The Woodcutter

by Reginald Hill

  Alva said, ‘None of my grannies was English. Do English grannies suck a lot of eggs?’

  He said, ‘It’s a condition of service. Listen, I just wanted to say . . .’

  What he just wanted to say was drowned in a burst of noise.

  She said, ‘Say again. I didn’t get that.’

  He said, ‘Sorry, radio on. Look, I’ve got to dash. You take care.’

  Then he was gone, leaving her looking at her phone and wondering whether she should check the radio schedules to see if there was anything on that might be broadcasting a noise like a loudspeaker announcement on a railway platform or in an airport.

  Of course she didn’t. Her life was too busy for luxuries like reading the Radio Times.

  But she felt disappointed when he didn’t ring again and found it difficult to analyse why.

  Two days after Boxing Day, things (meaning Elvira) had settled down enough for Alva to think of accessing her London apartment phone to check on messages. She’d made sure everyone likely to want to contact her had known she’d be away, so there weren’t many, and only one that held her attention. It had been left the previous day.

  ‘Dr Ozigbo, this is Imogen Estover. I thought it might be useful for us to talk. I’m up here at the castle for a few more days, then I’ll be back in London.’

  She left her mobile number and the message ended. Her voice had been cool, almost expressionless, but Alva would have recognized it even if she hadn’t given her name.

  Useful. To whom, she wondered as she saved the mobile number.

  She thought of ringing back that same evening, but decided to sleep on it.

  Next morning as she helped Elvira with the breakfast dishes, her phone rang.

  The display showed a Cumbrian number. Either Hadda or his ex-wife, she guessed as she put it to her ear. But she was wrong. It was Luke Hollins.

  She went out of the kitchen into the garden. It was chilly, but here she could keep an eye on her mother through the window with no risk of being overheard.

  ‘Dr Ozigbo, hi, I’ve been meaning to ring to see how your father is, but it’s been a busy time for me. So how are things?’

  She’d rung him before Christmas to explain why she hadn’t contacted him as promised before leaving Cumbria.

  After she’d brought him up to date on Ike, he said, ‘That’s good to hear. You’ll be staying on there for a while?’

  ‘I was always planning to stay till the New Year,’ she said, not adding her mental rider, unless my mother has driven me to flight with her catechism about my private life!

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  He wants to tell me something but is reluctant to pile more stuff on me during a family crisis, she thought. There was only one possible topic.

  She said, ‘How are things at Birkstane?’

  That turned on the tap. He told her about his encounter with the Ulphingstones on Christmas Day.

  ‘I got worried, so I called at the house on Boxing Day. Not a sign. I tried again yesterday. Still nothing. The Defender wasn’t in the barn. Of course no reason why he couldn’t have been out all day. So I was up there at the crack this morning. Nothing. There’s no escaping it, he’s not here, probably hasn’t been here since before Christmas.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ said Alva. ‘The terms of his licence don’t preclude movement within the country.’

  ‘Yes, I realize that, but he’d need to keep his probation officer informed, I should have thought? And definitely the police?’

  ‘So have you checked?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Hollins hesitantly. ‘To tell the truth, I didn’t want to stir things up unnecessarily. I thought maybe you . . .’

  ‘I see,’ said Alva.

  What she saw was how yet again the priest’s personal liking for Wolf was at odds with his pastoral concerns. She should have been irritated by his efforts to share the problem with her, but she realized she wasn’t.

  She could see Elvira behind the kitchen window, still at the sink, watching her as she dried and re-dried the same cup.

  She’s dying to know if there’s a man in my life! thought Alva. How would she react if I told her there were two men, one a convicted pederast, the other a married vicar!

  She waved at the watching woman and raised her face to catch the morning sun still low on the south-eastern horizon. It wasn’t nine o’clock yet. The day stretched before her, full of hospital smells and Elvira’s subtle questioning. The sky was cloudless. She took a deep breath of the sharp air and it seemed to scour her mind.

