‘Oh yes? Well, that’s your line of country, isn’t it? Ed did all he could, and went on trying to find out what was really going on long after Wolf went down. But we’re not detectives, and it’s hard helping someone who doesn’t want to be helped. We thought he was just going to rot inside for the whole length of his sentence. So when he got in touch and asked Ed to help him with the parole hearing, we were really delighted.’
‘But weren’t you surprised?’ asked Alva. ‘Ed must have told you that the whole basis of that hearing was his full and frank acknowledgement of his guilt and his willingness to undertake a course of remedial therapy.’
Doll laughed and asked, ‘How else was he going to get out, dearie?’
Then she stopped laughing and looked at Alva pityingly.
‘I’m sorry. It must have been a real shock to find out how he’d fooled you. But what else could he do when he realized the only way to get out early was getting you to testify that he was no longer a danger to anyone? He had to use you. You must see that.’
Alva nodded, unable to trust herself to speak. Being fooled was an occupational hazard; every therapy session with a patient was to some extent a contest in manipulation; but to feel personally betrayed was irrational, as if they’d been in some sort of relationship other than therapeutic.
Doll reached over and patted her on the shoulder.
‘Don’t take it to heart, dearie,’ she said. ‘He’d have tricked his own mother if that’s what had been needed to get him out.’
Alva was back in control now.
She drew away and said, ‘What bothers me is that he felt that getting out was worth admitting to the world he was as bad as he’d been painted. He’s not interested in proving his innocence, is he? All he wants to do is take revenge on the people he blames for putting him inside.’
Looking uneasy for the first time, Doll said, ‘It’s not quite like that. What he wants is to find out the exact truth of what happened.’
‘And then he’ll apply to get his case reviewed, is that what you’re telling me?’
Doll shook her head and said, ‘No. You’ve met him, ducks. You know what he’s like. And I don’t blame him, whatever he does. So long as it’s based on the facts.’
She spoke defiantly. She’s got reservations too, thought Alva.
She said, ‘So how does he intend to get these facts?’
‘Oh, he’s done that already,’ said Doll. ‘We’re well in to phase two now.’
‘Phase two! For God’s sake, tell me about phase one before we go there!’
Doll said, ‘We’re really getting to the edge of girl scout country here, dearie.’
Here it comes! thought Alva. She’d known from the start that sooner or later they were going to leave the ambiguous territory in which she could still persuade herself that keeping silent was a matter of personal choice. Now she was at the border.
She said carefully, ‘If Wolf has committed or is planning to commit an act of violence, then I will have no choice but to call in the authorities. But peccadilloes such as breaking the strict terms of his parole licence won’t bother me.’
‘Great,’ said Doll. ‘In that case it won’t bother you to learn that Wolf went to Spain over Christmas. There was an ex-cop living there, the one who arrested him. He thought he might know something that could help.’
‘You mean,’ said Alva, ‘that while Wolf was supposed to be staying with you over Christmas he was actually out of the country? And you helped him and covered up for him? You realize how much trouble you could be in?’
‘Ed’s a lawyer,’ said Doll indifferently. ‘Look, Wolf thought it might help if he talked to this ex-cop, Arnie Medler, who lived in Spain, so that’s where Wolf had to go.’
Medler. The name rang a bell. This was the arresting officer that Hadda had assaulted. Twice.
‘And did it help?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes. Wolf told Ed that Medler had been able to confirm a lot of what he suspected. And he got it all recorded. You can listen to the recording, if you like.’
‘I will do,’ said Alva. ‘Me and the authorities too. That should do the trick.’
But Doll was shaking her head.
‘Wish it was so simple, ducks. Thing is, not long after Wolf left him, this guy Medler had an accident and died. That’s really muddied the water.’
This got worse. Hadda leaves the country illegally to visit an excop he thinks might be withholding information and now the cop is dead. Alva knew how it sounded to her, so she didn’t have to take time out to guess how it would sound to the authorities.
‘How did Medler die?’ she asked.
