The Woodcutter

by Reginald Hill

  ‘I’m sorry . . .?’

  Hadda said bleakly, ‘Think about it. They say things come in threes, don’t they? They certainly did for Fred. One, I disappeared for five years. Two, I came back and married Imogen against his wish and his judgment. Three, I got sent down for fraud and messing with young girls. Three times I broke his heart. The last time it didn’t mend.’

  And who do you blame for that? wondered Alva. But this wasn’t the time to get aggressive, not when she’d got him talking about what had to be one of the most significant relationships in his life.

  She said, ‘But the first two times, you say Leon tried to help?’

  ‘Oh yes. I think he recognized Dad and me were carved from the same rock. Left to our own devices, we’d probably never have spoken again! Don’t know what he said to Fred about me, but he told me that, after I vanished, often he’d go into the forest with Imogen, and they’d find Dad just sitting slumped against the old rowan, staring into space, completely out of it. Sometimes there’d be tears on his cheeks. It cracked me up, just hearing about it. So whenever I felt like telling Dad that if he wanted to be a stubborn old fool, he could just get on with it, I’d think of what Leon had told me and try to bite my tongue. Gradually things got better between us. And when Ginny was born . . .’

  He stopped abruptly and glared at her as if defying her to question him further about his daughter.

  She said, ‘So did Fred attend the wedding?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Wolf, relaxing. ‘That would have been too much. I hoped right up till the ceremony started he’d show up. Then, once it started, I was scared he might!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That bit when the vicar asks if anyone knows of any impediment, I imagined the church door bursting open and Fred coming in with his axe and yelling, “How’s this for an impediment?” I remember, after the vicar asked the question he seemed to pause for ever. Then Johnny glanced round to the back of the church and shouted, “Speak up then” and that set everyone laughing.’

  ‘Johnny . . .?’

  ‘Johnny Nutbrown. He was my best man.’

  ‘A large step from being the nose-bleeding object of your anger,’ she said. ‘How did that come about?’

  ‘You mean, how come I didn’t have any old friends of my own to take on the job? Simple. I was always a loner and the few half friendships I formed at school didn’t survive my transformation, as you call it.’

  ‘But didn’t you make any new ones during this transformation period?’ she asked. ‘Even lowly woodcutters on a quest to perform three impossible tasks probably need a bit of human contact on the way.’

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t meet any others,’ he said shortly.

  Then he pushed back his chair and stood up, reaching into his blouson as he did so.

  ‘You’re curious about me and Johnny Nutbrown?’ he said. ‘Well, I think you’ll find all you need to know in here.’

  And there it was, the next exercise book just as she’d hypothesized.

  But by producing it he had once again stepped aside from talking about those missing years, so as she took the book, she felt it less as a triumph than an evasion.

  Wolf

  i

  Let’s move on from our little diversion into childhood trauma and adolescent sexuality, shall we? Where was I before you nudged me down that fascinating side road?

  Oh yes.

  I’d been in a coma for the best part of nine months.

  During the early stages of my so-called recovery, I’ve no idea what proportion of my time I spent out of things. All I do know is that every period of full lucidity seemed to provide the opportunity for a new piece of shit to be hurled at me.

  I rapidly came to see that, far from things going away while I lay unconscious, they had got immeasurably and by now irrecoverably worse.

  Let me lay them out, not in any particular order.

  The charges against me had multiplied and intensified.

  It seems that during the panic caused by my false terrorist attack warning to the Magistrates Court, several people had been injured and one had died. Didn’t matter that like me he was a prisoner waiting to face committal proceedings, that he too tried to escape in the panic, slipped on the stairs, and suffered a heart attack from a long-standing condition, the bastards still added a charge of manslaughter to the offence of making a hoax terrorist call which was worth a long jail sentence in itself.

  In addition, the bus driver had been severely traumatized, several of his passengers had been hurt, two patrons of the pavement café had been hospitalized, and the driver of the Range Rover turned out to be a barrister, and he was orchestrating a whole battery of civil claims against me.

  But these were the least of my troubles. In face of these charges there was nothing to do but put my hand up and plead guilty, only offering in mitigation the tremendous strain the manifestly ludicrous allegations of paedophilia had put me under.

  Except they were no longer manifestly ludicrous. In fact they had moved on from the passive downloading of pornographic images to devastating accusations that I was actively involved in the whole revolting business, both as commercial organizer and active participant.

  The InArcadia website, it was alleged, had been set up and maintained by money channelled through one of my off-shore companies. Some of the video footage obtained from InArcadia was identified as having been shot at various of my overseas properties. And in several scenes of a particularly revolting nature, there were glimpses of a naked back that bore a scar similar to mine.

  There had been a steady leak of much of this material into the public domain and I’d already been tried, judged and condemned by the media, a verdict that must have seemed confirmed by the news that Imogen had started divorce proceedings.

  And was this the end?

  No, Elf, you bet your sweet life it wasn’t!

  Back in 2008 we could all hear the rumblings of the approaching economic storm. I admit I was rather smug about it and arrogantly assumed Woodcutter was soundly enough rigged to ride it out. When I woke from my trance, I found the tempest had struck with even greater force than anyone had anticipated and the economies of the Western world were in tatters.