  The motorway wouldn’t be back to its normal overcrowded state yet. She could be back in Cumbria in a couple of hours. To do what?

  Hollins said, ‘Hello? Dr Ozigbo, are you still there?’

  She said, ‘Yes, sorry. Look, are you going to be around later this morning? I could come up . . .’

  He said, ‘Great. That would be helpful.’

  She wanted to ask him, How exactly? but it didn’t seem apt.

  She said, ‘Till later then,’ switched off and went back into the kitchen.

  ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘would you mind if I ducked out of the visits today?’

  ‘Of course not, dear. You deserve a break. Is it something special you want to do?’

  ‘I thought I might take a little drive and maybe look up an old friend.’

  ‘Anyone I know?’ said Elvira, very casual.

  ‘I think you know all my old friends, Mum,’ she said.

  Her mother smiled but didn’t press.

  She’s spotted that there’s more going on than I’m saying, thought Alva, but naturally her interpretation’s romantic. A date, an assignation, even an affair!

  She gave her mother a hug and said, ‘Great. Give my love to Daddy. I’ll be home this evening some time. Don’t wait supper for me.’

  As she drove away from the house, she felt a pang of guilt at her own sense of release. It had come as a disappointment to her as a student to realize that understanding the often irrational origins of common emotions didn’t stop you feeling them. When she told her father this, he’d boomed his great laugh and said, ‘Even dentists get toothache!’

  And even cardiologists have heart attacks, she told herself.

  She set the guilt aside and concentrated on her driving as she swept down the slip road on to the motorway.

  She soon realized she’d been wrong about the traffic, or perhaps everyone had made the same miscalculation. Her two-hour estimate rapidly stretched to three, giving her both the incentive and the time to ask herself precisely why she was doing this.

  Striving for that complete honesty she looked for in her therapies, she systematically listed all her motivational springs.

  First the professional: concern for a patient; concern for a community; Luke Hollins’s request for help; Imogen Estover’s desire to speak with her.

  Then the personal: her fear that she might have got things wrong; her irritation at the feeling that Hadda was mucking her about; her frustration in the presence of mysteries she’d not yet been able to disentangle; her simple need to have a break from her mother’s company and hospital visits!

  There it was. Can’t get any honester than that, she told herself.

  Except that, as her college tutor had loved to iterate, complete honesty is like clearing a cellar. When you’ve got all the clutter neatly laid out in the back yard, don’t waste time congratulating yourself on a job well done. Head down those steps again and start digging up the concrete floor.

  She dug. She knew already there was something to find. Something so deeply repressed that she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a figment of her imagination, the crocodile under the sofa that had made her sit with her legs tucked up beneath her as a child, the trolls in Elvira’s Swedish fairy tales who lived beneath the rockery in the garden. Unreal things, but her fear was real till she discovered that the simple way to dispose of them was to expose them to daylight and watch them shrivel away.

  This w
as what she tried now. It didn’t take long to find it, not because it wasn’t buried deep but because she knew where to start digging. And there it was, hidden beneath all that stuff about his face-transforming smile, that dangerous charm which she had complimented herself on being so alert to.

  She spoke it out loud so that there could be no fudging.

  ‘Deeply repressed reason for driving north to Birkstane: I am sexually attracted to Wolf Hadda.’

  Now she could submit it to the test of exposure to the clear light of day.

  But it wasn’t shrivelling.

  Damn! But no need to panic. Such things happened. Usually the other way round, of course. And it seemed peculiarly perverse in every sense that her urges should have focused on a man who was physically scarred, psychologically damaged, and morally repugnant. But if human beings weren’t perverse, she’d be out of a job.

  She would deal with it, just as Simon Homewood dealt with his feelings for her.

  Her self-examination had taken care of the time nicely. She saw a sign telling her that she was now in Cumbria.

  She wasn’t altogether sure what had started here all those years ago, but one way or another all journeys are circular. We never arrive anywhere that we haven’t been before.

