by P. R. Black
‘What?’ Glenn gasped.
‘Boy’s right to be curious,’ Harvie muttered. ‘Why did you bring him?’
‘Help. If I needed it.’
Harvie tilted his head at an odd angle as Freya approached. ‘Something fishy about you, lass. Too much of your father in you by halves.’
‘You may be right about that. But, you first. Tell me about the Woodcutter.’
‘I’m the fucking Woodcutter,’ he snarled.
‘Yeah, I mean the other Woodcutter. Come on, Mick. You were practically falling over yourself to tell us about it. What was the message you left at the weir? “To Me, To You?” It’s obvious, now. There were two of you. There must have been. Let someone loose, and take the chance of chasing them on your own? There are a million ways that could have gone wrong. And it’s not like we’re in Alaska, or the Amazon, or somewhere like that. Even in the far north of Scotland, you’ve got a decent chance of bumping into people out on the mountains. That’s how you did it, didn’t you? One chases, the other one waits at the target zone you gave them. Isn’t that right?’
‘I was the architect,’ Harvie said, proudly. ‘I planned it all out. We both executed it – I’ll give you that.’
‘Except for the squaddie. What was the story there?’
‘Ah! Now, that was the hardest one. The odd one out. I took him on myself. One-man job. Took a swing at me outside a court martial case I was covering. Nasty little fucker. He paid the price, though. You can be as fast or as hard as you like – I corner you with a shotgun, you’ve fucking had it. He was still alive when I chopped him, though. I enjoyed that. More than I enjoyed braining everyone’s favourite corrupt policeman, over there. Your dad should be thanking me for that one.’
‘Who was it?’ Glenn said, perhaps reassured on some level by the friendly tone of the conversation. ‘If there were two of you, who was the other Woodcutter?’
‘Gads, he’s really keen on this case, isn’t he? In the face of grim death, he has to know. Not as bright as he makes out, though.’ Harvie cackled. ‘Patience, lad. I’ll tell you before you die. OK? That’s a promise.’
‘If there’re two Woodcutters, the other one was Galvin, surely,’ Glenn said. ‘He was top of my list. He tied everything together.’
‘That bastard?’ Even though his nemesis lay dead and still bleeding just yards away, Harvie couldn’t conceal his venom. ‘It would have been a good ruse, all the same. Him belting me one. If we’d made it look like we were enemies, but actually we were in it together. I can see your thinking. Best acting I’ve ever done, that afternoon. Talk about biting your lip and taking it. You will never know the fury I had to bottle in. Well… Maybe you’ve just seen the fury, actually. But no. It wasn’t Bernie. He was a psychopath, though. The worst kind, in my book, and I’ve got the fucking expertise when it comes to that – one who thinks he’s doing the right thing. Me – I’m a scumbag. I just enjoy hunting and killing people. Always have. My mother was terrible to me, as well. I wet the bed and I got bullied at school. I’ve read all the books, too. Big deal. Boo hoo, blah fucking blah.
‘Bottom line, however I got here – I like it. This is leisure. This is what I do for a hobby. But guys like Galvin… When they get in charge of things, that’s when it becomes systemic. When some coppers fit you up, they say it’s something to do with confirmation bias, or selection bias. They’ve just gone with the information that fits their theories, and ignored the evidence. That idiot just wanted someone in jail, and to look good in the papers. In so far as someone so butt-ugly can look good. He’s prettier now, in fact. Anyway. Take a good look where that level of scheming gets you. I struck a blow for justice, and that’s the truth. Several blows, in fact.’
Glenn had backed away, just an inch or two, while Harvie was focused on her. Freya tried not to make eye contact with him. They still had a weapon. Had Harvie forgotten?
‘So, you give me something now. Who’s your candidate for my little helper?’
‘You killed her,’ Freya said. ‘Cheryl Levison.’ Her voice crumpled upon saying that name. She remembered the axe splitting the bedframe up above her in that filthy rathole of a bunker. She remembered the gurgling sound as Levison’s last breaths escaped. She remembered contorting into a ball, too terrified to move. She remembered the blood, a rain of it, dripping onto the floor. The smell of it. She sobbed.
