The Woodcutter

by Reginald Hill

  Toby said, ‘There have been developments. I’m far from sure exactly what’s going on, but they’ve raided your offices. Also we’re getting word that simultaneous raids are being carried out on your other premises worldwide, domestic and commercial.’

  I think that was the moment when I first felt a chill of fear beneath the volcano of anger and indignation that had been simmering inside me since I met Medler coming up my stairs.

  I sank heavily on to a chair.

  ‘Toby,’ I said, ‘what the fuck’s going on?’

  Before he could answer, the door opened and Medler’s face appeared.

  ‘Nearly done, Mr Estover?’ he said.

  ‘Give us another minute,’ said Toby.

  Medler glanced at me. What he saw in my face seemed to please him.

  He gave me one of his smug smiles and said, ‘OK. One minute.’

  It was the smile that provoked me to my next bit of stupidity. To me it seemed to say, Now you’re starting to realize we’ve really got you by the short and curlies!

  I said to Toby, ‘Give me your mobile.’

  He said, ‘Why?’

  I said, ‘For fuck’s sake, just give it to me!’

  In the Observer profile when I got my knighthood, they talked about what they called my in-your-face abrasive manner. When I read the draft, I rang up to request, politely I thought, that this phrase should be modified. After I’d been talking to the feature writer for a few minutes, he said, ‘Hang on. Something I’d like you to listen to.’ And he played me back a tape of what I’d just been saying.

  When it finished, I said, ‘Jesus. Print your piece the way it is. And send me a copy of that tape.’

  I made a genuine effort to tone down my manner after that, but it wasn’t easy. I paid my employees top dollar and I didn’t expect to have to repeat anything I said to them. That included solicitors, even if they happened to be friends.

  I thrust my hand out towards Toby. It took him a second or two, but in the end he put his mobile into my palm.

  I thumbed in 999.

  When the operator asked, ‘Which service?’ I said, ‘Police.’

  Toby’s eyes widened.

  When he heard what I said next, it was a wonder they didn’t pop right out of their sockets.

  ‘The Supreme Council of the People’s Jihad has spoken. There is a bomb in West End Magistrate’s Court. In three and a half minutes all the infidel gathered there will be joining their accursed ancestors in the fires of Hell. Allahu Akbar!’

  Toby’s face was grey.

  ‘For God’s sake, Wolf, you can’t . . .’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, putting the phone in my pocket. ‘Now we’ll see just how efficient all these new anti-terrorist strategies really are.’

  They were pretty good, I have to admit.

  Within less than a minute I heard the first sounds of activity outside the door.

  Toby said, ‘This is madness. We’ve got to tell them . . .’

  I poked him hard in the stomach.

  It served a double purpose. It shut him up and when the door opened and Medler said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here,’ I was able to reply, ‘Mr Estover’s not feeling well. I think we ought to get a doctor.’

  ‘Not here, outside!’ commanded Medler.

  I got one of Toby’s arms over my shoulder and began moving him through the door. I looked appealingly at Medler. He didn’t look happy, but to give him credit he didn’t hesitate. He hooked Toby’s other arm over his shoulder and we joined the flood of people pouring down the corridor towards the exit.

  To create urgency without causing panic is no easy task and I think the police and court officers did pretty well. But of course the last people to get the message are very aware that there’s a large crowd between them and safety, and they want it to move a lot faster than it seems to be doing. Two men dragging a third along between them forms a pretty effective bung and all I had to do as the lobby came in sight was to cease resisting the growing pressure behind me and let myself be swept towards the exit on the tide.

  I don’t know at what point Medler realized I was no longer with him. I didn’t look back but burst out of the building into the sunlight to be confronted by a uniformed constable who shouted at me. For a second I thought my escape was going to be very short lived. Then I realized that what he was shouting was, ‘Get away from the building! Run!’

  I ran. Everyone was running. I felt a surge of exhilaration. It must feel like this to start a marathon, I thought. All those months of training and now the moment was here to put your fitness to the test.