‘His wife found him early on Christmas morning. He’d got so pissed he fell forward unconscious with his arm stretched out across the threshold of his patio door. He must have touched some control panel as he fell. Result, as he lay there some heavy security shutters came down. Chopped his hands right off. He’d bled to death.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ said Alva aghast. Just when you thought you’d hit rock bottom, the ground opened up again.
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Doll. ‘You’re thinking Woodcutter. But it’s not Wolf’s style, ducks. Might have chopped the bastard’s head off, if he deserved it, but not his hands!’
She seemed to think this comment should be reassuring. Alva did not find it so.
She said, ‘So what do you and Ed do when someone turns up with their head chopped off?’
Doll regarded her quizzically as if wondering whether the first of Wolf Hadda’s suggested methods for dealing with her might not have been the better option.
The door opened and Ed Trapp looked in and tapped his watch significantly.
‘I think that’ll do to be going on with, dear,’ said Doll. ‘You’ll want to get home to listen to that tape and I’ve got work to do.’
Ed was holding the door open invitingly.
‘I’ll walk you back to your car,’ he said.
They walked to the Fiesta in silence. As she unlocked the door, Trapp said gently, ‘Don’t worry about Wolf, Dr Ozigbo. He’d never hurt anyone that was innocent.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘There’s something in him, connected with something that happened a long time ago, I think. Maybe he did once. He won’t do it again.’
‘He shouldn’t be thinking about hurting anyone, Mr Trapp. Innocence, guilt, punishment, that’s the Law’s job. You of all people should know that.’
He smiled at her rather sadly.
‘Should I?’ he said. ‘When the Law kept an innocent man banged up for seven years despite anything I could do? When the only way he could get out was to deceive a woman he likes and respects? Should I? Good night, Dr Ozigbo.’
She got in her car and drove home.
She tried to put everything she had just heard into some sort of order, but every third thought took her back to Mr Trapp’s parting words.
A woman he likes and respects.
That had to mean something!
But not, she thought, all that much. Not while the memory of Imogen Ulphingstone was still burnt on his soul like a shadow on a wall left by an atomic explosion.
8
Monday morning dawned bright and very cold, with frost scaling the window panes and highlighting the bare twigs and branches of the trees and shrubbery in the grounds of Poynters.
‘Where are you going, Johnny?’ demanded Pippa Nutbrown.
‘Just for a stroll through the spinney,’ said her husband. ‘Thought I’d see if I could pick up a rabbit.’
Pippa looked in scorn at the shotgun he carried broken in the crook of his arm.
‘As much chance of you coming back with a Siberian tiger,’ she said.
‘Sorry, old girl, was there something you wanted me to do?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped dismissively. ‘What the hell would I want you to do that I can’t do better myself?’
Nutbrown could think of one thing but he knew better than to say it.
Best policy was to make yourself scarce when Pippa was in one of her moods, which she seemed to be most of the time recently. It was a couple of weeks since she’d announced that she’d given Skinners their marching orders and done a private deal with Donald Murray. The news had filled Nutbrown with a dismay that not even his wife’s delight could compensate for. But as the days went by and she heard nothing more from Murray, her mood began to darken while her husband’s spirits began to rise, though he was careful not to let her see this.
As he walked away from the house, he began to whistle ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, though not till he was sure he was out of earshot. He had neither the will nor the guile to resist Pippa’s insistence that they should sell Poynters and go to live abroad, but he did have a deep-rooted conviction that this was never going to happen. No logical basis, of course, but nothing new there! His motto had always been, Take the line of least resistance and generally speaking things would work out for the best.
He entered the spinney. The winter sun could hardly penetrate here and the temperature dropped by several degrees. He heard a twig crack and paused. All was silent again. Pity. It would be nice to surprise Pippa and actually come back with something in his game bag. The trouble was, on the odd occasion he’d managed to get something in his sights, he’d rarely been able to bring himself to shoot it. The wild creatures here were also inhabitants of Poynters and deserved as much as he did to pass their lives untroubled.
But not perhaps all of them.