‘I chopped Cheryl Levison up, all right,’ Harvie said, chuckling. ‘But you’re off beam. She wasn’t involved. I just had to get rid of her. Your dad, you see… Your dad might have let something slip to her. Every chance of it. Good-looking woman like that, she knows how to manipulate a man. She had to go. She was my top target, but I’d have taken you, just as easily. Nice surprise for your dad, on the day of his release! Too bad I couldn’t have sorted you both. And, think about it – Levison’s a little too young to be involved in the originals. And she wasn’t involved in the new cases. All my own work, those ones. You wouldn’t believe how much I got into those… Well, you would believe it, in fact. You were there!’
‘Right up until you killed her, I thought Levison was there to help you, that night.’
Harvie threw his head back and laughed. ‘What a load of old bollocks! That doesn’t make a bit of sense. God, it’s so obvious who the other Woodcutter was. I get the feeling you just don’t want to admit it.’
The shotgun dropped, just a little. This might be the time.
‘Yeah. It is obvious. And always was.’
Harvie showed his teeth, a cartoonish grin. ‘That’s my girl. Say it, go on. Out loud. Do it for me.’
She shook her head. ‘You have to explain it first. My dad went to jail. He could have put you in there with him. Why didn’t he?’
‘Vanity.’ Harvie grinned. ‘In a nutshell. Guy’s a rock star, and he knows it. Handsome, oversexed little shit, back then. One thing I never got to the bottom of – guy as good-looking as that, why does he feel the need to chop women up? You should have seen them outside court. Think the Beatles landing in America for the first time. It was fucking embarrassing, the way those bitches lost their minds. Grown goddamned women in Laura Ashley floral print fucking dresses. Placards. “I Believe Him”. Good Christ in his kingdom.’
‘That doesn’t answer why he didn’t just blame you. He went inside.’
‘Loyalty, in a nutshell. Or something like it.’ He shook his head. ‘Oh, come on. You’re still defending him? He’s the other Woodcutter. Your dad. All along. We were partners!’
‘Nonsense,’ Freya croaked. ‘Why in God’s name would he go to jail… to protect you?’
‘It’s complicated. The thing is, your instincts were kinda right. You dad’s a maniac, no quibbles there. But he’s got some good in him. You see, your dad had this guilt, shame, remorse, call it what you like. Maybe “the thing I lack” is the best description. I couldn’t give a shit. I’m a sicko. I got back into it in later life, as a solo act! Ha! But he hated himself. For indulging his urges. Common thing. You don’t have to be a Catholic to be guilty here, but it helped in his case. He didn’t want to carry on with it. So he decided to go inside, to take himself away from the urge. Justice had nothing to do with it. He took his porridge. And he didn’t want to give me away. Vanity played its part. Also loyalty. We made a pact. We were friends.
‘It suited me, ’course it did. But it suited him, too. It was his idea. He didn’t care about the morality, as such, of what I was doing. He just wanted to be locked up for it, kept away from society. I mean my God, if you’d seen his face after he chopped those women up, I mean… the glee. Ever wanted to chop someone up? Imagine if it was your thing, your big goal in life. Imagine achieving it four times. He was good with the axe, as well. Credit to him for that. One chop, wallop, there’s an arm. There’s a thigh, cut right through. There’s some fucker’s head. And there’s their head again, but this time, halved down the middle. He was a genius with it. An artist at work. Well.’ Harvie sighed. ‘In other circumstances I’d sugg
est going for a pint, now. I’m parched after all that talking. Best we get started.’
‘Wait,’ Glenn said, ‘wait a minute. It was Gareth Solomon all along? I thought you said it was Levison.’
‘I didn’t think it was Levison, really,’ Freya said to him. Her neck and shoulders were tense, and she spoke through clenched teeth. ‘I was buying some time.’
Harvie’s grin faded.
‘You’ll soon see, Glenn,’ Freya said. She pointed right at Harvie, then, gazing into his eyes, her teeth gritted. ‘You won’t, though.’
Harvie looked uncertain, for a second. He paused, turning his head slightly.
Just as the axe crashed into it.
His legs buckled, and he fell on his backside. He blinked; there was no blood yet, but the axe was buried in the side of his face, splitting the cheekbone and some of the temple. Its handle was parallel to the vertical line of his body.
Harvie tugged at it uselessly, then sank forward, his backside resting against the brickwork of the shed.