  Had I been around, I might have been able to do something to limit the damage to Woodcutter.

  Or, as the Financial Times put it, ‘Possibly if Sir Wilfred’s grubby paw had still been on the helm, he might have been able to steer the most seaworthy of his piratical fleet into some extrajudicial haven, but left unmanned in those desperate seas, they either sank with all hands or were boarded and taken in tow by the local excise men.’

  In times of crisis, journalists often erupt in flowery excrescence.

  To continue in the same vein, as far as I could make out many of my old shipmates had leapt overboard clutching whatever portable pillage they could, while others had surrendered to the invading officers and saved their own worthless carcases from the yard-arm by offering them mine!

  My initial assumption had been that the morning raid on my house was part of a Fraud Office investigation, and I recalled my airy reassurance to Toby that there was nothing for them to find.

  Now I had the Fraud Office crawling all over my affairs and finding all kinds of crap! The worst of it was that I couldn’t remember in most instances whether I knew it was there or not. The trauma of the accident had left so many gaps both physical and mental that my degree of recovery was always in doubt. But I can’t remember is not a line of defence that wins much sympathy from a stony-faced financial investigator.

  But none of these events and accusations hit me like the news that Imogen was planning to divorce me. And even that wasn’t the end of the trauma. The very next day they broke the news to me that Fred had suffered a serious stroke and while I had been lying in my coma, he’d been lying in the twilight state of the stroke victim.

  I was desperate to see him, but I wasn’t fit to travel even if the authorities had given me permission. DC Mc
Lucky was very helpful here, bringing me the phone and getting me connected to the Northern hospital where Dad was a patient. According to the consultant I spoke to, Dad’s condition was still extremely serious. He wasn’t willing to even estimate just how far any recovery process might take him.

  Fred and I had slowly moved back towards each other after the rift over my marriage. Ginny made the difference. In a way I’m glad he wasn’t around to hear of her death.

  Back then I was devastated by the prospect that I might never see him again.

  McLucky did his best to reassure me in his forthright Glaswegian way. He it was who ran a check on the hospital and discovered that it had possibly the best stroke unit in the north of England, and that Fred was there as a private patient funded by no less a person than my dear old father-in-law, Sir Leon! It was a strange irony that their shared opposition to a Hadda–Ulphingstone marriage had turned their strong employer/employee bond into something like friendship and ultimately Fred had graduated from being the estate’s head forester to more of an overall estate manager.

  For several days, I could think about nothing else but my sick father and my estranged wife. I had plenty of time for thinking as, apart from the medical staff and DC McLucky, I saw no one.

  As I’ve said, I’d never been a particularly sociable man and as I became rich and powerful, I put little faith in the pretensions of new acquaintance to genuine affection. But people seemed to like me and I did form a small circle of friends to whom I would once have applied the old-fashioned designation of faithful and true.

  Not one of the faithful and the true made an effort to contact me or turned up to see me in hospital. Wankers! I thought. But why should any of them prove more faithful and true than my own wife and my good friend and solicitor, Toby Estover?

  The only one I felt confident would show me some loyalty was Johnny Nutbrown.

  As I’ve already told you, my first encounter with Johnny age fifteen was far from auspicious. On my return after my years away with the fairies, I was rather surprised to find him still around. While Johnny is always at ease everywhere, he never gives an impression of actually belonging anywhere. Of course he’d been to the same school as some of the others, including Estover, and also he had a bad case of the hots for Imo’s best friend, Pippa Thursby. So they were good enough reasons for him to be on the fringe of their magic little circle.

  But I never counted him as being truly in it, which was a plus for me.

  I’m sure Imogen had to put up with a lot of crap from her friends when she announced she was going to marry me. She never passed any of it on, and it wouldn’t have bothered me if she had. Frankly, I thought most of them were a waste of space that could have been more usefully occupied by a flock of Herdwicks. All the interest most of them showed in me was a prurient curiosity about the parameters of the sexual performance they were sure must be the basis of Imogen’s interest. I think I could probably have shagged the lot of them, men and women, if I’d been so inclined.

  But Johnny saw me differently. Later, when we got close enough for honesty, he told me with that cynical grin of his, ‘The others looked at you and thought big fucks; I looked at you and thought big bucks. This guy is going where the money is.’

  I couldn’t complain about this economic basis for our relationship as initially I only became interested in him when I realized he’d got the sharpest mind for figures of anyone I’d ever met. If it had been allied to an entrepreneurial spirit, he would have been a master of the commercial universe in his own right.

  I soon realized we were made for each other.

  The thing was that Johnny could do just about anything, so long as someone told him what to do.

  An old schoolmate of his – in fact, Toby Estover my former solicitor, and former friend – told me about Johnny’s first appearance on a rugby field. As he evinced neither interest nor talent, they stuck him on the wing for a practice game. The first time the ball was passed to him, he caught it one-handed and was standing still, examining it with mild curiosity, when most of the opposing team jumped on top of him. When he’d got back on his feet, the games master expostulated, ‘For heaven’s sake, Nutbrown, I don’t expect you to do much when you get the ball, but I do expect you to do something!’

