The Woodcutter Read online

  She’d watched Hadda’s face as he heard the news. There’d been no reaction that a camera could have recorded, but she had felt a reaction the way you feel a change of pressure as a plane swoops down to land, and you swallow, and it’s gone.

  He hadn’t been wearing his sunglasses and his monoptic gaze had met hers for a moment. For the first time in their silent encounters, she felt her presence was registered.

  Then he had turned his back on them and stood there till the Director nodded at the escorting officer and he opened the door and ushered the prisoner out.

  ‘I’ve put him on watch,’ said the Director. ‘It’s procedure in such circumstances.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Procedure.’

  He looked at her curiously.

  ‘You don’t think he’s a risk?’

  ‘To himself, you mean? No. But there has to be some sort of reaction.’

  There was, but its nature surprised her.

  He started talking.

  Or at least he started responding to her questions. He was always reactive, never proactive. Only once did he ask a question.

  He looked up at the CCTV camera in the interview room and said, ‘Can they hear us?’

  She replied, ‘No. As I told you when we first met, the cameras are on for obvious security reasons, but the sound is switched off. This is a condition of my work here.’

  The question had raised hopes that in the weeks that followed were consistently disappointed. He began to talk more but he never said anything that came close to the confessional. References to his daughter were met by the old blankness. She asked why he hadn’t applied to go to the funeral. He said he wouldn’t see his daughter there but he would see people he didn’t want to see. What people? she asked. The people who put me here, he said. But he didn’t even assert his innocence with any particular passion. Again the mountain image came into her mind. Climbers talk of conquering mountains. They don’t. Sometimes the mountain changes them, but they never change the mountain.

  But she persevered and after a few more months of this, there came a session when, as soon as he came into the room, she had felt something different in him. As the door closed behind Prison Officer Lindale, she got a visual clue as to what it was.

  Usually when he sat down, he placed his hands palm up on the table, the right one black gloved, the left bare, its life and fate lines deep etched, as though he expected his fortune to be read.

  This day his hands were out of sight, as though placed on his knees.

  She said, ‘Good morning, Mr Hadda. How are you today?’ He said in his customary quiet, level tone, ‘Listen, you black bitch, and listen carefully. I have a shiv in my hand. Show any sign of alarm and I’ll have one of your eyes out before they can open the door.’

  Shock kept her brave. Only once had she been attacked, shortly after she’d started work here. A client (she refused to talk of them as prisoners), a mild-mannered little man who hadn’t even come close to the kind of innuendo by which some of the men tried to imply a sexual relationship with her, suddenly lunged across the table, desperate to get his hands on some part of her, any part of her. The best he’d managed was to brush her left wrist before the door slid open and a warder gave him a short burst with a taser.

  Since then there’d been no trouble. Only Alva knew how frightened she’d been. When Parliament passed the Act a year ago permitting prison officers to carry tasers after the great Pentonville riot of 2014 she had been one of those who protested strongly against it. Now her certainty that if she pushed back her chair and screamed, the taser would be pumping 50kV into Hadda’s back long before the shiv could get anywhere near her eyes, gave her the strength to respond calmly, ‘What is it you want, Mr Hadda?’

  He said, ‘What I want is to fuck you till you faint, but we don’t have time for that. So I’ll have to make do with you kicking your left shoe off, stretching your leg under the table, placing your bare foot against my crotch, and rubbing it up and down till I come.’

  The part of her mind not still in shock thought, You poor sad bastard! You’re banged up with all the other deviants. Can’t you find someone in there to service you?

  She was still wondering if she could bring this situation to a conclusion without testing what level of voltage was necessary to subdue a mountain when Hadda smiled – that was the first time – and placed his empty hands palm up on the table and said, ‘I think if they were going to come they’d have been here by now, don’t you agree?’

  It took a second or two to get it. He’d been testing her assurance that the watching officers could not hear what was being said. Her mind was already exploring the implications of this, and she did not realize that her body was shaking in reaction until the door slid open and Officer Lindale said, ‘You OK, miss?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just got something stuck in my throat.’ And subsumed her trembling into a bout of coughing.

  He said, ‘Like some water, miss?’

  She shook her head and said, ‘No thanks. I’ll be OK.’

  When the door was closed again, Hadda said, ‘Sorry about my little charade. What you need is a stiff brandy. I suggest we cut this session short so you can go and get one.’

  She was still struggling with the after-effects of the shock and now she had to adjust to the new tone of voice in which he was addressing her.

  Somehow she managed to keep her own voice level as she replied, ‘No, if you’re so keen to be sure we’re not being listened to, I presume that means you’ve got something you’d like to say.’

  ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘What I’ve got is something for you to read. OK, I’m convinced you’re telling the truth when you say there’s nobody listening to us. Now I’d like your reassurance that nobody else will read this or anything else I give to you.’

  As he spoke, he pulled from his prison blouse a blue school exercise book.

  This was a shock different in nature from the threat of a shiv attack but in its way almost as extreme.

