Get yourself down here!’
The time for flight was past. I went down and met my fate.
It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Sir Leon was very laid back about things. He said boys always fight, it’s in their genes, and he was sure my blow had been more in sport than in earnest, and Johnny’s nose wasn’t broken, and he was sure a little note of apology would set all things well.
Dad stood over me while I wrote it.
Dear Johnny, I’m really sorry I made your nose bleed, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident. Yours sincerely Wilfred Hadda.
Dad also wanted me to write to Lady Kira, but Sir Leon said that wouldn’t be necessary, he’d pass on my verbal apologies.
As he left, he punched me lightly on the arm and said, ‘Us wolves need to pick our moments to growl, eh?’
I expected Dad to really whale into me after Sir Leon had gone, but he just looked at me and said, ‘So that’s a lesson to us both, lad, one I thought I’d learned a long time back. My fault. Folks like us and folks like the Ulphingstones don’t mix.’
‘Because they’re better than us?’ I asked.
‘Nay!’ he said sharply. ‘The Haddas are as good as any bugger. But if you put banties in with turtle doves, you’re going to get ructions!’
And that was it. He obviously felt in part responsible. Me, I suppose I should have been delighted to get off so lightly, but as I lay in bed that night, all I could think of was Imogen, and why she’d accompanied her father to Birkstane.
I found out the next day. She wanted to be sure she knew how to get there by herself. I left the house as usual straight after breakfast, i.e. about seven a.m. Dad got up at six and so did Aunt Carrie. Breakfast was the one meal of the day she could be relied on for, so long as you were happy to have porridge followed by scrambled egg, sausage and black pudding all the year round. If I decided to have a lie-in, the penalty was I had to make my own, so usually I got up.
It was a beautiful late July morning. The sun had been up for a good hour and a half and the morning mists were being sucked up the wooded fellside behind the house, clinging on to the tall pines like the last gauzy garments of a teasing stripper.
I hadn’t any definite plan, it might well turn into a pleasant pottering-about, basking kind of day with a dip in the lake at the end of it, but in case I got the urge to do a bit of serious scrambling, I looped a shortish length of rope over my rucksack and clipped a couple of karabiners and slings to my belt.
I hadn’t gone a hundred yards before Imogen stepped out from behind a tree and blocked my path.
I didn’t know what to say so said nothing.
She was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and trainers. On her back was a small pack, on her head a huge sunhat that shaded her face so I could not see her expression.
She said, ‘Johnny says you punched him ‘cos he was rude about my dancing. He said if I saw you to tell you he’s OK and it was a jolly good punch.’
I remember feeling surprise. In Nutbrown’s shoes I don’t think I’d have been anywhere near as gracious. In fact I know bloody well I wouldn’t!
I said, ‘Is that what you’ve come to tell us? Grand. Then I’ll be off.’
I pushed by her rudely and strode away. I thought I’d left her standing but after a moment I heard her voice behind me saying, ‘So where are we going?’
I spun round to face her and snapped, ‘I’m going climbing. Don’t know where you’re going. Don’t care either.’
In case you’re wondering, Elf, how come I was talking like this to the same girl I’d fallen for so utterly and irreversibly just the day before, you should recall I was a fifteen-year-old lad, uncouth as they came, with even fewer communication skills than most of the breed because there were so very few people I wanted to communicate with.
Also, let’s be honest, standing still in shorts and trainers with her golden hair hidden beneath that stupid hat, it was hard to believe this was the visionary creature I’d seen dancing on the lawn.
My mind was in a whirl so I set off again because that seemed the only alternative to standing there, looking at her.
She fell into step beside me when the terrain permitted, a yard behind me when it didn’t. I set a cracking pace, a lot faster than I would have done if I’d been by myself, but it didn’t seem to trouble her. When I got to the lake, that’s Wastwater, I deliberately headed along the path on the south-east side, the one at the foot of what they call the Screes, a thousand feet or so of steep, unstable rock that only an idiot would mess with. Even the so-called path that tracks the lake’s edge is a penance, involving a tedious mile or so of scrambling across awkwardly placed boulders. I thought that would soon shake her off, but she was still there at the far end. So now I crossed the valley and went up by the inn at Wasdale Head into Mosedale, not stopping until I reached Black Sail Pass between Kirk Fell and Pillar.
This was a good six miles over some pretty rough ground and she was still with me, no more out of breath than I was. Now I found I had a dilemma. The further I went, particularly if as usual I wandered off the main well-trodden paths, the more I’d be stuck with her. But she could easily retrace the path we’d come by back to the valley road, and on a day like this, there would be plenty of walkers tracking across Black Sail, so I felt I could dump her here without too much trouble to my conscience.
I sat down and took a drink from the bottle of water I carried in my sack. She produced a can of cola and drank from that.
I said, ‘That’s stupid.’
‘Why’s that?’ she said, not sounding offended but genuinely interested.
‘Because you can’t seal it up again like a bottle. You’ve got to drink the lot.’
‘So I’ll drink the lot.’
‘What happens when you get thirsty again?’
‘I’ll open another one,’ she said, grinning and shaking her rucksack till I could hear several cans rattling against each other. ‘Like a drink?’
She offered me the can. I shook my head. I wouldn’t have minded, but drinking out of a can that had touched her mouth seemed a bit too intimate when I was planning to dump her.
I said, ‘Won’t your mam and dad be worrying about you?’
She said, ‘No. They think I’m out walking up Greendale with Jules and Pippa.’
These it emerged were two of the other girls I’d seen the previous day. Imogen had proposed they all went out walking today, but when she revealed her plan involved getting up really early, two of them had dropped out. It said much for her powers of persuasion that she’d persuaded the other two to go along with her. It said even more that she’d got them to agree to cover up for her when she announced she was taking off on her own the moment they were out of sight of the castle.
‘I’ve arranged to meet them at five,’ she said, ‘so that gives us plenty of time.’
‘To do what?’ I was foolish enough to ask.
‘Whatever you’re going to do,’ she said expectantly. ‘Sounds like it could be fun. A lot better than anything that was likely to happen with Jules and Pippa.’
It turned out she’d made enquiries about me, of Sir Leon and also of some of the locals who worked at the castle.
From them she’d learned that I spent most of my spare time roaming the countryside, ‘getting up to God knows what kind of mischief’. She heard the story of my accident, my miraculous survival, and my subsequent exploits with some of the mountain rescue team. She’d also learned that I was usually up with the lark, so when she resolved to tag along with me, she knew she had to contrive an early start.
The trouble was, in letting her explain all this to me, I had taken a significant step towards the role of fellow conspirator. If I tried to dump her, I could now see that she was quite capable of following at a distance. I could have tried to take her back to the castle, but I had no way to compel her. And one thing I knew for certain, if ever it became known that she hadn’t spent the day with her friends, no way would my pleas of complete innocence cut any ice with Lady Kira.
So I was stuck with her. The best plan looked to be to keep her occupied a couple of hours and above all make sure that she kept her rendezvous with the other two girls.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Time to move.’
We stood up. I noticed she just left her Coke can lying on the ground. I gave it a kick. She looked down at it, looked up at me, thought for a moment, then grinned and picked it up and stuffed it into her sack.
Daft, but somehow that acknowledgement that I was the boss gave me a thrill, so rather than simply lead her up the main track on to Pillar, I decided to take her round by the High Level route that winds above Ennerdale and eventually leads to the summit by a steep scramble at the back of Pillar Rock.
It was a bad mistake. It turned out she’d heard of Pillar Rock because a friend’s brother had had a fall there in the spring and broken both his legs.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. I know a couple of the guys who brought him down. They said him and his mates were real wankers, didn’t know what they were doing.’
‘My friend said her brother had been climbing in the Alps,’ she protested.
‘Oh yeah? Can’t have been all that good if he managed to come off the Slab and Notch,’ I declared, annoyed that my mountain rescue friends’ verdict should be called in doubt. ‘It’s nowt but a scramble. Don’t even need a rope.’
This was laying it on a bit thick. OK, in terms of climbing difficulty, this most popular route up the Rock really is classed as a Grade-3 scramble. But it’s got tremendous exposure. If you come off, you fall a long way. Only real climbers, or real idiots, go up there without a rope. The guy they brought down in the spring was lucky to get away with nothing worse than a couple of smashed legs.
She said, ‘You’ve been up it then?’
‘Couple of times.’
‘By yourself?’
‘Yeah.’
It was true. The first time I’d been ten and back then I suppose I was a real idiot. I was like a spider, scuttling up rock faces that give me vertigo now just thinking about them. How the hell I never got cragfast, I don’t know.
I’d got a bit more sense since my close encounter with the mountain rescue, but I still liked climbing by myself. The second time I went up Pillar Rock had been the previous spring. After I heard my mountain rescue friends talking about the accident, some ghoulish subconscious impulse took me back there. I remember pausing in the Notch and looking down and picturing the guy tumbling through the air. I wondered what it must feel like. All I had to do to find out was let go.
Don’t worry, it wasn’t a serious thought. If I was going to fall, it would be off something that would impress my rescue mates! But dismissing the Slab and Notch as a ‘mere’ scramble now got me into more bother.
‘Let’s go up there then,’ she said.
‘With you? No way!’
‘Why not? You just said it was dead easy.’
‘Yeah, but not for someone like you.’
‘What do you mean, like me? We do climbing at my school. I’ve been on the wall at the sports centre.’
This was true, though, as I learned later, Imogen’s desire to take up rock climbing seriously had provoked a loud and unified negative from her parents, and the school had been instructed to make sure she didn’t get near the wall again.
Well, her parents might have got their way, but with me it was no contest.
In my defence, she did make it clear that she was going to have a go with or without me, and by going along with her at least I could make sure she was on the end of my rope.
And to tell the truth, this readiness of hers to go spidering up a rock face the way I’d been doing for years had an effect on me like the sight of her dancing on the lawn.
So up we went, me first, then Imogen after I’d got her belayed. There were no problems, and she clearly wasn’t in the slightest fazed by having several hundred feet of air beneath her at the most exposed points.
It was worth it just to see her face as she stood on the top of the rock.
It’s a marvellous place to be, beautifully airy in three directions with the huge bulk of Pillar Fell itself looming behind.
She drank it all in then she turned towards me, a wide smile on her face.
‘Thanks,’ she said, pulling her hat off so that her golden hair once more floated in the gentle breeze.
Then in one fluid movement she pulled her T-shirt over her head, kicked off her trainers, pushed down her shorts and stepped out of them.
‘Would you like to fuck me?’ she said.
I stood staring at her, dumbfounded.
Part of me was thinking that anyone on their way up the path to the summit of Pillar has a perfect view of the top of the rock.
Another part was thinking there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen. She was as far as you could get from those pneumatic images in the porn mags that got passed around at school.
But despite the danger of being overlooked, despite her lack of any obvious feminine attractiveness, my heart and my soul and, yes, my body was crying out in answer to her question: Oh yes, I’d like to fuck you very much!
And I did.
What was it like? It was a first for me, and for her too. I knew that because I ended up with blood on my cock. So, a pair of raw virgins, but we meshed like we’d been doing it for years, and unless they ran lessons in faking it at that expensive boarding school of hers, she enjoyed it every bit as much as I did. I can’t take any credit for that. While it was happening I was totally absorbed in my own feelings. But afterwards as we lay wrapped in each other’s arms, I knew I wanted this to be for ever.
In the end it was her who pushed me away and stood up.
‘Mustn’t be late,’ she said, ‘or those two will run scared and give the game away.’
She got dressed as quickly as she’d stripped, but not through any modest need to cover up. I’ve never met anyone as unselfconscious as Imogen.
I lay there and watched her, then followed suit. She would have done the descent unroped, but I wouldn’t let her.
On the long walk back I don’t think we exchanged more than half a dozen words. There was lots I wanted to say but, like I told you, communication wasn’t my thing.
With about a quarter mile to go she halted and put her hand on my chest.
‘I’m OK from now on,’ she said.
I said, ‘Yeah. When…how…?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you when I want you.’
And she was gone.
So there you have it, Elf. Sex, rites of passage, teenage trauma, all the steamy stuff you people like to paddle your inquisitive little fingers in.
Watch out that you don’t find yourself touching something nasty!
But that’s what turns you on, isn’t it?
That’s what turns you on!
Elf (#ulink_ab421730-5635-572d-9b61-8276d8e79000)
i
When she was thirteen Alva Ozigbo’s English teacher had asked her class to write about what they wanted to be when they grew up.
That night Alva sat so long over the assignment that both her parents asked if there was something they could help with.
She regarded them long and assessingly before shaking her head.
Her father, Ike, big, black and ebullient, was a consultant cardiologist at the Greater Manchester Teaching Hospital. Her mother, Elvira, slender, blonde and self-contained, had been an actress. She’d left her native Sweden in her teens to study in London in the belief that the English-speaking world would offer far greater opportunities. For a while her Scandinavian looks had got her parts that required Scandinavian looks, but it soon became clear that her best future lay on the stage. The nearest she got to a film career was being screentested for a Bergman movie. She still talked of it as a missed opportunity but the truth was the camera didn’t love her. On screen she became almost transparent, and by her mid-twenties she was resigned to a career of secondary roles in the theatre. She was Dina in The Pillars of the Community at the Royal Exchange when she met Ike Ozigbo. When they married six months later, she made a rare joke as they walked down the aisle together after the ceremony.
‘I always knew I’d get a starring role one day.’
To which he’d romantically replied, ‘And it’s going to be a recordbreaking run!’
So it had proved.
Thirteen-year-old Alva was proud of her father, but it had always been her mother she pestered for stories of her life on the stage. Now, after vacillating for a good hour between the two main exemplars in her life, it was not without a small twinge of disloyalty that she finally wrote that what she wanted to be was an actress.
At the time she meant it. But somewhere over the next few years that urge to get inside the skin of a character had changed from interpretation to analysis. She discovered that wanting to understand was not the same as wanting to be. The actress had to lose herself in the part; Alva found that she wanted to preserve herself, to remain the detached observer even as all the intricate wirings of personality and motivation were laid bare.
Psychiatry gave her that option, but she soon discovered that the observer had to be an actor too. When she read Hadda’s account of his first encounters with Imogen, she felt a great surge of excitement. To be sure, there was a deal of hyperbole here. The bolder the picture he painted of himself as the victim of a grand passion for one woman, the dimmer his sense of that other degrading and disgusting passion became. But in his effort to stress that his love for Imogen was based on some collision of mind and spirit rather than simply a natural adolescent lust, he had fallen into a trap of his own setting.
What did he say? Here it was…there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen…Yet he’d been sexually roused by this prepubescent figure, and sexually satisfied too. This was probably what he saw in his fantasies thereafter, this was the source of those desires that had brought about his downfall.
She recalled a passage in the first piece he’d written for her, when he was in his best hard-nosed thriller mode.
Imogen was sitting up in bed by this time. Even in these fraught circumstances I was distracted by sight of her perfect breasts.
Stressing his red-blooded maleness, trying to distract her attention, and his own, away from the fact that it was unformed new-budding bosoms that really turned him on.
And now she knew she would need to call upon her acting skills when next she saw him. She must give no hint that she saw in this narrative anything more than an honest and moving account of first love. Indeed, it might be well to give him a quick glimpse of that Freudian prurience he was accusing her of. He was, she judged, a man who liked to be right, who was used to having his assessments of people and policies confirmed. No way could she hope to drive such a man to that final climactic confrontation with his own dark inner self, but with care and patience she might eventually lead him there.
Another spur to caution was the fact that he’d obviously got the writing bug. She’d seen this happen in other cases. The people she dealt with were more often than not obsessive characters and this was something she liked to use to her advantage. Her guess was that he’d have another exercise book ready for her, but if she annoyed him, he’d punish her by not handing it over.
That was his weapon.
Hers of course was his desire that what he wrote should be read! Withholding it might punish her, but only at the expense of punishing himself.
So she prepared for her next session with more than usual care.
ii
‘Wolf,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your father.’
‘What?’
She’d wrong-footed him, she could tell. He’d expected her to home in on that first sexual engagement on top of Pillar Rock.
‘Fred, your father. Is he still alive?’
‘Ah. I see where we’re going. Oedipus stuff, right? No, I didn’t blame him for my mother’s death; no, I didn’t want to kill him; and no, just in case you’re too shy to ask, he never abused me in any way. Unless you count the odd clip around the ear, that is.’
‘In some circumstances, I might indeed count that,’ she said, smiling. ‘I was just wondering about his attitude to what’s happened, that’s all. You do indicate that when it came to your marriage with Imogen, he wasn’t all that keen.’
That got the flicker of a smile. The smiles, though hardly regular, came more frequently now. She took that as a sign of progress, though, paradoxically, in physical terms her goal was tears, not smiling.
‘That’s putting it mildly,’ he said. ‘He was even more opposed than Sir Leon. He at least in the end gave his daughter away. Dad wouldn’t even come to the wedding.’
‘Did that hurt you very much?’
‘Of course it bloody hurt me,’ he said angrily. ‘But I was ready for it, I suppose. He wasn’t exactly supportive when I started bettering myself. I thought he’d be proud of me, but he made it quite clear that he thought I’d have done better to follow in his footsteps and become a forester.’
‘Did he have any reason to think that was what you were going to do?’
Hadda shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I’d always gone along with the assumption that I’d leave school as soon as I could and start working under him on the estate. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I loved working with him, I’d been wielding an axe almost since I was big enough to pick up a teddy bear without falling over. And working outdoors in the countryside I loved seemed the best way of carrying on the way I was.’
‘So what changed?’
‘Don’t act stupid. You know what changed. I met Imogen.’
‘You carried on meeting after that first time?’
‘Obviously. All that summer, whenever we could. She needed to keep quiet about it of course. Me too. It was easier in my case, I just went on as normal, taking off in the morning with my walking and climbing gear. She had to make excuses. She was good at that, I guess. She couldn’t manage every day, but if three days went by without her showing up, I started getting seriously frustrated.’
‘You continued having sex?’
‘Why wouldn’t we?’
‘She was under age. And the danger of pregnancy. Did you start using condoms?’
‘No, she said she’d taken care of all that. As for her age, I suppose I was under age too to start with. Anyway, it never crossed my mind. We were at it all the time. Always out of doors and in all weathers. On the fellside, in the forest.’
He smiled reminiscently.
‘There was this old rowan tree that had survived among all the conifers that had been planted commercially on the estate. We often used to meet there early morning or late evening if one of us couldn’t manage to get away for the whole day. Imo would slip out of the castle and I would go over the wall behind Birkstane, and be there in twenty minutes or so. We didn’t even have to make a special arrangement. It was like we both knew the other would be there under the tree.’
‘This was the rowan you had dug up and transplanted to your London garden?’
He said, ‘You remembered! Yes, the very same. They were harvesting the conifers in that part of the forest and it looked as if the rowan would simply be mowed down to give the big machines access. So I saved it. A romantic gesture, don’t you think?’
‘More sentimental, I’d say. Men in particular look back fondly on their adolescent encounters. Pleasure without responsibility, I can see its attraction. So you’d meet under this tree, have a quick bang, then go home?’
This was a deliberate provocation. The clue to what he’d become had to lie in this first significant sexual relationship.
He looked at her coldly.
‘It wasn’t like that. We drew each other like magnets. I felt her presence wherever I was, whatever I was doing. She was always with me. Under the rowan we were in total union, but no matter how far apart physically, she was always with me.’
She was tempted to probe how he felt now, whether he still believed that Imogen had genuinely shared that intensity of feeling. But she judged this wasn’t the right moment. Concentrate on getting the facts.
‘So when did it end?’
‘How do you know it ended?’
‘Because it had to. From what you say of Lady Kira, she wasn’t going to be fooled for ever. Also that first piece you wrote, the one about living in a fairy tale, in it you talk about the woodcutter’s son being given three impossible tasks and going away and performing them. That implies an ending – and a new beginning, of course.’
‘Did I write that? Yes, I did, didn’t I? It seems a long time ago, somehow.’
‘Three weeks,’ she said.
‘Is that all? We’ve come a long way.’
He spoke neutrally and she was tempted to probe but decided against it. The more progress you made, the more dangerous the ground became.
‘So, the end,’ she said.
‘It was in the Christmas holidays,’ he said slowly. ‘We’d both gone back to school in the autumn, her to her fancy ladies’ college in the south, me to the comp. I couldn’t wait for the term to finish.’
‘You didn’t think she might have had second thoughts about your relationship during those months apart?’
‘Never crossed my mind,’ he said wearily. ‘Not vanity, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just a certainty, like knowing the sun would rise. But when we met in December, it was harder for us to get whole days together when the weather was bad. I mean, a teenage girl wanting to go for a solitary stroll in the summer sunshine is one thing. In a winter gale it’s much more suspicious. We met more and more often under the rowan tree. A blizzard blew up, it was practically a white-out. We sheltered among the trees till things improved a bit, then I insisted on accompanying her back through the grounds till the castle was in sight. Sir Leon had got worried and organized a little search party that included my dad. We met them on the estate drive. I’d have tried to bluff it out, say I’d run into Imogen somewhere and offered to see her home, but she didn’t bother. I think she was right. They weren’t going to believe us. I went home with Fred, she went home with Sir Leon to face her mother.’
‘What did Fred say?’
‘He asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him we were in love, that I was going to marry her as soon as I legally could. He said, “Forget the law, there’s no law ever passed that’ll let you marry that lass!” I said, “Why not? There’s nowt anyone can say that’ll make a difference.” And he laughed, more snarl than a laugh, and he said that up at the castle the difference had been made a long time back. I didn’t know what he meant, not until the next day.’
‘You saw Imogen again?’ guessed Alva.
‘Oh yes. Sir Leon brought her down to Birkstane. They left us alone together. I grabbed hold of her and began gabbling about it making no difference, we could still do what we planned, we could run away together, and so on, lots of callow adolescent stuff. She pushed me away and said, sort of puzzled, “Wolf, don’t talk silly. We never planned anything.” And she was right, I realized later. All the plans had been in my head.’
‘And was this when she set you the three impossible tasks?’ asked Alva.
‘Who’s a clever little shrink then?’ he mocked. ‘Yes, suddenly this girl every bit of whose body I knew as well as my own turned into something as cold and distant as the North Pole. She said she was sorry, it had been great fun, but she’d assumed I knew as well as she did that it would have to come to an end eventually. I managed to stutter, “Why?” And she told me. With brutal frankness.’
His face darkened at the memory, still potent after all these years.
Alva prompted, ‘What did she say?’
‘She said surely I could see how impossible it would be for her to marry someone who couldn’t speak properly, had neither manners nor education, and was likely to remain on a working man’s wage all his life.’
Jesus! thought Alva. They really do bring their princesses up differently!
‘So these were the three impossible tasks?’ she said. ‘Get elocution lessons, get educated, get rich. And you resolved you would amaze everyone by performing them?’
‘Don’t be silly. I had a short fuse, remember? I went into a right strop, told her she was a stuck-up little cow just like her mam, that I weren’t ashamed to talk the way everyone else round here talked, that a Hadda were as good as an Ulphingstone any day of the week, and that my dad said all a man needs is enough money to buy what’s necessary for him to live. She smiled and said, “Clearly you don’t put me in that category. That’s good. I’ll see you around.” And she went.’
‘She sounds very self-contained for a fourteen-year-old,’ said Alva.
‘She was fifteen by then,’ he said, as if this made a difference. ‘And I was sixteen.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I moped all over Christmas. Must have been unliveable with. Dad headed off to the Dog as often as he could. Then New Year came. Time for resolutions about changing your life, according to the guys on the telly. I started fantasizing about leaving home, having lots of adventures, striking it rich by finding a gold mine or something, then returning, all suave and sexy like one of them TV presenters, to woo Imogen. Only she wouldn’t know it was me till she’d been overcome by my manly charms. Pathetic, eh?’
‘We all have our dreams,’ said Alva, recalling her teenage fantasies of collecting a best actress Oscar.
‘Yeah. I’d like to say I set off to chase mine, but it wouldn’t be true. I just knew that, whatever I wanted, I wasn’t going to get it hanging around in Cumbria. So I set off to school one morning with everything I owned in my sports bag and all the money I could raise in my pocket. And I just kept on going. The rest as they say is history.’
‘I’d still like to hear it,’ said Alva.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘You strike me as a conscientious little researcher. The meteoric rise of Wilfred Hadda from uncouth Cumbrian peasant to multi-millionaire master of the universe has been charted so often you must have got it by heart!’
‘Indeed,’ she said, reaching into her document case. ‘I’ve got copies of most of the articles here. There’s general agreement on events after your return. But their guesses at what you did between running away as a poor woodcutter’s son and coming back with your rough edges smoothed and enough money in the bank to launch your business career make speculation about Lord Lucan read like a Noddy story. Anyone get close?’
‘How would I know? I never read them. Which looks best to you?’
