The Woodcutter (25 page)

He knelt down and pulled out an old metal chest, rusting at the corners, painted in flaking black enamel, with the initials W.H. stencilled on the lid in white.

It felt quite heavy.

There was a key in the lock.

So, nothing to hide there, not with the key left in the lock . . .

Why am I still looking for excuses? he asked himself.

Surely that wine box is justification enough?

He was still debating the point mentally as he turned the key and opened the box.

It was full of money. Bundles of fifty-pound notes, neatly laid out four times six, and at least five layers of them, with a couple of bundles missing from the top layer.

Oh hell! thought Luke Hollins, sitting heavily on the bed.

Now at last he had something to take his mind off the vicarage boiler.

7

Wolf Hadda realized he’d forgotten his phone when he was halfway to Carlisle.

Old age, he thought. Not that it mattered. The call he wanted to make was perhaps better made from the anonymous security of a landline rather as part of the babbling traffic of the air.

Public boxes were thin on the ground these days and he was on the edge of the city before he spotted one. It occurred to him that in the years since he’d rung this number, it might well have changed. In fact it was answered almost immediately.

‘Chapel Domestic Agency, how can I help you?’ said a bright young voice.

He said, ‘I’m looking for a woodcutter.’

‘Hold on.’

There was a long silence then a man’s voice said, ‘Good day.’

‘And a good day to you too, JC.’

‘How nice to hear your voice. What can I do for you?’

‘I need something.’

‘Really? And what makes you imagine I may be in a giving mood?’

‘The fact that I’ve not been pestered by hordes of journalists lurking in the undergrowth. Only reason I can think of for that is editors have had their arms twisted. Only one old twister with that kind of strength I can think of.’

‘I’m almost flattered. But if I have already done so much for you, why do you think I should want to do more?’

‘Because having done so much suggests there’s a bit of guilt there, JC. How much, I’m not sure. Eventually I’ll find out, but till then you might feel the need to establish a bit more goodwill.’

‘Have you never heard of simple altruism?’

Hadda replied with a silence more telling than laughter.

‘All right. What do you want?’

‘A couple of kilos of coke.’

‘I see. Any chance of giving a reason?’

‘Call it necessity.’

‘In that case, give me a moment.’

‘I’m in Cumbria, on the western outskirts of Carlisle, if you’re running a trace.’

‘Of course you are,’ said the man. ‘Which may in fact be pertinent. So, let me see . . . Ah, yes. Here we are. Now I think a couple of kilos might be difficult.’

‘A kilo might do, at a pinch.’

‘No, the problem is in the other direction. If you could make do with a hundred kilos, I might be able to help. In fact, geographically speaking, you are particularly well placed. Interested? If so, ring off and I’ll get back to you in a few minutes.’

Hadda rang off and went to sit in the Defender. Three minutes later the phone rang.

He answered it, listened, made a note, and said, ‘Thanks.’

‘Be careful. These are professional people. And you are not as young as you were.’

‘I’m not as anything as I was,’ said Hadda harshly and rang off.

He got back into the Land Rover and drove away.

As he negotiated the increasing traffic into the heart of the ancient city, he said to himself, ‘Now that was very easy. Just how guilty do you feel, JC?’

8

With her parentage, Alva Ozigbo felt she ought to be able to switch seasonally from a stoic indifference to the chills of winter to a sensuous enjoyment of summer heat.

The truth was her slim Scandinavian mother hated to be cold and enjoyed nothing more than luxuriating in the scorching rays of a southern sun, while her bulky Nigerian father strode around in sub-zero temperatures wearing a short-sleeved shirt and at the first sign of milder weather started mopping his perspiring brow and turning up the air conditioning.

Alva felt she’d got the worst of both worlds. She was no sunworshipper and she hated the pervasive chill of the wintry city.

This evening as she returned home from work, the east wind that had been pursuing her like a determined stalker ever since she got out of her car managed to squeeze enough of its presence into the entrance hall of her apartment block to keep her shivering as she paused to check her mail box. It contained only one letter and as she saw the postmark, she shivered again.

