The Woodcutter

‘Can you manage?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ you say. It might be a lie.

He goes out of the room.

You pick up the phone with difficulty, then realize you can’t recall a single number. Except, thank God, Directory Enquiries. Asking for your own home number seems a sad admission of failure, so you say, ‘Estover, Mast and Turbery. Solicitors in Holborn.’

They get the number and put you through. You give your name and ask for Toby. After a delay a woman’s voice says, ‘Hello, Sir Wilfred. It’s Leila. How can I help you?’

Leila. The name conjures up a picture of a big blonde girl with a lovely bum. Rumour has it that when Toby enters his office in the morning, his mail and Leila are both lying open on his desk. You’ve always got on well with Leila.

‘Hi, Leila,’ you say. ‘Could you put me through to Toby.’

‘I’m sorry, Sir Wilfred, but I can’t do that,’ she says.

‘Why not, for God’s sake? Isn’t he there?’ you say.

‘I mean I’ve consulted Mr Estover and he does not think it would be appropriate to talk with you,’ she says, sounding very formal, as if she’s quoting verbatim.

‘Not appropriate?’ You can’t raise a bellow yet, but you manage a menacing croak. ‘So when did sodding lawyers start thinking it wasn’t appropriate to talk to their clients?’

She says, still formal, ‘I’m sorry, Sir Wilfred, I assumed it had been made clear to you that you are no longer Mr Estover’s client.’

Then her voice changes and she reverts to her usual chatty tone, this time tinged with a certain worrying sympathy.

‘In the circumstances, it wouldn’t really be appropriate, you must see that.’

You get very close to a bellow now.

‘What circumstances, for fuck’s sake?’

‘Oh hell. Look, I’m sorry,’ she says, now sounding really concerned. ‘I just assumed you’d know. It shouldn’t be me who’s telling you this, but the thing is, Toby’s acting for your wife in the divorce.’

Elf (#ulink_3f0bd1e2-46ce-5eb1-b5be-9bbfcffb38de)

i

Now this really was interesting, thought Alva Ozigbo.

He’d moved from the first person past to the second person present.

Did this bring him closer or move him further away?

Closer in a sense. The first instalment had been a pretty straightforward piece of storytelling. The detail he recalled, the emotional colouring he injected, all suggested this was a version of that distant morning frequently rehearsed in his mind. In fact, rehearsed was the mot juste. Like a dedicated actor, he had immersed himself so deeply in his role of innocent victim that he was actually living the part.

She’d done some serious research since she took over Hadda’s case. In fact, when she looked at her records, she was surprised to see just how much research she’d done. She’d turned her eye inwards to seek out the reason for this special interest. Like her analysis of Hadda, that too was still work in progress.

She recalled Simon Homewood’s advice when she had started here on that dark January day in 2015. It had surprised her.

‘Many of them will tell you they are innocent. Believe them. Carry on believing them as you study their cases. Examine all the evidence against them with an open, even a sceptical mind. You understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, but I don’t understand why you’re saying it,’ she’d said.

He smiled and said, ‘Because that’s what I do with every prisoner who comes into my care at Parkleigh. Until I’m absolutely convinced of their guilt, I cannot help them. I want it to be the same for you.’

‘And how often have you not been convinced?’ she’d asked boldly.

‘Twice,’ he said. ‘One was freed on appeal. The other killed himself before anything could be done. I am determined that will never happen again.’

So she’d gone over the evidence against Hadda in the paedophile case with a fine-tooth comb. And she’d persuaded Giles Nevinson of the prosecutor’s office to do the same. ‘Tight as a duck’s arse,’ he’d declared cheerfully. ‘And that’s water-tight. Why so interested in this fellow?’

‘Because he’s…interesting,’ was all she could reply. ‘Psychologically, I mean.’

Why did she need to add that? How else could she be interested in a man like this, a convicted sexual predator and fraudster with a penchant for violence? It was on record that in his early days at Parkleigh he’d come close enough to ‘normal’ prisoners for them to attempt physical assault. His crippling leg injury limited his speed of movement, but he retained tremendous upper body strength and he had hospitalized one assailant. Transfer to the Special Wing had put him out of reach of physical attack, and verbal abuse he treated with the same massive indifference as he displayed to all other attempts to make contact with him. In the end a kind of contract was established with the prison management. He made no trouble, he got no trouble.

