So what to do?
She could drive back to Manchester and ponder. She could get out of the car and bang on the door and demand readmittance. She could head round to Birkstane and lie in wait for Hadda. She could . . .
She shook her head impatiently. Choice is a largely delusional concept, her tutor used to say. Whether in politics, morals or shopping, we have far less than we imagine. In the end what we have to do often doesn’t even figure on our list of pseudo-options.
She took out her phone and played her mother’s message and was yet again reminded how right her tutor was.
‘Alva! Where are you? You’ve got to get back here as soon as you can. Your father’s much worse. They think he’s going to die!’
10
Wolf Hadda liked to believe he had his feelings under tight control. You didn’t survive a long stretch in jail by letting your imagination roam free. Deal with the minute and let the hour look after itself. A man can dig his way out with a teaspoon, but only if he takes it one scrape at a time. But if you let yourself relax too much, sometimes feelings and imagination can sneak up and take you by surprise.
He had spent a good part of the afternoon talking with Davy McLucky, then he had diverted on the way home to a supermarket. It was a couple of weeks now since he’d given Luke Hollins a Tesco order and fresh supplies would be running low. On the way back he stopped on a high fell road to give Sneck a bit of a run and it was getting on for eight o’clock as he approached Birkstane.
Perhaps it was the pleasure of heading back to the only place in the world he thought of as home that relaxed him, but he realized that somehow over the last few miles his mind had been playing such a lively picture of reaching the turn into the Birkstane lonning and finding Alva Ozigbo’s grey Fiesta parked there that he felt a totally illogical shock of disappointment at its absence.
‘Just thee and me then, Sneck,’ he said to the dog as he brought the Defender to a halt in front of the closed barn door.
The dog jumped out and started quartering the yard, muzzle low, sniffing the cobbles and growling softly in its throat.
Wolf watched him for a moment, before climbing down stiffly. With his supermarket bag swinging from one hand and leaning heavily on his stick with the other, he limped slowly towards the house.
The kitchen felt cold and unwelcoming. He realized his fantasy had expanded insidiously to finding Alva had got the fire going and was brewing a pot of coffee. But now his earlier disappointment had turned to relief. As he closed the door, he saw a sheet of paper that must have been pushed beneath it.
He smoothed it out on the kitchen table and read the words scribbled across it.
I’m at the castle till the New Year. We ought to talk.
No signature. None needed.
He used it to help start the fire and while it got going he put the kettle on the hob, switched on the radio, turning it up loud. All this he did with a slow and laboured movement that would have caused Ed and Doll Trapp serious concern. When the kettle boiled he made himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table with his back to the small window. After a while he rose, shivering, and went to the window to draw the curtains, as if to keep out the draught.
But when he turned away he didn’t sit down. Moving now with decisive swiftness, pausing only to pluck his long-handled axe from the wall, he headed out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the bedroom on the far side of the house from the yard. This was north facing and its window was small even by Cumbrian farmhouse standards but he went through it on his back, head first, reaching up to take a grip in a crack between two of the rough granite blocks, and hauling himself out till he stood on the sill. Then he dropped down till his arms rested on the sill, reached in and retrieved his axe.
Sneck stood alert, watching him.
He said, ‘Guard!’
It was a stronger command than Stay! In Sneck’s mind Stay! had a time-limitation clause. After ten minutes max, he’d reckon it had expired and start thinking independently. With Guard! he’d stay all night and attack anyone who came near.
Now, hanging one-handed, Hadda lowered his body full length then dropped the remaining five feet to the ground.
Picking himself up, he made for the old forest wall, climbed over it with silent ease and went a couple of yards into the trees. Here he turned south and moved parallel to the wall till he was opposite the side of the barn.
Now he emerged from the forest and climbed back over the wall and waited.
A man emerged from the barn and flitted silently across the yard. He was dressed in black and in his right hand he carried a gun.
Slowly he turned the handle of the kitchen door then flung it open and stepped inside.
A moment later he reappeared and made a signal. A second man came out of the barn as the first went back into the house.
So, two of them. The first had expected to surprise him in the kitchen. That having failed, he was now going to search the house, and he’d called up the second to watch his back.
Could there be a third? Doubtful. If so, a pair of them would probably have made the initial sortie.
He didn’t waste time debating the point, reaching his conclusion and the second man crouched by the kitchen door almost simultaneously.
The man must have heard something, for he turned – which was unfortunate for him. Instead of the stunning blow to the base of the neck that was intended, he took the full force of the axe’s shaft across his Adam’s apple. There was usually only one result of such a blow, but Hadda was in too much of a hurry to check it out.
The kitchen was empty, the living room too. The second man had gone up the stairs. If he opened the door of the bedroom which Sneck was guarding, the dog would attack. And a bullet moves quicker than even the fastest dog.
Hadda went up the stairs not bothering to try for silence. The man was pushing open the bedroom door. He glanced round as he heard Hadda’s approach. Then Sneck hit him with such force he was driven back across the narrow landing. He’d instinctively raised his left arm to ward off the attack and he screamed as Sneck’s fangs tore through the fabric of his tight-fitting top and dug into the flesh beneath. But his right arm was still free and he raised his weapon to put the muzzle to the dog’s head at the same time as the axe blade drove down through his skull.