Cumbria.

As far as she knew, she had only one connection with Cumbria.

But she didn’t recognize this handwriting.

Quickly she ran up the stairs to her second-floor flat. The central heating had already switched itself on and she turned her electric fire up high to give herself the thermal boost she needed.

Then she sat down and opened the envelope.

St Swithin’s Vicarage
Mireton
Cumbria
Dear Dr Ozigbo
I am sorry to trouble you but I need advice and, so far as I can judge at the moment, you are the best person to give it to me. I am vicar of St Swithin’s here in West Cumbria and since last November Wilfred Hadda has been one of my parishioners. Let me say at once I know that as he is a former, perhaps indeed a current, patient of yours, the usual strict rules of medical confidentiality will apply and I’m not about to ask you to do anything that may break them. All I can do is provide you with some information and ask for your expert guidance on what, if anything, I should do about it.

I visit Mr Hadda every couple of weeks or so. While I can’t say his return was welcomed locally, after some initial violent reaction things have settled down considerably, helped by both the relative remoteness of Birkstane, his house, and also by Mr Hadda’s own self-prescribed remoteness. So far as I know, he has made no attempt to communicate with anyone in the parish. My own conversations with him have, on the whole, been at a fairly social level, but I haven’t evaded the subject of his offence and its consequences. While I’ve got the impression of a pretty calm and well-ordered personality (and to my surprise a rather engaging one, too), I am very aware that the baggage he carries must at times weigh heavy. One thing I didn’t spot, however, was any overt sign of remorse or repentance. When I put this to him he more or less told me to mind my own business.

Now, in a very real sense, this is my business, and I cannot let my generally good impression of Mr Hadda and my respect for his rights come before my responsibilities to the rest of my parishioners. I want to be able to assure them with no reservation that I’ve found nothing in Mr Hadda’s attitude or behaviour to suggest he could ever be a threat to their families. I suppose it could be argued that the fact that he doesn’t wear remorse on his sleeve is a good sign. I mean, a paedophile still seeking the opportunity to offend would be at pains to advertise his change of heart, wouldn’t he? I’d be interested to hear what you have to say about that. But the reason I’m writing to you is that, whatever the state of his libido, I’ve come across something that suggests in his other sphere of crime, financial fraud, he may still be adept at concealment.

Mr Hadda claims to be surviving on state benefit alone. But by chance when I was alone in his house yesterday I came across a crate of expensive wine and a box full of money. A lot of money. I didn’t count it, but it must have amounted to several hundred thousand pounds, in bundles of forty £50 notes, two of which seemed to be missing (= £4,000).

I’ve thought about this and a possible explanation seems to be that when he was in business, knowing the risks he was running, he put aside an emergency fund, and hid it so well that the Fraud Squad investigation didn’t manage to turn it up. This implies a level of foreplanning and powers of deception that trouble me. I don’t know what to do. To talk to the authorities opens up the possibility that this has been a breach of his probation conditions, which would mean an instant return to jail. I don’t want that on my conscience. But if it is symptomatic of a naturally deceitful character, and if at some stage it turned out he was also concealing his old urges, and these burst out and resulted in damage to any of my parishioners, I could not easily forgive myself.

I could of course confront him and demand to know where the money came from, and what he has spent £4,000 on since his release. But this would certainly shatter our delicate relationship and I doubt if I have the skills to sort the wheat from the chaff in any explanation he cares to offer.

So in my dilemma, I’m turning to you, Dr Ozigbo. Mr Hadda has mentioned your name and your job, lightly but affectionately I felt, and I’ve tracked down your address via the Internet. No such thing as privacy these days! And what I want to ask you is this. As the psychiatric expert who supervised his progress through the regeneration course (sorry, don’t know what you call it, but that’s how I think of it!) how convinced are you that he is no longer a menace to the community?