  ‘Yes, sir. What exactly?’ replied Johnny.

  ‘Well, ideally I’d like to see you run forward as fast as you can, not letting anyone touch you, until you reach those two tall posts sticking out of the ground, and then place the ball gently between them. Failing that, as I’m sure you will, just kick it as far as you can!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Johnny.

  And next time he received the ball, he jinked and sidestepped his way the length of the field without anyone laying a hand upon him and touched down between the posts. The only trouble was the next time he took a pass he chose the alternative instruction and kicked it as far as he could, this being sideways over the line of poplars separating the ground from a river into which the ball plopped, never to be seen again.

  That was the thing about Johnny. You had to tell him what to do, you had to be clear what you were telling him, and you had to tell him every time. We suited each other perfectly. I had the ambition, the energy and the imagination; and he had a mind that could run over my proposals, detect flaws, point out shortcuts, and calculate risks, often in the time it took to down the two large vodka martinis that were the inevitable precursor to lunch and dinner.

  Without Johnny, I don’t doubt I would have still managed to become stinking rich, but with him, the sweet stink of success came a lot quicker.

  Without me, Johnny might well have degenerated into a sort of old-fashioned lounge-lizard, charming enough money to get by on out of a succession of susceptible women. I took some pride in having saved him from this fate, but rather less in having been responsible for his marriage.

  Pippa Thursby, like many best friends, was all the things that Imogen wasn’t.

  While Imogen defied friends and family to marry the man she loved, Pippa never made any secret of the fact that though she found Johnny to be hugely attractive, highly entertaining, and a maestro of the mattress, he was merely (as she put it) stopping her gap until she could get her hands on some seriously wealthy old guy who would set her up for life by either death or divorce. She had her sights set on the MD of the advertising company for which she worked. Pippa was no featherbrain, she had excellent IT skills and could have carved out a successful career for herself, but she saw no reason to catch a train into work every day when she could get somebody else to do that on her behalf.

  So Johnny was fun but marriage to someone so feckless simply wasn’t an option. Then he and I got together, and things changed as it dawned on Pippa that my eruption towards the financial stratosphere was dragging Johnny in its wake.

  Johnny himself was more than happy with his long-standing no-strings relationship, but he was dead meat once Pippa decided that life as Mrs Nutbrown could be a five-star arrangement after all. So three years after my own wedding, I was standing as best man at Johnny’s.

  As my closest colleague and my closest friend, I had hoped, nay I had believed, he would stand by me in turn.

  I put it to the back of my mind as I set about trying to make sense of what was happening in my marriage.

  DC McLucky had proved to be a rough diamond with a heart of gold. He even apologized obliquely for not being allowed to leave the phone permanently plugged in by my bedside, but he fetched it without demur whenever I asked for it. I tried without success to talk with Imogen. I rang Pippa but she told me bluntly that she couldn’t help me and put the phone down. I rang my office and found the number was disconnected. When I got on to BT to complain, there was a long silence then I found myself connected to a DI in the Fraud Squad. I told him all the money was buried in a dead man’s chest on a South Sea island but I’d lost the map, which wasn’t very clever but I was getting beyond clever. I rang just about everyone I knew and found they were either unc
ommunicative or unavailable. A call from me clearly sounded like the tinkle of a leper’s bell.

  But I made no attempt to contact Johnny Nutbrown. I didn’t mention him even when I spoke to his wife. I think it was superstition. If Johnny deserted me, then I was truly fucked. He would surely come to see me of his own accord. And in his own time, of course, for one thing you soon found out about Johnny was that his own time was not as other people’s time.

  But as the days passed and he didn’t appear, I was ready to sink into despair.

  Then one afternoon I woke up from yet another involuntary nap to find a lean, rangy figure sitting by my bed. His face was hidden behind a copy of the Racing Times but I didn’t need to see his face to know who it was.

  I felt a huge surge of happiness.

  If you’re interested in drawing a detailed map of my emotional progress, Elf, here is a significant moment to sketch in.

  That is the last time I can recall feeling happy. I mean, what the fuck have I had to be happy about in the last seven years?

  But, moron that I was, I felt happy then.

  Johnny had come at last.

  ii

  As I fixed my one eye on Johnny, a second emotion came to join happiness.

  It was relief.

  The thing was he looked so relaxed, so completely unchanged from the man I had last seen many months earlier, or indeed from the elegant figure who’d winked at me as I passed him his wedding ring all those years ago, that it seemed impossible there could be anything seriously wrong with my life or my business.

  ‘My dear old Wolf,’ he said. ‘So glad you’ve decided to join us.’

  I pressed the button that raised the top end of the bed.

  ‘Johnny, good to see you,’ I croaked. ‘Have you been here long?’

  ‘Ten minutes or so. Chap in the corridor with a speech defect wanted to stop me, but I managed to talk him round.’

  It was a comfort to know that not even DC McLucky was immune to the Nutbrown charm.