The Woodcutter Page 8

  With the help of an artistic friend, she’d identified the artist as the American, Winslow Homer. The painting was called The Woodcutter. She’d tracked down an image on her computer. It was accompanied by an old catalogue blurb.

  In Winslow Homer’s painting, the Woodcutter stands looking out on a panorama of mountains and lakes and virgin forest. He is tall and muscular, brimful of youthful confidence that he can see no peak too high to climb, no river too wide to cross, no tree too tall to fell. This land is his to shape, and shape it he will, or die in the attempt.

  She could see what the writer meant. And of course Woodcutter had been the name of Hadda’s business organization. Significant?

  Everything is significant, her tutor used to reiterate. You cannot know too much.

  I’m certainly still a long way from knowing too much about you, Wolf Hadda, she thought as she watched him limp slowly into the interview room. She’d wondered in George Proctor’s presence if it might not be possible to equip him with a walking stick. The Chief Officer had laughed and said, ‘Yeah, and I’ll put in a requisition for a supply of shillelaghs and assegais while I’m at it!’

  He seemed even slower than usual today. As he settled on to his chair, she looked for signs that he was impatient to discuss the second episode. That would have been indicative; she wasn’t sure of what. But there were no signs, which was also indicative, though again she wasn’t sure what of.

  His face was expressionless, the dark glasses blanking out his good eye. For all she knew, it could be closed and he could be asleep.

  She said loudly, ‘How do you feel now about your disfigurement?’

  If she’d thought to startle him by her sudden bluntness, she was disappointed.

  He said reflectively, ‘Now let me see. Do you mean the Long John Silver limp, or the Cyclopean stare, or the fact that I’ll never play the violin again?’

  She nodded and said, ‘Thank you,’ and made a note on her pad.

  ‘What for? I didn’t answer your question.’

  ‘I think you did. By hyperbole in respect of your leg and your eye. Silver was a murderous cutthroat who’d lost his entire leg, and the Cyclops were vile cannibalistic monsters. As for your hand, nothing in your file suggests you ever could play the violin, so that was a dismissive joke.’

  ‘Indicating?’

  ‘That you’re really pissed off by being lame and one-eyed, but you’ve managed to adapt to the finger loss.’

  ‘Maybe that’s because I don’t get the chance to play much golf in this place. Mind you, I’ll be able to cap Sammy Davis Junior’s answer when asked what his handicap was.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not into golf.’

  ‘He said, “I’m a black, one-eyed Jew.” I’d be able to say, I’m a one-eyed, one-handed, lame, paedophiliac fraudster.’

  ‘And how much of that would be true?’

  He frowned and said, ‘You don’t give up, do you? Eighty per cent at most. The physical stuff is undeniable. As for the fraud, I walked some lines that seemed to get re-drawn after the big crash and I’m willing to accept that maybe I ended up on the wrong side of the new line. But I’m not in word or thought or deed a paedophile.’

  She decided to let it alone. Accepting he might have been guilty of fraud had to be some kind of advance, though from her reading of the trial transcripts, the evidence against him here had looked far from conclusive. Perhaps his lawyer had got it right when he tried to argue that the huge publicity surrounding his conviction on the paedophilia charges made it impossible for him to get a fair hearing at the fraud trial. The judge had slapped him down, saying that in his court he would be the arbiter of fairness. But by all accounts Hadda had cut such an unattractive and non-responsive figure in the dock, if they’d accused him of membership of alQaeda, too, he’d probably have been convicted.

  She knew how the jury felt. He had made no effort to project a positive image of himself. Even after he started talking to her, all she got was a sense of massive indifference. This in itself did not bother her. It was a psychiatrist’s job to inspire trust, not affection. But it did puzzle her if only because in jail her clients usually fell into two categories – those who resented and feared her, and those who saw her as a potential ally in their campaigns for parole.

  Hadda was different. Though he had by now served enough time to be eligible for parole he had made no application nor shown the slightest interest in doing so.

  Not of course that there was much point. A conviction like his made it very hard to persuade the parole board to release you back into the community, particularly when your application was unsupported by any admission of guilt or acceptance of treatment.

  But at least he had started writing these narratives. That had to be progress.

  And there was something about him today, something only detectable once he’d started talking. An undercurrent of restlessness; or, if that was too strong, at least a sense of strain in his self-control.

  She said, ‘Wilfred . . . Wilf . . .’

  Both versions of his name felt awkward on her lips, smacking of the enforced familiarity of the hospital ward or the nursing home. His expression suggested he was enjoying her problem.

  She said, ‘. . . Wolf.’

  He nodded as if she’d done well and said, ‘Yes, Elf?’

  Her sobriquet came off his tongue easily, almost eagerly, as though she were an old friend whose words he was anxious to hear.

  She said, ‘How do you feel about Imogen now?’

  He frowned as if this wasn’t the question he’d been looking for.

  ‘About the fact that she divorced me? Or the fact that she subsequently married my former solicitor and friend, Toby Estover? Wonder how that worked out?’