Obviously you must have been very convinced last autumn or you wouldn’t have recommended his release on licence. But in the light of what I’ve just told you, how convinced are you now?

We are both employed in the cure of souls, Dr Ozigbo, though not in the same sense of the term. Your concern is individual; you try to repair damaged psyches. Mine is pastoral; I try to look after the welfare of my flock. If you do not feel able to reply to this letter, or if in your reply you are not able to offer total reassurance, then my duty will be clear and I’ll have to report what I know to the authorities even though I fear that the consequences for Mr Hadda might be severe.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Luke Hollins

After she’d read the letter, Alva went into the kitchen, took a prepared chicken salad out of the fridge, poured herself a glass of white wine, carried food and drink into the living room and sat down by the fire. Before she started eating, she switched her radio on to catch the six o’clock news.

Its burden was familiar. The world was in a mess. Not quite the same mess it had been in when Wilfred Hadda started his sentence – the worry now was that the economy was overheating again rather than bumping along the bottom – but the same wars were being fought, the same groups were blowing people up in the name of the same gods, the ice-mass was a little lower, the sea levels were a little higher, a couple more species had been declared extinct – no, on the whole Hadda would probably not have noticed any significant change on his release.

She brought to mind their last meeting, some three months earlier. She had met him as he came out of the prison. The only other person there was a small bespectacled man in a battered Toyota. She recognized him as Mr Trapp, the solicitor. They hadn’t met, but she had glimpsed him when he was acting for Hadda as his probation hearing approached. He wasn’t the most impressive representative of the legal profession she’d met, but he seemed to know his business.

It occurred to her it must have been a pretty big favour he owed Hadda to still be paying it off after all this time. Or maybe it was Hadda’s capacity to inspire personal loyalty that she saw working here. She’d felt it herself and there were suggestions in Luke Hollins’s letter that he’d come under the influence.

It was a dangerous quality in a man with his sexual predilections.

There was no such thing as a cure, of course, not unless you went a lot further down the chemical road than she was able to contemplate. All you could do was try and restore that barrier between impulse and action that keeps most of us within the bounds of socially acceptable behaviour. First of all you had to strip away all the excuses and evasions, the explanations and deceptions, and once you had got the patient to see what he was, then you could start building up a positive image of what he might be.

It was a tortuous road that you trod with great care, for at the end of it lay the question, Is it safe to let this man out into the world again?

She had of course discussed progress with Simon Homewood at regular intervals. He had been consistently helpful and supportive. And always he had talked about the final recommendation for parole as being their joint decision. Technically this was true, but nothing Homewood said could blur Alva’s awareness that ultimately the responsibility for Hadda’s release would be hers.

She’d also spoken of the case in general terms with John Childs. Curiously she derived much more comfort from her non-specific chats with him than she did from her much more detailed discussions with the Director. Perhaps this was because his response was tinged with a gentle cynicism against which she was forced to test her own conclusions and intuitions.

‘Is it inevitable,’ he asked, ‘that recognition of the evil of one’s actions is accompanied by regret for performing them?’

‘Not in certain extreme cases of sociopathic behaviour,’ she replied. ‘But I do not categorize my client as a sociopath.’

‘Then what?’

‘A man with a compulsion he deplores so much he could only deal with it by denying it completely. Like some alcoholics.’

‘Isn’t that a rather easy judgment? I mean, alcoholics don’t hurt other people. Except their families. And they have the AA to help them. And I doubt the public would tolerate a support organization called Paedophiles Pseudonymous.’

‘The Law makes judgments,’ said Alva. ‘My job is to assess and, where possible, adjust.’

‘And ultimately to advise,’ said Childs. ‘It’s a huge responsibility.’

‘And you think I should duck it by leaving my client banged up for ever?’

‘Good Lord, no. I’m sure you wouldn’t dream of letting him loose if you had the slightest fear he’d still be a danger to young girls. Whether, of course, he might be a danger to anyone else hardly falls within the brief of your terms of employment.’