‘Well, I’m torn between the South American diamond mine and the Mexican lottery. But on the whole I’d go for the Observer writer, who reckons you probably got kidnapped by the fairies, like True Thomas in the ballad.’
That made him laugh, a rare sound, the kind of laugh that made you want to join in.
‘Yeah, go with that one,’ he said. ‘Away with the fairies, that’s about right. Did he have a good time, this Thomas fellow?’
‘It was a strange place they took him too,’ said Alva. ‘Hang on, he quotes from the ballad in his article. You’ll have to excuse my Scots accent.’
She opened the file and began to read.
‘It was mirk mirk night, there was nae stern light,
And they waded through red blude to the knee;
For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth
Rins through the springs o’ that countrie.’
When she finished he nodded vigorously and said, ‘Oh yes, that guy knows what he’s talking about. So how did Thomas make out when he got back?’
‘Well, he had a bit of a problem, Wolf,’ she said. ‘The one condition of his return was that thereafter he was never able to tell a lie.’
Their gazes locked. Then he smiled, not his attractive winning smile this time, but something a lot more knowing, almost mocking.
‘Just like me then, Elf,’ he said. ‘That old lie-detector mind of yours must have spotted long ago that you’re getting nothing but gospel truth from me!’
‘Gospel? Somehow I doubt if your runaway years had much of religion in them!’
‘You’re so wrong, Elf,’ he said with a grin. ‘I was a regular attender at chapel.’
‘Chapel?’ she said. ‘Not church? That’s interesting. None of the speculation in the papers suggested a religious dimension to your disappearance.’
‘For God’s sake,’ he said, suddenly irritated. ‘Can we get away from what those fantasists dream up? Look, Elf, I’m trying to be honest with you, but if I say there’s something I don’t want to talk about, you’ve got to accept it, OK?’
‘OK, OK,’ she said making a note. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. Age twenty-one, you’re back with a suitcase full of cash, talking like a gent, no longer sucking your peas off your knife, and able to tell a hawk from a handsaw. How did Imogen greet you?’
‘She asked me to dinner at the castle. There were two or three other guests. Sir Leon was very polite to me. Lady Kira watched me like the Ice Queen but hardly spoke. I joined in the conversation, managed to use the right cutlery and didn’t knock over any wine glasses. After dinner Imogen took me out into the garden, allegedly to cast my so-called expert eye over a new magnolia planted to replace one that hadn’t made it through the winter. Out of sight of the house she stopped and turned to face me. “Well, will I do?” I asked. “Let’s see,” she said. And stepped out of her dress with the same ease that she’d stepped out of her shorts and trainers on Pillar Rock all those years ago. When we finished, she said, “You’ll do.” Couple of months later we married.’
‘Despite all the family objections?’
‘We had a trump card by then. Imo was pregnant. With Ginny. Made no difference to Dad and Sir Leon. They still stood out against the marriage. But Lady Kira seemed to see it made sense and that was enough. She calls the shots at the castle. Always did. So poor Leon had no choice but to give his blessing, and shake the mothballs out of his morning dress to give the bride away.’
‘Poor Leon?’ she echoed. ‘You sound as if you have some sympathy for him.’
‘Why not? He’s married to the Ice Queen, isn’t he? No, fair do’s, he may not have wanted me for his son-in-law, but I always got on well with Leon. And he went out of his way to try to make things right between me and my dad. Just about managed it the first two times. Third time was beyond human help.’
‘I’m sorry…?’
Hadda said bleakly, ‘Think about it. They say things come in threes, don’t they? They certainly did for Fred. One, I disappeared for five years. Two, I came back and married Imogen against his wish and his judgment. Three, I got sent down for fraud and messing with young girls. Three times I broke his heart. The last time it didn’t mend.’
And who do you blame for that? wondered Alva. But this wasn’t the time to get aggressive, not when she’d got him talking about what had to be one of the most significant relationships in his life.
She said, ‘But the first two times, you say Leon tried to help?’
‘Oh yes. I think he recognized Dad and me were carved from the same rock. Left to our own devices, we’d probably never have spoken again! Don’t know what he said to Fred about me, but he told me that, after I vanished, often he’d go into the forest with Imogen, and they’d find Dad just sitting slumped against the old rowan, staring into space, completely out of it. Sometimes there’d be tears on his cheeks. It cracked me up, just hearing about it. So whenever I felt like telling Dad that if he wanted to be a stubborn old fool, he could just get on with it, I’d think of what Leon had told me and try to bite my tongue. Gradually things got better between us. And when Ginny was born…’
He stopped abruptly and glared at her as if defying her to question him further about his daughter.
She said, ‘So did Fred attend the wedding?’
‘Oh no,’ said Wolf, relaxing. ‘That would have been too much. I hoped right up till the ceremony started he’d show up. Then, once it started, I was scared he might!’
‘Why?’
‘That bit when the vicar asks if anyone knows of any impediment, I imagined the church door bursting open and Fred coming in with his axe and yelling, “How’s this for an impediment?” I remember, after the vicar asked the question he seemed to pause for ever. Then Johnny glanced round to the back of the church and shouted, “Speak up then” and that set everyone laughing.’
‘Johnny…?’
‘Johnny Nutbrown. He was my best man.’
‘A large step from being the nose-bleeding object of your anger,’ she said. ‘How did that come about?’
‘You mean, how come I didn’t have any old friends of my own to take on the job? Simple. I was always a loner and the few half friendships I formed at school didn’t survive my transformation, as you call it.’
‘But didn’t you make any new ones during this transformation period?’ she asked. ‘Even lowly woodcutters on a quest to perform three impossible tasks probably need a bit of human contact on the way.’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t meet any others,’ he said shortly.
Then he pushed back his chair and stood up, reaching into his blouson as he did so.
‘You’re curious about me and Johnny Nutbrown?’ he said. ‘Well, I think you’ll find all you need to know in here.’
And there it was, the next exercise book just as she’d hypothesized.
But by producing it he had once again stepped aside from talking about those missing years, so as she took the book, she felt it less as a triumph than an evasion.
Wolf (#ulink_df6435da-fb2e-5694-bf1d-cde89612c97f)
i
Let’s move on from our little diversion into childhood trauma and adolescent sexuality, shall we? Where was I before you nudged me down that fascinating side road?
Oh yes.
I’d been in a coma for the best part of nine months.
During the early stages of my so-called recovery, I’ve no idea what proportion of my time I spent out of things. All I do know is that every period of full lucidity seemed to provide the opportunity for a new piece of shit to be hurled at me.
I rapidly came to see that, far from things going away while I lay unconscious, they had got immeasurably and by now irrecoverably worse.
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Reginald Hill
A fast-moving, stunning new standalone psychological thriller – from the award-winning author of the Dalziel and Pascoe seriesWolf Hadda has lead a charmed life. From humble origins as a woodcutter’s son, he has risen to become a hugely successful entrepreneur, happily married to the girl of his dreams.A knock on the door one morning ends it all. Thrown into prison while protesting his innocence, Wolf retreats into silence. Seven years later prison psychiatrist Alva Ozigbo makes a breakthrough: Wolf begins to talk. Under her guidance he gets parole, returning to his rundown family home in rural Cumbria.But there is a mysterious period in Wolf’s youth when he disappeared from home and was known to his employers as the Woodcutter. And now the Woodcutter is back, looking for the truth – and revenge.
REGINALD HILL
THE WOODCUTTER
Copyright (#ulink_6c9f9744-e161-5211-a546-0c6ffbc92fb2)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollins 2010
Copyright © Reginald Hill 2010
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007343874
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007343898
Version: 2015-09-18
For John Lennard
a poet among critics
a true friend to writers
and a fountain of knowledge
who by imagining what he knows
helps us to know what we imagine
‘Insensé, dit-il, le jour où j’avais résolu de me venger, de ne pas m’être arraché le coeur!’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Alexander Dumas: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
Contents
Cover Page (#ud0b4896b-1392-57de-a954-d0ca9ffcc927)
Title Page (#ud300a2b5-502f-5b1f-b3ed-1935d3219e92)
Copyright (#u155dd043-6c93-54c6-bf0e-d9df8b135c55)
Epigraph (#u2b12fe6a-a9de-5c2f-8a5f-ced78e94d8d0)
PROLOGUE (#u7eced605-9994-5120-b967-f2b1929a7241)
1 (#u2508b0bd-ff94-57d1-92c0-f77d1bf19b69)
2 (#u1520ccb2-a9cf-5cd3-aee3-7bcb797fd650)
3 (#u458f7627-fa48-5d6f-a319-851d42e36a25)
BOOK ONE (#u64e7cd6c-d6d7-57a4-a684-9018ec23520b)
Wolf (#ubbd9f28f-0538-5ad4-ad9d-0ccf7505a6c6)
Elf (#u150b2397-7842-564c-b8dd-3bf03f2c52f5)
Wolf (#u40f7d1b9-123f-5349-b213-1c3481e1d1e1)
Elf (#u5b1cf695-7d82-501f-a8f9-02ce7db2960b)
Wolf (#uea7a1493-7722-50ad-9ac0-a786d1fced73)
Elf (#uab67b411-3d67-55a6-8059-cb6684683bc2)
Wolf (#u048d97f3-af4f-516a-98f3-f1aa3b89f710)
Elf (#litres_trial_promo)
Wolf (#litres_trial_promo)
Elf (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
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BOOK THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
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BOOK FOUR the noise of wolves (#litres_trial_promo)
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BOOK FIVE a shocking light (#litres_trial_promo)
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BOOK SIX the world’s edge (#litres_trial_promo)
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EPILOGUE wait and hope (#litres_trial_promo)
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2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Reginald Hill (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_5fabb460-ee23-5fc8-9cd5-f05ca971b89e)
necessity
I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.
Shakespeare: Richard II (v.i)
1 (#ulink_1ca61b46-7f55-5043-a477-ff7cc1792cd3)
Summer 1963; Profumo disgraced; Ward dead; The Beatles’ Please please me top album; Luther King having his dream; JFK fast approaching the end of his; the Cold War at its chilliest; the Wind of Change blowing ever more strongly through Colonial Africa, with its rising blasts already being felt across the Gate of Tears in British-controlled Aden.
But the threat of terrorist activity is not yet so great that an eleven-year-old English boy cannot enjoy his summer holiday there before returning to school.
There are restrictions, however. His diplomat father, aware of the growing threat from the National Liberation Front, no longer lets him roam free, but sets strict boundaries and insists he is always accompanied by Ahmed, a young Yemeni gardener cum handyman who has become very attached to the boy.
In Ahmed’s company he feels perfectly safe, so when a scarred and dusty Morris Oxford pulls up alongside them with its rear door invitingly open, he feels surprise but no alarm as his friend urges him inside.
There are already two people on the back seat. The boy finds himself crushed not too comfortably between Ahmed and a stout bald man who smells of sweat and cheap tobacco.
The car roars away. Soon they reach one of the boundaries laid down by his father. The boy looks at Ahmed queryingly, but already they are moving into one of the less salubrious areas of the city.
Oddly this isn’t his first visit. The previous year, in safer times, having overheard one of the British clerks refer smirkingly to its main thoroughfare as The Street of a Thousand Arseholes, he had persuaded Ahmed to bring him here. The street in question had been something of a disappointment, offering the boy little clue as to the origin of its entertaining name. Ahmed had responded to his questioning by saying with a grin, ‘Too young. Later maybe, when you are older!’
Now the Morris turns into this very street, slows down, and almost before it has come to a halt the boy finds himself bundled out by the bald man and pushed through a doorway.
But he is not yet so frightened that he does not observe the number 19 painted on the wall beside the door.
He is almost carried up some stairs and taken into a room empty of furniture but full of men. Here he is dumped on the floor in a corner. He tries to speak to Ahmed. The young man shakes his head impatiently, and after that will not meet his gaze.
After ten minutes or so a new man arrives, this one wearing a European suit and exuding authority. The others fall silent.
The newcomer stands over the boy and stoops to peer into his face.
‘So, boy,’ he says. ‘You are the son of the British spymaster.’
‘No, sir,’ he replies. ‘My father is the British commercial attaché.’
The man laughs.
‘When I was your age, I knew what my father was,’ he says. ‘Come, let us speak to him and see how much he values you.’
He is dragged to his feet by the bald man and marched into another room where there is a telephone.
The man in the suit dials a number, the boy hears him speak his father’s name, there is a pause, then the man says, ‘Say nothing. I speak for the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen. We have your son. He will speak to you so that you know I do not lie.’
He makes a gesture and the boy is forced forward.
The man says, ‘Speak to your father so he may know it is you,’ and puts the phone to the boy’s mouth.
The boy chants, ‘Mille ani undeviginti.’
The man snatches the phone away and grabs the boy by the throat.
‘What did you say?’ he screams.
‘You said he had to know it was me,’ gabbles the boy. ‘It’s a song we sing together about Paddy McGinty’s Goat. Ask him, he’ll tell you.’
The man speaks into the phone: ‘What is this Ginty goat?’
Whatever is said to him seems to satisfy him and, at a nod from the man, the boy is dragged back to the first room.
Here he lies in the corner, ignored. Men come and go. There is an atmosphere of excitement as though everything is going well. Ahmed, who receives many congratulatory slaps and embraces, still refuses to look at him. He grows increasingly fearful and sinks towards despair.
Then from below comes a sudden outburst of noise.
First the splintering of wood as though a locked door is being broken down, then a tumult of upraised voices followed almost instantly by the rattle of small-arms fire.
All the men rush out. Left alone, the boy looks for a place to hide but there is nowhere. The room’s one window is too small for even a small eleven-year-old to wriggle through.
The din is getting louder, nearer. The door bursts open. The bald man rushes in with a pistol in his hand. The boy falls to the floor. The man screams something unintelligible and aims the weapon. Before he can fire, Ahmed comes in behind and jumps on his back. The gun goes off. The bullet hits the floor between the boy’s splayed legs.
The two men wrestle briefly. The gun explodes again.
And the bald man slumps against the wall, his hands holding his stomach. Blood seeps through his fingers.
Ahmed stands over him, clutching the pistol. Now at last his eyes meet the boy’s and he tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite work. Then he turns to the door that has been slammed shut in the struggle.
The boy cries, ‘Ahmed, wait!’
But the young Yemeni is already opening the door.
He hardly takes one pace over the threshold before he is driven back into the room by a hail of bullets that shatter his chest.
Their eyes meet once more as he lies on the floor. This time the smile makes it to his lips. Then he dies.
Folded in his father’s arms, the boy finally lets himself cry.
His father says, ‘You did well, you kept your head; the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, eh? And didn’t I tell you that doing your Latin homework would come in useful some day!’
Two years later his father will be killed when his car is blown up by a FLOSY bomb, so the boy never has the chance to sit down with him as an adult and ask what the subversives wanted him to do as the price of his son’s safety.
Nor what his answer would have been if his own young wits had not been quick enough to reveal the street and the building number where he was being held.
But before he went back to school he did ask how it was that his friend Ahmed, who had loved him enough to save his life and give up his own in the process, could have put him in that perilous position in the first place.
And his father had answered, ‘When love is in opposition to grim necessity, there is usually only one winner.’
He had not understood then what he meant. But he was to understand later.
2 (#ulink_c41e1dc6-97ef-5868-8018-39f9715ddf6d)
Autumn 1989; the world in turmoil; the Berlin Wall crumbling; Chris Rea’s The Road to Hell top album; Western civilization watching with bated breath the chain of events that will lead to the freeing of Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.
In a Cumbrian forest in a glade dappled by the midday sun, a man sits slumped against a twisted rowan, his weathered face more deeply scored by the thoughts grinding through his bowed head, his eyes fixed upon but not seeing the unopened flask and sandwich box between his feet. A little way apart, a second man stands and watches, his long brown hair edged wolf-grey, his troubled face full of a compassion he knows it is vain to express, while at his back a young girl too regards the sitting man with unblinking gaze, though her expression is much harder to read. And over the wide woodland tract, so rarely free of the wind’s soughing music above, and the pizzicato of cracking twigs below, a silence falls as if trees and sky and surrounding mountains too were bating their breath for fear of intruding on grief.
Three hundred miles to the south in an East London multi-storey car park, five hoodies who probably wouldn’t bate a breath if Jesus Christ crash-landed on St Paul’s in a chariot of fire are breaking into a car.
But they’ve done it once too often, and suddenly cops spring up all around as if someone had been sowing dragon’s teeth. The hoodies scatter and run, only to find there’s no place to run to.
Except for one. He heads for a ten-foot concrete wall with a one-foot gap at the top. To the cops’ amazement, he goes up the wall like a lizard. Then, to their horror, he rolls through the gap and vanishes.
They are on the fifth level and there’s nothing beyond that gap but a sixty-foot drop to the street below.
The cops radio down to ask their waiting colleagues to go round the back of the multi-storey and pick up the corpse.
A few minutes later word comes back – no corpse at the foot of the wall, just a young hoodie who tried to run off as soon as he spotted them.
At the station he tells them he is John Smith, age eighteen, no fixed abode.
After that he shuts up and stays shut up.
They print him. He’s not in the records.
His fellow hoodies claim never to have seen him before. They also claim never to have seen each other before. One of them is so doped up he’s uncertain whether he’s ever seen himself before.
Two are clearly juveniles. A social worker is summoned to sit in on their questioning. The other two have police records. One is eighteen, the other nineteen. The duty solicitor deals with them.
John Smith’s age they’re still not sure about, and something about the youth, some intangible aura of likeability, makes them share their doubts with the duty solicitor.
He starts his interview by pointing out to Smith that as a juvenile he would be dealt with differently, probably getting a light, non-custodial sentence. Smith sticks to his story, refusing to add details about his background though his accent is clearly northern.
The solicitor guesses he’s lying about his age and name to keep his family out of the picture. Hoping to scare the boy into honesty by over-egging the adult consequences of his crime, he turns his attention to the case against him and quickly perceives it isn’t all that strong. Identification via the grainy CCTV tape in the dimly lit multi-storey is a long way this side of reasonable doubt. And could anyone really have shinned down the sheer outer wall in under a minute as the police evidence claims?
As they talk, the boy relaxes as long as no questions are asked about his origins, and the solicitor finds himself warming to his young client. On his way home he diverts to take a photo of the outer wall of the multi-storey to show just how sheer it is. Next day he shows it to the boy, who is clearly touched by this sign of concern, but becomes panicky when told he has to appear before a magistrate that same morning. The solicitor assures him this is just a committal hearing, not a trial, but warns him that as he is officially an adult of no fixed abode, he will almost certainly be remanded in custody.
This is what happens. As the boy is led away, the solicitor tells him not to worry, he will call round at the Remand Centre later in the day. But he has other work to deal with that keeps him busy well into the evening. He remembers the boy as he makes his way home and eases his guilt with the thought that a night in a Remand Centre without sight of a friendly face might be just the thing Smith needs to make him see sense.
He talks to his wife about the boy. She regards him with surprise. He is not in the habit of getting attached to the low-life criminals who form his customary clientele.
He goes to bed early, exhausted. In the small hours when his wife awakens him, whispering she thinks someone is trying to break in through the living-room window, he reckons she must be having a nightmare as their flat is on the tenth floor of a high rise.
But when they go into the living room and switch on the light, there perched on the narrow window box outside the window is the figure of a man.
Not a man. A boy. John Smith.
The solicitor tells his wife it’s OK, opens the window and lets Smith in.
You said you would come, says the boy, half tearfully, half accusingly.
How did you get out of the Centre? asks the solicitor. And how did you find me?
Through a window, says the boy. And your office address was on thatcard you gave me, so I got in through a skylight and rooted around till I found your home address. I tidied up after, I didn’t leave a mess.
His wife, who has been listening to this exchange with interest, lowers the bread knife she is carrying and says, I’ll make a cup of tea.
She returns with a pot of tea and a large sponge cake which Smith demolishes over the next hour. During this time she gets more out of the boy than the combined efforts of her husband and the police managed in two days.
When she’s satisfied she’s got all she can, she says, Now we’d better get you back.
The boy looks alarmed and she reassures him, My husband’s going to get you off this charge, no problem. But absconding from custody’s another matter, so you need to be back in the Remand Centre before reveille.
We can’t just knock at the door, protests her husband.
Of course not. You’ll get back in the way you came out, won’t you, ducks?
The boy nods, and half an hour later the couple sit in their car distantly watching a shadow running up the outer wall of the Remand Centre.
Nice lad, says the wife. You always did have good judgment. When you get him off you’d better bring him back home till we decide what to do with him.
Home! exclaims the solicitor. Our home?
Who else’s?
Look, I like the lad, but I wasn’t planning to adopt him!
Me neither, says his wife. But we’ve got to do something with him. Otherwise what does he do? Goes back to thieving, or ends up flogging his arsehole round King’s Cross.
So when the case is dismissed, Smith takes possession of the solicitor’s spare room.
But not for long.
The wife says, I’ve mentioned him at the Chapel. JC says he’d like to meet him.
The solicitor pulls a face and says, King’s Cross might be a better bet.
The wife says, No, you’re wrong. None of that with a kid he takes under his wing. In any case, the boy needs a job and who else can we talk to?
The meeting takes place in a pub after the lunchtime crush has thinned out. To start with the boy doesn’t say much, but under the influence of a couple of halves of lager and the man, JC’s, relaxed undemanding manner he becomes quite voluble. Voluble enough to make it clear he’s not too big on hymn-singing, collection-box rattling or any of the other activities conjured up in his mind by references to the Chapel.
The man says, I expect you’d prefer something more active and out of doors, eh? So tell me, apart from running up and down vertical walls, what else is it that you do?
The boy thinks, then replies, I can chop down trees.
JC laughs.
A woodcutter! Well, curiously at the Chapel we do have an extensive garden to tend and occasionally a nimble woodcutter might come in handy. I’ll see what I can do.
The boy and the woman look at each other and exchange smiles.
And the man, JC, looks on and smiles benevolently too.
3 (#ulink_e5ce2bc9-c0e3-5d20-996c-30bf7115765d)
Winter 1991; Terry Waite freed; 264 Croats massacred at Vukovar; Freddy Mercury dies of AIDS; Michael Jackson’s Dangerous top album; the Soviet Union dissolved; Gorbachev resigns.
And in a quiet side street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, a man with a saintly smile relaxes in the comfortable rear seat of a Citroën CX. Through the swirling mist above the trees on the far side of a small park he can just make out the top three storeys of a six-storey apartment block. He imagines he sees a shadow moving rapidly down the side of the building, but it is soon out of sight, and in any case he is long used to the deceptions of the imagination on such a night as this. He returns his attention to Quintus Curtius’s account of the fall of Tyre, and is soon so immersed that he is taken by surprise a few minutes later when the car door opens and the boy slips inside.
‘Oh hello,’ he says, closing the book. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Piece of cake,’ says the boy. ‘Bit chilly on the fingers though.’
‘You ought to wear gloves,’ says the man, passing over a thermos flask.
‘Can’t feel the holds the same with gloves,’ replies the boy, drinking directly from the flask.
The man regards him fondly and says, ‘You’re a good little woodcutter.’
In the front of the car a phone rings. The driver answers it, speaking in French. After a while, he turns and says, ‘He’s on his way, JC. But there’s a problem. He diverted to the Gare d’Est. He picked up a woman and a child. They think it’s his wife and daughter. They’re in the car with him.’
Without any change of expression or tone the man says softly, ‘Parles Français, idiot!’
But his warning is too late.
The boy says, ‘What’s that about a wife and daughter? You said he lived by himself.’
‘So he does,’ reassures the man. ‘As you doubtless observed, it’s a very small flat. Also he’s estranged from his family. If it is his wife and daughter, and that’s not definite, he is almost certainly taking them to a hotel. Would you like something to eat? I have some chocolate.’
The boy shakes his head and drinks again from the flask. His face is troubled.
The man says quietly, ‘This is a very wicked person, I mean wicked in himself as well as a dangerous enemy of our country.’
The boy says, ‘Yeah, I know that, you explained that. But that doesn’t mean his wife and kid are wicked, does it?’
‘Of course it doesn’t. And we do everything in our power not to hurt the innocent; I explained that too, didn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ agrees the boy.
‘Well then.’
They sit in silence for some minutes. The phone sounds again.
The driver answers, listens, turns his head and says, ‘Ils sont arrivés. La femme et l’enfant aussi. Il demande, que voudrais-vous?’
The man said, ‘Dites-lui, vas’y.’
The boy’s face is screwed up as if by sheer concentration he can make sense of what’s being said. On the far side of the park the mist above the trees clears for a moment and the apartment block is visible silhouetted against a brightly starred sky.
A light comes on in one of the uppermost chambers. At first it is an ordinary light, amber against an uncurtained window.
And then it turns red. It is too distant for any sound to reach inside the well-insulated car, but in that moment they see the glass dissolve and smoke and debris come streaming towards them like the fingers of a reaching hand.
Then the mist swirls back and the man says, ‘Go.’