  My marathon lasted about a quarter of a mile, firstly because I was now far enough away from the court for a running man to attract attention and secondly because I was knackered. I still tried to keep reasonably fit but clearly the days when I could roam twenty miles across the Cumbrian fells without breaking sweat were long past.

  I was beginning to feel anything but exhilarated. My sense of self-congratulation at getting away was being replaced by serious self-doubt. What did I imagine I was going to do with my freedom? Head up to Poynters to see Imogen and Ginny? That would be the first place Medler would set his dogs to watch. Or was my plan to set about proving my innocence like they do all the time in the movies? I’d need professional help to do that and no legitimate investigator was going to risk his licence aiding and abetting a fugitive. OK, the promise of large sums of money might make one or two of them bend the rules a little, but only if they believed I still had easy access to large sums of money.

  And now I came to think about it, I didn’t even have access to small sums of money. In fact, I had absolutely nothing in my pockets except for Toby’s phone. I was an idiot. I should have made him hand over his wallet as well!

  My horizons had shrunk. Without money I wasn’t going anywhere I couldn’t reach on my own two feet. The obvious places to lay my hands on cash – home in Holland Park, my offices in the City – were out because they were so obvious.

  Well, as my Great Aunt Carrie was fond of saying, if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain. Probably saying that would get you stuck on the pointed end of a fatwa nowadays. But Carrie lived all her life in Cumberland where they knew a lot about the intractability of mountains and bugger all about the intractability of Islam.

  I took out Toby’s phone and rang Johnny Nutbrown on his mobile.

  When he answered I said, ‘Johnny, it’s me. Meet me in twenty minutes at the Black Widow.’

  I thought I was being clever when I said that. No reason why anybody should be listening in to Johnny, but even if they were, unless the Met was recruiting Smart Young Things, even less reason for them to know this was how habitués referred to The Victoria pub in Chelsea. Not that I was ever a Smart Young Thing, but Johnny had taken me there once and been greeted as an old chum by the swarming Dysons, i.e. vacuums so empty they don’t even contain a bag. I’d committed the place to my memory as somewhere I’d no intention of visiting again.

  Circumstances change cases. It’s being nimble on your feet that keeps you ahead of the game in business and in life.

  I soon realized that I was going to need to be exceedingly nimble on my feet if I was going to make the Widow in twenty minutes. Being chauffeured around in an S-class Merc tends to make you insensitive to distances. Might have done it if I’d started running again but neither my legs nor my need for discretion permitted that. Not that it mattered. Johnny would wait. In fact, come to think of it, he too would be hard pushed to make it through the lunchtime traffic in much under half an hour.

  I took thirty-five minutes. As I entered the crowded bar my first thought was that we were going to have to find somewhere a lot quieter to have a chat. I couldn’t see Johnny. At six feet seven, he was usually pretty easy to spot, even in a crowd, but I pushed a little further into the room just to make sure.

  No sign, but I did notice a man at the bar, not because he was tall, though he was; nor be
cause he had the kind of face that defies you to make it smile, though he did. No, it was just that somehow he looked out of place. That is, he looked like an ordinary guy who’d just dropped in for a quick half in his lunch break. Except that this was the kind of bar that ordinary guys in search of a quick half reversed out of at speed. He was raising a bottle of Pils to his mouth. As he did so his gaze met mine for a moment and registered . . . something. Maybe he’d just realized how much he’d had to pay for the Pils. He drank, lowered his head, and I saw his lips move. Nowadays everyone knows what men speaking into their lapels are doing.

  I didn’t turn back to the main door. If I’d got it right, the guys he was talking to would be coming in through there pretty quickly. Instead I followed a sign reading Toilets and found myself in a dead-end corridor. I peered into the Gents. Windowless. I pushed open the door of the Ladies. That looked better. A frosted-glass pane about eighteen inches square. There was a bin for the receipt of towels. I stood on it and examined the catch. It didn’t look as if it had been opened in years and the frame was firmly painted in place. I stepped down, picked up the bin and hit the glass hard. Cheap stuff, it shattered easily. Behind me I heard a door open. I swung round but it was only a woman coming out of one of the cubicles. I’ll say this for the Dysons, they don’t do swoons or hysterics.

