The Woodcutter

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘State the world’s in, you’d think they’d have better things to occupy them.’

  This won him a faintly mocking smile, then she returned her attention to the crossword.

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said, stooping as if to kiss her then contenting himself with a squeeze of her shoulder.

  She didn’t look up but said, almost to herself, ‘I think you’re right about the rowan. It’s going to be a long time before it grows big enough to shelter us.’

  He said, ‘Don’t worry, my love. While we’ve got the Law to hide behind, there’s nothing that can touch us.’

  Now she looked up.

  ‘But if you chop down the Law,’ she said, ‘how long does that take to grow again?’

  3

  Alva Ozigbo also woke early on that February morning. For a moment she lay in the darkness, in that birth moment when we don’t know who or what or where we are.

  Then memory switched on and joy flooded her mind and body like the midday sun.

  This morning she did not have to rise and prepare herself for the drive east to the Dark Tower.

  Yesterday she had left Parkleigh for the last time!

  Against her expectations she hadn’t felt any shame at her easy capitulation. Perhaps that would come later. She could, if she’d wanted to, have rehearsed the excellent reasons for her decision to go quietly – principally the threat to Wolf Hadda’s freedom and the fact that she had no concrete evidence whatsoever for her belief that the refurbishment of the prison had given Childs’s people an opportunity to embed surveillance devices in every nook and cranny. But she was too honest to give them pride of place over her recognition that she was simply relieved and delighted to be giving up her job.

  Know thyself is a good if not an essential motto for a psychiatrist. And she was ready to admit she knew herself a lot better now than when she’d first started at Parkleigh.

  Her father had resisted any temptation he felt to say I told you so! when she gave him the news, but he hadn’t concealed his feeling that these were glad tidings.

  ‘Don’t you be rushing into any other job,’ he said. ‘Give yourself time to look around. And above all, Elf, give yourself time to come up here to rescue your poor old dad from this Swedish monster who’s got him chained to the wall! I’m wasting away to nothing on a diet of lettuce leaves. If she had her way, I’d spend six hours a day in a sauna, whipping myself with willow twigs. It’s my birthday this month and I bet she won’t even let me have a cake unless you’re here!’

  The ‘Swedish monster’ had intervened at this point to say that she hoped her daughter would come as soon as possible as Ike was now even harder to keep under control than he’d been before his heart attack.

  And Alva, hearing the love in their voices and the desire to see for themselves that she was OK, had difficulty in keeping her own voice bright and steady as she promised to come up for Ike’s birthday and stay at least a week.

  She had put her feelings about Hadda and her concern about his plans and his future to one side during the past couple of weeks. Once the decision to go had been taken, she had no desire to hang around, but at the same time she wanted to make sure that the files and notes she left her successor were comprehensive and up to date. She thought of leaving some form of warning that the confidentiality of his exchanges with the inmates was not guaranteed. The problem was, if it were too general it would be useless and if it were too explicit, it would provoke questions she could not answer. Or did not want to answer.

  She knew that in life there were some battles you had to fight even if the odds were insuperable and defeat guaranteed. This did not feel like one of them. OK, it was part of the ongoing and important debate about prisoners’ rights versus the general weal. But there was no torture involved here, no physical or mental abuse. This was more like the discussion of how admissible telephone tapping should be in criminal cases. People got heated about it, but no one sacrificed their own reputation or someone else’s freedom because of it.

  Was this simply a self-justifying rationalization? she asked herself after her waking delight at the realization of her freedom had faded. She didn’t think so, but it was almost with relief that she moved from considering that moral question to the other and more personal issue of what she was going to do about Hadda.

  She was convinced he was innocent. Her duty was therefore to make public her belief, argue the case, get the investigation reopened, mount an appeal . . .

  All of which sounded very straightforward if it weren’t for the fact that she could not rely on any of those who should have been her supporters – Doll and Ed Trapp, Davy McLucky, Wolf himself – to stand alongside her.

  And this brought her to the next, even more pressing question.

  What was Hadda planning to do – and what ought she to do about it?

  To hell with it – enjoy your first morning as a free woman! she told herself.

  She flung back the duvet and got out of bed.

  Dawn was tinting the sky an ochrous pink. London was rumbling back to full consciousness. She washed and dressed then went into her kitchen.

  The room could do with a good spring clean, she judged as she sat and ate her breakfast. One way and another with all the pressures she’d endured over the past couple of months, she’d let things go. In fact the whole flat needed a good going over. Her awareness of the symbolic implications of this decision did not make it any the less a factual truth. The place had a neglected look. Leave it much longer and it would be downright grubby! She imagined what Elvira, with her Nordic standards of hygiene, would say if she walked in now.

  She’d promised her parents she would drive north in time for her father’s birthday. That gave her three days to set her apartment to rights. And some good hard non-cerebral work was just what the psychiatrist had ordered!

  By mid-morning she had reduced the relative order of the flat to chaos, but at least it was well on the way to being clean chaos. When her doorbell rang, she was up a stepladder, dealing with a spider’s web of Shelobian proportions. She thought of ignoring the bell, but it rang again insistently.