He also got no treatment. While he wasn’t one of those prisoners who staged roof-top demonstrations to protest their innocence or had outside support groups mounting appeals, he never took the smallest step towards acknowledging his guilt. Perhaps it was this sheer intractability that caught her attention.

With the Director’s permission, she had visited Hadda’s cell at a time he and all the other prisoners were in the dining hall. Even by prison standards it was bare. A reasonable amount of personalization was allowed, but all that Hadda seemed to have done to mark his occupancy was to Blu-Tack to the wall a copy of a painting that looked as if it had been torn out of a colour supplement. It showed a tall upright figure, his right hand resting on a lumberjack’s axe, standing under a turbulent sky, looking out over a wide landscape of mountains and lakes. Alva studied it for several minutes.

‘Like paintings, do you, miss?’ enquired Chief Officer Proctor, who’d escorted her into the cell.

‘I like what they tell me about the people who like them,’ said Alva. ‘And of course the people who paint them.’

If there were a signature on the painting, the reproduction wasn’t good enough to show it. She made a note to check and turned her attention to the rest of the cell. Only its emptiness said anything about the personality of its inmate. It was as if Hadda had resolved to leave no trace of his passing. She did find one book, a dog-eared paperback copy of The Count of Monte-Cristo. Seeing her looking at it, Proctor said sardonically, ‘It’s all right, miss. We check regularly under the bed for tunnels.’

Later in the prison library she asked for a record of Hadda’s borrowings and found there were none. Years of imprisonment with little but his own thoughts for company. He was either a man of great inner resources or of no inner life whatsoever.

Giles Nevinson during his trawl through the case files on her behalf had come up with an inventory of all the material removed from Hadda’s house at the time of the initial raid. It was the books and DVDs confiscated that she was interested in. There was nothing here that the prosecution had been able to use to support their case, but they suggested that, pre-accident, Hadda’s taste had been for the kind of story in which a tough, hard-bitten protagonist fought his way through to some kind of rough justice despite the fiendish plots and furious onslaughts of powerful enemies.

This could account for his choosing to present the police raid and its sequel in the form of the opening chapters of a thriller with himself as the much put-upon hero.

But in Alva’s estimate the form disguised its true function.

For Hadda this wasn’t fiction, it was revelation, it was Holy Writ! If ever any doubts about the rightness of his cause crept into his consciousness, all he had to do was refer back to this ur-text and all became simple and straightforward again.

But he hadn’t been able to keep it up when it came to writing about his emergence from the coma. Here the tight narrative control was gone. Even after the passage of so many years, that sense of confusion on waking into a new and alien landscape remained with him. His account of it was immediate, not historical. Hindsight usually allows us to order experience, but here it was still possible to feel him straining to make sense of blurred images, broken lines, shifting foci.

There was some shape. Each of the two sections climaxed at a moment of violent shock. The first, his recognition of physical change; the second, his discovery of his wife’s defection. Nowhere in his account of his waking confusion, nor in the aftermath of these systemic shocks, was there the slightest indication that he was moving out of denial towards recognition.

But these were early days. She was pretty certain she now had every scrap of available information about Wolf Hadda, but what did it add up to? Very little. The significant narrative of the mental and emotional journey that had brought him to Parkleigh could only come from within.

Her hope had to be that, by coaxing him to provide it, she might be able to lead him to a moment of self-knowledge when, like a mountain walker confronted by a Brocken Spectre, he would draw back in horror from the monstrous apparition before him, then recognize it as a projection of himself.

She liked that image, and it was particularly apt in Hadda’s case. From her study of his background she knew he’d grown up in the Lake District where his father had been head forester on the estate of his father-in-law, Sir Leon Ulphingstone. Lots of fascinating possibilities there. Perhaps the almost idealized figure in the painting on his cell wall was saying something about his relationship with his father. Or perhaps it was there as a reminder to himself of what he had been and what he now was.

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.