This was going to be even harder than she’d anticipated.
She said, ‘So, an eye for an eye; that sounds a lot more like revenge to me than justice.’
‘Anything they get will be less than they deserve,’ he said dismissively.
‘Would you still have been able to say that if Estover had died? You knew that was the likely outcome if it hadn’t been for Childs’s intervention.’
He shrugged.
‘It may still be that Toby will come to regard that as the better alternative,’ he said. ‘As for JC, I’ll bottle my gratitude till I’ve got enough to make a grateful tear.’
‘I think that, despite everything, he’s helped you because he is fond of you.’
‘And the same for you, no doubt. But John’s god is Necessity, and that’s an idol carved out of granite. Try not to come between it and anything you value.’
‘He’s genuinely worried about what you intend to do next,’ she said.
‘He needn’t be. What’s the point of worrying about fate?’
‘He said you might be suffering from the delusion that you were the instrument of God. Wolf, believe me, if left too late, that’s a delusion whose dissipation you might find too hard to bear.’
Suddenly he relaxed and let out a hoot of laughter.
‘Jesus, Elf, we’re beginning to sound like two characters in an old-fashioned melodrama! What do you think’s going to happen? I’m not about to mount a rocket attack on Ulphingstone Castle or anything like that, believe me. I’ve got most of the revenge stuff out of my system now, honest. All I want’s a bit of peace and quiet so that I can watch the spring arrive.’
She wanted to believe him. She had a feeling he wanted to believe himself. But she’d had it drummed into her that the truly effective psychiatrist always gets the couch warm for the client. Or, put another way, the first job is to look deep into yourself and make sure you start with a clean sheet.
Sneck suddenly rose from the hearth and went to the door, growling deep in this throat.
Hadda rose too.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
Motioning Sneck to heel, he pulled the door open, waited a moment, then slipped outside. Alva found herself once more comparing the smooth, slightly rolling movement caused by his ruined knee with the laboured limp she remembered from Parkleigh.
She too stood up and went to the door.
She saw him in the barn doorway standing by the Defender. He plucked a spill of paper tucked in behind the wipers, unfolded it and began to read. Sneck turned and looked at Alva. Not wanting Wolf to think she was spying on him, she retreated and was sitting at the table once more, nursing her coffee mug, when he came back in.
‘Problem?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, tossing a screwed-up ball of paper towards the fire. ‘Might have been a deer. Sneck and me are both getting neurotic. We had a bit of trouble with reporters.’
‘Yes, Luke Hollins told me about the muck-spreader. He seemed to find it rather poetic.’
‘He’s a good lad,’ said Hadda, resuming his seat and picking up his mug. ‘Now, where were we?’
He was trying to sound the same as he did before, but something had changed.
She said, ‘You were telling me how content you were to relax in your own cosy little house, far away from the world’s troubles, just waiting for the daffodils and swallows to return with the spring.’
‘Was I? Sounds good to me. Why are you giving me that fish-eyed psychiatrist look?’
‘Because I don’t believe you,’ she said.
‘Hang about? Are you people allowed to call your patients liars?’
‘I’m not talking to you as a patient but as a friend,’ she said. ‘And here’s what I think. I think that everything you’ve done since you got out, all your clever planning and scheming, all your talk of justice and revenge, amounts to nothing more than delaying tactics. You don’t really give a damn about Estover and Nutbrown. You don’t give a damn about proving your innocence. The only thing that really matters to you is what you’re going to do about Imogen. And the truth is, you’ve no idea what to do, no idea what you want to do. But now, with everything else out of the way, the big moment’s getting near. So what’s it to be, Wolf? Have you made up your mind yet?’
For a moment she thought she’d stung him to an honest reply. Then he let out a rather histrionic sigh, shook his head ruefully and said, ‘There you go, Elf. Even when you’re talking as a friend, you can’t stop working out interesting little mental scenarios, can you? I always suspected that all this psycho-analysing stuff came down to storytelling in the end. You plot a little narrative to take everything in, make a few adjustments to let the action flow more smoothly, offer a couple of endings, one happy, one unhappy, then tell your client to make his choice, that’ll be a hundred guineas please. Well, I’m sorry, Elf. I’m no longer a character in your fairy tale. I’m very happy in my own.’
She said, ‘Once upon a time I was living happily ever after. Those were the first words you wrote for me, remember? You were a character in your own fairy tale, Wolf, not mine. In fact, you were two characters. The wolf and the woodcutter. Bit of a conflict there. Maybe it’s a good job that fairy tale’s over. No way can you ever get back into it. But you’re right. Even without paying a hundred guineas, you can still choose the ending.’
On the wall the old bracket clock struck the hour.
He stood up and said, ‘That time already? Damn. And I was so enjoying our fireside chat. But I’m afraid I’ve got to go. Us licensed cons aren’t masters of our lives, as I’m sure you know. I need to show my face at regular intervals, prove I’m still on the straight and narrow.’