  Grumbling, she descended and went to the door.

  It was John Childs. He stood there, looking even more neat and tidy than usual by contrast with the confusion behind her, his sweet smile neither broadening nor fading as he took in her bedraggled appearance.

  ‘I had pictured you taking your ease on your first day away from the toils of employment,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should have known better.’

  With Homewood it had been easier to maintain the pretence that her departure was by mutual agreement on reasonable grounds.

  With Childs she saw no reason for such pretence.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘To apologize,’ he said. ‘And to talk to you about Wolf.’

  This, she acknowledged, was perhaps the only formula that could have got him into the flat. She suspected no matter whose door he knocked at he would always have the right formula.

  She let him disinter a chair and she didn’t offer him coffee, partly because she did not want to make him feel welcome, but mainly because until she shifted everything she’d taken out of her cupboards back into them, the kitchen was a no-go area.

  ‘So, apologize,’ she said.

  ‘I am truly sorry to have recruited you to the job at Parkleigh under false pretences. I am sure that by now a combination of your own sharp intellect and the information supplied by the estimable Chief Officer Proctor will have filled in the picture. Any damage to your self-esteem from the discovery that you were recruited less for your positive qualities and more because of your youth and inexperience should be repaired by your own awareness, even more than my reassurance, that you have performed your duties in an exemplary fashion and with a skill far beyond your years. The glowing testimonial Simon Homewood will no doubt provide will be no less than the truth and no more than you deserve.’

  He
paused. She gave an ironic little clap that reminded her she was still wearing rubber gloves.

  ‘Nice apology,’ she said. ‘Must have taken you half an hour off the Phoenicians to prepare it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve never really mastered the art of sounding spontaneous, even when that’s exactly what I’m being. I’ve truly enjoyed our ongoing relationship and I truly regret that it has probably come to an end.’

  ‘Probably!’ she exploded.

  ‘Life is fuller of surprises than certainties,’ he said. ‘And the more I got to know you, the more I suspected you were going to surprise me. So, that’s my apology. All of us are to some degree driven by grim necessity. In my job she is, alas, almost a permanent companion. Let’s move on to Wolf.’

  ‘Yes, let’s,’ she said.

  ‘I assume you are pretty well au fait by now with the circumstances that led to his jail sentence?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good. What happened was of course regrettable, but because of the way things worked themselves out, also inevitable, I fear. Had I been aware earlier what was going on, I might have been able to do something, but by the time I became involved, it was out of my hands.’

  ‘Out of your hands!’ she exclaimed. ‘He was innocent, this man you feel some affection for – at least that’s the conclusion I draw from his inclusion in your picture gallery . . .’

  He nodded and said, ‘Yes, indeed. I have always been very fond of Wolf.’

  ‘Yet you let him be sent down for a long sentence on the most disgusting of charges! Jesus, Childs, what do you do to your enemies?’

  He gave her the sweet smile and said, ‘This is not the time or place to go into that. But as to those I’m fond of, I fear that from time to time in too many cases grim necessity has ordained that I should be complicit in their suffering far worse fates than poor Wolf.’

  He was, she saw, deadly serious. Her head was in a whirl but she did not want to let this occasion to learn all she could about Hadda escape.

  She said, ‘When Doll Trapp brought him to you, what did you do with him?’

  ‘I gave him a home and an education. He also received some special training, not that he needed much, his peculiar talent for scaling unscaleable obstacles was already highly developed. He could get in and out of almost anywhere.’

  ‘You mean you used him as a burglar?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘On occasion. But more often it was a matter of leaving rather than removing something.’

  ‘Leaving what?’ she demanded. She didn’t want to know, but she had to ask.

  ‘Surveillance devices,’ he said. ‘And occasionally, other devices.’

  ‘Like bombs, you mean? You turned him into an assassin?’

  ‘I fear so. Just on a couple of occasions. I did not send him in blind. He was fully briefed. On each occasion the details of the file we were able to show him on the targets were sufficiently powerful to persuade him that this was in the public good, a necessary execution rather than a wanton killing.’

  Sneering is not a response that psychiatrists find much occasion to practise, but Alva managed it as to the manner born.

  ‘You persuaded him! A boy, a naïve young man at the very most, in your employ, in your care, probably dependent upon you emotionally as well as economically! And you persuaded him to become a killer. I bet that called on all your Ciceronian skills!’

  He said, ‘If I gave you the details, I think you yourself might be persuaded that the world was a better place and our country more secure for the deaths of these men. But your reproach is not unjust. I had become very fond of young Wolf in the time I had known him. Rest quiet, Miss Ozigbo. There was nothing sexual in it, not overtly anyway. Wolf, you may be pleased to hear, is unswervingly straight in his appetites.’

  He paused as if to allow response and Alva thought of bursting out indignantly, ‘Why do you think I should be particularly pleased to hear that?’ But she didn’t. She was beginning to understand that Childs rarely used words casually.