Something growled, a deep threatening rumble, and standing at a bend in the track about fifty feet ahead he saw a dog.
Johnny Nutbrown quite liked dogs. (Pippa didn’t, so there were none at Poynters.) But this didn’t look like the kind of dog you called Hey boy! to and ruffled its ears when it came running up to you, tail wagging. It stood quite still. What light there was under the tree glinted off its yellowing teeth and from its eyes that seemed to have a reddish glow as they focused unblinkingly on the approaching man.
He clicked the shotgun barrel into place.
The beast’s ears pricked. It let out one last growl that had something of a promissory note in it, then turned and vanished.
Slowly, still holding the gun at the ready, he advanced round the bend.
And halted.
The dog was there, lying across the feet of a man sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree. If anything, with his scarred face and a patch over his right eye, he looked even more menacing than the dog. Alongside him, resting against the trunk, stood a long-handled axe.
The man spoke.
‘When I was a lad, I got taught never to point a gun at anything I wasn’t going to use it on.’
Nutbrown took a step closer and said, ‘Good God, is that you, Wolf?’
‘Who else? Been a long time, Johnny.’
‘Too long, Wolf,’ said Nutbrown fervently, lowering the gun. ‘It’s great to see you!’
Wolf Hadda laughed. He hadn’t been sure what reaction to expect; certainly not this one, but, now he’d heard it, nothing else seemed possible. He shifted to make room beside him on the trunk. The dog growled as Nutbrown sat down, but ceased at a warning nudge from his master’s foot.
‘Been here long?’ asked Nutbrown, resting his shotgun against the fallen tree. ‘Jesus, you must be frozen! You should have come up to the house.’
‘I don’t think so, Johnny.’
Nutbrown considered then nodded.
‘Probably right. Pippa’s got a bit of a bee in her bonnet about you, I’m afraid.’
‘Really? Now why should that be, do you think?’
‘Well, she seems to think there could be some bad blood between us, after everything that happened, don’t you know?’
‘Everything that happened,’ echoed Hadda. ‘That’s really what I came to talk to you about, Johnny. Everything that happened. I’d just like to understand it from your point of view, if you’ve got the time, that is.’
‘Of course. Gent of leisure these days. But let’s not freeze altogether. Try a nip of this.’
He produced a hip flask, opened it and passed it to Hadda. He took a long pull of the liquor, rolled it round in his mouth, then swallowed.
‘Still nothing but the best, Johnny.’
‘What else is there? Cheers!’
‘Cheers. So, from the beginning, Johnny.’
Nutbrown took another drink as if, despite his apparent ease of manner, he needed a little booster for an imminent ordeal. Or perhaps, thought Hadda, it simply is against the cold.
‘Well, it was all that money swilling around,’ he began. ‘Those were golden days, do you remember, Wolf? And you had the golden touch. It was like taking buckets of water out of a bottomless pond. An endless supply. Impossible to leave a hole!’
‘So you helped yourself, is that what you’re saying, Johnny?’
‘No. Well, yes. But not really. You always saw to it that I had plenty, Wolf. But Toby and Pippa, they felt that you weren’t making the most of your opportunities. A wise man fills his boots while he’s still got boots to fill, that was how Toby put it. And Pippa agreed. Toby took care of the legal side and Pippa’s always been a whiz with computers.’
‘And you, Johnny?’
‘They needed me to run the figures. Complex business keeping things in balance, you see. My sort of thing. I could hardly say no when Pippa and Toby asked. And they would have brought you in, Wolf, really they would. Only Toby said that, despite you marrying Imo and all, you still had this working-class thing about wealth, and it was best to keep you out for your own sake. Me, I thought it was a load of bollocks, I knew you were one of us from the start, but they insisted that it was best for us to make sure you got your share without you knowing.’
‘And you went along with them?’
‘All got a bit complicated for me, Wolf. Figures, fine. But forward planning, not my scene. Though, way back in 2006, I did get a feeling things were going pear-shaped.’
‘You foresaw the financial crisis as far back as that?’ said Hadda. ‘Didn’t you think it might be worth mentioning it to me?’
