The Woodcutter (18 page)

After a sleepless night retreading every inch of the past till my heavy feet must have obliterated all traces of truth, I turned up at court like a zombie. My face and bearing spoke guilt, and in the end Stoller didn’t even bother to put me on the witness stand.

In prison, I was put in the relative safety of the exclusion wing from the start, but that didn’t stop me being viciously abused whenever the so-called normal prisoners got within shouting and spitting distance. When the time of my second trial arrived, I was past caring about its outcome. I wouldn’t plead guilty, but I couldn’t be bothered to make much effort to prove I wasn’t guilty. No surprise then that they found me guilty.

So that’s how it ended, my fairy tale.

A year after I came out of the coma, I was locked up for a total of twelve years.

That feels like forever after in anyone’s language.

Like that guy Thomas in the poem, I told nothing but the truth. Those fairies knew a thing or two. The truth doesn’t set you free, it gets you banged up for ever!

I had no friends. Johnny never came back. The only time I saw him again was when he appeared as a witness in the fraud case. To give him his due, he was clearly reluctant to say anything that told against me, but his airy evasions just managed to suggest there was a helluva lot of stuff to hide, and the fact that he kept glancing across at me with a look of rueful bewilderment and saying, ‘Sorry, Wolf’, didn’t help much either.

Just when you think things can’t get worse, they do. Six months after I’d started my sentence, Ed Trapp came to see me. I could tell it was bad news. Typically he didn’t muck about.

‘Your dad’s dead,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

I never got to see Fred. I just assumed that soon as he was fit to travel he’d come down to see me. News had begun to sound a bit more promising. Progress continued, very slow but steady. And then he’d had another stroke, so massive that despite being where he was, they could do nothing.

I didn’t bother to apply to be allowed to go to the funeral. What was the point? He’d be laid to rest in St Swithin’s up at Mireton. Everyone would be there. He was well liked. All that my presence would do would be to attract the media swarm, all pointing their cameras to see how I would react as they lowered into the ground the father that I’d killed.

That’s how I felt, Elf, that’s how I feel. I don’t need the papers to say it. One way or another, I killed Fred, I acknowledge it.

And that’s not all. Fill your boots, this is payday for you.

After I heard about Fred, I sat down and wrote a letter to Ginny. I’d written to her several times in the period leading up to the trial. No reply, either because she didn’t want to, or maybe she never got my letters. After I was sentenced, I wrote again, and again nothing came back. I didn’t blame her. It’s a lot for a young kid to get her head around, being told her father’s a pervert and a fraudster. Give her time, I thought, let her grow up. Christmas cards, birthday cards, let her know I was still alive. But she’d been close to her granddad, and I wanted her to know . . . I don’t know what I wanted her to know, except that I loved her. When I finished the letter I read it through, once, twice, three times. Then I tore it up, because in my mind’s eye that’s what I could see her doing.

Another mistake. I should have had the courage to send it. I should have moved heaven and earth to make contact with her. Maybe if I’d been able to talk to her, maybe I could have persuaded her I was innocent, maybe she wouldn’t have let them pack her off out of the country like they did . . .

Maybe she would still be alive.

But now I look back on her childhood I see how rarely I’d been there for her. I’d always thought of myself as a loving dad, but thinking about her after my sentence, I realized the last time I’d seen her before everything blew up was early in that last summer vacation when she asked me to help her with her Wordsworth assignment. Shortly afterwards I’d shot off on a business trip and by the time I returned she’d gone back to school. In fact that had been the pattern of our contact for the past few years: me away a lot of the time, only getting to see her if my presence in England coincided with one of her school vacations. OK, I always came back loaded with expensive presents from exotic parts, but what kind of compensation was that for my neglect?

What do you make of that, Elf? Some great dad, eh?

Whatever responsibility others share for putting me in this place and for putting Ginny in the way of harm over there in France, I know the truth of it. She was my responsibility and I failed her. I failed her all along. There’s a long trail leading back from that filthy Parisian alleyway she died in, and it starts at my feet.

Is that what you’re after, Elf? Is that what you want to hear?

Then you’ve got it, girl.

Whatever else I may have been framed for, I make a full and frank confession here.

You’ve got me bang to rights. I let my daughter down and I let my father down.

I killed them both. I killed them both.

Elf

i

This was it. The breakthrough!

She liked to watch sport on television. She got real pleasure out of the grace and athleticism of those involved, and she also learned a lot from observing with clinical detachment the range of human reaction to triumph and failure, to victory and defeat. She had written a paper on the subject for a psychological journal. It was judged to have such popular appeal that a national paper had offered a handsome fee for the right to publish it, but she had refused, mainly because they wanted to make some significant cuts but also because in retrospect her initial delight at the offer felt like taking a step away from a spectating objectivity towards the condition of those in the sporting arena.

But now as she read Hadda’s narrative for a second time, she knew at last what it was to feel the impulse to punch the air and let out a scream of
YES!

This was the crack in the dam that could . . . should . . . might . . .
must
lead to a breach of the huge defensive wall he had thrown up around his actions.

Its form had changed again, this time more subtly. It was back to first-person historical narrative, but it was now addressed directly and specifically to herself. It was a statement that went a good way to being one half of a dialogue.

And its concluding admission that he had failed his daughter and his father beyond any mitigation of circumstance or outside interference was monumental. Even the derisive snarl of
Is that what you want to hear? . . . Then you’ve got it, girl!
was significant. It showed that he recognized and, albeit with reluctance and distaste, accepted their relationship of patient and therapist.

Of course he was still in denial . . . w
hatever else I’ve been framed for . . .
but the more aggressive he became, the more it demonstrated his inner turmoil as he felt his defences hard pressed.