Back in their apartment, the boy goes to his room and the man sits by a gently hissing gas fire, encoding his report. When it is finished, he pours himself a drink and opens his History of Alexander the Great.
Suddenly the door opens and the boy, naked except for his brief underpants, bursts into the room.
He says in a voice so choked with emotion he can hardly get the words out, ‘You lied to me, you fucking bastard! They were still with him, both of them, it’s on the news, it’s so fucking terrible it’s on the British news. You lied! Why?’
The man says, ‘It had to be done tonight. Tomorrow would have been too late.’
The boy comes nearer. The man is very aware of the young muscular body so close he can feel the heat off it.
The boy says, ‘Why did you make me do it? You said you’d never ask me to do anything I didn’t want to do. But you tricked me. Why?’
The man for once is not smiling. He says quietly, ‘My father once said to me, when love and grim necessity meet, there is only one winner. You probably don’t understand that now any more than I did then. But you will. In the meantime all I can say is I’m very sorry. I’ll find a way to make it up to you, I promise.’
‘How? How can you possibly make it up to me?’ screams the boy. ‘You’ve made me a murderer. What can you do that can ever make up for that! There’s nothing! Nothing!’
And the man says, rather sadly, like one who pronounces a sentence rather than makes a gift, ‘I shall give you your heart’s desire.’
BOOK ONE (#ulink_4c49631f-6599-52b6-99a9-9358c755b277)
wolf and elf
After the hunters trapped the wolf, they put him in a cage where he lay for many years, suffering grievously, till one day a curious elf, to whom iron bars were no more obstacle than the shadows of grasses on a sunlit meadow, took pity on his plight, and asked, ‘What can I bring you that will ease your pain, Wolf?’
And the wolf replied, ‘My foes to play with.’
Charles Underhill (tr): Folk Tales of Scandinavia
Wolf (#ulink_02371732-0473-5487-a06e-e27fc3556b57)
i
Once upon a time I was living happily ever after.
That’s right. Like in a fairy tale.
How else to describe my life up till that bright autumn morning back in 2008?
I was the lowly woodcutter who fell in love with a beautiful princess glimpsed dancing on the castle lawn, knew she was so far above him that even his fantasies could get his head chopped off, nonetheless when three seemingly impossible tasks were set as the price of her hand in marriage threw his cap into the ring and after many perilous adventures returned triumphant to claim his heart’s desire.
Here began the happily ever after, the precise extent of which is nowhere defined in fairy literature. In my case it lasted fourteen years.
During this time I acquired a fortune of several millions, a private jet, residences in Holland Park, Devon, New York, Barbados and Umbria, my lovely daughter, Ginny, and a knighthood for services to commerce.
Over the same period my wife Imogen turned from a fragrant young princess into an elegant, sophisticated woman. She ran our social life with easy efficiency, made no demands on me that I could not afford, and always had an appropriate welcome waiting in whichever of our homes I returned to after my often extensive business trips.
Sometimes I looked at her and found it hard to understand how I could deserve such beauty, such happiness. She was my piece of perfection, my heart’s desire, and whenever the stresses and strains of my hugely active life began to make themselves felt, I just had to think of my princess to know that, whatever fate brought me, I was the most blessed of men.
Then on that autumn day – by one of those coincidences that only a wicked fairy can contrive, our wedding anniversary – everything changed.
At half past six in the morning we were woken in our Holland Park house by an extended ringing of the doorbell. I got up and went to the window. My first thought when I saw the police uniforms was that some joker had sent us an anniversary stripaubade. But they didn’t look as if they were about to rip off their uniforms and burst into song, and suddenly my heart contracted at the thought that something could have happened to Ginny. She was away at school – not by my choice, but when the lowly woodcutter marries the princess, there are some ancestral customs he meekly goes along with.
Then it occurred to me they’d hardly need a whole posse of plods to convey such a message.
Nor would they bring a bunch of press photographers and a TV crew.
Imogen was sitting up in bed by this time. Even in these fraught circumstances I was distracted by sight of her perfect breasts.
She said, ‘Wolf, what is it?’ in her usual calm manner.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and see.’
She said, ‘Perhaps you should put some clothes on.’
I grabbed my dressing gown and was still pulling it round my shoulders as I started down the stairs. I could hear voices below. Among them I recognized the Cockney accent of Mrs Roper, our housekeeper. She was crying out in protest and I saw why as I reached the half landing. She must have opened the front door and policemen were thrusting past her without ceremony. Jogging up the stairs towards me was a short fleshy man in a creased blue suit flanked by two uniformed constables.
He came to a halt a couple of steps below me and said breathlessly, ‘Wolf Hadda? Sorry. Sir Wilfred Hadda. Detective Inspector Medler. I have a warrant to search these premises.’
He reached up to hand me a sheet of paper. Below I could hear people moving, doors opening and shutting, Mrs Roper still protesting.
I said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’
His gaze went down to my crotch. His lips twitched. Then his eyes ran up my body and focused beyond me.
He said, ‘Maybe you should make yourself decent, unless you fancy posing for Page Three.’
I turned to see what he was looking at. Through the half-landing window overlooking the garden, I could see the old rowan tree I’d transplanted from Cumbria when I bought the house. It was incandescent with berries at this time of year, and I was incandescent with rage at the sight of a paparazzo clinging to its branches, pointing a camera at me. Even at this distance I could see the damage caused by his ascent.
I turned back to Medler.
‘How did he get there? What are the press doing here anyway? Did you bring them?’
‘Now why on earth should I do that, sir?’ he said. ‘Maybe they just happened to be passing.’
He didn’t even bother to try to sound convincing.
He had an insinuating voice and one of those mouths which looks as if it’s holding back a knowing sneer. I’ve always had a short fuse. At six thirty in the morning, confronted by a bunch of heavy-handed plods tearing my home to pieces and a paparazzo desecrating my lovely rowan, it was very short indeed. I punched the little bastard right in his smug mouth and he went backwards down the stairs, taking one of his constables with him. The other produced his baton and whacked me on the leg. The pain was excruciating and I collapsed in a heap on the landing.
After that things got confused. As I was half dragged, half carried out of the house, I screamed at Imogen, who’d appeared fully dressed on the stairs, ‘Ring Toby!’
She looked very calm, very much in control. Princesses don’t panic. The thought was a comfort to me.
Cameras clicked and journalists yelled inanities as I was thrust into a car. As it sped away, I twisted round to look back. Cops were already coming down the steps carrying loaded bin bags that they tossed into the back of a van. The house, gleaming in the morning sunlight, seemed to look down on them with disdain. Then we turned a corner and it vanished from sight.
I did not realize – how could I? – that I was never to enter it again.
ii
My arrival at the police station seemed to take them by surprise. My arrest at that stage can’t have been anticipated. Once the pain in my leg subsided and my brain started functioning again, I’d worked out that I must be the subject of a Fraud Office investigation. Personal equity companies rise on the back of other companies’ failures and Woodcutter Enterprises had left a lot of unhappy people in its wake. Also the atmosphere on the markets was full of foreboding and when nerves are on edge, malicious tongues soon start wagging.
So being banged up was my own fault. If I hadn’t lost my temper, I would probably be sitting in my own drawing room, refusing to answer any of Medler’s impertinent questions till Toby Estover, my solicitor, arrived. I would have liked to see Medler’s expression when he heard the name. Mr Itsover his colleagues call him, because that’s what the prosecution says when they hear Toby’s acting for the defence. Barristers may get the glory but there are many dodgy characters walking free because they were wise enough and rich enough to hire Toby Estover when the law came calling.
I was treated courteously – I even thought I detected the ghost of a smile on the custody sergeant’s lips when told I’d been arrested for thumping Medler – then put in a cell. Pretty minimalist, but stick a couple of Vettriano prints on the wall and it could have passed for a standard single in a lot of boutique hotels.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I hadn’t been wearing my watch when they arrested me. In fact I hadn’t been wearing anything but my dressing gown. They’d taken that and given me an off-white cotton overall and a pair of plastic flip-flops.
I was just wondering whether to start banging on the door and making a fuss when it opened and Toby came in. It was good to see him, in every sense. As well as having one of the smartest minds I’ve ever known, he dresses to match. Same age as me but slim and elegant. Me, I can make a Savile Row three-piece look like a boiler suit in twenty minutes; Toby would look good in army fatigues. In his Henry Poole threads and John Lobb shoes he looked smooth enough to talk Jesus off the Cross which, had he been in Jerusalem at the time, I daresay he would have done.
I said, ‘Toby, thank God. Have you brought me some clothes?’
He looked surprised and said, ‘No, sorry, old boy. Never crossed my mind.’
‘Damn,’ I said. ‘I thought Imo might have chucked a few things together.’
‘I think she may have other things to occupy her,’ he observed. ‘Let’s sit down and have a chat.’
‘Here?’ I said.
‘Here,’ he said firmly, sitting on the narrow bed. ‘Less chance of being overheard than in an interview room.’
The idea that the police might try to eavesdrop on a client/lawyer conversation troubled me less than the implication that it could contain something damaging to me.
I said, ‘Frankly, I don’t give a damn what they hear. I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘It’s certainly true that by now you’re unlikely to have anything you think may be hidden,’ he said sardonically. ‘I understand they are still searching the house. But it’s your computers we need to concentrate on. Wolf, we won’t have much time so let’s cut to the chase. I’ve had a word with DI Medler…is it true you hit him, by the way?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said with some satisfaction. ‘You’ll probably see the picture in the tabloids. I’d like to buy the negative and have it blown up for my office wall, if you can fix that. Did Imogen tell you the media were all over the place? There must have been a tip-off from the police. I want you to chase that up vigorously, Toby. There’s been far too much of that kind of thing recently and no one’s ever called to account…’
‘Wolf, for fuck’s sake, shut up.’
I stopped talking. Toby was normally the most courteous of men. OK, he’d heard me on one of my favourite hobby horses before, but there was an urgency in his tone that went far beyond mere exasperation. For the first time I started to feel worried.
I said, ‘Toby, what’s going on? What are the bastards looking for? For God’s sake, I may have cut a few corners in my time, but the business is sound, believe me. Does Johnny Nutbrown know about this? I think we ought to give him a call…’
Nutbrown was my closest friend and finance director at Woodcutter. He was mathematically eidetic. If Johnny and a computer calculation differed, I’d back Johnny every time.
Toby said, ‘Johnny’s not going to be any use here. Medler’s not Fraud. He’s on what used to be called the Vice Squad. Specifically his area is paedophilia. Kiddy porn.’
I laughed in relief. I really did.
I said, ‘In that case, the only reason I’m banged up here is because I hit the smarmy bastard. They’ve had plenty of time to realize they’ve made a huge booboo, and they’re just hoping the media will get tired and go away before I emerge. No chance! I’ll have my say if I’ve got to rent space on TV!’
I stopped talking again, not because of anything Toby said to me but because of the way he was looking at me. Assessingly. That was the word for it. Like a man looking for reassurance and not being convinced he’d found it.
He said, ‘From what Medler said, they feel they have enough evidence to proceed.’
I shook my head in exasperation.
I said, ‘But they’ll have squeezed my hard drive dry by now. What’s the problem? Some encryptions they haven’t been able to break? God, I’m happy to let them in for a quick glance at anything, so long as I’m there…’
Toby said, ‘He spoke as if they’d found…stuff.’
That stopped me in my tracks.
‘Stuff?’ I echoed. ‘You mean kiddy porn? Impossible!’
He just looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had taken on its forensic colouring.
‘Wolf, I need to be clear so that I know how to proceed. You are assuring me there is nothing of this nature, no images involving paedophilia, to be found on any computer belonging to you?’
I felt a surge of anger but quickly controlled it. A friend wouldn’t have needed to ask, but Toby was more than my friend, he was my solicitor, and that was how I had to regard him now, in the same way that he was clearly looking at me purely as a client.
I said, ‘Nothing.’
He said, ‘OK,’ stood up and went to the door.
‘So let’s go and see what DI Medler has to say,’ he said.
So hell begins.
iii
I’ll say this for Medler, he didn’t mess around.
He showed me some credit-card statements covering the past year, asked me to confirm they were mine. I said that as they had my name and a selection of my addresses on them, I supposed they must be. He asked me to check them more closely. I glanced over them, identified a couple of large items on each – hotel bills, that kind of thing – and said yes, they were definitely mine. He then drew my attention to a series of payments – mainly to an Internet company called InArcadia – and asked me if I could recall what these were for. I said I couldn’t offhand, which wasn’t surprising as I paid for just about everything in my extremely busy life by one of the vast selection of cards I’d managed to accumulate, but no doubt if I sat down with my secretary we could work out exactly what each and every payment covered.
He shuffled the statements together, put them in a folder, and smiled. His split lip must have hurt but it didn’t stop his smile from being as slyly insinuating as ever.
‘Don’t think we’ll need to involve your secretary, Sir Wilfred,’ he said. ‘We can give your memory a jog by showing you some of the stuff you were paying for.’
Then he opened a laptop resting on the table between us, pressed a key and turned it towards me.
There were stills to start with, then some snatches of video. All involved girls on the cusp of puberty, some displaying themselves provocatively, some being assaulted by men. Years later those images still haunt me.
Thirty seconds was enough. I slammed the laptop lid shut. For a moment I couldn’t speak. I looked towards Toby. Our gazes met. Then he looked away.
I said, ‘Toby, for God’s sake, you don’t think…’
Then I pulled myself together. Whatever was going off here, getting into a public and recorded row with my solicitor wasn’t going to help things.
I said to Medler, ‘Why the hell are you showing me this filth?’
He said, ‘Because we found it on a computer belonging to you, Sir Wilfred. On a computer protected by your password, in an encrypted program accessed by entering a twenty-five digit code and answering three personal questions. Personal to you, I mean. Also, the images in question, and many more, both still and moving, were acquired from the Internet company InArcadia and paid for with various of your credit cards, details of which you have just confirmed.’
The rest of the interview was brief and farcical. Medler made no effort to be subtle. Perhaps the little bastard disliked me so much he didn’t want me to cooperate! He simply fired a fusillade of increasingly offensive questions at me – How long had I been doing this? How deeply involved was I with the people behind InArcadia? Had I ever personally taken part in any of the video sessions? and so on, and so on – never paying the slightest heed to my increasingly vehement denials.
Toby sat there silent as a statue during all this and in the end I forgot my resolve not to have a public row and screamed, ‘For fuck’s sake, man, say something! What the hell do you think I’m paying you for?’
He didn’t reply. I saw him glance at Medler. Maybe I was so wrought up I started imagining things but it seemed to me Toby was looking almost apologetic as if to say, I really don’t want to be here doing this, and Medler gave him a little sympathetic smile as if to reply, yes, I can see how tough it must be for you.
I was at the end of my admittedly short tether. It was a toss up whether I took a swing at my lawyer or the cop. If I had to rationalize I’d say it made more sense to opt for the latter on the grounds that my relationship with him was clearly beyond hope whereas I was still going to need Toby.
Whatever, I gave Medler a busted nose to add to his split lip.
And that brought the interview to a close.
iv
My second journey to my cell was handled less courteously than the first.
The two cops who dragged me there then followed me inside were experts. I lay on the floor, racked with pain for a good half hour after the door crashed shut behind them. But when I recovered enough to examine my body, I realized there was precious little visual evidence of police brutality.
I banged at the door till a constable appeared and told me to shut up. I demanded to see Toby. He went away and came back a few minutes later to say that Mr Estover had left the station. I then said I wanted to make the phone call I was entitled to. How entitled I was, I’d no idea. Like most people my knowledge of criminal law was garnered mainly from TV and movies. The cop went away again and nothing happened for what felt like an hour. I was just about to launch another assault on the door when it opened to reveal Medler. His nose was swollen and he had a couple of stitches in his lip. In his hand was a grip that I recognized as mine. He tossed it towards me and said, ‘Get yourself dressed, Sir Wilfred.’
I opened the bag to see it contained clothing.
I said, ‘Did my wife bring this? Is she here?’
He said, ‘No. She’s gone to stay with a Mrs Nutbrown at her house, Poynters, is it? Out near Saffron Walden.’
I sat down on the bed. OK, so Johnny Nutbrown’s wife, Pippa, was Imogen’s best friend, but the notion that she was running for cover without even attempting to contact me filled me with dismay. And disappointment.
It must have showed, for Medler said roughly, as though he hated offering me any consolation, ‘She had to go. Your daughter was being taken there. The press would have been sniffing round her school in no time. They’re already camped outside your house.’
‘Yes, and whose fault is that?’ I demanded.
‘Yours, I think,’ he said shortly.
I didn’t argue. What was the point? And if Imo and Ginny needed to seek refuge, there were few better places than Poynters. Johnny had bought the half-timbered Elizabethan mansion a couple of years earlier. It must have cost him a fortune. I recall saying to him at the time, I’m obviously paying you too much! He claimed it had once belonged to the Nutbrowns back in the eighteenth century and he’d always known it would come back. The great thing in the present situation was that it was pretty remote and Pippa, who was a bit of a hi-tech nerd, had installed a state-of-the-art security system.
I tipped the clothes he’d brought on to the bed. The jacket trousers and shirt weren’t a great match, which meant they hadn’t been selected by Imogen. Presumably Medler or one of his minions had flung them together. I ripped off the paper overall.
Medler stood watching me.
‘Looking for bruises?’ I said.
He didn’t reply and I turned my back on him. As I pulled on my underpants, there was a brief flash of light. I looked round to see Medler holding a mobile phone.
‘Did you just take a photo?’ I demanded incredulously.
I got that knowing smirk, then he said, ‘That’s a nasty scar you’ve got on your back, Sir Wilfred.’
‘So I believe,’ I said, controlling my temper again. ‘I don’t see a lot of it.’
A man doesn’t spend much time watching his back. Perhaps he ought to. The scar in question dated from when I was thirteen and running wild in the Cumbrian fells. I slipped on an icy rock on Red Pike and tobogganed three hundred feet down into Mosedale. By the time I came to a halt, my clothing had been ripped to shreds and my spine was clearly visible through the torn flesh on my back. Fortunately my fall was seen and the mountain rescue boys stretchered me out to hospital in a relatively short time.
First assessment of the damage offered little hope I would ever walk again. But gradually as they worked on me over several days, their bulletins grew cautiously more optimistic, till finally, much to their amazement, they declared that, while the damage was serious, I had a fair chance of recovery. Six months later, I was back on the fells with nothing to show for my adventure other than a firm conviction of my personal immortality and a lightning-jag scar from between my shoulder blades to the tip of my coccyx.
Was it legal for Medler to take a photo of my naked body without my permission? I wondered.
Whatever, I was determined not to let him think he had worried me, so I carried on dressing and when I was finished I said, ‘Right, now I’d like to phone my wife.’
‘First things first. Sergeant, bring Sir Wilfred along to the charge room.’
Things were moving quickly. Too quickly, perhaps. Arrest, questioning, police custody, these were stages a man could come out of with his reputation intact. There were time limits that applied. Eventually that moment so beloved of TV dramatists would arrive when a solicitor says, ‘Either charge my client or let him go, Inspector.’
But Medler was pre-empting all that.
Foolishly when I realized I was being charged with assault on a police officer in the execution of his duty, I felt relieved. I took this to mean they were still uncertain about their child pornography case. I’d passed through disbelief and outrage to indignation. Either the cops had made a huge mistake or someone was trying to drop me in the shit. Either way, I felt certain I could get it sorted. After all, wasn’t I rich and powerful? I could pay for the best investigators, the best advisors, the best lawyers, and once they got on the case I felt confident that all these obscene allegations would quickly be shown for the nonsense they were.
After the formalities were over, I was about to re-assert my right to call Imogen when Medler took the wind out of my sails by saying, ‘Right, Sir Wilfred, let’s get you to a phone.’
He took me to a small windowless room containing a chair and a table with a phone on it.
‘This is linked to a recorder, I take it?’ I said mockingly.
‘Why? Are you going to say something you don’t want us to hear?’ he asked.
He always slipped away from my questions, I realized.
But what did I expect him to say anyway?
I sat down and Medler went out of the door. It took a few seconds for me to recall the Nutbrowns’ Essex number. I dialled. After six or seven rings, a woman’s voice said cautiously, ‘Yes?’
‘Pippa? Is that you? It’s Wolf.’
She didn’t reply but I heard her call, ‘Imo, it’s him.’
A moment later I heard Imogen’s voice saying, ‘Wolf, how are you?’
She sounded so unworried, so normal that my spirits lifted several degrees. This was not the least of her many qualities, the ability to provide an area of calm in the midst of turbulence. She was always at the eye of the storm.
I said, ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry, we’ll soon get this nonsense sorted out. How about you? Is Ginny with you? How is she?’
‘Yes, she’s here. She’s fine. We’re all fine. Pippa’s being marvellous. There’ve been a couple of calls from the papers. I think that once they realized I’d gone, and Ginny had been taken out of school, they started checking out all possible contacts. They really are most assiduous, aren’t they?’
She sounded almost admiring. I was alarmed.
‘Jesus! What did Pippa say?’
‘She was great. Pretended not to have heard anything about the business, then drove them to distraction by asking them endless silly questions till finally they were glad to ring off.’
‘Good. But it means you’ll have to keep your heads down in case they send someone to take a look for themselves. I blame that little shit Medler for this, he obviously alerted the press in the first place…’
She said, ‘Perhaps. But it was Mr Medler who suggested I got Ginny out of school, then helped smuggle me out of the house without the press noticing.’
This got a mixed reaction from me. Naturally I was pleased my family were safe, but I didn’t like having to feel grateful to Medler. Still, I comforted myself, it was good to know that Imogen’s powers of organization included the police.
I said, ‘I’m glad to hear Medler’s got a conscience. And if the media turn up mob-handed at Pippa’s door, we’ll definitely know who to blame, won’t we?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’ll know who to blame. Wolf, I need to ring off now. I’m expecting a call. I rang home to let them know what was going on. I didn’t want them to start hearing things through the media. I spoke to Daddy but Mummy was out. She’s expected back for lunch, so Daddy said he’d get her to ring me then.’
I bet she’ll enjoy that! I thought savagely. My mother-in-law, Lady Kira Ulphingstone, had never been my greatest fan, though things improved slightly after the birth of Ginny. I suspect she vowed to herself that her granddaughter wasn’t going to make the same ghastly mistake as her mother, and she was clever enough to know that pissing me off all the time might put Ginny outside her sphere of influence. So superficially she thawed a little, but underneath I knew it was the same impenetrable permafrost.
My father-in-law, Sir Leon, on the other hand, though he was a Cumbrian landowner of the old school with political views that erred towards the feudal, had demonstrated the pragmatism of his class by making the best of a bad job. Unlike my own father, Fred. He and Sir Leon had been united in absolute opposition to the marriage, the difference being that Fred’s disapproval survived the ceremony. I can’t blame Dad. After putting him through the wringer by vanishing for five years with only the most minimal attempt at contact, I’d returned, and while he was still trying to get his head round that, I had once more set my will in opposition to his. Any hope of getting back to our old relationship had died then and things had never been the same between us since. That had been the highest price I paid for my fairy-tale happy ending. For fourteen years I had judged it a price worth paying. I was wrong. And though I didn’t know it yet, I was never going to get the chance to tell him so.
I said, ‘Well, we can’t have Mummy getting the engaged signal, can we? But if the journalists start bothering them up there, do try to stop Leon setting the dogs on them. Listen, you couldn’t give Fred a ring, could you? The bastards are likely to have him in their sights too. I’d do it myself soon as I get out of here, but I’m not sure how long that will take.’
‘I asked Daddy to make sure Fred knows,’ she said.
God, she was efficient, I thought admiringly. Even at moments of crisis, she took care of all the details.
She went on, ‘You’re expecting to be out…when?’
‘I don’t know exactly, but it can’t be long,’ I said confidently. ‘You know Toby. He’s helped get serial killers, billion-dollar fraudsters and al-Qaeda terrorists off. I’m sure he can sort out my bit of bother.’
I was exaggerating a bit, less about Toby’s CV than my confidence in his ability to sort out my problem. I recalled the way he’d looked at me. Perhaps he was just too high powered for something like this.
‘Is he there with you now?’ said Imogen.
‘No, he left after…after my interview.’
I hesitated to tell Imogen that I’d assaulted Medler a second time. She’d find out soon enough, but no need to give her extra worry now.
‘Then I’ll hear from you later,’ she said.
‘Of course. Listen, don’t ring off, I’d like a quick word with Ginny.’
There was a pause then she said, ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. She’s very bewildered by everything that’s happened, naturally. So I gave her a mild sedative and she’s having a rest now.’
I said, ‘OK. Then give her my love and tell her I’ll see her very soon.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Wolf.’
‘Bye,’ I said. ‘I love you.’
But she’d already rung off.