  With many of her clients, she suggested that if they felt like putting any of their feelings or thoughts down on paper before their next meeting, this could only be to the good. Nobody but herself would see what they wrote, she assured them, an assurance some took advantage of to lay before her in graphic detail their sexual fantasies.

  Hadda had simply blanked her out when she first suggested he might like to write something. She’d repeated the suggestion over several weeks, then at last she had given up.

  So this came completely out of the blue. It should have felt like a breakthrough, but she didn’t have the energy to exult.

  She realized Hadda was right. What she wanted to do now was get away to somewhere quiet and have a stiff drink.

  She said, ‘I promise you. No one will read anything of yours, unless you give permission. All right?’

  ‘It will have to be,’ he said, handing her the book.

  She took it and held it without attempting to open it.

  ‘And this is . . .?’ she said.

  ‘You keep saying you want to understand how I ended up in here. Well, this is the story. First instalment anyway.’

  She stood up, glanced at one of the cameras, and said as the door opened, ‘I look forward to reading it.’

  Then she’d headed straight back to her flat, had the longed-for stiff drink after which, rather to her surprise, she was violently sick.

  When she was done, she had a very hot shower. Dried and wrapped in a heavy white bathrobe, she sat at her dressing table and stared back at herself out of the mirror.

  Behind her, through the open door into the living room, she could see the exercise book lying on a table where she’d thrown it on entering the flat.

  Opening it was going to be the first step on a journey that could take her to some very dark places. No darker, she guessed, than many others she’d visited already. But somehow going there in the company of Wilfred Hadda seemed particularly unappealing.

  Why w
as that? she asked herself.

  Not because of any horrors that might possibly be revealed. They came with the territory. So it must have something to do with the man they would be revealed about.

  This was a measure of his power. This was why she must be on her guard at all times, not against the physical threat which he had used to test her assurance of confidentiality, but against a much more insinuating mental and emotional onslaught.

  She recalled her father’s words when she told him about the job offer.

  ‘Elf,’ he had boomed, ‘you sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew?’

  ‘Trust me,’ she had replied. ‘I’m a psychiatrist.’

  And they had shared one of those outbursts of helpless laughter that had her mother looking at them in affectionate bewilderment.

  But now, alone, in her mind’s eye she conjured up an image of the menacing bulk of Parkleigh Prison printed against the eastern sky and shuddered at the thought of driving towards it in the morning.

  ii

  Parkleigh Prison was built in the 1850s on a marshy greenfield site in Essex just outside London. As if determined that it would be to penology what cathedrals were to religion, its architect incorporated into the design a single massive tower, visible for miles around in that flat landscape, a reassurance to the virtuous and a warning to the sinful.

  Rapidly overtaken by the capital’s urban sprawl, it continued pretty well unchanged until the 1980s when even the Thatcher hardliners had to accept it was no longer fit for purpose. Closed, it languished as a menacing monument to Victorian values for a decade or more. Everyone expected that eventually the building would be demolished and the site redeveloped for housing, but then it was announced, in the face of considerable but unavailing local protest, that under the Private Finance Initiative, Parkleigh was going to be refurbished as a maximum-security category A private prison.

  It would be a prison for all seasons, enthused the developers. Outside dark and forbidding enough to please the floggers and hangers, inside well ahead of the game in its rehabilitatory structures and facilities.

  Its clientele was to be category A prisoners, those whom society needed to be certain stayed locked up until they had served out their usually lengthy sentences. In 2010 Wolf Hadda was sent there to popular acclaim. Five years later he was joined by Alva Ozigbo, to far from popular acclaim.

  There were two main strikes against her.

  As a psychiatrist, she was too young.

  And as a woman, she was a woman.

  Outwardly Alva treated such objections with the contempt they deserved.

  Inwardly she acknowledged that both had some merit.

  At twenty-eight she was certainly a rising star, a rise commenced when she’d worked up her PhD thesis on the causes and treatment of deviant behaviour into a book with the catchy title of Curing Souls. This attracted attention, mainly complimentary, though the word precocious did occur rather frequently in the reviews. But it was a chance meeting that brought her to Parkleigh.

  Giles Nevinson, a lawyer friend who hoped by persistence to become more, had invited her to a formal dinner in the Middle Temple. While she had no intention of ever becoming more, she liked Giles. Also, through his job with the Crown Prosecution Service, he was a useful source of free legal advice and information. So she accepted.

  Giles spent much of the dinner deep in conversation about the breeding of Persian cats with the rather grand-looking woman on his left. As he explained later, it was ambition rather than ailurophilia that caused him to neglect his guest. The other woman was Isa Toplady, the appropriately named wife of a High Court judge rumoured to be much influenced by his spouse’s personal opinions.

  Alva, obliged to turn to her right for conversational nourishment, found herself confronted by a slightly built man in his sixties, with wispy blond hair, pale blue eyes, and that expression of rather vapid benevolence with which some painters have attempted to indicate the indifference of saints to the scourges they are being scourged with, arrows they are being pierced with, or flames they are being roasted with.