‘You mean you’re driving to Carlisle to see your probation officer?’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘No need for you to rush off, sit here and finish your coffee. But don’t feel you’ve got to wash up! Will I see you again before you go back down to Manchester, or are you heading off straight away?’
She looked up at him and said, ‘I’m not sure.’
‘OK,’ he said, turning away to pluck his axe from where it stood in a corner. Then he turned to look at her, curiously indecisive. Finally he took a couple of steps forward till he was standing alongside her chair. She sat quite still, aware of the closeness of his body. And of his axe also.
He said, ‘I never felt I could do this while you thought I was guilty. And now you don’t, I’m finding all kinds of other reasons for being frightened of doing it. At this rate, I’ll never do it! So here goes.’
He stooped, put his right hand behind her head and pressed his face to hers in a kiss that went on so long she felt herself becoming breathless, but she made no effort to break contact.
Finally he pulled away.
‘For better or worse, that’s done,’ he said. ‘First kiss? Last kiss? Who can ever tell?’
He made for the door. Sneck rose from the hearth but subsided reluctantly as his master commanded, ‘Stay!’
Then he was gone. A moment later she heard the grating roar of the Defender. When that died away, the silence seemed like the silence of space.
She finished her coffee. She’d made it strong, the way she knew Hadda liked it, but far from being a stimulant, it seemed to act on her like an opiate. A strange lassitude stole over her limbs and she sat peering sightlessly and for the most part thoughtlessly into her empty mug. It was as if there were a problem she had to puzzle out, only it was so big her mind could not even begin to get to grips with it.
It was the wigwam of logs in the grate collapsing in a gentle sigh of heron-grey ash that roused her from her reverie.
She ran her tongue round her lips.
Better or worse? First or last?
Who can tell?’
She stood up to get some more logs from the basket. Sneck looked up at her hopefully. She said, ‘Sorry,’ and he returned his attention to something he was licking at between his paws. As she set the logs in the grate, she realiz
ed it was the piece of paper Hadda had balled up and thrown at the fire.
She tried to pick it up. The dog bared his teeth. She went to the kitchen cupboard and got a ginger biscuit. Sneck acknowledged this was fair exchange and let her retrieve the paper.
She smoothed it out on the kitchen table.
It was a handwritten note:
Is she a permanent fixture then? I think I’ll take a stroll to Pillar Rock. Who says I’m not sentimental?
She didn’t recognize the writing; she didn’t need to.
He wasn’t on his way to see his probation officer. She should have known that as soon as he took his axe from the corner. But the kiss had diverted her mind down other channels in search of its meaning.
One thing she was certain of: the kiss couldn’t mean whatever she wanted it to mean while his problems with Imogen remained unresolved.
And she doubted whether a true resolution were possible while the woman was alive. But if she died, and if Wolf was responsible, then the problem would remain frozen in time for ever, and Wolf would be completely beyond her reach, emotionally, mentally, and almost certainly physically too.
She had no idea what she could do, but she knew that the possibility of solution did not lie in the maze of her mind but out there somewhere on the cold fell tops.
She made for the door. From the hearth came an enquiring growl.
She turned and looked at Sneck.
‘Why not, boy?’ she said. ‘To tell you the truth, I’ll be glad of company!’
4
Imogen stood on top of Pillar Rock looking down at the Liza winding its way along the valley bottom two thousand feet below and recalling the first time she had climbed up here more than a quarter of a century before.
Then she had simply trailed along beside Wolf, not certain where he was going, just knowing there was a life force in this young man that she wanted a share of.
Well, she’d certainly got her share, sucked him almost dry some might say, though he had got his fair share of all that she had to offer too.
No, not his fair share, because fairness didn’t enter into it.
He had stepped out of his world into hers, but it had been both impossible and undesirable that he could step all the way.
Impossible because, despite all the social cosmetology of the modern democratic era, it remained as true as it had always been that the arriviste could never really arrive.
And undesirable because for Wolf to have completely adapted to the moral code of her circle, which was basically do what thou wilt shall be all of the law, he would have had to sacrifice so much of what made him Wolf that he’d no longer have been worth having.
The wind was blowing hard up here. She sat down with her back to it. She was well insulated by several layers of clothing, but its chilly fingers still probed through to her warm flesh. Suggesting the Rock as a rendezvous point had not been the cleverest idea she’d ever had. Why had she done it? In one sense it was typical of the way she’d conducted a great deal of her life, an instinctive decision made without reference to reason or consequence. But at the same time it was also atypical, a reaching out of the random in search of a pattern.
Here it had all started. Here it would all end.
How it would end, she could not foretell. Her efforts to see him at Christmas had been coloured by the assumption that she would still have power over him, based on her awareness that he still had power over her. Her sense that he was making a conscious effort not to see her had confirmed her assumption. But after what had happened to Toby and the Nutbrowns, things had moved on. A first step had been taken, and she knew from her own life how much easier a second step was.