I put the phone down. The fact that Imogen hadn’t felt it necessary to refer to the monstrous allegations being made against me should have been a comfort. But somehow I didn’t feel comforted.
Medler came into the room a moment later, confirming my suspicion he’d probably been listening in.
I said, ‘Look, I need to get Mr Estover back here so that he can speed up whatever rigmarole you people put me through before my release.’
He said, ‘We’ve kept Mr Estover in the picture. He’ll be waiting at the court.’
I said, ‘The court? Which court?’
He said, ‘The magistrate’s court. The hearing’s in half an hour.’
And again, I was relieved!
Magistrate’s court, assault charge, slap on the wrist, hefty fine,
I could be out in a couple of hours organizing my own super-investigation into what the fuck was going on here.
‘So what are we hanging about for?’ I said. ‘Let’s go!’
v
When we reached West End Magistrates Court, the media were already there in force.
I looked at Medler and said, ‘I expect they were just passing, huh?’
He said wearily, ‘You’d better get used to it. You’re in the system now and the system is accessible. Wherever you’re headed, there’ll always be someone ready to make a quick buck by tipping the mob.’
Curiously, this time I believed him.
Inside I was shown into a small windowless room furnished with two chairs and a table. Toby was waiting there. He quickly disabused me of my notion that I’d be in and out in the time it took to sign a cheque.
He said, ‘You’re being charged with assaulting a police officer in the execution of his duty and occasioning actual bodily harm. The magistrate can deal with this himself or decide it’s serious enough to commit you to the Crown Court for a jury trial.’
I said, ‘Which is best for me? I mean, which will get me on my way home quickest?’
He regarded me gloomily and said, ‘There are problems either way. The magistrate has the power to jail you for six months…’
‘Six months for hitting a cop?’ I interrupted. ‘There’s people murder their mothers and get less than that, especially when they’ve got you on a retainer!’
He ignored the flattery and said. ‘If on the other hand the beak decides you’re a Crown Court job, then the question of bail arises. Medler would certainly oppose it.’
‘On what grounds?’ I demanded.
‘On the grounds that you are being investigated on more serious charges and that, with your wealth and international connections, there’s a serious risk you might abscond.’
This incensed me as much as anything I’d heard on this increasingly surreal day.
‘Abscond? Why would I? From what, for God’s sake? From these ludicrous kiddy-porn allegations? Give me twenty-four hours to have those properly investigated and they’ll vanish like snow off a dyke. And how the hell can Medler claim they’re more serious anyhow? You said I could get six months for punching his stupid face. That pop singer they sent down for having child abuse images on his computer only got three months, didn’t he?’
Toby said, ‘There have been developments. I’m far from sure exactly what’s going on, but they’ve raided your offices. Also we’re getting word that simultaneous raids are being carried out on your other premises worldwide, domestic and commercial.’
I think that was the moment when I first felt a chill of fear beneath the volcano of anger and indignation that had been simmering inside me since I met Medler coming up my stairs.
I sank heavily on to a chair.
‘Toby,’ I said, ‘what the fuck’s going on?’
Before he could answer, the door opened and Medler’s face appeared.
‘Nearly done, Mr Estover?’ he said.
‘Give us another minute,’ said Toby.
Medler glanced at me. What he saw in my face seemed to please him.
He gave me one of his smug smiles and said, ‘OK. One minute.’
It was the smile that provoked me to my next bit of stupidity. To me it seemed to say, Now you’re starting to realize we’ve really got you by the short and curlies!
I said to Toby, ‘Give me your mobile.’
He said, ‘Why?’
I said, ‘For fuck’s sake, just give it to me!’
In the Observer profile when I got my knighthood, they talked about what they called my in-your-face abrasive manner. When I read the draft, I rang up to request, politely I thought, that this phrase should be modified. After I’d been talking to the feature writer for a few minutes, he said, ‘Hang on. Something I’d like you to listen to.’ And he played me back a tape of what I’d just been saying.
When it finished, I said, ‘Jesus. Print your piece the way it is. And send me a copy of that tape.’
I made a genuine effort to tone down my manner after that, but it wasn’t easy. I paid my employees top dollar and I didn’t expect to have to repeat anything I said to them. That included solicitors, even if they happened to be friends.
I thrust my hand out towards Toby. It took him a second or two, but in the end he put his mobile into my palm.
I thumbed in 999.
When the operator asked, ‘Which service?’ I said, ‘Police.’
Toby’s eyes widened.
When he heard what I said next, it was a wonder they didn’t pop right out of their sockets.
‘The Supreme Council of the People’s Jihad has spoken. There is a bomb in West End Magistrate’s Court. In three and a half minutes all the infidel gathered there will be joining their accursed ancestors in the fires of Hell. Allahu Akbar!’
Toby’s face was grey.
‘For God’s sake, Wolf, you can’t…’
‘Shut up,’ I said, putting the phone in my pocket. ‘Now we’ll see just how efficient all these new anti-terrorist strategies really are.’
They were pretty good, I have to admit.
Within less than a minute I heard the first sounds of activity outside the door.
Toby said, ‘This is madness. We’ve got to tell them…’
I poked him hard in the stomach.
It served a double purpose. It shut him up and when the door opened and Medler said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here,’ I was able to reply, ‘Mr Estover’s not feeling well. I think we ought to get a doctor.’
‘Not here, outside!’ commanded Medler.
I got one of Toby’s arms over my shoulder and began moving him through the door. I looked appealingly at Medler. He didn’t look happy, but to give him credit he didn’t hesitate. He hooked Toby’s other arm over his shoulder and we joined the flood of people pouring down the corridor towards the exit.
To create urgency without causing panic is no easy task and I think the police and court officers did pretty well. But of course the last people to get the message are very aware that there’s a large crowd between them and safety, and they want it to move a lot faster than it seems to be doing. Two men dragging a third along between them forms a pretty effective bung and all I had to do as the lobby came in sight was to cease resisting the growing pressure behind me and let myself be swept towards the exit on the tide.
I don’t know at what point Medler realized I was no longer with him. I didn’t look back but burst out of the building into the sunlight to be confronted by a uniformed constable who shouted at me. For a second I thought my escape was going to be very short lived. Then I realized that what he was shouting was, ‘Get away from the building! Run!’
I ran. Everyone was running. I felt a surge of exhilaration. It must feel like this to start a marathon, I thought. All those months of training and now the moment was here to put your fitness to the test.
My marathon lasted about a quarter of a mile, firstly because I was now far enough away from the court for a running man to attract attention and secondly because I was knackered. I still tried to keep reasonably fit but clearly the days when I could roam twenty miles across the Cumbrian fells without breaking sweat were long past.
I was beginning to feel anything but exhilarated. My sense of self-congratulation at getting away was being replaced by serious self-doubt. What did I imagine I was going to do with my freedom? Head up to Poynters to see Imogen and Ginny? That would be the first place Medler would set his dogs to watch. Or was my plan to set about proving my innocence like they do all the time in the movies? I’d need professional help to do that and no legitimate investigator was going to risk his licence aiding and abetting a fugitive. OK, the promise of large sums of money might make one or two of them bend the rules a little, but only if they believed I still had easy access to large sums of money.
And now I came to think about it, I didn’t even have access to small sums of money. In fact, I had absolutely nothing in my pockets except for Toby’s phone. I was an idiot. I should have made him hand over his wallet as well!
My horizons had shrunk. Without money I wasn’t going anywhere I couldn’t reach on my own two feet. The obvious places to lay my hands on cash – home in Holland Park, my offices in the City – were out because they were so obvious.
Well, as my Great Aunt Carrie was fond of saying, if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain. Probably saying that would get you stuck on the pointed end of a fatwa nowadays. But Carrie lived all her life in Cumberland where they knew a lot about the intractability of mountains and bugger all about the intractability of Islam.
I took out Toby’s phone and rang Johnny Nutbrown on his mobile.
When he answered I said, ‘Johnny, it’s me. Meet me in twenty minutes at the Black Widow.’
I thought I was being clever when I said that. No reason why anybody should be listening in to Johnny, but even if they were, unless the Met was recruiting Smart Young Things, even less reason for them to know this was how habitués referred to The Victoria pub in Chelsea. Not that I was ever a Smart Young Thing, but Johnny had taken me there once and been greeted as an old chum by the swarming Dysons, i.e. vacuums so empty they don’t even contain a bag. I’d committed the place to my memory as somewhere I’d no intention of visiting again.
Circumstances change cases. It’s being nimble on your feet that keeps you ahead of the game in business and in life.
I soon realized that I was going to need to be exceedingly nimble on my feet if I was going to make the Widow in twenty minutes. Being chauffeured around in an S-class Merc tends to make you insensitive to distances. Might have done it if I’d started running again but neither my legs nor my need for discretion permitted that. Not that it mattered. Johnny would wait. In fact, come to think of it, he too would be hard pushed to make it through the lunchtime traffic in much under half an hour.
I took thirty-five minutes. As I entered the crowded bar my first thought was that we were going to have to find somewhere a lot quieter to have a chat. I couldn’t see Johnny. At six feet seven, he was usually pretty easy to spot, even in a crowd, but I pushed a little further into the room just to make sure.
No sign, but I did notice a man at the bar, not because he was tall, though he was; nor because he had the kind of face that defies you to make it smile, though he did. No, it was just that somehow he looked out of place. That is, he looked like an ordinary guy who’d just dropped in for a quick half in his lunch break. Except that this was the kind of bar that ordinary guys in search of a quick half reversed out of at speed. He was raising a bottle of Pils to his mouth. As he did so his gaze met mine for a moment and registered…something. Maybe he’d just realized how much he’d had to pay for the Pils. He drank, lowered his head, and I saw his lips move. Nowadays everyone knows what men speaking into their lapels are doing.
I didn’t turn back to the main door. If I’d got it right, the guys he was talking to would be coming in through there pretty quickly. Instead I followed a sign reading Toilets and found myself in a deadend corridor. I peered into the Gents. Windowless. I pushed open the door of the Ladies. That looked better. A frosted-glass pane about eighteen inches square. There was a bin for the receipt of towels. I stood on it and examined the catch. It didn’t look as if it had been opened in years and the frame was firmly painted in place. I stepped down, picked up the bin and hit the glass hard. Cheap stuff, it shattered easily. Behind me I heard a door open. I swung round but it was only a woman coming out of one of the cubicles. I’ll say this for the Dysons, they don’t do swoons or hysterics.
She said, ‘About time they aired this place out.’
I rattled the bin around the frame to dislodge the residual shards, put the bin on the floor once more, stood on it and launched myself through the window. As I did so, I heard another door open and male voices shouting.
I felt my trousers tear, then my leg, so my clear-up technique hadn’t been all that successful. I hit the ground awkwardly, doing something to my shoulder. I was dazed but able to see that I was in a narrow alley. One way it ran into a brick wall, the other on to a busy street. I staggered towards the street.
Behind me, voices. Ahead, a crowded pavement. I could vanish into the crowd, I told myself. I glanced back. Two men coming very quick. I commanded my legs to move faster and the old in-your-face-abrasive technique worked.
I erupted on to the pavement at a fair rate of knots, decided that turning left or right would slow me down, so kept on going.
The thing about London buses is you can wait forever when you want one in a hurry, but if you don’t want one…
I saw it coming, even saw the driver’s shocked face, almost saw the number…
Then I saw no more.
Elf (#ulink_9bebba79-4fe5-518e-9990-5c56236fe297)
i
‘It’s…interesting,’ said Alva Ozigbo cautiously.
Wolf Hadda smiled. It was like a pale ray of winter sunshine momentarily touching a dark mountain. In all the months she’d been treating him, this was only the second time she’d seen his smile, but even this limited observation had hinted at its power to distract attention from the sinister sunglasses and the corrugated scars, inviting you instead to relate to the still charming man beneath.
Charm was perhaps the most potent weapon a pederast could possess.
But it was a weapon Hadda could hardly be conscious of possessing or surely he would have brought it out before now to reinforce his lies?
He said, ‘I remember interesting. That’s the word they use out there to describe things they don’t understand, don’t approve of, or don’t like, without appearing ignorant, judgmental or lacking in taste.’
She noted the intensity of out there.
She said, ‘In here I use it to describe things I find interesting.’
They sat and looked at each other across the narrow table for a while. At least she presumed he was looking at her; his wrap-around glasses made it difficult to be certain. She could see herself reflected in the mirrored lenses, a narrow ebon face, its colouring inherited from her Nigerian father, its bone structure from her Swedish mother. Also her hair, straight and pale as bone. Many people assumed it was a wig, worn for effect. She was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved sweater that neither obscured nor drew attention to her breasts. Don’t be provocative in your dress, the Director had advised her when she started the job. But no point in over-compensating. If you turned up in a burka, they’d still mentally undress you.
Did Hadda mentally undress her? she wondered. Up to their last session she’d have judged not. But what had happened then had stayed with her for the whole of the intervening seven days.
It had started in the usual way. She was already seated at her side of the bare wooden table when the door on the secure side of the interview room opened. Prison Officer Lindale, young and compassionate, had smiled and nodded his head at her, then stood aside to let Wilfred Hadda enter.
He limped laboriously into the room and sat down on the basic wooden chair that always seemed too small for him. Her fanciful notion that his rare smile was like wintry sunshine on a mountain probably rose from the sense of mountainous stillness he exuded. A craggy mountain, its face bearing the scars of ancient storms, its brow streaked with the greyish white of old snows.
It was well over a year since their first meeting, and despite her own extensive research that had been added to the file inherited from Joe Ruskin, her predecessor at Parkleigh, she did not feel she knew much more about Hadda. Ruskin’s file was in Alva’s eyes a simple admission of failure. All his attempts to open a dialogue were simply ignored and in the end the psychiatrist had set down his assessment that in his view the prisoner was depressed but stable, and enforced medication would only be an option if his behaviour changed markedly.
Alva Ozigbo had read the file with growing exasperation. The system it seemed to her had abandoned Hadda to deal with his past himself, and the way he was choosing to do it was to treat his sentence as a kind of hibernation.
The trouble with hibernation was when the bat or the hedgehog or the polar bear woke up, it was itself again.
Hadda, she read, had never admitted any of his crimes, but unlike many prisoners he did not make a thing of protesting his innocence either. According to his prison record, verbal abuse simply bounced off his monumental indifference. Isolation in the Special Unit had meant that there was little opportunity for other prisoners to attack him physically, but on the couple of occasions when, hopefully by accident, the warders let their guard down and an assault had been launched, his response had been so immediate and violent, it was the attackers who ended up in hospital.
But that had been in the early days. For five years until Alva’s appointment in January 2015 he had been from the viewpoint of that most traditional of turnkeys, Chief Officer George Proctor, a model prisoner, troubling no one and doing exactly what he was told.
The Chief Officer, a well-fleshed man with a round and rubicund face that gave a deceptive impression of Pickwickian good humour, was by no means devoid of humanity, but in his list of penal priorities it came a long way behind good order and discipline. So when he concluded his verdict on Hadda by saying, ‘Can’t understand what he’s doing in here’, Alva was puzzled.
‘But he was found guilty of very serious crimes,’ she said.
‘Yeah, and the bugger should be locked up for ever,’ said Proctor. ‘But look around you, miss. We got terrorists and subversives and serial killers, the bloody lot. That’s what this place is for. Hadda never done any serious harm to no one.’
It was a point Alva would usually have debated fiercely, but she had already wasted too much time beating her fists against Proctor’s rock-hard shell of received wisdom and inherited certainties. Also she knew how easy it would be for him to make her job even harder than it was, though in fairness he had never done anything to block or disrupt what he called her tête-à-têtes, which he pronounced tit-a-tits with a face so blank it defied correction.
After a year in post, she wasn’t sure how much good she’d done in relation to the killers and terrorists, but as far as Hadda was concerned, she felt she’d made no impression whatsoever. They brought him along to see her, but he simply refused to talk. After a while she found that her earlier exasperation with what she had judged to be her predecessor’s too easy abandonment of his efforts was modifying into a reluctant understanding.
And then one day when she turned up at Parkleigh, the Director had sent for her.
‘Terrible news,’ he said. ‘It’s Hadda’s daughter. She’s dead.’
Alva had studied the man’s file so closely she did not need reminding of the facts. The girl, Virginia, had been thirteen when her father was sentenced. She had never visited him in prison. A careful check was kept of prisoners’ mail in and out. He had written letters to her c/o his ex-wife in the early days. There had been no known reply and the letters out had ceased though he persevered with birthday and Christmas cards.
Joe Ruskin had recorded that Hadda’s reaction to any attempt to bring up the subject of his relationship with his daughter had been to stand up and head for the door. Grief or guilt? the psychiatrist speculated. Hadda’s predilection for pubescent girls had led the more prurient tabloids to speculate whether she might have been an object of his abuse, but there had been no suggestion of this either in the police investigation nor in the case for the prosecution. Ruskin had demanded full disclosure of all information relevant to the man’s state of mind and crimes, but nowhere had he found anything to indicate that details had been kept secret to protect the child.
Now the Director filled in the details of Ginny’s life after her father’s downfall.
‘Her mother sent her to finish her education abroad, out of the reach of the tabloids. Her grandmother, that’s Lady Kira Ulphingstone, has family connections in Paris, and that’s where the girl seems to have settled. She was, by all accounts, pretty wild.’
‘With her background, why wouldn’t she be?’ said Alva. ‘How did she die?’
‘The worst way,’ said the Director. ‘There was a party in a friend’s flat, drugs, sex, the usual. She was found early this morning in an alley behind the apartment block. She’d passed out, choked on her own vomit. Nineteen years old. What a waste! Alva, he’s got to be told. It’s my job, I know, but I’d like you to be there.’
She’d watched Hadda’s face as he heard the news. There’d been no reaction that a camera could have recorded, but she had felt a reaction the way you feel a change of pressure as a plane swoops down to land, and you swallow, and it’s gone.
He hadn’t been wearing his sunglasses and his monoptic gaze had met hers for a moment. For the first time in their silent encounters, she felt her presence was registered.
Then he had turned his back on them and stood there till the Director nodded at the escorting officer and he opened the door and ushered the prisoner out.
‘I’ve put him on watch,’ said the Director. ‘It’s procedure in such circumstances.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Procedure.’
He looked at her curiously.
‘You don’t think he’s a risk?’
‘To himself, you mean? No. But there has to be some sort of reaction.’
There was, but its nature surprised her.
He started talking.
Or at least he started responding to her questions. He was always reactive, never proactive. Only once did he ask a question.
He looked up at the CCTV camera in the interview room and said, ‘Can they hear us?’
She replied, ‘No. As I told you when we first met, the cameras are on for obvious security reasons, but the sound is switched off. This is a condition of my work here.’
The question had raised hopes that in the weeks that followed were consistently disappointed. He began to talk more but he never said anything that came close to the confessional. References to his daughter were met by the old blankness. She asked why he hadn’t applied to go to the funeral. He said he wouldn’t see his daughter there but he would see people he didn’t want to see. What people? she asked. The people who put me here, he said. But he didn’t even assert his innocence with any particular passion. Again the mountain image came into her mind. Climbers talk of conquering mountains. They don’t. Sometimes the mountain changes them, but they never change the mountain.
But she persevered and after a few more months of this, there came a session when, as soon as he came into the room, she had felt something different in him. As the door closed behind Prison Officer Lindale, she got a visual clue as to what it was.
Usually when he sat down, he placed his hands palm up on the table, the right one black gloved, the left bare, its life and fate lines deep etched, as though he expected his fortune to be read.
This day his hands were out of sight, as though placed on his knees.
She said, ‘Good morning, Mr Hadda. How are you today?’
He said in his customary quiet, level tone, ‘Listen, you black bitch, and listen carefully. I have a shiv in my hand. Show any sign of alarm and I’ll have one of your eyes out before they can open the door.’
Shock kept her brave. Only once had she been attacked, shortly after she’d started work here. A client (she refused to talk of them as prisoners), a mild-mannered little man who hadn’t even come close to the kind of innuendo by which some of the men tried to imply a sexual relationship with her, suddenly lunged across the table, desperate to get his hands on some part of her, any part of her. The best he’d managed was to brush her left wrist before the door slid open and a warder gave him a short burst with a taser.
Since then there’d been no trouble. Only Alva knew how frightened she’d been. When Parliament passed the Act a year ago permitting prison officers to carry tasers after the great Pentonville riot of 2014 she had been one of those who protested strongly against it. Now her certainty that if she pushed back her chair and screamed, the taser would be pumping 50kV into Hadda’s back long before the shiv could get anywhere near her eyes, gave her the strength to respond calmly, ‘What is it you want, Mr Hadda?’
He said, ‘What I want is to fuck you till you faint, but we don’t have time for that. So I’ll have to make do with you kicking your left shoe off, stretching your leg under the table, placing your bare foot against my crotch, and rubbing it up and down till I come.’
The part of her mind not still in shock thought, You poor sad bastard! You’re banged up with all the other deviants. Can’t you find someone in there to service you?
She was still wondering if she could bring this situation to a conclusion without testing what level of voltage was necessary to subdue a mountain when Hadda smiled – that was the first time – and placed his empty hands palm up on the table and said, ‘I think if they were going to come they’d have been here by now, don’t you agree?’
It took a second or two to get it. He’d been testing her assurance that the watching officers could not hear what was being said. Her mind was already exploring the implications of this, and she did not realize that her body was shaking in reaction until the door slid open and Officer Lindale said, ‘You OK, miss?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just got something stuck in my throat.’ And subsumed her trembling into a bout of coughing.
He said, ‘Like some water, miss?’
She shook her head and said, ‘No thanks. I’ll be OK.’
When the door was closed again, Hadda said, ‘Sorry about my little charade. What you need is a stiff brandy. I suggest we cut this session short so you can go and get one.’
She was still struggling with the after-effects of the shock and now she had to adjust to the new tone of voice in which he was addressing her.
Somehow she managed to keep her own voice level as she replied, ‘No, if you’re so keen to be sure we’re not being listened to, I presume that means you’ve got something you’d like to say.’
‘Not now,’ he said. ‘What I’ve got is something for you to read. OK, I’m convinced you’re telling the truth when you say there’s nobody listening to us. Now I’d like your reassurance that nobody else will read this or anything else I give to you.’
As he spoke, he pulled from his prison blouse a blue school exercise book.
This was a shock different in nature from the threat of a shiv attack but in its way almost as extreme.
With many of her clients, she suggested that if they felt like putting any of their feelings or thoughts down on paper before their next meeting, this could only be to the good. Nobody but herself would see what they wrote, she assured them, an assurance some took advantage of to lay before her in graphic detail their sexual fantasies.
Hadda had simply blanked her out when she first suggested he might like to write something. She’d repeated the suggestion over several weeks, then at last she had given up.
So this came completely out of the blue. It should have felt like a breakthrough, but she didn’t have the energy to exult.
She realized Hadda was right. What she wanted to do now was get away to somewhere quiet and have a stiff drink.
She said, ‘I promise you. No one will read anything of yours, unless you give permission. All right?’
‘It will have to be,’ he said, handing her the book.
She took it and held it without attempting to open it.
‘And this is…?’ she said.
‘You keep saying you want to understand how I ended up in here. Well, this is the story. First instalment anyway.’
She stood up, glanced at one of the cameras, and said as the door opened, ‘I look forward to reading it.’
Then she’d headed straight back to her flat, had the longed-for stiff drink after which, rather to her surprise, she was violently sick.
When she was done, she had a very hot shower. Dried and wrapped in a heavy white bathrobe, she sat at her dressing table and stared back at herself out of the mirror.
Behind her, through the open door into the living room, she could see the exercise book lying on a table where she’d thrown it on entering the flat.
Opening it was going to be the first step on a journey that could take her to some very dark places. No darker, she guessed, than many others she’d visited already. But somehow going there in the company of Wilfred Hadda seemed particularly unappealing.
Why was that? she asked herself.
Not because of any horrors that might possibly be revealed. They came with the territory. So it must have something to do with the man they would be revealed about.
This was a measure of his power. This was why she must be on her guard at all times, not against the physical threat which he had used to test her assurance of confidentiality, but against a much more insinuating mental and emotional onslaught.
She recalled her father’s words when she told him about the job offer.
‘Elf,’ he had boomed, ‘you sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew?’
‘Trust me,’ she had replied. ‘I’m a psychiatrist.’
And they had shared one of those outbursts of helpless laughter that had her mother looking at them in affectionate bewilderment.
But now, alone, in her mind’s eye she conjured up an image of the menacing bulk of Parkleigh Prison printed against the eastern sky and shuddered at the thought of driving towards it in the morning.
ii
Parkleigh Prison was built in the 1850s on a marshy greenfield site in Essex just outside London. As if determined that it would be to penology what cathedrals were to religion, its architect incorporated into the design a single massive tower, visible for miles around in that flat landscape, a reassurance to the virtuous and a warning to the sinful.