  Where was Hadda now? she asked herself.

  And where did he think he was heading?

  She switched on her left indicator and prepared to turn off the motorway.

  5

  McLucky was late.

  ‘Fucking trains,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t run a raffle.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Hadda. ‘I’m just here myself. My probation officer was very keen to exchange notes on how we’d enjoyed our respective Christmases.’

  ‘Me too,’ said McLucky, sitting down heavily.

  The lounge door opened and a young, pretty waitress backed in carrying a heavily laden tray.

  ‘I ordered you a scotch,’ said Hadda. ‘And some smoked salmon sandwiches.’

  ‘And I told you before, I’m choosy who I eat with.’

  ‘If you don’t stop snarling, the waitress will be thinking we’re having a lovers’ tiff.’

  ‘Would it put her mind at rest if I gave you a thump?’

  ‘She looks the happy-ending type to me, so she’d probably prefer if you gave me a kiss.’

  That didn’t make McLucky smile but his face relaxed a little and when the waitress reached their table and set down the plates and glasses, he picked up his glass.

  ‘I’m not so choosy who I drink with,’ he said. ‘Cheers. Now, answers.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been to Spain,’ said Hadda. ‘Yes, I saw Medler. No, I didn’t kill him.’

  McLucky said, ‘Jesus.’

  ‘You did ask.’

  ‘I didn’t actually. I was hoping you were going to turn up with your clerical friend and he was going to swear on the Bible you’d not been out of the county all Christmas. How the hell did you manage it? I thought there were travel restrictions.’

  ‘There are. I would have needed permission. If I’d asked.’

  ‘But your passport . . . you’ll be on record . . .’

  ‘Mr Wally Hammond, widower, of Gloucestershire, is on record as having enjoyed a festive break with sixty other geriatrics at the Hotel Flamenco. I have a friend who knows how to arrange such things. He is, as you’ll probably have gathered, a cricket fan.’

  McLucky looked at him blankly, then said, ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because I think the only way to persuade you I’m telling you everything is to do just that. I went to see Medler late on Christmas Eve, having seen his wife head off to the midnight service at the English Church. We had a long conversation. I left him a sadder and I hope a wiser man about twelve thirty. He was alive and well. Except for being pretty drunk. And he must have got drunker from the sound of what happened. Happy now?’

  ‘Happy? You must be joking.’

  ‘You’ve still got doubts? I thought that tape you brought me of Estover and the Nutbrowns chatting at Poynters would have cleared your mind.’

  ‘It was suggestive, but a long way from conclusive,’ said McLucky. ‘Anyway, it just says something about what you maybe were. It’s what you might have become that bothers me.’

  ‘Fine.’ Hadda sipped his orange juice. ‘In your shoes, maybe I’d be cautious too. Why don’t you see how suggestive you find this? Me, I’ll just check that Sneck’s all right in the van. Give me a ring when you’ve had time to listen to it.’

  He pushed across the table a digital recorder with an earpiece attached.

  McLucky studied it suspiciously for a moment then fixed the device in his ear and pressed the start button. Hadda rose and, leaning heavily on his stick, made his way out of the lounge, smiling his gratitude at the young waitress who rushed forward to open the door for him.

  In the car park he opened the Defender’s tailgate.

  ‘Out,’ he said to Sneck.

  The dog woke up, yawned as if thinking about it, then jumped down. Hadda locked the car, walked to the edge of the car park and sat down on a low wall bordering a patch of municipal greenery. Sneck jumped over the wall, sniffed around, cocked his leg against a tired-looking tree, then returned to lie across his master’s feet and went back to sleep.

  Hadda, leaning forward with both hands resting on his stick and his chin resting on his hands, closed his eyes too and let his mind go back to his encounter with Arnie Medler on Christmas Eve.

  6

  It had taken a minute or more for Medler to recover from his initial shock. Hadda saw no reason to make things easier. He settled in a chair opposite the man and stared at him fixedly as if able to read the confusion of emotion running across the ex-policeman’s mind. Finally he reached forward with the axe and nudged the cognac bottle towards the ex-cop.