  She said, ‘About time they aired this place out.’

  I rattled the bin around the frame to dislodge the residual shards, put the bin on the floor once more, stood on it and launched myself through the window. As I did so, I heard another door open and male voices shouting.

  I felt my trousers tear, then my leg, so my clear-up technique hadn’t been all that successful. I hit the ground awkwardly, doing something to my shoulder. I was dazed but able to see that I was in a narrow alley. One way it ran into a brick wall, the other on to a busy street. I staggered towards the street.

  Behind me, voices. Ahead, a crowded pavement. I could vanish into the crowd, I told myself. I glanced back. Two men coming very quick. I commanded my legs to move faster and the old in-your-face-abrasive technique worked.

  I erupted on to the pavement at a fair rate of knots, decided that turning left or right would slow me down, so kept on going.

  The thing about London buses is you can wait forever when you want one in a hurry, but if you don’t want one . . .

  I saw it coming, even saw the driver’s shocked face, almost saw the number . . .

  Then I saw no more.

  Elf

  i

  ‘It’s . . . interesting,’ said Alva Ozigbo cautiously.

  Wolf Hadda smiled. It was like a pale ray of winter sunshine momentarily touching a dark mountain. In all the months she’d been treating him, this was only the second time she’d seen his smile, but even this limited observation had hinted at its power to distract attention from the sinister sunglasses and the corrugated scars, inviting you instead to relate to the still charming man beneath.

  Charm was perhaps the most potent weapon a pederast could possess.

  But it was a weapon Hadda could hardly be conscious of possessing or surely he would have brought it out before now to reinforce his lies?

  He said, ‘I remember interesting. That’s the word they use out there to describe things they don’t understand, don’t approve of, or don’t like, without appearing ignorant, judgmental or lacking in taste.’

  She noted the intensity of out there.

  She said, ‘In here I use it to describe things I find interesting.’

  They sat and looked at each other across the narrow table for a while. At least she presumed he was looking at her; his wrap-around glasses made it difficult to be certain. She could see herself reflected in the mirrored lenses, a narrow ebon face, its colouring inherited from her Nigerian father, its bone structure from her Swedish mother. Also her hair, straight and pale as bone. Many people assumed it was a wig, worn for effect. She was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved sweater that neither obscured nor drew attention to her breasts. Don’t be provocative in your dress, the Director had advised her when she started the job. But no point in over-compensating. If you turned up in a burka, they’d still mentally undress you.

  Did Hadda mentally undress her? she wondered. Up to their last session she’d have judged not. But what had happened then had stayed with her for the whole of the intervening seven days.

  It had started in the usual way. She was already seated at her side of the bare wooden table when the door on the secure side of the interview room opened. Prison Officer Lindale, young and compassionate, had smiled and nodded his head at her, then stood aside to let Wilfred Hadda enter.

  He limped laboriously into the room and sat down on the basic wooden chair that always seemed too small for him. Her fanciful notion that his rare smile was like wintry sunshine on a mountain probably rose from the sense of mountainous stillness he exuded. A craggy mountain, its face bearing the scars of ancient storms, its brow streaked with the greyish white of old snows.

  It was well over a year since their first meeting, and despite her own extensive research that had been added to the file inherited from Joe Ruskin, her predecessor at Parkleigh, she did not feel she knew much more about Hadda. Ruskin’s file was in Alva’s eyes a simple admission of failure. All his attempts to open a dialogue were simply ignored and in the end the psychiatrist had set down his assessment that in his view the prisoner was depressed but stable, and enforced medication would only be an option if his behaviour changed markedly.

