The Woodcutter

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 al-Qaeda, 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?’