The gun went off.
The man slid to the ground, blood and brains trickling down his face. Sneck lay on top of him, his teeth still fixed in his arm. Hadda dropped the axe and knelt down beside the dog. There was a smell of scorched hair coming from a burn line between his ears, as though someone had laid a hot poker there. But the eyes that looked up at Hadda were as bright as ever.
‘OK, you can let go now,’ he said, and turned his attention to the man.
‘Damn,’ he said. Then he looked closer. Death, especially when caused by a blow from an axe, changes features somewhat, but there was something familiar about the face.
He stood up and went back down stairs. When he checked out the second man in the yard, he said, ‘Damn,’ again.
It seemed a long long time ago that he’d driven down the lonning, buoyed with a foolish hope that he’d find Alva Ozigbo waiting to welcome him.
Instead he had two dead men on his hands. He wasn’t sure yet how he felt about that. Disappointed didn’t seem to do it.
‘Good job you’re not here, Elf,’ he said to the dark sky. ‘I don’t have time for psycho-analysis right now!’
He set to work. The living first.
He checked Sneck’s burn mark. It didn’t look too bad. He smeared some antiseptic cream along the line of the bullet, then commanded the dog to lie down in the kitchen.
Then the dead.
He went through their pockets and found nothing, but in the barn he found a small back-pack containing two mobile phones, a Toyota key, and the OS sheet for the area. The key he pocketed, the phones he set aside for later examination, the map he opened. There was a cross on the unclassified road about half a mile no
rth of where the Birkstane lonning turned off. He brought the place to his mind. There was an old track there, no longer used, leading to one of the sad heaps of stones that marked where a thriving hill farm had once stood. Some scrubby woodland offered good temporary shelter for a vehicle. Then they would have walked back along the road and down the lonning and, realizing he wasn’t home, settled to wait.
But that implied they knew he was coming home.
He put that problem aside with the phones.
There were lots of old plastic sheets in the barn, remnants of better days.
He set about parcelling up the bodies, placing large rocks alongside them before securing the plastic with baler twine and wire. He then loaded the grisly packages into the Defender and returned to the house to clean up the mess on the landing. The blade of his axe he washed beneath the running tap in the kitchen.
The bullet that had burned Sneck was buried in the bedroom wall. He would dig it out later.
He went back to the barn and opened the lid of an ancient but still solid metal feed box. It was in here that he’d found on his return, neatly packaged and labelled, all the stuff that had been his as a boy. At some point during his runaway years, his father must have collected all his gear together and set out to make sure it would still be to hand and serviceable on his return. It had made him weep to see the care with which the task had been carried out, and to imagine Fred’s state of mind as he went about the job.
Of course when he came back he’d been, in his own eyes at least, a man and far beyond childish things. Looking back now, he found it unforgivable that his fixation on Imogen, and his euphoria at winning her, had deadened him completely to any real appreciation of what he’d put his father through. It wasn’t till he himself experienced the gut-searing pain of loss all those years later that he came, too late, to understand.
Now he lifted out of the box the inflatable dinghy that had been in the kitchen on the occasion of Luke Hollins’s first visit. It had required very little work to render it serviceable. Look after your gear and your gear will look after you, was a lesson Fred had drummed into him, and he practised what he preached. The rubber had been heavily oiled and the inflation nozzle coated in a thick layer of protective grease. How many times had his father renewed it over the years – as if by preserving it he also preserved the hope that somehow the young boy who had left him would return unchanged?
He put the dinghy and the foot pump in the back of the Defender. Then he went into the kitchen, stoked up the fire and set the kettle to boil again.
He didn’t have much of an appetite, but he knew he had a long night ahead and his body needed fuel. So he opened a can of stew, heated it up and ate it straight out of the pan, wiping the sides clean with a hunk of bread. Sitting drinking tea and chewing on a muesli bar, he checked out the mobile phones. No messages. He brought up their phone books. None of the numbers was familiar. Next he checked their photo stores. One specialized in close-ups of female genitalia. Maybe it was some kind of trophy thing. They did nothing for Hadda. The other had shots of a family picnic, a handsome woman with an Eastern European look and a couple of young kids, sitting on a sunny hillside overlooking the sea. This did something for him. It made him feel bad.
He looked at his watch. It was eleven o’clock. Three hours had passed since he came home. But it was still too early. He fed Sneck, who seemed none the worse for his close encounter with the intruder’s gun, then he settled in the wooden rocker by the fire and closed his eyes.
In Parkleigh he had learned to sleep almost at will and to wake at whatever hour he ordained, but sleep came hard now. When he finally nodded off he went straight into a dream in which he was being pursued through a dark forest by two men whom he couldn’t shake off no matter how he twisted and turned. Then in the space of a single stride he was no longer the pursued but the pursuer, his quarry not two men but a single woman whose skin as she ran naked through the moon’s shadows gleamed first white as pearl then dark as ebony.