Rapidly overtaken by the capital’s urban sprawl, it continued pretty well unchanged until the 1980s when even the Thatcher hardliners had to accept it was no longer fit for purpose. Closed, it languished as a menacing monument to Victorian values for a decade or more. Everyone expected that eventually the building would be demolished and the site redeveloped for housing, but then it was announced, in the face of considerable but unavailing local protest, that under the Private Finance Initiative, Parkleigh was going to be refurbished as a maximum-security category A private prison.
It would be a prison for all seasons, enthused the developers. Outside dark and forbidding enough to please the floggers and hangers, inside well ahead of the game in its rehabilitatory structures and facilities.
Its clientele was to be category A prisoners, those whom society needed to be certain stayed locked up until they had served out their usually lengthy sentences. In 2010 Wolf Hadda was sent there to popular acclaim. Five years later he was joined by Alva Ozigbo, to far from popular acclaim.
There were two main strikes against her.
As a psychiatrist, she was too young.
And as a woman, she was a woman.
Outwardly Alva treated such objections with the contempt they deserved.
Inwardly she acknowledged that both had some merit.
At twenty-eight she was certainly a rising star, a rise commenced when she’d worked up her PhD thesis on the causes and treatment of deviant behaviour into a book with the catchy title of Curing Souls. This attracted attention, mainly complimentary, though the word precocious did occur rather frequently in the reviews. But it was a chance meeting that brought her to Parkleigh.
Giles Nevinson, a lawyer friend who hoped by persistence to become more, had invited her to a formal dinner in the Middle Temple. While she had no intention of ever becoming more, she liked Giles. Also, through his job with the Crown Prosecution Service, he was a useful source of free legal advice and information. So she accepted.
Giles spent much of the dinner deep in conversation about the breeding of Persian cats with the rather grand-looking woman on his left. As he explained later, it was ambition rather than ailurophilia that caused him to neglect his guest. The other woman was Isa Toplady, the appropriately named wife of a High Court judge rumoured to be much influenced by his spouse’s personal opinions.
Alva, obliged to turn to her right for conversational nourishment, found herself confronted by a slightly built man in his sixties, with wispy blond hair, pale blue eyes, and that expression of rather vapid benevolence with which some painters have attempted to indicate the indifference of saints to the scourges they are being scourged with, arrows they are being pierced with, or flames they are being roasted with.
He introduced himself as John Childs and when he heard her name, he said, ‘Ah, yes. Curing Souls. A stimulating read.’
Suspecting that, for whatever reason, he might have simply done a little basic pre-prandial homework, she tried him out with a few leading questions and was flattered to discover that not only had he actually read the book but he did indeed seem to have been stimulated by it.
Some explanation of his interest came when he told her that he had a godson, Harry, who was doing A-level psychology and hoping to pursue his studies at university. Childs then set himself to pick Alva’s brain about the best way forward for the boy. It is always flattering to be consulted as an expert and it wasn’t till well through the dinner that she managed to turn the conversation from herself to her interlocutor.
His own job he described as a sort of Home Office advisor, I suppose, a vagueness that from any other nationality Alva would have read as an attempt to conceal unimportance, but which from this kind of Englishman probably meant he was very important indeed.
When they parted he said how much he’d enjoyed her company, and she replied that the feeling was mutual, realizing, slightly to her surprise that this was no more than the truth. He was certainly very good to talk to, meaning, of course, that he was an excellent listener!
Next morning she was surprised but not taken aback when he rang to invite her to take tea with him in Claridge’s. Curious as to his motives, and also (she always tried to confront her own motivations honestly) because she’d never before been invited to take tea at Claridge’s, she accepted. The hotel lived up to her expectations. Childs couldn’t because she had none. They chatted easily, moving from the weather through the ghastliness of politicians to more personal matters. She learned that he came from Norfolk yeoman stock, lived alone in London, and was very fond of his godson, whose parents, alas, had separated. Childs had clearly done all he could to minimize the damage done to the boy. He seemed keen to get her approval for the way he’d responded to the situation, and once again Alva enjoyed the pleasure of being deferred to.
Later she also had a vague feeling with no traceable source that she was being assessed.
But for what? The notion that this might be an early stage of some rather old-fashioned seduction technique occurred and was dismissed.
Then a couple of days later he asked her to lunch at a Soho restaurant she didn’t know. When on arrival she found she had to knock to get admittance, the seduction theory suddenly presented itself again. Might this be the kind of place where elderly gentlemen entertained their lights-of-love in small private rooms decorated in high Edwardian kitsch? If so, what might the menu consist of?
She knocked and entered, and didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed when she was escorted into an airy dining room with very well spaced tables. Any residual suspicions were finally dissipated by the sight of a second man at the table she was led towards.
Childs said, ‘Dr Ozigbo, hope you don’t mind, I invited Simon Homewood along. Homewood, this is Alva Ozigbo that I was telling you about.’
‘Dr Ozigbo,’ said the newcomer, reaching out his hand. ‘Delighted to meet you.’
Not as delighted as me, she thought as they shook hands. This had to be the Simon Homewood, Director of Parkleigh Prison, whose liberal views on the treatment of prisoners, widely aired when appointed to the job six years earlier, had met with scornful laughter or enthusiastic applause, depending on which paper you read.
Or maybe, she deflated herself as she took her seat, maybe it was another Simon Homewood, the Childs family trouble-shooter, come to cast an assessing eye over this weird young woman bumbling old John had taken a fancy to.
One way to settle that.
‘How are things at Parkleigh, Mr Homewood?’ she enquired.
He smiled broadly and said, ‘Depends whether you’re looking in or out, I suppose.’
The contrast with Childs couldn’t have been stronger. There was nothing that you could call retiring or self-effacing about Homewood. In his late thirties with a square, determined face topped by a thatch of vigorous brown hair, he fixed her with an unblinking and very unmoist gaze as he talked to her. He asked her about her book, prompted her to expatiate on her ideas, outlined some of the problems he was experiencing in the management of long-term prisoners, and invited her opinion.
Am I being interviewed? she asked herself. Unlikely, because if she were, it could only be for one job. Ten days previously, the chief psychiatrist at Parkleigh Prison, Joe Ruskin, had died in a pileup on the M5. She’d had only a slight acquaintance with the man, so her distress at the news was correspondingly slight and soon displaced by the thought that, if this had happened four or five years later, she might well have applied to fill the vacancy. Parkleigh held many of the most fascinating criminals of the age. For someone with her areas of interest, it was a job to die for.
But at twenty-eight, she was far too young and inexperienced to be a candidate. And they’d want another man anyway. But she enjoyed the conversation, in which Childs took little part, simply sitting, watching, with a faintly proprietorial smile on his lips.
At the end of lunch she excused herself and made for the Ladies. Away from the two men, her absurdity in even considering the possibility seemed crystal clear.
‘Idiot,’ she told her reflection in the mirror.
As she returned to the table she saw the two men in deep conversation. It stopped as she sat down.
Then Homewood fixed her with that gaze which probably declared to everyone he spoke to, You are the most interesting person in the room, and as if enquiring where she was spending her holidays this year, he said, ‘So how would you like to work at Parkleigh, Dr Ozigbo?’
iii
Fortified with a large scotch and water accompanied by a bowl of bacon-flavoured crisps, Alva at last felt up to opening Hadda’s exercise book.
She went through the narrative three times, the first time swiftly, to get the feel of it; the second slowly, taking notes; the third intermittently, giving herself plenty of time for reflection and analysis.
She was as disappointed at the end of the third reading as she had been by the first.
The narrative had panache, it was presented with great clarity of detail and emphatic certainty of recollection, it rang true.
All of which meant only one thing: Wilfred Hadda was still in complete denial.
This was not going to be easy, but surely she’d never expected it would be?
She knew from both professional experience and wide study how hard it was to lead some men to the point where they could confront their own crimes. When child abuse was involved, the journey was understandably long and tortuous. At its end was a moment of such self-revulsion that the subconscious decided the cure was worse than the disease and performed gymnastics of Olympic standard to avoid it.
This was why the narrative rang so true. Hadda wasn’t trying to deceive her. He’d had years to convince himself he was telling the truth. Plus, of course, so far as the events described were concerned, she knew from her close reading of all the trial and associated media material, he never deviated from the known facts. Only the implied motivation had changed. He was a man of wealth and power, used to getting his own way, and while he clearly had a very sharp mind, he was a man whose physical responses were sometimes so urgent and immediate that reason lagged behind. It wasn’t outraged innocence that made him assault Medler but the challenge to his authority. And once he realized that, by doing this, he had provided the police with an excuse for keeping him in custody while they delved into his private business at their leisure, he had made a desperate bid to get within reach of the sources of wealth and influence he felt could protect him.
The important thing was that her relationship with Hadda had advanced to the point where he clearly wanted to get her on his side. She knew she had to proceed very carefully from here on in. To let him see how little credit she gave to his account would almost certainly inhibit him from writing any more. There was still much to be learned even from evasions and downright lies.
As she drove towards Parkleigh next morning, she found herself wondering as she did most mornings why she wasn’t feeling a lot happier at the prospect of going to work. Was it cause or effect that, when she met older, more experienced colleagues, particularly those who had been close to her predecessor, Joe Ruskin, she had to bite back words of explanation and apology? What had she to feel sorry for? She hadn’t been responsible for the lousy driving that killed him!
As for explanation, she still hadn’t explained things satisfactorily to herself. Had she been deliberately sought out or was she just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time? After the euphoria of being offered the post died down, she’d asked Giles very casually who’d invited John Childs to the dinner. Not casually enough, it seemed. His barrister sensors had detected instantly the thought behind the question and he had teased her unmercifully about her alleged egotism in imagining she might have been headhunted. Next day he had renewed the attack when he rang to say that Childs had been the guest of the uxorious Mr Justice Toplady, whose cat-loving wife was always on the lookout for elderly bachelors to partner her unmarried sister.
‘Though that might be described as the triumph of hope over experience,’ he concluded.
‘That sounds rather sexist even for a dedicated male chauvinist like yourself,’ said Alva.
‘Why so? I refer not to the sister’s unattractiveness, although it is great, but Childs’ predilections.’
‘You mean he’s gay?’
‘Very likely, though in his case he seems to get his kicks out of moulding and mentoring personable young men, then sitting back to watch them prosper in their adult careers. Geoff Toplady was one such, I believe, and he’s certainly prospered. Word is that he’ll be lording it in the Court of Appeal by Christmas. Oh yes. Hitch your wagon to John Childs and the sky’s the limit.’
‘Meaning what? That he’s buying their silence?’
‘Good Lord, what a mind you have! Still, if you spend your time dabbling in dirt, I suppose some of it must stick. No, on the whole Childs’ young men seem to be very positively heterosexual types, and the fact that most of them seem perfectly happy to continue the relationship in adult life suggests that he never tried to initiate them into the joys of buggery as boys. A form of sublimation, I expect you’d call it.’
‘Giles, if you don’t try any analysis, I won’t try any cases,’ said Alva acidly, stung more than she cared to show by the dabbling-in-dirt crack. ‘Would Simon Homewood have been one of his mentored boys?’
‘I believe he was. Of course, it could be Childs is going blind and mistook you for a testosteronic young man in need of a helping hand. Whatever, you simply hit lucky, Alva. No subtle conspiracy to take a closer look at you. Even the seating plan at these do’s is purely a random thing so you don’t get all the nobs clumping together.’
Alva didn’t believe the last – nothing lawyers did was ever random – but she more or less accepted that fate alone had been responsible for her advancement. Which, she assured herself, she didn’t mind. The world was full of excellent young psychiatrists; far better to be one of the lucky ones!
Still it would have been nice to be headhunted! Or perhaps she meant it would have made her feel more confident that she was the right person in the right job.
She met Chief Officer Proctor as she went through the gate. He greeted her with his usual breezy friendliness, but as always she felt those sharp eyes were probing in search of the weakness that would justify his belief that this wasn’t a suitable job for a woman.
She put all these negative thoughts out of her mind as she sat and waited for Hadda to be brought into the interview room.
His face was expressionless as he sat down, placing his hands on the table before him with perhaps a little over emphasis.
Then he let his gaze fall slowly to the exercise book she’d laid before her and said, ‘Well?’
And she said, with a brightness that set her own teeth on edge, ‘It’s very interesting.’
And this led to the brief exchange that ended with them trying to outstare each other.
This was not how she’d planned to control the session.
She said abruptly, Tell me about Woodcutter Enterprises.’
Her intention was to distract him by focusing not on his paedophilia, which was her principal concern, but on the fraudulent business activities that had got him the other half of his long sentence.
He looked at her with an expression that suggested he saw through her efforts at dissimulation as easily as she saw through his, but he answered, ‘You know what a private equity company is?’
She nodded and he went on, ‘That’s what Woodcutter was to start with. We identified businesses that needed restructuring because of poor management and organization which often made them vulnerable to take-over as well. When we took charge, we restructured by identifying the healthy profit-making elements and getting rid of the rest. And eventually we’d move on, leaving behind a leaner, healthier, much more viable business.’
‘So, a sort of social service?’ she said, smiling.
‘No need to take the piss,’ he said shortly. ‘The aim of business is to make profits and that’s what Woodcutter did very successfully and completely legitimately.’
She said, ‘And you called yourselves Woodcutter Enterprises because you saw your job as pruning away deadwood from potentially healthy business growth?’
He smiled, not the attractive face-lightening smile she had already remarked upon but a teeth-baring grimace that reminded her that his nickname was Wolf.
‘That’s it, you’re right, as usual. And eventually as time went by with some of our more striking successes we retained a long-term interest, so anyone saying we were in for a quick buck then off without a backward glance ought to check the history.’
Interesting, she thought. His indignation at accusation of business malpractice seems at least as fervent as in relation to the sexual charges.
She said, ‘I think the relevant government department has done all the checking necessary, don’t you?’
For a moment she thought she might have provoked him into another outburst, but he controlled himself and said quietly, ‘So where are we now, Dr Ozigbo? I’ve done what you asked and started putting things down on paper. I’ve told you how things happened, the way they happened. I thought someone in your job would have an open mind, but it seems to me you’ve made as many prejudgments as the rest of them!’
The reaction didn’t surprise her. The written word gave fantasy a physical existence and, to start with, the act of writing things down nearly always reinforced denial.
‘This isn’t about me, it’s about you,’ she said gently. ‘I said it was very interesting, and I really meant that. But you said it was just the first instalment. Perhaps we’d better wait till I’ve had the whole oeuvre before I venture any further comment. How does that sound, Wilfred? May I call you Wilfred? Or do you prefer Wilf? Or Wolf? That was your nickname, wasn’t it?’
She had never moved beyond the formality of Mr Hadda. To use any other form of address when she was getting no or very little response would have sounded painfully patronizing. But she needed to do something to mark this small advance in their relationship.
He said, ‘Wolf. Yes, I used to get Wolf. Press made a lot of that, I recall. I was named after my dad. Wilfred. He got Fred. And I got Wilf till…But that’s old history. Call me what you like. But what about you? I’m tired of saying Doctor. Sounds a bit clinical, doesn’t it? And you want to be my friend, don’t you? So let me see…Your name’s Alva, isn’t it? Where does that come from?’
‘It’s Swedish. My mother’s Swedish. It means elf or something.’
The genuine non-lupine smile again. That made three times. It was good he doled it out so sparingly. Forewarned was forearmed.
‘Wolf and elf, not a million miles apart,’ he said. ‘You call me Wolf, I’ll call you Elf, OK?’
Elf. This had been her father’s pet name for her since childhood. No one else ever used it. She wished she hadn’t mentioned the meaning, but thought she’d hidden her reaction till Hadda said, ‘Sure you’re OK with that? I can call you madam, if you prefer.’
‘No, Elf will be fine,’ she said.
‘Great. And elves perform magic, don’t they?’
He reached into his tunic and pulled out another exercise book.
‘So let’s see you perform yours, Elf,’ he said, handing it over. ‘Here’s Instalment Two.’
Wolf (#ulink_dfa4ce0e-3dc5-57eb-9eb6-cac22ff67149)
i
You open your eye.
The light is so dazzling, you close it instantly.
Then you try again, this time very cautiously. The process takes two or three minutes and even then you don’t open it fully but squint into the brightness through your lashes.
You are in bed. You have wires and tubes attached to your body, so it must be a hospital bed. Unless you’ve been kidnapped by aliens.
You close your eye once more to consider whether that is a joke or a serious option.
Surely you ought to know that?
It occurs to you that somehow you are both experiencing this and at the same time observing yourself experiencing it.
Neither the observer nor the experiencer is as yet worried.
You open your eye again.
You’re getting used to the brightness. In fact the observer notes that it’s nothing more than whatever daylight is managing to enter the room through the slats of a Venetian blind on the single window.
The only sound you can hear is a regular beep.
This is reassuring to both of your entities as they know from the hospital soaps it means you’re alive.
Then you hear another sound, a door opening.
You close your eye and wait.
Someone enters the room and approaches the bed. Everything goes quiet again. The suspense is too much. You need to take a look.
A nurse is standing by the bedside, writing on a clipboard. Her gaze moves down to your face and registers the open eye. Hers round in surprise.
It is only then that it occurs to you that they usually come in pairs.
You say, ‘Where’s my other eye?’
At least that’s your intention. To the observer and presumably to the nurse what comes out sounds like a rusty hinge on a long unopened door.
She steps back, takes a mobile out of her pocket, presses a button and says, ‘Tell Dr Jekyll he’s awake.’
Dr Jekyll? That doesn’t sound like good news.
You close your eye again. Until you get a full report on the spare situation, it seems wise not to overtax it.
You hear the door open and then the nurse’s voice as she assures the newcomer that your eye was open and you’d tried to talk. A somewhat superior male voice says, ‘Well, let’s see, shall we?’
A Doubting Thomas, you think. Feeling indignant on the nurse’s behalf you give him a repeat performance. He responds by producing a pencil torch and shining it straight into your precious eye.
Bastard!
Then he asks, ‘Do you know who you are?’
You could have done with notice of this question.
Does it mean he has no idea who you are?
Or is he merely wanting to check on your state of awareness?
You need time to think. Not just about how you should respond tactically, but simply how you should respond.
You are beginning to realize you’re far from certain if you know who you are or not.
You check with your split personality.
The observer declares his best bet is that you’re someone called Wilfred Hadda, that you’ve been in an accident, that leading up to the accident you’d been in some kind of trouble, but no need to worry about that just now as it will probably all come back to you eventually.
The experiencer ignores all this intellectual stuff. You’re a one-eyed man in a hospital bed, he says, and all that matters is finding out just how much of the rest of you is missing.
You make a few more rusty hinge noises and Dr Jekyll demonstrates that the tens of thousands spent on his training have not been altogether misused by saying, ‘Nurse, I think he needs some water.’
He presses a button that raises the top half of the bed up to an angle of forty-five degrees. For a moment the change of viewpoint is vertiginous and you feel like you’re about to tumble off the edge of a cliff.
Then your head clears and the nurse puts a beaker of water to your lips.
‘Careful,’ says Jekyll. ‘Not too much.’
Bastard! He’s probably one of those mean gits who put optics on spirit bottles so they know exactly how much booze they’re giving their dinner guests.
When at last you get enough liquid down your throat to ease your clogged vocal cords, you don’t try to speak straight away. First you need a body check.
You try to waggle fingers and toes and feel pleased to get a reaction. But that means nothing. You’ve read about people still having pain from a limb that was amputated years ago. With a great effort you raise your head to get a one-eyed view of your arms.
First the left. That looks fine. Then the right. Something wrong there. You’re sure you used to have more than two fingers. But a man can get by on two fingers. Missing toes would be more problematical.
You say, ‘Feet.’
Jekyll looks blank but the nurse catches on quickly.
‘He wants to see his feet,’ she says.
Jekyll still looks puzzled. Perhaps he had a hangover when they did feet on his course. But the nurse slowly draws back the sheet and reveals your lower body.
The Boy David it isn’t, but at least everything seems to be there even if your left leg does look like it’s been badly assembled by a sculptor who felt that Giacometti was a bit too profligate with his materials. There’s a tube coming out of your cock and someone’s been shaving your pubic hair. So far as you can see, your scrotum’s still intact.
You try for something a little more complicated than wiggling your toes but an attempt to bend your knees produces nothing more than a slow twitch and you give up.
You say, ‘Mirror.’
Nurse and doctor exchange glances over your body.
They’re both wearing name tags. The nurse is called Jane Duggan.
The doctor claims to be Jacklin, not Jekyll. A misprint, you decide.
Jekyll shrugs as if to say he doesn’t care one way or the other, mirrors are a nurse thing.
Nurse Duggan leaves the room. Jekyll takes your pulse and does a couple of other doctorly things you’re too weak to stop him from doing. Then Jane comes back in carrying a small shaving mirror.
She holds it up before your face.
You look into it and observer and experiencer unite in a memory of what you used to look like.
You never were classically handsome; more an out-of-doors, rough-hewn type.
Rough-hewn falls a long way short now. You look as if you’ve been worked over by a drunken chain-saw operator.
Where your right eye used to be is a hollow you could sink a long putt in.
Out of your left eye something liquid is oozing.
You realize you are starting to cry.
You say, ‘Fuck off.’
And to give Nurse Duggan and Dr Jekyll their due, off they fuck.
ii
It turns out you have been in a coma for nearly nine months.
During the next nine you come to regard that as a blessed state.
There is some good news. You’ve slept through another lousy winter.
Your memories are as fragmented as your body. You’ve little recall of the accident, but someone must have described it in detail for later you know exactly what happened.
It seems you’d been very unlucky.
Normally in the middle of the day Central London traffic proceeds at a crawl. Occasionally, however, there occur sudden pockets of space, stretches of open road extending for as much as a hundred metres. Most drivers respond by standing on the accelerator in their eagerness to reconnect with the back of the crawl.
You’d emerged in the middle of one of these pockets. The bus had lumbered up to close on thirty miles an hour. You were flung through the air diagonally on to the bonnet of an oncoming Range Rover whose superior acceleration had got him up to near sixty. From there you bounced on to a table set on the pavement outside a coffee shop, and from there through the shop’s plate-glass window.
By this time your body was in such a mess that it wasn’t till they got you into an ambulance that someone noticed there was a coffee spoon sticking out of your right eye.
Both your legs were fractured, the left one in several places. You also broke your left arm, your collarbone, your pelvis and most of your ribs. You suffered severe head trauma and fractured your skull. And you’d left half of your right hand somewhere in the coffee shop, but unfortunately no one handed it in to Lost Property.
As for your internal organs, you get the impression the medics crossed their fingers and hoped.
Not that it can seem to have mattered all that much. Until you opened your eye, the smart prognosis was that sooner or later you’d have to be switched off.
At first you have almost as little concept of the passage of time as in your coma. You exist in a no-man’s land between waking and sleeping, and the pain of treatment and the pain of dreams merge indistinguishably. Brief intervals of lucidity are occupied with trying to come to terms with your physical state. You are totally self-centred with your mental faculties so fragmented that information comes in fluorescent flashes, making it impossible to distinguish between memory and nightmare. So you do what non-nerds do when a computer goes on the blink: you switch off and hope it will have put itself right by the time you switch on again.
But though you have no sense of progress, progress there must be for eventually in one of the lucid intervals you find that you’re certain you have a wife and family.
But no one comes visiting. Your room is not bedecked with get-well cards, you receive no bouquets of flowers or bottles of bubbly to mark your return to life. Perhaps the nursing staff are hoarding them, is your last lucid thought before drifting off into no-man’s land once more.
Next time you awake, you have a visitor. Or a vision.
He stands at the end of your bed, a fleshy little man wearing a beach shirt with the kind of pattern you make on the wall after a bad chicken tikka. You think you recognize his sun-reddened face but no name goes with it.
He doesn’t speak, just stands there looking at you.
You close your eye for a second. Or a minute. Or longer.
When you open it again, he’s gone.
But the space he occupied, in reality or in your mind, retains an after-image.
Or rather an after-impression.
Though still unable to separate memory from nightmare, you’ve always had a vague sense of some unpleasantness in the circumstances leading up to your accident. But even if real, you don’t feel that this is anything to worry about. It’s as if a deadline had passed. OK, you regret not being able to meet it, but once it has actually passed, your initial reaction is simply huge relief that you no longer have to worry about it!
But the appearance of Medler destroyed this foolish illusion.
Medler!
There, you remember the name without trying, or perhaps because you didn’t try.
And with the name come other definite memories.
Medler, with his sly insinuating manner.
Medler whose mealy-mouth you punched. Twice.
Medler who raided your house, drove your wife and child into hiding, accused you of being a paedophile.
That at least must be sorted out by now, you reckon. Even the slow creaky mills of the Met must have ground the truth out of that ludicrous allegation after all these months.
Nurse Duggan comes in. You ask her how long since you came out of your coma.
She says, ‘Nearly a fortnight.’