  He resumed, ‘So I myself had begun to have some misgivings about steering the boy down this road. I comforted myself with the thought that it was not too late to divert. Then a third occasion requiring his special talents presented itself. Definitely the last, I told myself. And I was right, but for the wrong reasons. Things went awry.’

  ‘Awry?’ echoed Alva, tiring of his prissy language. ‘You mean there was a cock-up?’

  ‘Yes and no. The target was killed. So unfortunately were some members of his family who were not expected to be there. His wife. And two children.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Alva aghast. ‘And this was down to Wolf?’

  ‘No, as I attempted to explain to him, it was down to grim necessity. These things happen. It is not a question of choice. As I told Wolf when last I saw him, only God can claim to be independent of accident and necessity.’

  ‘You’ve seen Wolf recently? And you don’t have any broken bones?’

  ‘You sound regretful, Miss Ozigbo,’ he said, smiling. ‘So there are occasions when you might approve violence?’

  ‘Never approve, Mr Childs,’ she said coldly. ‘But I’m a human being as well as a scientist. I have emotions. So, you were telling me how you took a young boy and broke him to pieces.’

  ‘Yes. And then as best I could, I put him back together again. I offered him the only prize that could compensate for the damage I had done. You will know what that was from his interesting interchanges with you at Parkleigh.’

  ‘You offered him Imogen Ulphingstone,’ she said.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. He’d told me all about his reasons for running away from home. I couldn’t, of course, guarantee that Miss Ulphingstone would accept his proposal, and indeed, having made a few discreet enquiries about the lady, I had serious doubts as to whether it would be to Wolf’s benefit if she did. But once again I had no choice. Had I offered Wolf anything else, he would have taken off, and God knows what would have happened to him.’

  ‘He might have been able to carve out a perfectly happy life for himself!’ she said. ‘At least he would have been away from your malign influence!’

  Childs grimaced.

  ‘I’m sorry, I am being unnecessarily periphrastic. When I say God knows what would have happened, I am talking about details not outcome. A young man who had been privy to the sort of event I have just sketched out to you could hardly be allowed to run wild, could he? Loose cannons, if they cannot be tied down, must be tipped overboard. You must see that.’

  ‘You mean, he would have been killed? What kind of monster are you, Childs?’

  ‘The kind who saved Wolf’s life. It was clear to me from the start that as well as huge personal charm, he had a surprising aptitude for business. In America they value these assets rather more highly than we do here and I saw to it that he received there the kind of higher education that made the most of them. Now all he needed was opportunity, and of course money. The latter was easy enough. Reward for services rendered and still to render. He returned to England a personable young man with his first million already in his account, and a great future before him. All the tests the young woman had set him he had passed with flying colours. She, alas, kept her end of the bargain.’

  ‘You said, services still to render. Do you mean Wolf carried on working for you after he founded Woodcutter?’

  ‘Not in the capacity you fear,’ said Childs. ‘But in his capacity as international businessman, he was welcome in circles that we were glad to get intelligence from. And people opened up to him in a wonderful way. Oh yes, he earned his keep. In fact, as he was soon so successful he didn’t need to be underpinned by public monies, he proved to be huge value for our initial investment.’

  ‘But you were still willing to let this valuable asset be destroyed?’

  ‘Even if he had been saved, with the collapse of Woodcutter, he was considerably less of an asset. And there was no way that I could have prevented the defe
ction of Imogen. His occupation gone, his wife untrue, he would have been as unstable as Othello. As I say, loose cannons must be tied down, and it was convenient in so many ways that the State did us this service.’

  ‘He’s not tied down now,’ said Alva. ‘Indeed. And after the apology, that is my second reason for intruding upon you today. The Woodcutter is running free. I am sure you have been experiencing some serious concerns as to what he may be planning to do.’

  She said, ‘Yes, I have. But I’ve no reason to believe whatever he’s planning will have anything to do with his connection with Chapel. You say you’ve spoken to him. He must have made this clear, surely?’

  ‘Because I have no broken bones?’ He smiled. ‘True. But I’m not here in my ringmaster capacity, Alva. I’m here as a friend of Wolf’s.’

  His use of her name was as shocking as anything else she’d heard from him. It signalled . . . she wasn’t sure what it signalled, but it put her on maximum alert.

  ‘His friend? You mean you want to save him from himself and scupper any plan he might have to take revenge?’ she mocked. ‘Of course it would be pure coincidence that this would probably involve protecting what sounds like another of your valuable assets, the unspeakable Toby Estover.’

  ‘Too late for that, I fear,’ he said.

  The words trembled across her brain like a migraine.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There have been developments. You’ve probably been too preoccupied with your priestlike task of pure ablution to listen to the news, but if you had done so, you might have heard that the Nutbrowns’ country residence was raided this morning and Johnny and Pippa Nutbrown have been taken into custody. Naturally they have summoned their solicitor, Mr Toby Estover. Unfortunately, he is nowhere to be found. His car is in its reserved spot in the underground car park that serves his office block. But of Mr Estover himself, there is not a trace.’