Curiously, her increased sense of risk made her all the more determined to confront him head on. She enjoyed danger as long as it was in her face. What she didn’t like was relaxing in her bath and hearing the buzz of an invisible wasp. Or to put it more poetically (she sometimes tried at poetry) all she wanted was to be able to stroll through the woodlands of her future without constantly straining her ears to catch the distant sound of an axe.
Was she a cold-hearted bitch, as a discarded lover had once called her? She’d examined the accusation closely and did not think so. Indeed, compared with her mother, she felt she was a creature of impulse and feeling. They had so much in common yet there were ways in which they were incomprehensible to each other. When Kira declared that the only thing better than having Wolf back in jail would be to have him buried deep in his grave, she was simply stating what she felt. To Imogen, neither of these was a desirable solution. What she wanted was to find a way for the pair of them to accept the collapse of their relationship and walk away from the wreckage comparatively unscathed.
There was a chance, albeit a small one, that her breakfast exchange with Kira might have provided a faint hope of finding such a way.
And another hopeful factor was the possibility that Wolf might even have something to walk away to as well as from. Men traditionally fell in love with their nurses, so why not with their psychiatrists?
Finding the black woman at the house again had been a surprise. When Alva Ozigbo came to the castle after Christmas, Imogen hadn’t considered the possibility that she might have any interest in Wolf other than a professional one. After all, from her point of view, he was a convicted paedophile/fraudster whom she had certified safe to return to the community, so naturally she had a vested interest in keeping a close eye on him.
Now Imogen wished she’d taken rather more notice of her as an individual. She was certainly striking. Attractive? Possibly. Imogen tried to see her through male eyes. She herself wasn’t too sensitive to the sexual aura of other women. In the interest of total experience she and Pippa had once spent a night together, but while there had been certain advantages in relating to a body that had the same geography and responses as your own, it had not been something she wanted to do again.
But she could see how Alva Ozigbo, with that combination of black skin, ochrous hair and fine bone structure, might turn some men on. Wolf? She wasn’t sure. He had been so totally fixated on herself that she had never heard him express even a theoretical interest in another woman. She was one hundred per cent sure he’d never been unfaithful to her, even when his travels had kept him away from home for months on end. The pent-up passion released on his return had given her some of the sensual highs of her life, though after he’d been at home a while, his attentions began to make her feel a touch claustrophobic.
Had he ever suspected this? She thought not.
And she was absolutely sure he’d never suspected her of being unfaithful. His reaction would have been, to say the least, extreme. She had been very lucky for fourteen years that no malicious tongue had sought to set him straight. Perhaps his natural unselfconscious likeability had protected him. It would have been like hurting a child.
Or perhaps it had been his other defining quality, the sense of raw power seething beneath the surface and looking for an outlet, that had kept him safe. If ever there was a man whose first reaction might be to kill the messenger, it was Wolf!
But eventually, inevitably, he would have found out.
She knew her friends.
They might hold their peace for years but in the end, like the scorpion in the fable, they would have to sting, because it was in their nature.
This certainty that the marriage was living on borrowed time had been one of the factors that made it easy to go along with Toby and Pippa when they’d revealed their survival scheme. When necessity rules, regret is as pointless as resistance.
One way or another, Wolf was going to jail and the marriage was finished.
One way, she would be penniless.
The other, she wouldn’t be.
Where was the choice in that?
To say she saw him condemned without a pang would have been untrue. To say that this pang kept her awake at nights would have been untruer. Only two things kept her awake and they were sex and toothache.
No, that was the kind of smart untruth she’d grown too used to pushing away people with. After Ginny died, she hadn’t slept soundly for months without the help of pills or alcohol. Though, curiously, she now found that since moving into Ginny’s old room, she slept like a child.
And she felt a kind of childish diffidence now as she sat on top of the Rock and wondered if he would come, and if he did, what he would do. She felt a sense of danger but no real fear. If necessity drove him to harm her, then so be it. She was confident he would not want to disfigure her as he had been disfigured. Death was another matter. He had never spoken openly about the years of youthful absence, but there had been killing in there somewhere, she was sure. In the right cause, he had the power to kill.
She stared down into the valley and saw herself slowly tumbling through the air.
Of course it wouldn’t really be slow. Thirty-two feet per second, something like that, she seemed to recollect. Which worked out at a lot of miles per hour!
But how slow might it feel in the mind? Climbing, she’d often wondered about this. How many recollections and regrets could be crushed between that moment when your fingers slipped from their hold and the next when your body broke against the rocks?
Perhaps there was just time for one clear revelation, one all-illuminating insight.
Or perhaps it would go on forever. She recalled a story her father used to read to her about a thief who escaped capture by jumping over the edge of the world. She used to lie in bed after Leon had put out the light, imagining how that would feel. And the words had often played through her mind as she was climbing . . . falling from us still through the unreverberate blackness of the abyss . . .
Falling . . . falling . . . falling . . .
A sound reached her that wasn’t borne on the gusting wind. She rose to her feet and strained her ears.
There it was again, the sound of boot on rock, from far below.
He was coming. She’d never doubted that he would.
She settled down for the last minutes of waiting.
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