‘A fortnight!’ you echo, looking round at the flowerless, card-less room.
She takes your point instantly and smiles sympathetically. She is, you come to realize, a truly kind woman. And she’s not alone. OK, a couple of the nurses treat you like dog-shit, but most are thoroughly professional, even compassionate. Good old NHS!
Nurse Duggan now tries to soothe your disappointment with an explanation.
‘It’s not policy to make a general announcement until they think it’s time.’
Meaning until they’re sure your resurgence hasn’t just been a fleeting visit before you slip back under for ever. But surely your nearest and dearest, Imogen and Ginny, would have been kept informed of every change in your condition? Why weren’t they here by your bedside?
You take a drink of water, using your left hand. The two fingers remaining on the right come in useful when words fail you in conversation with Dr Jekyll, but you’re a long way from trusting a glass to their tender care.
Your vocal cords seem to be getting back to full flexibility, though your voice now has a sort of permanent hoarseness.
You say, ‘Any phone calls for me? Any messages?’
Nurse Duggan says, ‘I think you need to talk to Mr McLucky. I’ll have a word.’
She leaves the room. Mr McLucky, you assume, is part of the hospital bureaucracy and you settle back for a long wait while he is summoned from his palatial office. But after only a few seconds, the door opens and a tall, lean man in tight jeans and a grey sweat-shirt comes in. About thirty, with a mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth in a long lugubrious face, he doesn’t look like your idea of a hospital administrator.
You say, ‘Mr McLucky?’
He says, ‘Detective Constable McLucky.’
You stare at him. You feel you’ve seen him before, not like Medler, much more briefly…across a crowded room? Later you’ll work out this was the out-of-place drinker in the Black Widow who alerted you to the fact that the police were waiting for you.
You say, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
He says, ‘My job.’
You say, ‘And what is your job, Detective Constable McLucky?’
He says, ‘Making sure you don’t bugger off again, Sir Wilfred.’
You would have laughed if you knew which muscles to use.
You say, ‘You mean you’re sitting outside the door, guarding me? How long have you been there?’
‘Since you decided to wake,’ he says. ‘The nurse said you wanted to talk to me.’
He has a rough Glasgow accent and a manner to go with it.
You say, ‘I wanted to know if there’s been any messages for me. Or any visitors. But I’m not clear why this information should come through you.’
He says, ‘Maybe it’s something to do with you being in police custody, facing serious charges.’
It comes as a shock to hear confirmed what Medler’s visit has made you suspect, that nothing has changed in the time you’ve spent out of things.
You are wrong there, of course. A hell of a lot of things have changed.
You feel mad but you’re not in a position to lose your rag, so you say, ‘Messages?’
He shrugs and says, ‘Sorry, none.’
That’s enough excitement for one day. Or one week. Or whatever period of time it is that elapses before you feel strong enough to make a decision.
You get Nurse Duggan to summon DC McLucky again.
You say, ‘I’d like to make a phone call. Several phone calls.’
He purses his lips doubtfully, an expression his friends must find very irritating. You want to respond with some kind of legalistic threat, but a man not yet able to wipe his own arse is not in a position to be threatening. The best you can manage is, ‘Go ask DI Medler if you must. That will give him time to make sure all his bugs are working.’
He says laconically, ‘Medler? No use asking him. Early retirement back in January. Bad health.’
That confirms what you suspected. You were hallucinating. Funny thing, the subconscious. Can’t have been much of an effort for it to have conjured up Imo in all her naked glory, but instead it opted for that little shit.
You squint up at McLucky, difficult as that is with one eye. He still looks real.
You say, ‘Please,’ resenting sounding so childish. But it does the trick.
McLucky leaves the room. You hear his voice distantly. You presume he is ringing for instructions.
Then a silence so long that you slip back into no-man’s land. As you come out of it again, you wouldn’t be surprised to find you’d imagined DC McLucky too.
But there he is, sitting at the bedside. Has he been there for a minute or for an hour? Seeing your eye open, he picks up a phone from the floor and places it on the bed.
‘Can you manage?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ you say. It might be a lie.
He goes out of the room.
You pick up the phone with difficulty, then realize you can’t recall a single number. Except, thank God, Directory Enquiries. Asking for your own home number seems a sad admission of failure, so you say, ‘Estover, Mast and Turbery. Solicitors in Holborn.’
They get the number and put you through. You give your name and ask for Toby. After a delay a woman’s voice says, ‘Hello, Sir Wilfred. It’s Leila. How can I help you?’
Leila. The name conjures up a picture of a big blonde girl with a lovely bum. Rumour has it that when Toby enters his office in the morning, his mail and Leila are both lying open on his desk. You’ve always got on well with Leila.
‘Hi, Leila,’ you say. ‘Could you put me through to Toby.’
‘I’m sorry, Sir Wilfred, but I can’t do that,’ she says.
‘Why not, for God’s sake? Isn’t he there?’ you say.
‘I mean I’ve consulted Mr Estover and he does not think it would be appropriate to talk with you,’ she says, sounding very formal, as if she’s quoting verbatim.
‘Not appropriate?’ You can’t raise a bellow yet, but you manage a menacing croak. ‘So when did sodding lawyers start thinking it wasn’t appropriate to talk to their clients?’
She says, still formal, ‘I’m sorry, Sir Wilfred, I assumed it had been made clear to you that you are no longer Mr Estover’s client.’
Then her voice changes and she reverts to her usual chatty tone, this time tinged with a certain worrying sympathy.
‘In the circumstances, it wouldn’t really be appropriate, you must see that.’
You get very close to a bellow now.
‘What circumstances, for fuck’s sake?’
‘Oh hell. Look, I’m sorry,’ she says, now sounding really concerned. ‘I just assumed you’d know. It shouldn’t be me who’s telling you this, but the thing is, Toby’s acting for your wife in the divorce.’
Elf (#ulink_3f0bd1e2-46ce-5eb1-b5be-9bbfcffb38de)
i
Now this really was interesting, thought Alva Ozigbo.
He’d moved from the first person past to the second person present.
Did this bring him closer or move him further away?
Closer in a sense. The first instalment had been a pretty straightforward piece of storytelling. The detail he recalled, the emotional colouring he injected, all suggested this was a version of that distant morning frequently rehearsed in his mind. In fact, rehearsed was the mot juste. Like a dedicated actor, he had immersed himself so deeply in his role of innocent victim that he was actually living the part.
She’d done some serious research since she took over Hadda’s case. In fact, when she looked at her records, she was surprised to see just how much research she’d done. She’d turned her eye inwards to seek out the reason for this special interest. Like her analysis of Hadda, that too was still work in progress.
She recalled Simon Homewood’s advice when she had started here on that dark January day in 2015. It had surprised her.
‘Many of them will tell you they are innocent. Believe them. Carry on believing them as you study their cases. Examine all the evidence against them with an open, even a sceptical mind. You understand what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, but I don’t understand why you’re saying it,’ she’d said.
He smiled and said, ‘Because that’s what I do with every prisoner who comes into my care at Parkleigh. Until I’m absolutely convinced of their guilt, I cannot help them. I want it to be the same for you.’
‘And how often have you not been convinced?’ she’d asked boldly.
‘Twice,’ he said. ‘One was freed on appeal. The other killed himself before anything could be done. I am determined that will never happen again.’
So she’d gone over the evidence against Hadda in the paedophile case with a fine-tooth comb. And she’d persuaded Giles Nevinson of the prosecutor’s office to do the same. ‘Tight as a duck’s arse,’ he’d declared cheerfully. ‘And that’s water-tight. Why so interested in this fellow?’
‘Because he’s…interesting,’ was all she could reply. ‘Psychologically, I mean.’
Why did she need to add that? How else could she be interested in a man like this, a convicted sexual predator and fraudster with a penchant for violence? It was on record that in his early days at Parkleigh he’d come close enough to ‘normal’ prisoners for them to attempt physical assault. His crippling leg injury limited his speed of movement, but he retained tremendous upper body strength and he had hospitalized one assailant. Transfer to the Special Wing had put him out of reach of physical attack, and verbal abuse he treated with the same massive indifference as he displayed to all other attempts to make contact with him. In the end a kind of contract was established with the prison management. He made no trouble, he got no trouble.
He also got no treatment. While he wasn’t one of those prisoners who staged roof-top demonstrations to protest their innocence or had outside support groups mounting appeals, he never took the smallest step towards acknowledging his guilt. Perhaps it was this sheer intractability that caught her attention.
With the Director’s permission, she had visited Hadda’s cell at a time he and all the other prisoners were in the dining hall. Even by prison standards it was bare. A reasonable amount of personalization was allowed, but all that Hadda seemed to have done to mark his occupancy was to Blu-Tack to the wall a copy of a painting that looked as if it had been torn out of a colour supplement. It showed a tall upright figure, his right hand resting on a lumberjack’s axe, standing under a turbulent sky, looking out over a wide landscape of mountains and lakes. Alva studied it for several minutes.
‘Like paintings, do you, miss?’ enquired Chief Officer Proctor, who’d escorted her into the cell.
‘I like what they tell me about the people who like them,’ said Alva. ‘And of course the people who paint them.’
If there were a signature on the painting, the reproduction wasn’t good enough to show it. She made a note to check and turned her attention to the rest of the cell. Only its emptiness said anything about the personality of its inmate. It was as if Hadda had resolved to leave no trace of his passing. She did find one book, a dog-eared paperback copy of The Count of Monte-Cristo. Seeing her looking at it, Proctor said sardonically, ‘It’s all right, miss. We check regularly under the bed for tunnels.’
Later in the prison library she asked for a record of Hadda’s borrowings and found there were none. Years of imprisonment with little but his own thoughts for company. He was either a man of great inner resources or of no inner life whatsoever.
Giles Nevinson during his trawl through the case files on her behalf had come up with an inventory of all the material removed from Hadda’s house at the time of the initial raid. It was the books and DVDs confiscated that she was interested in. There was nothing here that the prosecution had been able to use to support their case, but they suggested that, pre-accident, Hadda’s taste had been for the kind of story in which a tough, hard-bitten protagonist fought his way through to some kind of rough justice despite the fiendish plots and furious onslaughts of powerful enemies.
This could account for his choosing to present the police raid and its sequel in the form of the opening chapters of a thriller with himself as the much put-upon hero.
But in Alva’s estimate the form disguised its true function.
For Hadda this wasn’t fiction, it was revelation, it was Holy Writ! If ever any doubts about the rightness of his cause crept into his consciousness, all he had to do was refer back to this ur-text and all became simple and straightforward again.
But he hadn’t been able to keep it up when it came to writing about his emergence from the coma. Here the tight narrative control was gone. Even after the passage of so many years, that sense of confusion on waking into a new and alien landscape remained with him. His account of it was immediate, not historical. Hindsight usually allows us to order experience, but here it was still possible to feel him straining to make sense of blurred images, broken lines, shifting foci.
There was some shape. Each of the two sections climaxed at a moment of violent shock. The first, his recognition of physical change; the second, his discovery of his wife’s defection. Nowhere in his account of his waking confusion, nor in the aftermath of these systemic shocks, was there the slightest indication that he was moving out of denial towards recognition.
But these were early days. She was pretty certain she now had every scrap of available information about Wolf Hadda, but what did it add up to? Very little. The significant narrative of the mental and emotional journey that had brought him to Parkleigh could only come from within.
Her hope had to be that, by coaxing him to provide it, she might be able to lead him to a moment of self-knowledge when, like a mountain walker confronted by a Brocken Spectre, he would draw back in horror from the monstrous apparition before him, then recognize it as a projection of himself.
She liked that image, and it was particularly apt in Hadda’s case. From her study of his background she knew he’d grown up in the Lake District where his father had been head forester on the estate of his father-in-law, Sir Leon Ulphingstone. Lots of fascinating possibilities there. Perhaps the almost idealized figure in the painting on his cell wall was saying something about his relationship with his father. Or perhaps it was there as a reminder to himself of what he had been and what he now was.
With the help of an artistic friend, she’d identified the artist as the American, Winslow Homer. The painting was called The Woodcutter. She’d tracked down an image on her computer. It was accompanied by an old catalogue blurb.
In Winslow Homer’s painting, the Woodcutter stands looking out on a panorama of mountains and lakes and virgin forest. He is tall and muscular, brimful of youthful confidence that he can see no peak too high to climb, no river too wide to cross, no tree too tall to fell. This land is his to shape, and shape it he will, or die in the attempt.
She could see what the writer meant. And of course Woodcutter had been the name of Hadda’s business organization. Significant?
Everything is significant, her tutor used to reiterate. You cannot know too much.
I’m certainly still a long way from knowing too much about you, Wolf Hadda, she thought as she watched him limp slowly into the interview room. She’d wondered in George Proctor’s presence if it might not be possible to equip him with a walking stick. The Chief Officer had laughed and said, ‘Yeah, and I’ll put in a requisition for a supply of shillelaghs and assegais while I’m at it!’
He seemed even slower than usual today. As he settled on to his chair, she looked for signs that he was impatient to discuss the second episode. That would have been indicative; she wasn’t sure of what. But there were no signs, which was also indicative, though again she wasn’t sure what of.
His face was expressionless, the dark glasses blanking out his good eye. For all she knew, it could be closed and he could be asleep.
She said loudly, ‘How do you feel now about your disfigurement?’
If she’d thought to startle him by her sudden bluntness, she was disappointed.
He said reflectively, ‘Now let me see. Do you mean the Long John Silver limp, or the Cyclopean stare, or the fact that I’ll never play the violin again?’
She nodded and said, ‘Thank you,’ and made a note on her pad.
‘What for? I didn’t answer your question.’
‘I think you did. By hyperbole in respect of your leg and your eye. Silver was a murderous cutthroat who’d lost his entire leg, and the Cyclops were vile cannibalistic monsters. As for your hand, nothing in your file suggests you ever could play the violin, so that was a dismissive joke.’
‘Indicating?’
‘That you’re really pissed off by being lame and one-eyed, but you’ve managed to adapt to the finger loss.’
‘Maybe that’s because I don’t get the chance to play much golf in this place. Mind you, I’ll be able to cap Sammy Davis Junior’s answer when asked what his handicap was.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not into golf.’
‘He said, “I’m a black, one-eyed Jew.” I’d be able to say, I’m a one-eyed, one-handed, lame, paedophiliac fraudster.’
‘And how much of that would be true?’
He frowned and said, ‘You don’t give up, do you? Eighty per cent at most. The physical stuff is undeniable. As for the fraud, I walked some lines that seemed to get re-drawn after the big crash and I’m willing to accept that maybe I ended up on the wrong side of the new line. But I’m not in word or thought or deed a paedophile.’
She decided to let it alone. Accepting he might have been guilty of fraud had to be some kind of advance, though from her reading of the trial transcripts, the evidence against him here had looked far from conclusive. Perhaps his lawyer had got it right when he tried to argue that the huge publicity surrounding his conviction on the paedophilia charges made it impossible for him to get a fair hearing at the fraud trial. The judge had slapped him down, saying that in his court he would be the arbiter of fairness. But by all accounts Hadda had cut such an unattractive and non-responsive figure in the dock, if they’d accused him of membership of al-Qaeda, too, he’d probably have been convicted.
She knew how the jury felt. He had made no effort to project a positive image of himself. Even after he started talking to her, all she got was a sense of massive indifference. This in itself did not bother her. It was a psychiatrist’s job to inspire trust, not affection. But it did puzzle her if only because in jail her clients usually fell into two categories – those who resented and feared her, and those who saw her as a potential ally in their campaigns for parole.
Hadda was different. Though he had by now served enough time to be eligible for parole he had made no application nor shown the slightest interest in doing so.
Not of course that there was much point. A conviction like his made it very hard to persuade the parole board to release you back into the community, particularly when your application was unsupported by any admission of guilt or acceptance of treatment.
But at least he had started writing these narratives. That had to be progress.
And there was something about him today, something only detectable once he’d started talking. An undercurrent of restlessness; or, if that was too strong, at least a sense of strain in his self-control.
She said, ‘Wilfred…Wilf…’
Both versions of his name felt awkward on her lips, smacking of the enforced familiarity of the hospital ward or the nursing home. His expression suggested he was enjoying her problem.
She said, ‘…Wolf.’
He nodded as if she’d done well and said, ‘Yes, Elf?’
Her sobriquet came off his tongue easily, almost eagerly, as though she were an old friend whose words he was anxious to hear.
She said, ‘How do you feel about Imogen now?’
He frowned as if this wasn’t the question he’d been looking for.
‘About the fact that she divorced me? Or the fact that she subsequently married my former solicitor and friend, Toby Estover? Wonder how that worked out?’
He spoke casually, almost mockingly. A front, she guessed. And she also guessed he might have a pretty good idea how it had worked out. Modern prisons had come a long way from the Bastille and the Chateau d’If, where a man could linger, forgotten and forgetting, oblivious to the march of history outside. She’d checked on the happy pair, telling herself she had a professional interest. Estover was now, if not a household name, at least a name recognized in many households. He was so sought after he could pick and choose his clients, and the fact that he seemed to pick those involved in cases that attracted maximum publicity could hardly be held against him.
As for the lovely Imogen, she was certainly as lovely as ever. Alva had seen a recent photo of her in the Cumbrian churchyard where her daughter’s ashes were being placed in the family tomb. Not an event that drew the world’s press, but a local reporter had been there and taken a snap on his mobile. By chance he’d got a combination of light, angle, and background that lent the picture a kind of dark, brooding Brontë-esque quality, and the Observer had printed it for its atmospheric impact rather than its news value.
She said, ‘I just wondered what you feel when I mention her name?’
‘Hate,’ he said.
This took her aback.
He said, ‘You look surprised. That I should feel it, or that I should say it?’
‘Both. It’s such an absolute concept…’
‘It’s not a bloody concept!’ he interrupted. ‘It has nothing to do with intellectual organization. You asked what I felt. What else should I reply? Contempt? Revulsion? Anger? Dismay? A bit of all of those, I suppose. But hate does it, I think. Hate folds them all neatly into a single package.’
‘But what has she done to deserve this?’ she asked.
‘She has believed the lies they told about me,’ he said. ‘And because she believed them, my lovely daughter is dead.’
All Alva’s previous attempts to get him to talk about his daughter had been met with his mountainous blankness, but now for a moment she saw the agony that seethed beneath the rocky surface.
She said in her most neutral tone, ‘You blame her for Ginny’s death?’
He was back in control but within his apparent calm she sensed a tension like that intense stillness of air when an electric storm is close to breaking.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But not so much as I blame her bitch of a mother.’
She noted that, despite the intensity of the negative feelings he’d expressed about Imogen, he was reluctant to lay full responsibility for the girl’s death upon her. Whatever bonds there had been between him and his wife must have been unusually strong for this ambiguity of feeling to have survived.
‘You hold Lady Kira responsible?’
‘Oh yes. Everything tracks back to her. She never wanted me to have her daughter. And now she has helped deprive me of mine.’
‘And she did this, how? By helping with the arrangements for her to finish her education in France, out of reach of our prurient press?’
She deliberately let a trace of doubt seep into her voice, hoping to provoke further revelation of what was going on inside his mind, but all she succeeded in doing was bring down the defences even further.
He said indifferently, ‘If you’d ever met her, you’d understand.’
This for the moment was a dead end. Leave the mother-in-law, get back to the wife, she told herself.
She said, ‘If, as you claim, you are innocent, then someone must have framed you. Do you have any idea who?’
The question seemed to amuse him.
‘I have a short list of possibilities, yes.’
‘Is Imogen on it?’
The question seemed to surprise him. Or perhaps he simply didn’t like it. She really must find a way to get into this key relationship.
‘What does it matter?’ he demanded. ‘Which is worse? That she went along with a plot to frame me? Or that she actually believed I was guilty as charged?’
‘Be fair,’ said Alva. ‘The evidence was overwhelming; the jury took twenty minutes to find you guilty…’
‘Twelve strangers!’ he interrupted. ‘Twelve citizens picked off the street! In this world we’re unfortunate enough to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with a squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I’m sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.’
Wow! she thought as she studied him closely. That rolled off your tongue so easily, it’s clearly been picking up momentum in your mind for years!
His voice was still controlled, but his single eye sparkled with passion. What was it he said he felt about his ex-wife’s behaviour?
Contempt.
Revulsion.
Anger.
Dismay.
These were all necessary elements of that condition of self-awareness she was trying to draw him to. Perhaps by transferring these emotions away from himself to his ex-wife, he was showing her he was closer than she’d thought. His strained parallel with Mandela was also significant. A man of dignity and probity, imprisoned by a warped regime, and finally released and vindicated after long years to become a symbol of peace and reconciliation. It was as if Hadda’s denial could only be sustained by going to the furthermost extreme in search of supportive self-images.
Hopefully, if he continued far enough in that direction, he would eventually come upon himself unawares. And then it would be up to her to direct him away from self-hatred into more positively remedial channels.
Meanwhile it would be good if she could nudge him into a memory of Imogen in her fairy-tale princess phase. It was possible that by reliving that period when she had become the unique and obsessive object of his adoration, he might come to wonder whether it was in fact his idol that had fallen or himself.
Even if that admittedly ideal outcome didn’t materialize, this was the part of his life she had least information about, for there were few living sources but himself.
Now the passion had faded and he was looking at her assessingly.
He’s got something else for me, she thought. She knew how habit-forming this business of writing about your past could be. In many clients, it went beyond habit into compulsion. So of course since their last meeting he’d carried on writing.
But as what he wrote came closer to the most intimate details of his being, he naturally became less and less sure of sharing it with her.
So, show no eagerness. Do not press.
She said, ‘Wolf, time’s nearly up. I was wondering, is there anything I can get for you? Books, journals, that sort of thing? I should have asked before. Or something more personal. Something in the food line? Or proper linen handkerchiefs, silk socks, perhaps?’
He shook his head as if impatient at her change of subject, or perhaps at the silly notion that there could be something he might enjoy receiving, and said, ‘We were talking about Imo. I got to thinking about her after I wrote that last piece.’
She said, ‘Yes?’
He said, ‘That stuff about feeling hate, I mean it. Or part of me means it. But there’s also a part of me that hates me for feeling it. Does that make sense?’
She nodded and said gravely, ‘What wouldn’t make sense is for you not to feel it.’
That was the right answer. He pulled another exercise book out of his blouson.
‘You might like to see this,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the book. She opened it and glanced at the first page.
And she knew at once she’d got what she wanted.
Wolf (#ulink_f1d50f0d-8404-5c91-add3-6161e8be380b)
i
I was a wild boy, in just about every sense.
My mam, God bless her, died when I was only six. Brain fever, they called it locally. Probably some form of meningitis, spotted too late.
We had my dad’s Aunt Carrie living with us. Or rather we were living with her in her farmhouse, Birkstane. Up there in Cumbria they still expect the young to take care of the old. Not that Carrie can have been all that old when we moved in with her. Birkstane was all that remained, plus a couple of small fields, of her husband’s farm. Widowed in her mid forties, already in her early fifties she was getting a bit forgetful. Also she had arthritis which gave her mobility problems. Normally up there supportive neighbours would have kept her going quite happily till her dotage, but she was a bit isolated, several miles from Mireton, the nearest village, right on the edge of the Ulphingstone estate.
Dad was her only living relative so when word reached him that there was a social worker snooping around, he knew something had to be done. I was still in nappies at the time, so I can only speculate, but I suspect it suited him to move into Birkstane. As head forester to Sir Leon, Dad had a tied cottage on the estate but as I often heard him say later, only a fool lives in a house another fool can throw him out of any time he likes. Not that he thought Sir Leon was a fool. In fact they got on pretty well, and far from dividing them, my liaison with Leon’s daughter only brought them closer together.
They both thought it was a lousy idea.
But that was a long way in the future.
Everything seems to have worked fine to start with. Birkstane was almost as handy for Dad’s work as the tied cottage had been. Mam got to work on the old farmhouse and dragged it back from the edge of dereliction, while Carrie, in familiar surroundings with someone constantly present to keep an eye on her, got a new lease of life.
All this I picked up later. Like I say, I was so young that my memory of those early years in Birkstane is generally non-specific, but I know how blissfully happy I must have been, for I recall all too clearly how I felt when they told me Mam was dead. No, not when they told me; I mean when it finally got through to me that being dead meant gone for good, meant I would never ever see her again.
I was in my second year at school. It had taken a whole year for me to come to terms with the daily separation from Mam; this new and permanent separation was a loss beyond all reach of consolation. I was far too young and far too immersed in my own pain to observe what this blow did to my father, but as I have no recollection of him finding the strength to try and comfort me, I’d guess he too was rendered completely helpless by the loss. I suppose if I’d drawn attention to myself, someone might have tried to do something about me, but I think I must have moved in a bubble of grief through which everyone could see and hear me behaving apparently normally – in fact I suspect that many people observed what a blessing it was that I was clearly too young to take it all in and the best thing was for everyone to treat me as if nothing important had happened.
