The Woodcutter

I stopped talking. Toby was normally the most courteous of men. OK, he’d heard me on one of my favourite hobby horses before, but there was an urgency in his tone that went far beyond mere exasperation. For the first time I started to feel worried.

I said, ‘Toby, what’s going on? What are the bastards looking for? For God’s sake, I may have cut a few corners in my time, but the business is sound, believe me. Does Johnny Nutbrown know about this? I think we ought to give him a call…’

Nutbrown was my closest friend and finance director at Woodcutter. He was mathematically eidetic. If Johnny and a computer calculation differed, I’d back Johnny every time.

Toby said, ‘Johnny’s not going to be any use here. Medler’s not Fraud. He’s on what used to be called the Vice Squad. Specifically his area is paedophilia. Kiddy porn.’

I laughed in relief. I really did.

I said, ‘In that case, the only reason I’m banged up here is because I hit the smarmy bastard. They’ve had plenty of time to realize they’ve made a huge booboo, and they’re just hoping the media will get tired and go away before I emerge. No chance! I’ll have my say if I’ve got to rent space on TV!’

I stopped talking again, not because of anything Toby said to me but because of the way he was looking at me. Assessingly. That was the word for it. Like a man looking for reassurance and not being convinced he’d found it.

He said, ‘From what Medler said, they feel they have enough evidence to proceed.’

I shook my head in exasperation.

I said, ‘But they’ll have squeezed my hard drive dry by now. What’s the problem? Some encryptions they haven’t been able to break? God, I’m happy to let them in for a quick glance at anything, so long as I’m there…’

Toby said, ‘He spoke as if they’d found…stuff.’

That stopped me in my tracks.

‘Stuff?’ I echoed. ‘You mean kiddy porn? Impossible!’

He just looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had taken on its forensic colouring.

‘Wolf, I need to be clear so that I know how to proceed. You are assuring me there is nothing of this nature, no images involving paedophilia, to be found on any computer belonging to you?’

I felt a surge of anger but quickly controlled it. A friend wouldn’t have needed to ask, but Toby was more than my friend, he was my solicitor, and that was how I had to regard him now, in the same way that he was clearly looking at me purely as a client.

I said, ‘Nothing.’

He said, ‘OK,’ stood up and went to the door.

‘So let’s go and see what DI Medler has to say,’ he said.

So hell begins.

iii

I’ll say this for Medler, he didn’t mess around.

He showed me some credit-card statements covering the past year, asked me to confirm they were mine. I said that as they had my name and a selection of my addresses on them, I supposed they must be. He asked me to check them more closely. I glanced over them, identified a couple of large items on each – hotel bills, that kind of thing – and said yes, they were definitely mine. He then drew my attention to a series of payments – mainly to an Internet company called InArcadia – and asked me if I could recall what these were for. I said I couldn’t offhand, which wasn’t surprising as I paid for just about everything in my extremely busy life by one of the vast selection of cards I’d managed to accumulate, but no doubt if I sat down with my secretary we could work out exactly what each and every payment covered.

He shuffled the statements together, put them in a folder, and smiled. His split lip must have hurt but it didn’t stop his smile from being as slyly insinuating as ever.

‘Don’t think we’ll need to involve your secretary, Sir Wilfred,’ he said. ‘We can give your memory a jog by showing you some of the stuff you were paying for.’

Then he opened a laptop resting on the table between us, pressed a key and turned it towards me.

There were stills to start with, then some snatches of video. All involved girls on the cusp of puberty, some displaying themselves provocatively, some being assaulted by men. Years later those images still haunt me.

Thirty seconds was enough. I slammed the laptop lid shut. For a moment I couldn’t speak. I looked towards Toby. Our gazes met. Then he looked away.

I said, ‘Toby, for God’s sake, you don’t think…’

Then I pulled myself together. Whatever was going off here, getting into a public and recorded row with my solicitor wasn’t going to help things.

I said to Medler, ‘Why the hell are you showing me this filth?’

He said, ‘Because we found it on a computer belonging to you, Sir Wilfred. On a computer protected by your password, in an encrypted program accessed by entering a twenty-five digit code and answering three personal questions. Personal to you, I mean. Also, the images in question, and many more, both still and moving, were acquired from the Internet company InArcadia and paid for with various of your credit cards, details of which you have just confirmed.’

The rest of the interview was brief and farcical. Medler made no effort to be subtle. Perhaps the little bastard disliked me so much he didn’t want me to cooperate! He simply fired a fusillade of increasingly offensive questions at me – How long had I been doing this? How deeply involved was I with the people behind InArcadia? Had I ever personally taken part in any of the video sessions? and so on, and so on – never paying the slightest heed to my increasingly vehement denials.

Toby sat there silent as a statue during all this and in the end I forgot my resolve not to have a public row and screamed, ‘For fuck’s sake, man, say something! What the hell do you think I’m paying you for?’

He didn’t reply. I saw him glance at Medler. Maybe I was so wrought up I started imagining things but it seemed to me Toby was looking almost apologetic as if to say, I really don’t want to be here doing this, and Medler gave him a little sympathetic smile as if to reply, yes, I can see how tough it must be for you.

I was at the end of my admittedly short tether. It was a toss up whether I took a swing at my lawyer or the cop. If I had to rationalize I’d say it made more sense to opt for the latter on the grounds that my relationship with him was clearly beyond hope whereas I was still going to need Toby.

Whatever, I gave Medler a busted nose to add to his split lip.

And that brought the interview to a close.

iv

My second journey to my cell was handled less courteously than the first.

The two cops who dragged me there then followed me inside were experts. I lay on the floor, racked with pain for a good half hour after the door crashed shut behind them. But when I recovered enough to examine my body, I realized there was precious little visual evidence of police brutality.

I banged at the door till a constable appeared and told me to shut up. I demanded to see Toby. He went away and came back a few minutes later to say that Mr Estover had left the station. I then said I wanted to make the phone call I was entitled to. How entitled I was, I’d no idea. Like most people my knowledge of criminal law was garnered mainly from TV and movies. The cop went away again and nothing happened for what felt like an hour. I was just about to launch another assault on the door when it opened to reveal Medler. His nose was swollen and he had a couple of stitches in his lip. In his hand was a grip that I recognized as mine. He tossed it towards me and said, ‘Get yourself dressed, Sir Wilfred.’

I opened the bag to see it contained clothing.

I said, ‘Did my wife bring this? Is she here?’

He said, ‘No. She’s gone to stay with a Mrs Nutbrown at her house, Poynters, is it? Out near Saffron Walden.’

I sat down on the bed. OK, so Johnny Nutbrown’s wife, Pippa, was Imogen’s best friend, but the notion that she was running for cover without even attempting to contact me filled me with dismay. And disappointment.

It must have showed, for Medler said roughly, as though he hated offering me any consolation, ‘She had to go. Your daughter was being taken there. The press would have been sniffing round her school in no time. They’re already camped outside your house.’

‘Yes, and whose fault is that?’ I demanded.

‘Yours, I think,’ he said shortly.

I didn’t argue. What was the point? And if Imo and Ginny needed to seek refuge, there were few better places than Poynters. Johnny had bought the half-timbered Elizabethan mansion a couple of years earlier. It must have cost him a fortune. I recall saying to him at the time, I’m obviously paying you too much! He claimed it had once belonged to the Nutbrowns back in the eighteenth century and he’d always known it would come back. The great thing in the present situation was that it was pretty remote and Pippa, who was a bit of a hi-tech nerd, had installed a state-of-the-art security system.