  He introduced himself as John Childs and when he heard her name, he said, ‘Ah, yes. Curing Souls. A stimulating read.’

  Suspecting that, for whatever reason, he might have simply done a little basic pre-prandial homework, she tried him out with a few leading questions and was flattered to discover that not only had he actually read the book but he did indeed seem to have been stimulated by it.

  Some explanation of his interest came when he told her that he had a godson, Harry, who was doing A-level psychology and hoping to pursue his studies at university. Childs then set himself to pick Alva’s brain about the best way forward for the boy. It is always flattering to be consulted as an expert and it wasn’t till well through the dinner that she managed to turn the conversation from herself to her interlocutor.

  His own job he described as a sort of Home Office advisor, I suppose, a vagueness that from any other nationality Alva would have read as an attempt to conceal unimportance, but which from this kind of Englishman probably meant he was very important indeed.

  When they parted he said how much he’d enjoyed her company, and she replied that the feeling was mutual, realizing, slightly to her surprise that this was no more than the truth. He was certainly very good to talk to, meaning, of course, that he was an excellent listener!

  Next morning she was surprised but not taken aback when he rang to invite her to take tea with him in Claridge’s. Curious as to his motives, and also (she always tried to confront her own motivations honestly) because she’d never before been invited to take tea at Claridge’s, she accepted. The hotel lived up to her expectations. Childs couldn’t because she had none. They chatted easily, moving from the weather through the ghastliness of politicians to more personal matters. She learned that he came from Norfolk yeoman stock, lived alone in London, and was very fond of his godson, whose parents, alas, had separated. Childs had clearly done all he could to minimize the damage done to the boy. He seemed keen to get her approval for the way he’d responded to the situation, and once again Alva enjoyed the pleasure of being deferred to.

  Later she also had a vague feeling with no traceable source that she was being assessed.

  But for what? The notion that this might be an early stage of some rather old-fashioned seduction technique occurred and was dismissed.

  Then a couple of days later he asked her to lunch at a Soho restaurant she didn’t know. When on arrival she found she had to knock to get admittance, the seduction theory suddenly presented itself again. Might this be the kind of place where elderly gentlemen entertained their lights-of-love in small private rooms decorated in high Edwardian kitsch? If so, what might the menu consist of?

  She knocked and entered, and didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed when she was escorted into an airy dining room with very well spaced tables. Any residual suspicions were finally dissipated by the sight of a second man at the table she was led towards.

  Childs said, ‘Dr Ozigbo, hope you don’t mind, I invited Simon Homewood along. Homewood, this is Alva Ozigbo that I was telling you about.’

  ‘Dr Ozigbo,’ said the newcomer, reaching out his hand. ‘Delighted to meet you.’

  Not as delighted as me, she thought as they shook hands. This had to be the Simon Homewood, Director of Parkleigh Prison, whose liberal views on the treatment of prisoners, widely aired when appointed to the job six years earlier, had met with scornful laughter or enthusiastic applause, depending on which paper you read.

  Or maybe, she deflated herself as she took her seat, maybe it was another Simon Homewood, the Childs family trouble-shooter, come to cast an assessing eye over this weird young woman bumbling old John had taken a fancy to.

  One way to settle that.

  ‘How are things at Parkleigh, Mr Homewood?’ she enquired.

  He smiled broadly and said, ‘Depends whether you’re looking in or out, I suppose.’

  Th
e contrast with Childs couldn’t have been stronger. There was nothing that you could call retiring or self-effacing about Homewood. In his late thirties with a square, determined face topped by a thatch of vigorous brown hair, he fixed her with an unblinking and very unmoist gaze as he talked to her. He asked her about her book, prompted her to expatiate on her ideas, outlined some of the problems he was experiencing in the management of long-term prisoners, and invited her opinion.

  Am I being interviewed? she asked herself. Unlikely, because if she were, it could only be for one job. Ten days previously, the chief psychiatrist at Parkleigh Prison, Joe Ruskin, had died in a pile-up on the M5. She’d had only a slight acquaintance with the man, so her distress at the news was correspondingly slight and soon displaced by the thought that, if this had happened four or five years later, she might well have applied to fill the vacancy. Parkleigh held many of the most fascinating criminals of the age. For someone with her areas of interest, it was a job to die for.

  But at twenty-eight, she was far too young and inexperienced to be a candidate. And they’d want another man anyway. But she enjoyed the conversation, in which Childs took little part, simply sitting, watching, with a faintly proprietorial smile on his lips.

  At the end of lunch she excused herself and made for the Ladies. Away from the two men, her absurdity in even considering the possibility seemed crystal clear.

  ‘Idiot,’ she told her reflection in the mirror.

  As she returned to the table she saw the two men in deep conversation. It stopped as she sat down.

  Then Homewood fixed her with that gaze which probably declared to everyone he spoke to, You are the most interesting person in the room, and as if enquiring where she was spending her holidays this year, he said, ‘So how would you like to work at Parkleigh, Dr Ozigbo?’