What they didn’t realize was that within that bubble I too was as good as dead, and as I slowly came back to life, I think I unconsciously resolved that never again would I be in a position where the loss of any single individual could cause me such pain.
Because there was still a woman in the house, no thought was given to the need to make any special arrangements for me. And because of Carrie’s apparent return to her old self during the five years of having us to live with her, nobody doubted that she was a fit guardian and housekeeper.
The reality was very different. Her mobility problems made it hard for her to keep up with a wild young boy, and without my mam’s corrective presence, the old memory lapses (the result, it was later diagnosed, of early-onset Alzheimer’s) now became much more significant. As for Fred, my dad, he went out to work and rarely came home till it was time for his tea. This is the generic term we gave to the early evening meal. As Carrie got more forgetful, the combinations of food offered to us grew increasingly eccentric, but neither of us took much notice – me because I was too young to make comparisons, Dad because he prefaced the meal with a couple of bottles of strong ale and washed it down with another two before driving down to the Black Dog in Mireton. He successfully avoided the attention of the local constabulary by driving his old Defender along the forest tracks, which he knew like the back of his hand, and leaving it on the edge of the estate and walking the last quarter mile to the Dog.
Sorry, I’ve gone on a lot more than I intended about all this early trauma stuff and I know all you really wanted was an account of how me and Imogen got together. But I started off trying to explain the kind of youngster I was, and to understand that, you need to know the rest.
To cut a long story short, because of my instinctive reluctance to get close to anybody and because of the almost total lack of any meaningful supervision at home, I ran wild. Literally. Every free moment I had I spent roaming the countryside. Some streak of natural cunning made me realize the dangers of too much truancy, and I trod a line between being an internal nuisance and an external problem. But I usually turned up late and when I could I bunked off early. As I said, Aunt Carrie was ill-equipped physically or mentally to cope with me. Indeed, as I grew older and wiser, if that’s the right word, a combination of self-interest and I hope fondness for the old lady made me cover up for her as best I could.
Of course my behaviour did not go unremarked, but unlike in the towns where suspicion of child neglect prompts people either to look the other way or at best to ring Social Services anonymously, in the countryside they deal with such problems in-house, so to speak. Looking back, I see that I was probably watched over much more carefully than I understood then. The postman was the eyes and ears of the district, the vicar dropped by a couple of times a week, and there was a steady stream of local ladies who found a reason to call on Carrie, and help with a bit of tidying up. Also for some reason I never really understood, everyone, teachers and locals alike, seemed ready to show a remarkable degree of tolerance towards my aberrant behaviour.
Maybe I’d have turned out better if someone had been ready to skelp my ear a bit more frequently!
Sir Leon was another one who missed the chance to sort me out. I remember when I was eight or nine I got caught by his game-keeper. I was never a serious poacher, though if the odd trout or rabbit came my way, I regarded it as the peasant’s tithe. The day I got caught peering into Sir Leon’s newly stocked tarn, it was the fact that I had no criminal intent that made me vulnerable. I was stretched out on the bank, raptly viewing the tiny fry at their play, when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and I was hauled upright by Sir Leon’s head keeper.
When he realized who he’d got, he threw me into his pick-up and drove me through the forest to where my father was supervising a gang of loggers. Sir Leon was there too, and after the situation had been explained, he stared down at me and said, ‘This your brat then, Fred? What’s your name, boy?’
‘Wilf,’ I blurted.
‘Wilf?’
Then he squatted down beside me, ran his fingers through my hair, opened my mouth and peered in like he was checking out a horse, then winked at me and said, ‘Sure you don’t mean Wolf? Looks to me like you’ve been suckled by wolves. That might explain things! Suckled by wolves, and here’s me thinking they were all dead.’
He stood up, laughing at his own joke, and everyone else laughed, except me and Dad.
Thereafter every time Sir Leon saw me he called me Wolf and gradually the name stuck. I rather like the notion of being suckled by wolves, maybe because Sir Leon with his long nose and great mane of grey-brown hair looked like he might have a bit of wolf in him too. His name, Ulphingstone, certainly did.
Dad, however, hadn’t cared to be shown up in front of his workers and his boss. That night he stayed home and paid me more attention than I think he had since Mam died, and he didn’t much like what he saw. When I responded surlily to his remonstrations, he skelped me round the left ear, and when I responded angrily to that, he skelped me round the right.
After that I was obliged to mend my ways for a while, but as well as developing a taste for the wild life, I was already well grounded in the art of deception, and I continued on my independent way pretty much as before, only taking a little more care.
I suppose I was a bit of a loner, but that was through choice. At junior school I never had any problem getting on with the other boys; in fact most of them seemed keen to be friends with me, but I always felt myself apart from them. Maybe it was because I didn’t give a toss about who was going to win the Premier League, maybe it was something deeper than that. A lot of the girls were keen to be friendly too, but I reckoned they were a waste of space. At least with the boys you could run around and jump on top of each other and have a bit of a wrestle. It was a long time before I realized you could do that with girls too.
Then came secondary school. There was the usual bullying, but I’ve always had a short fuse. Neither size nor number made any difference – if you messed with me, I lived up to my name and reacted like a wild beast, wading in with fists, feet, teeth, and head till someone lay bleeding on the schoolyard floor. Eventually the physical bullying stopped, but there were still scores to settle. One day, aged about twelve, I found someone had broken into my locker and sprayed car paint all over the stuff I kept there. I had a good idea who it was. Next morning I smuggled in the cut-down lumber axe my dad was teaching me to use and I demolished my chief suspect’s locker and everything in it. All the kids thought I’d be expelled or at least excluded for that, but the Head just settled for giving me a long lecture and getting Dad to pay for the damage.
I didn’t get a lecture from Fred, but an ear-ringing slap which he made clear wasn’t for damaging the other boy’s gear but for ruining a perfectly good axe!
After that, helped by the fact that I got bigger and stronger every month, I was left strictly alone by the would-be bullies. I wasn’t thick, I did enough work to keep my head above water, and for some reason the teachers cut me a lot of slack. I never sucked up to any of them but most of them seemed to like me and I suspect I got away with stuff another kid might have been pulled up for. I never made any particular friends because the kind of thing I liked to do away from school, I liked to do alone. But I was always one of the first to get picked when my class was split up for schoolyard games.
The only significant contacts I made was age thirteen when I had my accident. You must have heard about my accident, Elf, the one that left me with the scars on my back that the bastards at my trial tried to claim established I was in those filthy videos. It was a real accident, not carelessness or anything on my part. A boulder that had been firmly anchored for a couple of thousand years decided to give way the same moment I put my weight on it. I fell off on to a sheet of ice and went bouncing and slithering down the fellside for a couple of hundred feet, and when the mountain rescue team reached me, they reckoned I was a goner. Didn’t I mention this in one of my other scribblings? I think I did, so you’ll know that fortunately there was no permanent damage and a few months later I was back on the fells with nothing worse than a heavily scarred back.
But what the experience did do was let me see close-up what a great bunch of guys the mountain rescue team was. They were really good to me. I was too young to join officially, but none of them objected when I started hanging out with them, and a couple of them really took me under their wing and taught me all about proper climbing.
Mind you, I did sometimes have a quiet laugh when they roped me up to do some relatively easy ascent that I’d been scampering up like a monkey all by myself for years, but I was learning sense and kept my gob shut.
Now at last we’re getting to Imogen.
I was fifteen when I first saw her, she was – is – a year younger.
I knew Sir Leon had a daughter and I daresay I’d glimpsed her before, but this was the first time I really noticed her.
Like I said, after that first encounter with Sir Leon, whenever our paths crossed he greeted me as Wolf and always asked very seriously how the rest of the pack was getting on. I’d grunt some response, the way boys do. Once when Dad told me to speak proper, Sir Leon said, ‘No need for that, Fred. The boy’s talking wolf and I understand him perfectly,’ then he grunted something back at me, and smiled so broadly I had to smile back as if I’d understood him. After that he always greeted me with a grunt and a grin.
There was of course no socialization between us peasants and the castle, not even in the old feudal sense: no Christmas parties for the estate staff, no village fêtes in the castle grounds, nothing like that. Sir Leon was a good and fair employer, but his wife, Lady Kira, my dear ma-in-law, called the shots at home.
Scion of a White Russian émigré family, Kira was more tsarist than her ancestors in her social attitudes. She believed servants were serfs, and anything that encouraged familiarity diminished efficiency. For her the term servant covered everyone in the locality. In her eyes we all belonged to the same sub-class, related by frequently incestuous intermarriage, and united in a determination to cheat, rob and, if the opportunity rose, rape our superiors.
I don’t think anyone actually doffed their cap and tugged their forelock as she passed, but she made you feel you ought to.
So when Sir Leon suggested to my dad I might like to come up to the castle one summer day to ‘play with the young ‘uns’ as he put it, we were both flabbergasted.
It turned out they had some house guests who between them had five daughters and one son, a boy of my own age, and Sir Leon felt he needed some male company to prevent his spirit being crushed by the ‘monstrous regiment’ (Sir Leon’s phrase again).
I didn’t want to go, but Dad dug his heels in and said that it was time I learnt some manners and Sir Leon had always been good to me and if for once I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d make bloody sure I didn’t do what I wanted for the rest of the summer holidays and lots of stuff like that, so one bright sunny afternoon I clambered over the boundary wall behind Birkstane and walked through the forest to the castle.
As castles go, it’s not much to write home about, no battlements or towers, not even a moat. It had been a proper castle once, way back in the Middle Ages, I think, but somewhere along the line it got bashed about a bit, whether by cannon balls or just general neglect and decay I don’t know, and when the family started rebuilding, they downsized and what they ended up with was a big house.
But that’s adult me talking. As I emerged from the trees that day, the building loomed ahead as formidable and as huge as Windsor!
Everyone was scattered around the lawn in front of the house. With each step I took, it became more apparent that the Sundaybest outfit that Dad had forced me to wear was entirely the wrong choice. Shorts, jeans, T-shirts abounded, not a hot tweed suit in sight. I almost turned and ran away, but Sir Leon had spotted me and advanced to meet me.
‘Uggh grrr,’ he said in his pretended wolf-speak. ‘Wolf, my boy, so glad you could make it. You look like you could do with a nice cold lemonade. And why don’t you take your jacket and tie off – bit too hot for them on a day like this.’
Thus he managed to get me looking slightly less ridiculous by the time he introduced me to the ‘kids’.
The girls, ranging from eleven to fifteen, more or less ignored me. The boy, stretched out on the grass apparently asleep, rolled over as Sir Leon prodded him with his foot, raised himself on one elbow, and smiled at me.
‘Johnny,’ said Leon, ‘this is Wolf Hadda. Wolf, this is Johnny Nutbrown. Johnny, why don’t you get Wolf a glass of lemonade?’
Then he left us.
Johnny said, ‘Is your name really Wolf?’
‘No. Wilf,’ I said. ‘Sir Leon calls me Wolf.’
‘Then that’s what I’ll call you, if that’s all right,’ he said with a smile.
Then he went and got me a lemonade.
I got no real impression of Johnny from that first encounter. The way he looked, and moved, and talked, he might have been a creature from another planet. As for him, I think even then he was as unperturbed by everything, present, past or future, as I was to find him in later life. He took the arrival of this inarticulate peasant in his stride. I think he was totally unaware that I’d been brought along to keep him company. I can’t believe that being the sole boy among all those girls had troubled him for a moment. That was Sir Leon imagining how he might have felt in the same circumstances.
A tall woman, slim and athletic with a lovely figure and a face whose features were almost too perfect to be beautiful came and looked at me for a second or two with ice-cold eyes, then moved away. That was Lady Kira. The ice-cold look and the accompanying silence set the pattern for most of our future encounters.
I’ve little recollection of any of the other adults. As for the girls, they were just a blur of bright colours and shrill noises. Except for Imogen. Not that I knew it was Sir Leon’s daughter to start with. She was just part of the blur until they started dancing.
Most of the adults had moved off somewhere. Johnny, after two or three attempts at conversation, had given up on me and gone back to sleep. The girls had got hold of a radio or it might have been a portable cassette player, I don’t know. Anyway it was beating out the pop songs of the time and they started dancing. Disco dancing, I suppose it was – it could have been classical ballet for all it meant to me – the music scene, as they term it, was an area of teenage life that entirely passed me by.
But presently as they went through their weird gyrations, one figure began to stand out from the half-dozen, not because she was particularly shapely or anything – in fact she was the skinniest of the lot – but because while the others were very aware of this as a competitive group activity, she was totally absorbed in the music. You got the feeling she would have been doing this if she’d been completely alone in the middle of a desert.
The difference eventually made itself felt even among her fellow dancers, and one by one they slowed down and stopped, till only this single figure still moved, rhythmically, sinuously, as though in perfect harmony not only with the music but with the grass beneath her feet and the blue sky above, and the gently shimmering trees of the distant woodland that formed the backdrop from my viewpoint. Unlike the others, she was wearing a white summer dress of some flimsy material that floated around her as she danced, and her long golden hair wreathed about her head like a halo of sunbeams.
I was entranced, in the strictest sense of the word; drawn into her trance; totally absorbed. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it meant something hugely significant to me. I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted to sit here and watch this small and still totally anonymous figure dancing forever.
Then Johnny who, unseen by me, had woken and sat up, said, ‘Oh God, there goes Imo again. Turn on the music and it sets her off like a monkey on a stick!’
His tone was totally non-malicious, but that didn’t save him.
I punched him on the nose. I didn’t even think about it. I just punched him.
Blood fountained out; one of the remaining adults – maybe it was Johnny’s mother – had been looking our way, and she screamed. Johnny sat there, stock-still, staring down at his cupped hand as it filled with blood.
I just wanted to be as far away from all this as I could get.
Again without thought, I found myself on my feet and heading as fast as I could run towards the welcome shelter of the distant woodland.
My shortest line took me past Imogen. She had stopped dancing and her eyes tracked me towards her and past her and I imagined I could feel them on me still as I covered the couple of hundred yards or so to the sanctuary of the trees.
That is my first memory of Imogen. I think even then, uncouth and untutored though I was, I knew I was hers and she was mine forever.
Just shows how wrong you can be, eh, Elf?
ii
I’ve just read over what I’ve written.
It strikes me this is just the kind of stuff you want, Elf. Childhood trauma, all that crap.
Except maybe I haven’t made it clear: I enjoyed my childhood. It was a magical time. Do you read poetry? I don’t. Rhyme or reason, isn’t that what they say? Well, I’m a reason man. At school I learnt some stuff by rote to keep the teachers happy but I also learnt the trick of instant deletion the minute I’d spouted it. The only bit that’s stuck doesn’t come from my schooldays but from my daughter, Ginny’s.
It was some time in that last summer, ‘08 I mean, it was raining most of the time I recall, perhaps that’s why Ginny got stuck into her holiday assignments early.
At her posh school, they reckoned poetry was important, and one of the things she had to do was write a paraphrase of some lines of Wordsworth. She assumed because I was a Cumbrian lad, I’d know all about him. A father doesn’t like to disappoint his daughter, so I glanced at the passage. A lot of the language was daft and he went all round the houses to say something, but to my amazement I found myself thinking, this bugger’s writing about me!
He was talking about himself as a kid, the things he got up to, climbing steep cliffs, moonlight poaching, going out on the lake, but the lines that stuck were the ones that summed it all up for him.
Fair seed-time had my soul and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.
That was me. I don’t mean fear of being clouted or abused, anything like that. I mean the kind of fear you feel when you’re hanging over a hundred-foot drop by your fingernails or when the night’s so black you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you hear something snuffling in the dark, the fear that makes your sense of being alive so much sharper, that lets you feel the lifeblood pounding through your heart, that makes you want to dance and shout when you beat it and survive!
Do you know what I’m talking about, Elf? Or are you stuck in all that Freudian clart, where everything’s to do with sex, even if you’re dealing with kids before they know what sex is all about?
Me, I was never much interested in sex, not even after my balls dropped. Maybe I was leading such a physical life, I was just too knackered. Of course my cock stood up from time to time and I’d give it a pull and I enjoyed the spasm of pleasure that eventually ensued. But I didn’t have much time for the dirty jokes and mucky books and boasting about what they’d done with girls that most of my schoolmates went in for.
Not that I didn’t have the chance to learn on the job, so to speak. Despite me ignoring them as much as I could, most of the girls seemed more than willing to be friendly, but I couldn’t see any point in wasting time with them that I could have spent scrambling up a wet rock face!
So what you’d likely call significant sexual experience didn’t come my way until…well, let me tell you about it.
Or rather, let me tell myself. I’m not at all sure I shall ever let you see this, Elf, which means I can be completely frank as I’m reserving the right to tear it all to pieces, if that’s what I decide.
So let’s go back to me taking off into the woods, leaving Imogen staring after me, Johnny Nutbrown bleeding from the nose, his parents puce with indignation, Sir Leon hugely disappointed and Lady Kira flaring her nostrils in her favourite what-did-you-expect expression.
Of course I’m just guessing at most of that, apart from Johnny’s nose. What I’m certain I left behind was the jacket and tie I’d taken off at Sir Leon’s suggestion.
He came round to Birkstane with them that evening.
I was in my bedroom. Naturally I’d said nothing about the events of the day to either Dad or Aunt Carrie, just muttered something in reply to their question as to whether I’d had a good time.
I heard the car pull up outside and when I looked out and recognized Sir Leon’s Range Rover, I thought of climbing out of the window and doing a bunk.
Then I saw there was still someone in the car after Sir Leon had climbed out of the driver’s seat.
It was Imogen, her pale face pressed against the window, staring up at me.
For a moment our gazes locked. I don’t know what my face showed but hers showed nothing.
Then Dad roared, ‘Wilf! Get yourself down here!’
The time for flight was past. I went down and met my fate.
It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Sir Leon was very laid back about things. He said boys always fight, it’s in their genes, and he was sure my blow had been more in sport than in earnest, and Johnny’s nose wasn’t broken, and he was sure a little note of apology would set all things well.
Dad stood over me while I wrote it.
Dear Johnny, I’m really sorry I made your nose bleed, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident. Yours sincerely Wilfred Hadda.
Dad also wanted me to write to Lady Kira, but Sir Leon said that wouldn’t be necessary, he’d pass on my verbal apologies.
As he left, he punched me lightly on the arm and said, ‘Us wolves need to pick our moments to growl, eh?’
I expected Dad to really whale into me after Sir Leon had gone, but he just looked at me and said, ‘So that’s a lesson to us both, lad, one I thought I’d learned a long time back. My fault. Folks like us and folks like the Ulphingstones don’t mix.’
‘Because they’re better than us?’ I asked.
‘Nay!’ he said sharply. ‘The Haddas are as good as any bugger. But if you put banties in with turtle doves, you’re going to get ructions!’
And that was it. He obviously felt in part responsible. Me, I suppose I should have been delighted to get off so lightly, but as I lay in bed that night, all I could think of was Imogen, and why she’d accompanied her father to Birkstane.
I found out the next day. She wanted to be sure she knew how to get there by herself. I left the house as usual straight after breakfast, i.e. about seven a.m. Dad got up at six and so did Aunt Carrie. Breakfast was the one meal of the day she could be relied on for, so long as you were happy to have porridge followed by scrambled egg, sausage and black pudding all the year round. If I decided to have a lie-in, the penalty was I had to make my own, so usually I got up.
It was a beautiful late July morning. The sun had been up for a good hour and a half and the morning mists were being sucked up the wooded fellside behind the house, clinging on to the tall pines like the last gauzy garments of a teasing stripper.
I hadn’t any definite plan, it might well turn into a pleasant pottering-about, basking kind of day with a dip in the lake at the end of it, but in case I got the urge to do a bit of serious scrambling, I looped a shortish length of rope over my rucksack and clipped a couple of karabiners and slings to my belt.
I hadn’t gone a hundred yards before Imogen stepped out from behind a tree and blocked my path.
I didn’t know what to say so said nothing.
She was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and trainers. On her back was a small pack, on her head a huge sunhat that shaded her face so I could not see her expression.
She said, ‘Johnny says you punched him ‘cos he was rude about my dancing. He said if I saw you to tell you he’s OK and it was a jolly good punch.’
I remember feeling surprise. In Nutbrown’s shoes I don’t think I’d have been anywhere near as gracious. In fact I know bloody well I wouldn’t!
I said, ‘Is that what you’ve come to tell us? Grand. Then I’ll be off.’
I pushed by her rudely and strode away. I thought I’d left her standing but after a moment I heard her voice behind me saying, ‘So where are we going?’
I spun round to face her and snapped, ‘I’m going climbing. Don’t know where you’re going. Don’t care either.’
In case you’re wondering, Elf, how come I was talking like this to the same girl I’d fallen for so utterly and irreversibly just the day before, you should recall I was a fifteen-year-old lad, uncouth as they came, with even fewer communication skills than most of the breed because there were so very few people I wanted to communicate with.
Also, let’s be honest, standing still in shorts and trainers with her golden hair hidden beneath that stupid hat, it was hard to believe this was the visionary creature I’d seen dancing on the lawn.
My mind was in a whirl so I set off again because that seemed the only alternative to standing there, looking at her.
She fell into step beside me when the terrain permitted, a yard behind me when it didn’t. I set a cracking pace, a lot faster than I would have done if I’d been by myself, but it didn’t seem to trouble her. When I got to the lake, that’s Wastwater, I deliberately headed along the path on the south-east side, the one at the foot of what they call the Screes, a thousand feet or so of steep, unstable rock that only an idiot would mess with. Even the so-called path that tracks the lake’s edge is a penance, involving a tedious mile or so of scrambling across awkwardly placed boulders. I thought that would soon shake her off, but she was still there at the far end. So now I crossed the valley and went up by the inn at Wasdale Head into Mosedale, not stopping until I reached Black Sail Pass between Kirk Fell and Pillar.
This was a good six miles over some pretty rough ground and she was still with me, no more out of breath than I was. Now I found I had a dilemma. The further I went, particularly if as usual I wandered off the main well-trodden paths, the more I’d be stuck with her. But she could easily retrace the path we’d come by back to the valley road, and on a day like this, there would be plenty of walkers tracking across Black Sail, so I felt I could dump her here without too much trouble to my conscience.
I sat down and took a drink from the bottle of water I carried in my sack. She produced a can of cola and drank from that.
I said, ‘That’s stupid.’
‘Why’s that?’ she said, not sounding offended but genuinely interested.
‘Because you can’t seal it up again like a bottle. You’ve got to drink the lot.’
‘So I’ll drink the lot.’
‘What happens when you get thirsty again?’
‘I’ll open another one,’ she said, grinning and shaking her rucksack till I could hear several cans rattling against each other. ‘Like a drink?’
She offered me the can. I shook my head. I wouldn’t have minded, but drinking out of a can that had touched her mouth seemed a bit too intimate when I was planning to dump her.
I said, ‘Won’t your mam and dad be worrying about you?’
She said, ‘No. They think I’m out walking up Greendale with Jules and Pippa.’
These it emerged were two of the other girls I’d seen the previous day. Imogen had proposed they all went out walking today, but when she revealed her plan involved getting up really early, two of them had dropped out. It said much for her powers of persuasion that she’d persuaded the other two to go along with her. It said even more that she’d got them to agree to cover up for her when she announced she was taking off on her own the moment they were out of sight of the castle.
‘I’ve arranged to meet them at five,’ she said, ‘so that gives us plenty of time.’
‘To do what?’ I was foolish enough to ask.
‘Whatever you’re going to do,’ she said expectantly. ‘Sounds like it could be fun. A lot better than anything that was likely to happen with Jules and Pippa.’
It turned out she’d made enquiries about me, of Sir Leon and also of some of the locals who worked at the castle.
From them she’d learned that I spent most of my spare time roaming the countryside, ‘getting up to God knows what kind of mischief’. She heard the story of my accident, my miraculous survival, and my subsequent exploits with some of the mountain rescue team. She’d also learned that I was usually up with the lark, so when she resolved to tag along with me, she knew she had to contrive an early start.
The trouble was, in letting her explain all this to me, I had taken a significant step towards the role of fellow conspirator. If I tried to dump her, I could now see that she was quite capable of following at a distance. I could have tried to take her back to the castle, but I had no way to compel her. And one thing I knew for certain, if ever it became known that she hadn’t spent the day with her friends, no way would my pleas of complete innocence cut any ice with Lady Kira.
So I was stuck with her. The best plan looked to be to keep her occupied a couple of hours and above all make sure that she kept her rendezvous with the other two girls.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Time to move.’
We stood up. I noticed she just left her Coke can lying on the ground. I gave it a kick. She looked down at it, looked up at me, thought for a moment, then grinned and picked it up and stuffed it into her sack.
Daft, but somehow that acknowledgement that I was the boss gave me a thrill, so rather than simply lead her up the main track on to Pillar, I decided to take her round by the High Level route that winds above Ennerdale and eventually leads to the summit by a steep scramble at the back of Pillar Rock.