He awoke to find he was sexually aroused.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ he asked the dog who lay at his feet, watching him.
It was one o’clock. He stood up, made another pot of tea and drank a burning mugful. The rest he poured into a thermos flask which he put into his backpack with a couple of bars of chocolate. He changed into his warmest mountain gear and pulled on his walking boots.
‘Right, Sneck, how are you feeling?’ he asked.
The dog rose instantly.
‘OK, if you’re sure. But we could face a long walk.’
The Defender, as ready it seemed as the dog, burst into life at first time of asking and he set it bumping back up the frozen lonning.
He found the intruder’s car exactly where he’d estimated. It was a Toyota Land Cruiser. Now he knew where he’d seen the first dead man before. But he was pretty sure the other body wasn’t that of the other man on Drigg Beach, the one called Pudo. Probably still recovering from a broken jaw.
The Land Cruiser had a capacious boot so there was plenty of room to transfer his grisly cargo and the rest of his gear. As an afterthought, he took the jerry can of petrol he always carried in the Defender and tossed it into the back of the Toyota.
‘OK, Sneck, here we go,’ he said.
The narrow winding road he followed ran up the remote western valley of Wasdale. It ended at the valley head, so unless there was anyone heading late for the tiny hamlet situated there, or the old inn, he was unlikely to have company at this hour of a freezing winter night. It wasn’t just the remoteness that attracted him. It was Wastwater, the darkest and deepest of all Cumbria’s lakes, lying between the road and the Screes, the awful precipitous slopes plunging down from the long ridge between Ill Gill and Whin Rigg.
He parked as close to the edge of the lake as possible and set about inflating the dinghy. As far as he could make out in the near pitch darkness, his father had done an excellent job of storage and the rubber expanded and tautened and held its shape when he finally stopped pumping.
He lifted the topmost body out of the car and laid it in the dinghy. As expected, there was only room for one of the bundles. Indeed, there was scarcely room for himself and he had to kneel with his knees resting against the dead man as he began to paddle the vessel out from the bank. An unimaginable distance above him the sky was crowded with stars but the light that had set out earthward so many millennia ago seemed to fail and lose heart as it was sucked into the terrestrial black hole of Wasdale’s lake.
Ahead was darkness, behind was darkness, all around was darkness. He struck with the paddle and struck again. The temptation to push the body over the side then turn to regain the shore was strong, but he knew he had to go much closer to the furthermost side. At its deepest the lake measured more than two hundred and fifty feet, well below the safety limit for the district’s recreational divers. But it was the Screes ahead that plunged to this forbidding depth and to deposit his burden too soon might mean it would come to rest on the much shallower northern shelf.
Now it seemed to him at last that the view ahead was mottled with different intensities of blackness and a couple of strokes later he began to make out the detail of the precipitous slopes soaring two thousand feet above his head.
He laid the paddle in the dinghy and tried to ease the body over the side. Lifting it in and out of the car had been hard enough. Moving it all in the unstable confines of this small craft was backbreaking and perilous. For a moment one side dipped down beneath the surface and water came slopping in. He had no illusions. Weighed down with boots and clothing as he was, he would find it hard to survive long enough in water at this temperature even to struggle to the visible shore. Then he’d have to walk all the way along the boulder strewn track to one end of the lake or the other and back along the road to the car.
It would take the best part of a couple of hours, he would be wet, cold, and exhausted, and he’d still have the second body to deal with.
The t
hought steadied him. Human beings are better at avoidance than achievement. When things are bad, don’t look for a good to struggle to, look for something worse to struggle from!
He wondered how this downbeat view of the human psyche would appeal to Alva. All that mattered now was that it worked for him. At last he got more of the plastic-wrapped package out of the dinghy than was in it and suddenly, as though it too had made a choice and opted for a peaceful rest in the dark deeps, it slid easily over the side and was gone.
Without that dead weight, it now seemed to him that the dinghy moved like an elfin pinnace (where did that phrase come from?) under his strong even strokes and what had felt like an immeasurable distance on the way out was behind him in no time and Sneck was welcoming him back on dry land with a wild oscillation of the tail.
But now it was all to do again.
He didn’t take a rest because he feared that if he did his heart might fail him.
They say that having performed a difficult task once gives you confidence and makes the second time easier.
As usual, the bastards lie!
The lake seemed wider, the night seemed darker, the dinghy rode even lower in the water, and at one point he felt so totally disorientated he could not with any confidence say in what direction he was paddling.
Then he got guidance, but in a form that was more frightening than the situation it rescued him from.
A car’s headlights came splitting the darkness along the road, heading up the valley.
It seemed to slow momentarily as it approached the point where he’d left the Toyota. And then, perhaps theorizing that the most likely reason for a car to be parked so late at night in such a remote situation was that the inmates were engaged in a very private activity, the driver speeded up again and soon the light faded as he wound his way to the distant inn.
This brief interlude of illumination deepened the resurgent blackness to impenetrability, but Hadda had once again got his bearings. A few more strokes, then, careless of the water he was shipping, he rolled the second body over the side and began to paddle back to the shore.
The Woodcutter Page 31