He gurgled, and it is possible that the last thing he saw was Gareth Solomon, snatching up the shotgun from his lap and hurling it away.
Then Solomon grabbed the axe handle, placed a boot against Harvie’s ruined face, and tugged the axe free with a clean snap.
Harvie’s head lolled back, resting against the brickwork, jaw dropped wide, as the blood surged down the side of his face. Harvie might have been dead by then; he certainly was after Solomon centred himself, legs braced, and swung hard at his face.
The horizontal axe blade swept clean through his mouth, shearing through the cheeks, embedding itself in the back of the mouth and clean through the other side. The blade buried itself into the brickwork with a clean, metallic chime and a puff of dust.
Harvie, the axe handle jutting from the red ruin of his cheeks at a perfect right angle, was transfixed to the wall, eyes staring, but sightless. The jaw, completely unhinged, drooped obscenely.
Solomon sighed, placing a hand on the arch of his back. ‘I’m well out of practice, so sorry. I mean, I work out, but I’m old, now. And there’s no substitute for active duty in the field, I find.’
Freya couldn’t speak for a second or two. All she could say was, ‘Hey, Dad.’ She stood, tensed, fists clenched, unsure what to do. Then she pounded her own temples. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. She knew it was a possibility, all along. But she’d believed him. Believed all the lies, thought she saw a spark of light in his eyes, wanted to believe he was innocent, ignored the obvious, the blatant facts, even as she’d recited them to him in prison. He was the killer. Maybe the worst of the two.
The glee. Those had been Harvie’s words. The glee of it.
The horror she’d felt upon seeing the name of her father in those old newspaper reports and badly scanned photocopies… his face, chin tilted down, caught perfectly in a saturnine expression by a tabloid photographer… The thought of sharing her genes with a killer, a maniac. It was all true.
‘Stop that, now,’ Solomon said, blankly. ‘Don’t be doing that to yourself. You – four eyes – yeah, you, haircut, whatever. Put an arm round her or… whatever you do.’
Glenn did as he was told. Freya sagged into him, sobbing.
Solomon considered Harvie for a second, biting one side of his mouth and then the other. He might have been considering a frozen-over windscreen, and working out how to chisel off the ice. ‘For the record… I’m sorry about Mick,’ he said. ‘It’s true, what he said. All of it. We had a bond. Birds of a feather. But I guess he had to go. He’s left some mess. I could not believe he had started killing again. He must have kept that bottled up for twenty-five years. My God, can you imagine that? Unless he got really good at stalking and killing. Anyway. Now he’s a great big mess, isn’t he? I’m not sure how we take care of him. Or this.’ Solomon tapped the edge of the axe handle with the tip of his index finger.
‘You can’t get away with this,’ Glenn said. ‘See sense.’
Solomon glared at Glenn; the younger man actually flinched.
‘You didn’t tell me… you had a boyfriend!’ Solomon roared, his voice echoing out. ‘Who’s this drip? The famous fucking Glenn Allander from sickos dot com?’
‘He’s a friend,’ Freya said, quickly. ‘He’s fine. He won’t say anything.’ Now she felt terror again – somehow, a worse terror than she’d felt with Harvie, or with Galvin pointing a shotgun at them. Solomon seemed more out of control. That person who’d been contained behind the reinforced glass was now on the loose. And there was no telling what’d happen to them, now. Even his own daughter. Maybe it wouldn’t matter who it was, when his blood was up. She had a nauseating realisation of how he would look in the moonlight; the broad, pale face, and the staring eyes, darker than shadow.
‘I’ll decide who says what, my girl.’ He kept his eyes on Glenn for a long time, before prodding Bernie Galvin’s body with his boot. ‘I am not sorry about this sack of shit, all the same. I didn’t get to thank Mick for that. That’s his parting gift. We’ll raise a glass to him later, eh?’
‘How’d you slip your markers with the police?’ Freya said.
‘They aren’t actually watching me. If they are, well…’ He spread his hands. ‘It’s over today, one way or the other. Mick was right about that other thing, the guilt and what have you. As well as the vanity. I’m old enough to accept all that. If we get arrested here, I’ll take the credit, and I’ll do the time. I was, after all, the Woodcutter. Hey – is it Glenn? Aren’t you going to say hello? You have to impress your girlfriend’s dad, you know. This is a very elemental moment, son. You look a little knock-kneed to be dating my daughter.’