  ‘You look like you need a drink,’ he said.

  ‘Bloody right, I do,’ croaked Medler. ‘Seeing you there waving that fucking hatchet around, wonder I didn’t have a heart attack.’

  ‘Can’t have that,’ said Hadda. ‘Not before we talk.’

  Medler topped up his glass, emptied it, filled it again then looked at Hadda.

  ‘You?’

  ‘No thanks. I’m driving.’

  The conventional response plus the drink seemed to help Medler’s recovery and his voice was stronger as he said, ‘So how’d you find me? McLucky, was it?’

  ‘Might have been.’

  ‘I knew there was something. First lesson in CID. Never trust a coincidence.’

  ‘So why did you go along with him?’

  ‘Don’t know. Could have snuck off home soon as I clocked him, pulled down the shutters. I suppose I was just glad to see a face I recognized from the old days. Any face. Someone to talk to who knew me when I was . . . someone.’

  ‘A good honest cop,’ said Hadda with savage irony.

  ‘That’s right! That’s what I was. All right, I cut a few corners, took a couple of drinks, but only to help me get where I wanted to be.’

  ‘You mean, like here?’

  ‘No! I mean get a result. Saw no harm in letting a few sprats swim loose if they helped me catch a fucking great shark. And if I picked up a few backhanders on the way, that just increased my credibility, right? Come on, Sir Wilf, you were a financial whiz. All right, you may have taken the rap for stuff you didn’t know about, but you can’t have made all the money you did without dipping your fingers in places they shouldn’t have been.’

  ‘You trying to say I got what I deserved?’ said Hadda incredulously.

  Medler shook his head.

  ‘No. Of course not.’ He tried a laugh, but it didn’t come out right. Nevertheless he pressed on: ‘I’ll tell you something funny, though. In one way it was your own fucking fault you got what you did. Ironic that. Like in Greek tragedy. That surprises you, eh? I’m not just a dumb plod, I got O-levels.’

  Hadda leaned forward and said harshly, ‘I’m not here for literary
fucking criticism, Medler. Just tell me what happened. And quick. I don’t want to be still here when the lovely Tina returns from her devotions.’

  ‘Don’t worry, one way or another I reckon she’ll be on her knees for a couple of hours yet. But all right, here goes . . .’

  He emptied his glass again. Refilled it. He was beginning to feel he had some control over the situation. Hadda didn’t mind. It was a delusion easily remedied.

  ‘Sure you won’t? OK. Well, it started with a tip, an anonymous email, said we might like to take a close look at Sir Wilfred Hadda, mentioned a website, InArcadia. We knew about InArcadia. Clever buggers, they were. Everything heavily encrypted, more layers to get through than you’d find on an Eskimo whore, ducking and weaving all the time so that just when you thought you’d got a handle on them, they’d be over the hills and far away. It was only a matter of time, though, and we’d just had a big breakthrough when we got this tip about you. While we hadn’t laid hands on the people running it – not surprising, they could be anywhere in the world – we’d got about twenty thousand client credit-card records.’

  ‘Twenty thousand!’

  ‘Tip of the fucking iceberg. There’s a lot of weirdoes about. Anyway, among all these credit-card records we found a couple that we traced back to your company. That with the email allegations was enough to get a warrant to take a closer look. Maximum discretion. You were an important man.’

  ‘Maximum discretion!’ exclaimed Hadda. ‘The media turned up mob-handed! You couldn’t resist it, could you, Medler? A big hit, you wanted all the world to see you making it, right?’

  The ex-cop was shaking his head vigorously.

  ‘You’re wrong, Hadda. Man like you with fancy-dan lawyers, we tread careful till we’re sure. I played it by the book, need-to-know op, me the lowest rank needing to know. Nearly shit myself when I arrived and saw it was looking like a muck-rakers’ convention.’