  He spoke casually, almost mockingly. A front, she guessed. And she also guessed he might have a pretty good idea how it had worked out. Modern prisons had come a long way from the Bastille and the Chateau d’If, where a man could linger, forgotten and forgetting, oblivious to the march of history outside. She’d checked on the happy pair, telling herself she had a professional interest. Estover was now, if not a household name, at least a name recognized in many households. He was so sought after he could pick and choose his clients, and the fact that he seemed to pick those involved in cases that attracted maximum publicity could hardly be held against him.

  As for the lovely Imogen, she was certainly as lovely as ever. Alva had seen a recent photo of her in the Cumbrian churchyard where her daughter’s ashes were being placed in the family tomb. Not an event that drew the world’s press, but a local reporter had been there and taken a snap on his mobile. By chance he’d got a combination of light, angle, and background that lent the picture a kind of dark, brooding Brontë-esque quality, and the Observer had printed it for its atmospheric impact rather than its news value.

  She said, ‘I just wondered what you feel when I mention her name?’

  ‘Hate,’ he said.

  This took her aback.

  He said, ‘You look surprised. That I should feel it, or that I should say it?’

  ‘Both. It’s such an absolute concept . . .’

  ‘It’s not a bloody concept!’ he interrupted. ‘It has nothing to do with intellectual organization. You asked what I felt. What else should I reply? Contempt? Revulsion? Anger? Dismay? A bit of all of those, I suppose. But hate does it, I think. Hate folds them all neatly into a single package.’

  ‘But what has she done to deserve this?’ she asked.

  ‘She has believed the lies they told about me,’ he said. ‘And because she believed them, my lovely daughter is dead.’

  All Alva’s previous attempts to get him to talk about his daughter had been met with his mountainous blankness, but now for a moment she saw the agony that seethed beneath the rocky surface.

  She said in her most neutral tone, ‘You blame her for Ginny’s death?’

  He was back in control but within his apparent calm she sensed a tension like that intense
stillness of air when an electric storm is close to breaking.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But not so much as I blame her bitch of a mother.’

  She noted that, despite the intensity of the negative feelings he’d expressed about Imogen, he was reluctant to lay full responsibility for the girl’s death upon her. Whatever bonds there had been between him and his wife must have been unusually strong for this ambiguity of feeling to have survived.

  ‘You hold Lady Kira responsible?’

  ‘Oh yes. Everything tracks back to her. She never wanted me to have her daughter. And now she has helped deprive me of mine.’

  ‘And she did this, how? By helping with the arrangements for her to finish her education in France, out of reach of our prurient press?’

  She deliberately let a trace of doubt seep into her voice, hoping to provoke further revelation of what was going on inside his mind, but all she succeeded in doing was bring down the defences even further.

  He said indifferently, ‘If you’d ever met her, you’d understand.’

  This for the moment was a dead end. Leave the mother-in-law, get back to the wife, she told herself.

  She said, ‘If, as you claim, you are innocent, then someone must have framed you. Do you have any idea who?’

  The question seemed to amuse him.

  ‘I have a short list of possibilities, yes.’

  ‘Is Imogen on it?’

  The question seemed to surprise him. Or perhaps he simply didn’t like it. She really must find a way to get into this key relationship.

  ‘What does it matter?’ he demanded. ‘Which is worse? That she went along with a plot to frame me? Or that she actually believed I was guilty as charged?’

  ‘Be fair,’ said Alva. ‘The evidence was overwhelming; the jury took twenty minutes to find you guilty . . .’

  ‘Twelve strangers!’ he interrupted. ‘Twelve citizens picked off the street! In this world we’re unfortunate enough to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with a squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I’m sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.’

  Wow! she thought as she studied him closely. That rolled off your tongue so easily, it’s clearly been picking up momentum in your mind for years!

  His voice was still controlled, but his single eye sparkled with passion. What was it he said he felt about his ex-wife’s behaviour?

  Contempt.

  Revulsion.

  Anger.

  Dismay.

  These were all necessary elements of that condition of self-awareness she was trying to draw him to. Perhaps by transferring these emotions away from himself to his ex-wife, he was showing her he was closer than she’d thought. His strained parallel with Mandela was also significant. A man of dignity and probity, imprisoned by a warped regime, and finally released and vindicated after long years to become a symbol of peace and reconciliation. It was as if Hadda’s denial could only be sustained by going to the furthermost extreme in search of supportive self-images.

  Hopefully, if he continued far enough in that direction, he would eventually come upon himself unawares. And then it would be up to her to direct him away from self-hatred into more positively remedial channels.

  Meanwhile it would be good if she could nudge him into a memory of Imogen in her fairy-tale princess phase. It was possible that by reliving that period when she had become the unique and obsessive object of his adoration, he might come to wonder whether it was in fact his idol that had fallen or himself.

  Even if that admittedly ideal outcome didn’t materialize, this was the part of his life she had least information about, for there were few living sources but himself.