It was a bad mistake. It turned out she’d heard of Pillar Rock because a friend’s brother had had a fall there in the spring and broken both his legs.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. I know a couple of the guys who brought him down. They said him and his mates were real wankers, didn’t know what they were doing.’
‘My friend said her brother had been climbing in the Alps,’ she protested.
‘Oh yeah? Can’t have been all that good if he managed to come off the Slab and Notch,’ I declared, annoyed that my mountain rescue friends’ verdict should be called in doubt. ‘It’s nowt but a scramble. Don’t even need a rope.’
This was laying it on a bit thick. OK, in terms of climbing difficulty, this most popular route up the Rock really is classed as a Grade-3 scramble. But it’s got tremendous exposure. If you come off, you fall a long way. Only real climbers, or real idiots, go up there without a rope. The guy they brought down in the spring was lucky to get away with nothing worse than a couple of smashed legs.
She said, ‘You’ve been up it then?’
‘Couple of times.’
‘By yourself?’
‘Yeah.’
It was true. The first time I’d been ten and back then I suppose I was a real idiot. I was like a spider, scuttling up rock faces that give me vertigo now just thinking about them. How the hell I never got cragfast, I don’t know.
I’d got a bit more sense since my close encounter with the mountain rescue, but I still liked climbing by myself. The second time I went up Pillar Rock had been the previous spring. After I heard my mountain rescue friends talking about the accident, some ghoulish subconscious impulse took me back there. I remember pausing in the Notch and looking down and picturing the guy tumbling through the air. I wondered what it must feel like. All I had to do to find out was let go.
Don’t worry, it wasn’t a serious thought. If I was going to fall, it would be off something that would impress my rescue mates! But dismissing the Slab and Notch as a ‘mere’ scramble now got me into more bother.
‘Let’s go up there then,’ she said.
‘With you? No way!’
‘Why not? You just said it was dead easy.’
‘Yeah, but not for someone like you.’
‘What do you mean, like me? We do climbing at my school. I’ve been on the wall at the sports centre.’
This was true, though, as I learned later, Imogen’s desire to take up rock climbing seriously had provoked a loud and unified negative from her parents, and the school had been instructed to make sure she didn’t get near the wall again.
Well, her parents might have got their way, but with me it was no contest.
In my defence, she did make it clear that she was going to have a go with or without me, and by going along with her at least I could make sure she was on the end of my rope.
And to tell the truth, this readiness of hers to go spidering up a rock face the way I’d been doing for years had an effect on me like the sight of her dancing on the lawn.
So up we went, me first, then Imogen after I’d got her belayed. There were no problems, and she clearly wasn’t in the slightest fazed by having several hundred feet of air beneath her at the most exposed points.
It was worth it just to see her face as she stood on the top of the rock.
It’s a marvellous place to be, beautifully airy in three directions with the huge bulk of Pillar Fell itself looming behind.
She drank it all in then she turned towards me, a wide smile on her face.
‘Thanks,’ she said, pulling her hat off so that her golden hair once more floated in the gentle breeze.
Then in one fluid movement she pulled her T-shirt over her head, kicked off her trainers, pushed down her shorts and stepped out of them.
‘Would you like to fuck me?’ she said.
I stood staring at her, dumbfounded.
Part of me was thinking that anyone on their way up the path to the summit of Pillar has a perfect view of the top of the rock.
Another part was thinking there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen. She was as far as you could get from those pneumatic images in the porn mags that got passed around at school.
But despite the danger of being overlooked, despite her lack of any obvious feminine attractiveness, my heart and my soul and, yes, my body was crying out in answer to her question: Oh yes, I’d like to fuck you very much!
And I did.
What was it like? It was a first for me, and for her too. I knew that because I ended up with blood on my cock. So, a pair of raw virgins, but we meshed like we’d been doing it for years, and unless they ran lessons in faking it at that expensive boarding school of hers, she enjoyed it every bit as much as I did. I can’t take any credit for that. While it was happening I was totally absorbed in my own feelings. But afterwards as we lay wrapped in each other’s arms, I knew I wanted this to be for ever.
In the end it was her who pushed me away and stood up.
‘Mustn’t be late,’ she said, ‘or those two will run scared and give the game away.’
She got dressed as quickly as she’d stripped, but not through any modest need to cover up. I’ve never met anyone as unselfconscious as Imogen.
I lay there and watched her, then followed suit. She would have done the descent unroped, but I wouldn’t let her.
On the long walk back I don’t think we exchanged more than half a dozen words. There was lots I wanted to say but, like I told you, communication wasn’t my thing.
With about a quarter mile to go she halted and put her hand on my chest.
‘I’m OK from now on,’ she said.
I said, ‘Yeah. When…how…?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you when I want you.’
And she was gone.
So there you have it, Elf. Sex, rites of passage, teenage trauma, all the steamy stuff you people like to paddle your inquisitive little fingers in.
Watch out that you don’t find yourself touching something nasty!
But that’s what turns you on, isn’t it?
That’s what turns you on!
Elf (#ulink_ab421730-5635-572d-9b61-8276d8e79000)
i
When she was thirteen Alva Ozigbo’s English teacher had asked her class to write about what they wanted to be when they grew up.
That night Alva sat so long over the assignment that both her parents asked if there was something they could help with.
She regarded them long and assessingly before shaking her head.
Her father, Ike, big, black and ebullient, was a consultant cardiologist at the Greater Manchester Teaching Hospital. Her mother, Elvira, slender, blonde and self-contained, had been an actress. She’d left her native Sweden in her teens to study in London in the belief that the English-speaking world would offer far greater opportunities. For a while her Scandinavian looks had got her parts that required Scandinavian looks, but it soon became clear that her best future lay on the stage. The nearest she got to a film career was being screentested for a Bergman movie. She still talked of it as a missed opportunity but the truth was the camera didn’t love her. On screen she became almost transparent, and by her mid-twenties she was resigned to a career of secondary roles in the theatre. She was Dina in The Pillars of the Community at the Royal Exchange when she met Ike Ozigbo. When they married six months later, she made a rare joke as they walked down the aisle together after the ceremony.
‘I always knew I’d get a starring role one day.’
To which he’d romantically replied, ‘And it’s going to be a recordbreaking run!’
So it had proved.
Thirteen-year-old Alva was proud of her father, but it had always been her mother she pestered for stories of her life on the stage. Now, after vacillating for a good hour between the two main exemplars in her life, it was not without a small twinge of disloyalty that she finally wrote that what she wanted to be was an actress.
At the time she meant it. But somewhere over the next few years that urge to get inside the skin of a character had changed from interpretation to analysis. She discovered that wanting to understand was not the same as wanting to be. The actress had to lose herself in the part; Alva found that she wanted to preserve herself, to remain the detached observer even as all the intricate wirings of personality and motivation were laid bare.
Psychiatry gave her that option, but she soon discovered that the observer had to be an actor too. When she read Hadda’s account of his first encounters with Imogen, she felt a great surge of excitement. To be sure, there was a deal of hyperbole here. The bolder the picture he painted of himself as the victim of a grand passion for one woman, the dimmer his sense of that other degrading and disgusting passion became. But in his effort to stress that his love for Imogen was based on some collision of mind and spirit rather than simply a natural adolescent lust, he had fallen into a trap of his own setting.
What did he say? Here it was…there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen…Yet he’d been sexually roused by this prepubescent figure, and sexually satisfied too. This was probably what he saw in his fantasies thereafter, this was the source of those desires that had brought about his downfall.
She recalled a passage in the first piece he’d written for her, when he was in his best hard-nosed thriller mode.
Imogen was sitting up in bed by this time. Even in these fraught circumstances I was distracted by sight of her perfect breasts.
Stressing his red-blooded maleness, trying to distract her attention, and his own, away from the fact that it was unformed new-budding bosoms that really turned him on.
And now she knew she would need to call upon her acting skills when next she saw him. She must give no hint that she saw in this narrative anything more than an honest and moving account of first love. Indeed, it might be well to give him a quick glimpse of that Freudian prurience he was accusing her of. He was, she judged, a man who liked to be right, who was used to having his assessments of people and policies confirmed. No way could she hope to drive such a man to that final climactic confrontation with his own dark inner self, but with care and patience she might eventually lead him there.
Another spur to caution was the fact that he’d obviously got the writing bug. She’d seen this happen in other cases. The people she dealt with were more often than not obsessive characters and this was something she liked to use to her advantage. Her guess was that he’d have another exercise book ready for her, but if she annoyed him, he’d punish her by not handing it over.
That was his weapon.
Hers of course was his desire that what he wrote should be read! Withholding it might punish her, but only at the expense of punishing himself.
So she prepared for her next session with more than usual care.
ii
‘Wolf,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your father.’
‘What?’
She’d wrong-footed him, she could tell. He’d expected her to home in on that first sexual engagement on top of Pillar Rock.
‘Fred, your father. Is he still alive?’
‘Ah. I see where we’re going. Oedipus stuff, right? No, I didn’t blame him for my mother’s death; no, I didn’t want to kill him; and no, just in case you’re too shy to ask, he never abused me in any way. Unless you count the odd clip around the ear, that is.’
‘In some circumstances, I might indeed count that,’ she said, smiling. ‘I was just wondering about his attitude to what’s happened, that’s all. You do indicate that when it came to your marriage with Imogen, he wasn’t all that keen.’
That got the flicker of a smile. The smiles, though hardly regular, came more frequently now. She took that as a sign of progress, though, paradoxically, in physical terms her goal was tears, not smiling.
‘That’s putting it mildly,’ he said. ‘He was even more opposed than Sir Leon. He at least in the end gave his daughter away. Dad wouldn’t even come to the wedding.’
‘Did that hurt you very much?’
‘Of course it bloody hurt me,’ he said angrily. ‘But I was ready for it, I suppose. He wasn’t exactly supportive when I started bettering myself. I thought he’d be proud of me, but he made it quite clear that he thought I’d have done better to follow in his footsteps and become a forester.’
‘Did he have any reason to think that was what you were going to do?’
Hadda shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I’d always gone along with the assumption that I’d leave school as soon as I could and start working under him on the estate. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I loved working with him, I’d been wielding an axe almost since I was big enough to pick up a teddy bear without falling over. And working outdoors in the countryside I loved seemed the best way of carrying on the way I was.’
‘So what changed?’
‘Don’t act stupid. You know what changed. I met Imogen.’
‘You carried on meeting after that first time?’
‘Obviously. All that summer, whenever we could. She needed to keep quiet about it of course. Me too. It was easier in my case, I just went on as normal, taking off in the morning with my walking and climbing gear. She had to make excuses. She was good at that, I guess. She couldn’t manage every day, but if three days went by without her showing up, I started getting seriously frustrated.’
‘You continued having sex?’
‘Why wouldn’t we?’
‘She was under age. And the danger of pregnancy. Did you start using condoms?’
‘No, she said she’d taken care of all that. As for her age, I suppose I was under age too to start with. Anyway, it never crossed my mind. We were at it all the time. Always out of doors and in all weathers. On the fellside, in the forest.’
He smiled reminiscently.
‘There was this old rowan tree that had survived among all the conifers that had been planted commercially on the estate. We often used to meet there early morning or late evening if one of us couldn’t manage to get away for the whole day. Imo would slip out of the castle and I would go over the wall behind Birkstane, and be there in twenty minutes or so. We didn’t even have to make a special arrangement. It was like we both knew the other would be there under the tree.’
‘This was the rowan you had dug up and transplanted to your London garden?’
He said, ‘You remembered! Yes, the very same. They were harvesting the conifers in that part of the forest and it looked as if the rowan would simply be mowed down to give the big machines access. So I saved it. A romantic gesture, don’t you think?’
‘More sentimental, I’d say. Men in particular look back fondly on their adolescent encounters. Pleasure without responsibility, I can see its attraction. So you’d meet under this tree, have a quick bang, then go home?’
This was a deliberate provocation. The clue to what he’d become had to lie in this first significant sexual relationship.
He looked at her coldly.
‘It wasn’t like that. We drew each other like magnets. I felt her presence wherever I was, whatever I was doing. She was always with me. Under the rowan we were in total union, but no matter how far apart physically, she was always with me.’
She was tempted to probe how he felt now, whether he still believed that Imogen had genuinely shared that intensity of feeling. But she judged this wasn’t the right moment. Concentrate on getting the facts.
‘So when did it end?’
‘How do you know it ended?’
‘Because it had to. From what you say of Lady Kira, she wasn’t going to be fooled for ever. Also that first piece you wrote, the one about living in a fairy tale, in it you talk about the woodcutter’s son being given three impossible tasks and going away and performing them. That implies an ending – and a new beginning, of course.’
‘Did I write that? Yes, I did, didn’t I? It seems a long time ago, somehow.’
‘Three weeks,’ she said.
‘Is that all? We’ve come a long way.’
He spoke neutrally and she was tempted to probe but decided against it. The more progress you made, the more dangerous the ground became.
‘So, the end,’ she said.
‘It was in the Christmas holidays,’ he said slowly. ‘We’d both gone back to school in the autumn, her to her fancy ladies’ college in the south, me to the comp. I couldn’t wait for the term to finish.’
‘You didn’t think she might have had second thoughts about your relationship during those months apart?’
‘Never crossed my mind,’ he said wearily. ‘Not vanity, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just a certainty, like knowing the sun would rise. But when we met in December, it was harder for us to get whole days together when the weather was bad. I mean, a teenage girl wanting to go for a solitary stroll in the summer sunshine is one thing. In a winter gale it’s much more suspicious. We met more and more often under the rowan tree. A blizzard blew up, it was practically a white-out. We sheltered among the trees till things improved a bit, then I insisted on accompanying her back through the grounds till the castle was in sight. Sir Leon had got worried and organized a little search party that included my dad. We met them on the estate drive. I’d have tried to bluff it out, say I’d run into Imogen somewhere and offered to see her home, but she didn’t bother. I think she was right. They weren’t going to believe us. I went home with Fred, she went home with Sir Leon to face her mother.’
‘What did Fred say?’
‘He asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him we were in love, that I was going to marry her as soon as I legally could. He said, “Forget the law, there’s no law ever passed that’ll let you marry that lass!” I said, “Why not? There’s nowt anyone can say that’ll make a difference.” And he laughed, more snarl than a laugh, and he said that up at the castle the difference had been made a long time back. I didn’t know what he meant, not until the next day.’
‘You saw Imogen again?’ guessed Alva.
‘Oh yes. Sir Leon brought her down to Birkstane. They left us alone together. I grabbed hold of her and began gabbling about it making no difference, we could still do what we planned, we could run away together, and so on, lots of callow adolescent stuff. She pushed me away and said, sort of puzzled, “Wolf, don’t talk silly. We never planned anything.” And she was right, I realized later. All the plans had been in my head.’
‘And was this when she set you the three impossible tasks?’ asked Alva.
‘Who’s a clever little shrink then?’ he mocked. ‘Yes, suddenly this girl every bit of whose body I knew as well as my own turned into something as cold and distant as the North Pole. She said she was sorry, it had been great fun, but she’d assumed I knew as well as she did that it would have to come to an end eventually. I managed to stutter, “Why?” And she told me. With brutal frankness.’
His face darkened at the memory, still potent after all these years.
Alva prompted, ‘What did she say?’
‘She said surely I could see how impossible it would be for her to marry someone who couldn’t speak properly, had neither manners nor education, and was likely to remain on a working man’s wage all his life.’
Jesus! thought Alva. They really do bring their princesses up differently!
‘So these were the three impossible tasks?’ she said. ‘Get elocution lessons, get educated, get rich. And you resolved you would amaze everyone by performing them?’
‘Don’t be silly. I had a short fuse, remember? I went into a right strop, told her she was a stuck-up little cow just like her mam, that I weren’t ashamed to talk the way everyone else round here talked, that a Hadda were as good as an Ulphingstone any day of the week, and that my dad said all a man needs is enough money to buy what’s necessary for him to live. She smiled and said, “Clearly you don’t put me in that category. That’s good. I’ll see you around.” And she went.’
‘She sounds very self-contained for a fourteen-year-old,’ said Alva.
‘She was fifteen by then,’ he said, as if this made a difference. ‘And I was sixteen.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I moped all over Christmas. Must have been unliveable with. Dad headed off to the Dog as often as he could. Then New Year came. Time for resolutions about changing your life, according to the guys on the telly. I started fantasizing about leaving home, having lots of adventures, striking it rich by finding a gold mine or something, then returning, all suave and sexy like one of them TV presenters, to woo Imogen. Only she wouldn’t know it was me till she’d been overcome by my manly charms. Pathetic, eh?’
‘We all have our dreams,’ said Alva, recalling her teenage fantasies of collecting a best actress Oscar.
‘Yeah. I’d like to say I set off to chase mine, but it wouldn’t be true. I just knew that, whatever I wanted, I wasn’t going to get it hanging around in Cumbria. So I set off to school one morning with everything I owned in my sports bag and all the money I could raise in my pocket. And I just kept on going. The rest as they say is history.’
‘I’d still like to hear it,’ said Alva.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘You strike me as a conscientious little researcher. The meteoric rise of Wilfred Hadda from uncouth Cumbrian peasant to multi-millionaire master of the universe has been charted so often you must have got it by heart!’
‘Indeed,’ she said, reaching into her document case. ‘I’ve got copies of most of the articles here. There’s general agreement on events after your return. But their guesses at what you did between running away as a poor woodcutter’s son and coming back with your rough edges smoothed and enough money in the bank to launch your business career make speculation about Lord Lucan read like a Noddy story. Anyone get close?’
‘How would I know? I never read them. Which looks best to you?’
‘Well, I’m torn between the South American diamond mine and the Mexican lottery. But on the whole I’d go for the Observer writer, who reckons you probably got kidnapped by the fairies, like True Thomas in the ballad.’
That made him laugh, a rare sound, the kind of laugh that made you want to join in.
‘Yeah, go with that one,’ he said. ‘Away with the fairies, that’s about right. Did he have a good time, this Thomas fellow?’
‘It was a strange place they took him too,’ said Alva. ‘Hang on, he quotes from the ballad in his article. You’ll have to excuse my Scots accent.’
She opened the file and began to read.
‘It was mirk mirk night, there was nae stern light,
And they waded through red blude to the knee;
For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth
Rins through the springs o’ that countrie.’
When she finished he nodded vigorously and said, ‘Oh yes, that guy knows what he’s talking about. So how did Thomas make out when he got back?’
‘Well, he had a bit of a problem, Wolf,’ she said. ‘The one condition of his return was that thereafter he was never able to tell a lie.’
Their gazes locked. Then he smiled, not his attractive winning smile this time, but something a lot more knowing, almost mocking.
‘Just like me then, Elf,’ he said. ‘That old lie-detector mind of yours must have spotted long ago that you’re getting nothing but gospel truth from me!’
‘Gospel? Somehow I doubt if your runaway years had much of religion in them!’
‘You’re so wrong, Elf,’ he said with a grin. ‘I was a regular attender at chapel.’
‘Chapel?’ she said. ‘Not church? That’s interesting. None of the speculation in the papers suggested a religious dimension to your disappearance.’
‘For God’s sake,’ he said, suddenly irritated. ‘Can we get away from what those fantasists dream up? Look, Elf, I’m trying to be honest with you, but if I say there’s something I don’t want to talk about, you’ve got to accept it, OK?’
‘OK, OK,’ she said making a note. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. Age twenty-one, you’re back with a suitcase full of cash, talking like a gent, no longer sucking your peas off your knife, and able to tell a hawk from a handsaw. How did Imogen greet you?’
‘She asked me to dinner at the castle. There were two or three other guests. Sir Leon was very polite to me. Lady Kira watched me like the Ice Queen but hardly spoke. I joined in the conversation, managed to use the right cutlery and didn’t knock over any wine glasses. After dinner Imogen took me out into the garden, allegedly to cast my so-called expert eye over a new magnolia planted to replace one that hadn’t made it through the winter. Out of sight of the house she stopped and turned to face me. “Well, will I do?” I asked. “Let’s see,” she said. And stepped out of her dress with the same ease that she’d stepped out of her shorts and trainers on Pillar Rock all those years ago. When we finished, she said, “You’ll do.” Couple of months later we married.’
‘Despite all the family objections?’
‘We had a trump card by then. Imo was pregnant. With Ginny. Made no difference to Dad and Sir Leon. They still stood out against the marriage. But Lady Kira seemed to see it made sense and that was enough. She calls the shots at the castle. Always did. So poor Leon had no choice but to give his blessing, and shake the mothballs out of his morning dress to give the bride away.’
‘Poor Leon?’ she echoed. ‘You sound as if you have some sympathy for him.’
‘Why not? He’s married to the Ice Queen, isn’t he? No, fair do’s, he may not have wanted me for his son-in-law, but I always got on well with Leon. And he went out of his way to try to make things right between me and my dad. Just about managed it the first two times. Third time was beyond human help.’
‘I’m sorry…?’
Hadda said bleakly, ‘Think about it. They say things come in threes, don’t they? They certainly did for Fred. One, I disappeared for five years. Two, I came back and married Imogen against his wish and his judgment. Three, I got sent down for fraud and messing with young girls. Three times I broke his heart. The last time it didn’t mend.’
And who do you blame for that? wondered Alva. But this wasn’t the time to get aggressive, not when she’d got him talking about what had to be one of the most significant relationships in his life.
She said, ‘But the first two times, you say Leon tried to help?’
‘Oh yes. I think he recognized Dad and me were carved from the same rock. Left to our own devices, we’d probably never have spoken again! Don’t know what he said to Fred about me, but he told me that, after I vanished, often he’d go into the forest with Imogen, and they’d find Dad just sitting slumped against the old rowan, staring into space, completely out of it. Sometimes there’d be tears on his cheeks. It cracked me up, just hearing about it. So whenever I felt like telling Dad that if he wanted to be a stubborn old fool, he could just get on with it, I’d think of what Leon had told me and try to bite my tongue. Gradually things got better between us. And when Ginny was born…’
He stopped abruptly and glared at her as if defying her to question him further about his daughter.
She said, ‘So did Fred attend the wedding?’
‘Oh no,’ said Wolf, relaxing. ‘That would have been too much. I hoped right up till the ceremony started he’d show up. Then, once it started, I was scared he might!’
‘Why?’
‘That bit when the vicar asks if anyone knows of any impediment, I imagined the church door bursting open and Fred coming in with his axe and yelling, “How’s this for an impediment?” I remember, after the vicar asked the question he seemed to pause for ever. Then Johnny glanced round to the back of the church and shouted, “Speak up then” and that set everyone laughing.’
‘Johnny…?’
‘Johnny Nutbrown. He was my best man.’
‘A large step from being the nose-bleeding object of your anger,’ she said. ‘How did that come about?’
‘You mean, how come I didn’t have any old friends of my own to take on the job? Simple. I was always a loner and the few half friendships I formed at school didn’t survive my transformation, as you call it.’
‘But didn’t you make any new ones during this transformation period?’ she asked. ‘Even lowly woodcutters on a quest to perform three impossible tasks probably need a bit of human contact on the way.’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t meet any others,’ he said shortly.
Then he pushed back his chair and stood up, reaching into his blouson as he did so.
‘You’re curious about me and Johnny Nutbrown?’ he said. ‘Well, I think you’ll find all you need to know in here.’
And there it was, the next exercise book just as she’d hypothesized.
But by producing it he had once again stepped aside from talking about those missing years, so as she took the book, she felt it less as a triumph than an evasion.
Wolf (#ulink_df6435da-fb2e-5694-bf1d-cde89612c97f)
i
Let’s move on from our little diversion into childhood trauma and adolescent sexuality, shall we? Where was I before you nudged me down that fascinating side road?
Oh yes.
I’d been in a coma for the best part of nine months.
During the early stages of my so-called recovery, I’ve no idea what proportion of my time I spent out of things. All I do know is that every period of full lucidity seemed to provide the opportunity for a new piece of shit to be hurled at me.
I rapidly came to see that, far from things going away while I lay unconscious, they had got immeasurably and by now irrecoverably worse.
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Reginald Hill
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A fast-moving, stunning new standalone psychological thriller – from the award-winning author of the Dalziel and Pascoe seriesWolf Hadda has lead a charmed life. From humble origins as a woodcutter’s son, he has risen to become a hugely successful entrepreneur, happily married to the girl of his dreams.A knock on the door one morning ends it all. Thrown into prison while protesting his innocence, Wolf retreats into silence. Seven years later prison psychiatrist Alva Ozigbo makes a breakthrough: Wolf begins to talk. Under her guidance he gets parole, returning to his rundown family home in rural Cumbria.But there is a mysterious period in Wolf’s youth when he disappeared from home and was known to his employers as the Woodcutter. And now the Woodcutter is back, looking for the truth – and revenge.