‘I did, I did,’ said Nutbrown indignantly. ‘But you were always busy busy, Wolf. And when you did listen, you just laughed and said we were in happy-ever-after land, these were the sunny uplands, no one was ever going to drive us out of here. And I thought, Good old Wolf, it’s down to him that I’m so comfortably placed, he always gets things right.’
Hadda regarded him sadly and asked, ‘Did I really say that, Johnny? Yes, I believe I did. That’s what I thought back then. Maybe you should have kept on at me. Punched me in the nose, maybe. You owed me one.’
Nutbrown laughed, a merry note, and said, ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? Still do, I suppose.’
‘No, Johnny,’ said Hadda gently. ‘Not any more. So who else did you try to warn?’
‘Pippa, of course. Not a warning as such, just chat over the breakfast table. Ignored me at first. What’s new? But once the US housing bubble began to burst, anyone with any sense could see what was coming.’
‘Pity you weren’t Chancellor,’ said Hadda. ‘And Pippa started listening?’
‘Still told me not to be stupid. But this time she gave Toby a bell and he came round and asked me what it was all about.’
‘And what did you tell him, Johnny?’
‘I said I thought it might be a good idea to do a bit of forward planning. First thing was to make sure that our little nest eggs were tucked away safe. I made a few suggestions, but he really sat up and took notice when I told him that he ought to have a word with you because, when the markets hit the skids, it was going to be impossible to carry on hiding what we’d been doing. Like I say, a few bucketfuls from a big pond no one notices, but once the pond starts drying up . . .’
‘I’ve got the picture,’ said Hadda. ‘But Toby didn’t take your advice.’
‘About placing our money, he did,’ said Johnny. ‘But as to putting you in the picture, he said he’d need to think about it.
’
‘I bet. And what was the result of his thinking?’
‘No idea,’ said Johnny cheerfully. ‘I mentioned it to Pippa, but she just said it was in hand. Toby too. When I mentioned you, he said everything was hunky-dory. Finally things began to slowly unravel, just like I’d said. I thought, Good old Wolf will be taking care of things as far as Woodcutter’s concerned. Next thing I hear is that they’re doing you for looking at mucky pictures on your computer or something.’
‘No, Johnny,’ said Hadda gently. ‘I think the next thing you heard was me on the phone asking you to meet me at The Widow.’
‘That’s right. Only I was in the office and there was this cop there and he sort of listened in. He asked me where The Widow was and I said, “Everyone knows The Widow!” And he said he didn’t, so naturally I told him. Then I got up to leave, but he said I shouldn’t bother, it was best for you if one of their chaps went there to meet you. I wasn’t all that happy about it, you understand, Wolf. But what could I do?’
Hadda took the flask from Nutbrown’s hand and took another long pull. It wasn’t against the cold.
‘And then?’ he said softly.
‘Next thing, you’re in hospital, on life support, bulletins lousy. Not long after, the banks start going bellyside up, shares drop like a donkey’s bollocks, and the Fraud Squad’s crawling all over Woodcutter like bluebottles round an open dustbin.’
‘And they found . . .?’
For the first time, Nutbrown was looking a little uneasy.
‘They found shortfalls, Wolf. I mean, they were bound to. Would have been all right if the good times had continued. We were always well ahead of the game. Would be all right now with everything back to where it was, more or less. But back then there was nowhere to hide.’
‘Yet somehow you managed it, Johnny. You hid so well no one even came looking for you. How did you manage that?’
‘Just lucky, I suppose.’
He sounded as if he really believed it, thought Hadda. Perhaps he did. And perhaps in his own terms he was lucky. Lucky to exist in an impermeable bubble where thoughts of loyalty, morality, friendship could not penetrate and in which the only reality was his own well being, comfort and survival. He felt no guilt about what had happened, just a touch of regret. While the news of his early release had clearly caused the others considerable disquiet, Johnny’s reaction was mild relief that his old friend was free again so no need to worry about that any more!
The Woodcutter Page 38