  Now the passion had faded and he was looking at her assessingly.

  He’s got something else for me, she thought. She knew how habit-forming this business of writing about your past could be. In many clients, it went beyond habit into compulsion. So of course since their last meeting he’d carried on writing.

  But as what he wrote came closer to the most intimate details of his being, he naturally became less and less sure of sharing it with her.

  So, show no eagerness. Do not press.

  She said, ‘Wolf, time’s nearly up. I was wondering, is there anything I can get for you? Books, journals, that sort of thing? I should have asked before. Or something more personal. Something in the food line? Or proper linen handkerchiefs, silk socks, perhaps?’

  He shook his head as if impatient at her change of subject, or perhaps at the silly notion that there could be something he might enjoy receiving, and said, ‘We were talking about Imo. I got to thinking about her after I wrote that last piece.’

  She said, ‘Yes?’

  He said, ‘That stuff about feeling hate, I mean it. Or part of me means it. But there’s also a part of me that hates me for feeling it. Does that make sense?’

  She nodded and said gravely, ‘What wouldn’t make sense is for you not to feel it.’

  That was the right answer. He pulled another exercise book out of his blouson.

  ‘You might like to see this,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the book. She opened it and glanced at the first page.

  And she knew at once she’d got what she wanted.

  Wolf

  i

  I was a wild boy, in just about every sense.

  My mam, God bless her, died when I was only six. Brain fever, they called it locally. Probably some form of meningitis, spotted too late.

  We had my dad’s Aunt Carrie living with us. Or rather we were living with her in her farmhouse, Birkstane. Up there in Cumbria they still expect the young to take care of the old. Not that Carrie can have been all that old when we moved in with her. Birkstane was all that remained, plus a couple of small fields, of her husband’s farm. Widowed in her mid forties, already in her early fifties she was getting a bit forgetful. Also she had arthritis which gave her mobility problems. Normally up there supportive neighbours would have kept her going quite happily till her dotage, but she was a bit isolated, several miles from Mireton, the nearest village, right on the edge of the Ulphingstone estate.

  Dad was her only living relative so when word reached him that there was a social worker snooping around, he knew something had to be done. I was still in nappies at the time, so I can only speculate, but I suspect it suited him to move into Birkstane. As head forester to Sir Leon, Dad had a tied cottage on the estate but as I often heard him say later, only a fool lives in a house another fool can throw him out of any time he likes. Not that he thought Sir Leon was a fool. In fact they got on pretty well, and far from dividing them, my liaison with Leon’s daughter only brought them closer together.

  They both thought it was a lousy idea.

  But that was a long way in the future.

  Everything seems to have worked fine to start with. Birkstane was almost as handy for Dad’s work as the tied cottage had been. Mam got to work on the old farmhouse and dragged it back from the edge of dereliction, while Carrie, in familiar surroundings with someone constantly present to keep an eye on her, got a new lease of life.

  All this I picked up later. Like I say, I was so young that my memory of those early years in Birkstane is generally non-specific, but I know how blissfully happy I must have been, for I recall all too clearly how I felt when they told me Mam was dead. No, not when they told me; I mean when it finally got through to me that being dead meant gone for good, meant I would never ever see her again.

  I was in my second year at school. It had taken a whole year for me to come to terms with the daily separation from Mam; this new and permanent separation was a loss beyond all reach of consolation. I was far too young and far too immersed in my own pain to observe what this blow did to my father, but as I have no recollection of him finding the strength to try and comfort me, I’
d guess he too was rendered completely helpless by the loss. I suppose if I’d drawn attention to myself, someone might have tried to do something about me, but I think I must have moved in a bubble of grief through which everyone could see and hear me behaving apparently normally – in fact I suspect that many people observed what a blessing it was that I was clearly too young to take it all in and the best thing was for everyone to treat me as if nothing important had happened.

  What they didn’t realize was that within that bubble I too was as good as dead, and as I slowly came back to life, I think I unconsciously resolved that never again would I be in a position where the loss of any single individual could cause me such pain.

  Because there was still a woman in the house, no thought was given to the need to make any special arrangements for me. And because of Carrie’s apparent return to her old self during the five years of having us to live with her, nobody doubted that she was a fit guardian and housekeeper.

  The reality was very different. Her mobility problems made it hard for her to keep up with a wild young boy, and without my mam’s corrective presence, the old memory lapses (the result, it was later diagnosed, of early-onset Alzheimer’s) now became much more significant. As for Fred, my dad, he went out to work and rarely came home till it was time for his tea. This is the generic term we gave to the early evening meal. As Carrie got more forgetful, the combinations of food offered to us grew increasingly eccentric, but neither of us took much notice – me because I was too young to make comparisons, Dad because he prefaced the meal with a couple of bottles of strong ale and washed it down with another two before driving down to the Black Dog in Mireton. He successfully avoided the attention of the local constabulary by driving his old Defender along the forest tracks, which he knew like the back of his hand, and leaving it on the edge of the estate and walking the last quarter mile to the Dog.