  Alva Ozigbo had read the file with growing exasperation. The system it seemed to her had abandoned Hadda to deal with his past himself, and the way he was choosing to do it was to treat his sentence as a kind of hibernation.

  The trouble with hibernation was when the bat or the hedgehog or the polar bear woke up, it was itself again.

  Hadda, she read, had never admitted any of his crimes, but unlike many prisoners he did not make a thing of protesting his innocence either. According to his prison record, verbal abuse simply bounced off his monumental indifference. Isolation in the Special Unit had meant that there was little opportunity for other prisoners to attack him physically, but on the couple of occasions when, hopefully by accident, the warders let their guard down and an assault had been launched, his response had been so immediate and violent, it was the attackers who ended up in hospital.

  But that had been in the early days. For five years until Alva’s appointment in January 2015 he had been from the viewpoint of that most traditional of turnkeys, Chief Officer George Proctor, a model prisoner, troubling no one and doing exactly what he was told.

  The Chief Officer, a well-fleshed man with a round and rubicund face that gave a deceptive impression of Pickwickian good humour, was by no means devoid of humanity, but in his list of penal priorities it came a long way behind good order and discipline. So when he concluded his verdict on Hadda by saying, ‘Can’t understand what he’s doing in here’, Alva was puzzled.

  ‘But he was found guilty of very serious crimes,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, and the bugger should be locked up for ever,’ said Proctor. ‘But look around you, miss. We got terrorists and subversives and serial killers, the bloody lot. That’s what this place is for. Hadda never done any serious harm to no one.’

  It was a point Alva would usually have debated fiercely, but she had already wasted too much time beating her fists against Proctor’s rock-hard shell of received wisdom and inherited certainties. Also she knew how easy it would be for him to make her job even harder than it was, though in fairness he had never done anything to block or disrupt what he called her tête-à-têtes, which he pronounced tit-a-tits with a face so blank it defied correction.

  After a year in post, she wasn’t sure how much good she’d done in relation to the killers and terrorists, but as far as Hadda was concerned, she felt she’d made no impression whatsoever. They brought him along to see her, but he simply refused to talk. After a while she found that h
er earlier exasperation with what she had judged to be her predecessor’s too easy abandonment of his efforts was modifying into a reluctant understanding.

  And then one day when she turned up at Parkleigh, the Director had sent for her.

  ‘Terrible news,’ he said. ‘It’s Hadda’s daughter. She’s dead.’

  Alva had studied the man’s file so closely she did not need reminding of the facts. The girl, Virginia, had been thirteen when her father was sentenced. She had never visited him in prison. A careful check was kept of prisoners’ mail in and out. He had written letters to her c/o his ex-wife in the early days. There had been no known reply and the letters out had ceased though he persevered with birthday and Christmas cards.

  Joe Ruskin had recorded that Hadda’s reaction to any attempt to bring up the subject of his relationship with his daughter had been to stand up and head for the door. Grief or guilt? the psychiatrist speculated. Hadda’s predilection for pubescent girls had led the more prurient tabloids to speculate whether she might have been an object of his abuse, but there had been no suggestion of this either in the police investigation nor in the case for the prosecution. Ruskin had demanded full disclosure of all information relevant to the man’s state of mind and crimes, but nowhere had he found anything to indicate that details had been kept secret to protect the child.

  Now the Director filled in the details of Ginny’s life after her father’s downfall.

  ‘Her mother sent her to finish her education abroad, out of the reach of the tabloids. Her grandmother, that’s Lady Kira Ulphingstone, has family connections in Paris, and that’s where the girl seems to have settled. She was, by all accounts, pretty wild.’

  ‘With her background, why wouldn’t she be?’ said Alva. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘The worst way,’ said the Director. ‘There was a party in a friend’s flat, drugs, sex, the usual. She was found early this morning in an alley behind the apartment block. She’d passed out, choked on her own vomit. Nineteen years old. What a waste! Alva, he’s got to be told. It’s my job, I know, but I’d like you to be there.’