Glenn said nothing. He stared from Freya, then back to Solomon.
‘What amazes me is that the copper over there—’ here he gestured towards the bloodied anemone lying in the dust a few yards away ‘—actually was on his own. They’d have swarmed the place by now. Just as well I arrived late, while Harvie was busy with him. Had I arrived earlier… he might have got the drop on me, the little shit. But I have to say, that was a nice bit of work. Tip of the hat to Harvie, there, so to speak. I mean we were competitive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate good work. Did you bring us all here, Freya?’
‘I did,’ she said. ‘It was the best way to find out who’s who. I had an idea. I just wanted to check it out.’
‘You’re saying you knew it was me?’
‘I was in denial. Right up to the last moment. But I guess I knew, somehow. It might be an instinct. The same instinct that makes me want to speak to you, and get to know you. Maybe we’re both messed up. There’s a fifty-fifty chance of it, if it comes to the genes, after all.’
‘Ach. That’s quite sad, in a way. Very sad. We had something, maybe. That’s a shame.’ Solomon stared at his hands. ‘Because I think… on balance… I’m going to have to kill you,’ he said, almost conversationally. ‘Don’t get me wrong, the odds of being a free man by sunset today are non-existent. But I think… Yep, you’re going to have to go.’
Glenn was braced to take off. ‘Run, Freya. You first. Go.’
She shook her head. She could not make the sound with her voice, so she mouthed: No.
‘I totally accept, I might not catch both of you. And there’s a limited chance I’ll get one of you, but… Yep, you’ve both got to go. Sorry, Freya. For what it’s worth, I hope I catch him, and you get away.’
Freya locked eyes with Glenn’s. ‘There’s another reason I picked this spot,’ she said. ‘I picked it because it was good and lonely.’
Solomon and Glenn both had the same expression. ‘You what?’
Freya reached into her backpack, and withdrew a hatchet. The blade was polished steel, and very sharp.
Glenn’s eyes appeared to be escaping from his skull. He backed off, hastily.
‘I wanted someone bumped off.’ Freya jerked her head towards Glenn. ‘Fancy doing it for me, Daddy?’
‘Are you serious?’ Glenn squeaked.
<
br /> ‘Yeah. You’re too pathetic for words, Glenn. God’s sake, I can’t believe we did it. Daddy, I don’t like my boyfriend. We can say Harvie did it.’ Her eyes shone, and she grinned at him. ‘Take care of it, would you?’
‘Would I?’ Solomon barked laughter, and rubbed his hands. ‘Too bloody right! You know, you’ve done a perfect job with the kill site, I have to say. It’s better than some of the places we staked out, back in the day.’
‘Get him, Daddy.’ Freya’s eyes were all pupils, it seemed – black and impenetrable. They seemed to engulf the whites. She bit her lip, mock coquettishly. ‘Glenn – I’d get motoring, if I was you.’
Glenn asked no questions; raised no objections. He simply started to run.
‘Off he goes,’ she said, absently. ‘I’d like to do it, Dad. It feels right. It feels like succession.’
A grin spread across his face. He might have been crying.
‘My girl,’ he said.
She ran to him. He kissed her fiercely, then hugged her close.
‘We going to chop him up, Daddy? Together?’
‘We are.’ They linked hands.
‘He can’t run,’ Freya said, pointing towards the stumbling figure. ‘I bet you could get him. Or maybe I’ll get him first?’
‘Killer instinct! Ha! That is a gold star for you!’ He turned, and yanked the axe from Mick Harvie’s still-startled death mask. Harvie finally fell forward. Though it made no odds to a corpse, the sound of his nose colliding with the concrete in the dust between his feet was wince-inducing. A red stain was turning dark on the crumbled brick at his back, and already drawing flies.
‘You first,’ Freya said.
‘Of course, pet.’
Solomon took off. He was a sprinter; his bulk was mainly muscle, and his enormous thighs and gorilla’s backside propelled him beyond Freya. The axe shone in the sunshine, sticky with gore like a butcher’s parcel.
His burst of pace didn’t last, and Freya soon caught up.
He was giggling in between breaths. ‘I’m going to do it, do it again!’ he wheezed. ‘Here it comes, boy!’