It wasn’t surprising. All the evidence suggested his predilection was for girls in the early pubertal stages. He blamed the Ulphingstones for his daughter’s banishment to boarding school, but from his point of view it put her safely out of the way during this dangerous stage of her development for a good two-thirds of the year. And his complaint that business trips frequently took him away from home during her holidays fitted the pattern perfectly. He knew what he was, didn’t trust himself round his own young daughter, and protected her and himself by keeping her at a physical distance as much as possible.

It wasn’t just guilt at her neglect that he was confessing to; it was the much greater guilt that had caused it!

Now was the time for her to press on – but with very great care. In the long hunt the most dangerous time is when the quarry turns at bay. So she prepared the ground for their next meeting even more meticulously than usual. But in the event she was frustrated.

He refused to see her.

There was nothing she could do.

These sessions were voluntary. No point in trying to work with a prisoner who had to be brought kicking and screaming before you.

The following week it was the same.

She guessed that he was regretting having gone so far to meet her. He felt he had given too much away, put himself in her power.

And perhaps he was fearful of what more might come. This was good. But only if somehow she could gain access to him.

The third week he didn’t show either. But Officer Lindale, one of the few she didn’t automatically assume would report everything back to Chief Officer Proctor, chose a moment when they were alone to say, ‘Hadda asked me to give you this, miss.’

He handed her an exercise book.

She took it and glanced inside.

‘Did you read this?’ she asked.

‘Looked through it, miss. In case it was, you know, offensive.’

And what would you have done if in your judgment it had been? she wondered.

But she knew that Hadda must have chosen Lindale as his messenger because he too trusted him, so all she said was, ‘Thank you very much.’

She couldn’t wait till she got home. As soon as she slipped into the driving seat of her car, she took out the book and began to read.

Wolf

i

Dear Dr Ozigbo, I won’t be seeing you again, not unless they bring me under restraint. At first I thought I’d simply just not turn up any more, but that lets you down too easily, and I’ve decided to write to you just so you’ll know that I know exactly what you’ve been up to.

You must have been really pleased with yourself when you read what I wrote about Johnny’s visit and seen that you’d managed to stir up all kinds of feelings I didn’t understand. And when you started in at me about Imogen I guess you didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to spot you’d touched a very sensitive spot. I know you’ll say it’s your job and everything you’re trying to do is for my benefit, and I daresay you half believe it. I was ready to believe it myself to start with, but not any longer. Now I’ve come to realize you’re little more than an interfering busybody poking around in matters you don’t understand on the basis of gross misinformation and all you’ve managed to do is disturb whatever equilibrium I’ve achieved to see me safe through my sentence.

This writing business, for instance – you said the point of it was to get me to externalize my memories and feelings about what happened so that I could stand back and take it all in and come to terms with it – OK, you’d probably wrap it up in some trick cyclist’s mumbo-jumbo but that’s what it amounts to – right? Clarity. It’s meant to give me clarity, but all it’s done is create utter confusion.

When I started, I thought I’d get you off my back by giving you a blow-by-blow account of what happened to me and my take on the reasons why it happened. Instead I’ve ended up doubting my own memories. Is that your job – to leave your patients more fucked up than when you found them?

Take sleeping, for instance. I used to sleep OK. I used to sleep sound. But ever since I started seeing you I’ve started having broken nights, bad dreams, the cold sweats, and it’s got steadily worse. Recently my dreams have been getting really terrible, I do some really bad stuff in them, I won’t tell you what because I know you’d just seize on it to support whatever it is you imagine you’re doing with me. But I know what you’re really doing. I’ve been reading about it in the library; false memory syndrome, they call it, which is when some trick cyclist is so obsessed with the notion that their patient has been abused in childhood that they keep on and on at the poor sod till he or she starts agreeing with them, and then the psych says
Hooray! This is a repressed memory brought to the surface through my clever therapy
when all it is is a disgusting idea that he or she has actually planted there!

I think this is what you’ve been doing to me, drip drip drip, going on at me about the paedophilia stuff, till you’ve got inside my head and put these false memory nightmares there. Look, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and accept that this probably wasn’t your intention. You read the trial transcripts and decided I was guilty and never once did you let it enter your head that maybe the stuff I was writing was the truth and you’d got it all wrong. No, from the start you reckoned I was in denial, isn’t that what you people say? That my accounts were just my effort to hide from the knowledge of my own perverted crimes.

Well, congratulations, Dr Ozigbo. I’d never looked at images of kids being sexually abused till Medler showed me those that had been planted on my computer. I thought I’d cleansed them out of my memory. But now, thanks to you, I’m seeing them all the time. They’re in my mind, in my dreams, in my nightmares, exactly where you’ve put them!

That’s what you’ve done to me. I was in control, eating my porridge, ticking down the minutes and hours and days till I got out of here.

Now I’m in hell.

Thanks a bunch.

And goodbye for ever.

Elf

i

As soon as she’d read Hadda’s letter, Alva Ozigbo asked to see the Director.

During her time at Parkleigh she had come to admire Simon Homewood. He was by no means the bleeding-heart liberal the right-wing papers liked to caricature him as. There was a strength in him that even George Proctor had to respect, though the Chief Officer made no secret of his belief that all this syrupy-therapy stuff, as he called it, was a waste of time that could more usefully have been spent picking oakum. But after some preliminary tussles, Proctor had come to realize that unless the prison was run the way the Director wanted it run, he might as well start looking for a new post.

Homewood asserted that his primary duty was one of care for the prisoners in his charge. Get that right and all the other penal issues of punishment, rehabilitation and public safety could be resolved. So now when Alva spoke to him about Hadda, she simply stated that in her judgment the prisoner had reached a stage in his journey to self-awareness where the burden of recognition might be stressful enough to provoke self-harm.