The Woodcutter (32 page)

Book Three
Unions and Reunions

Christmas was close at hand, in all his bluff and hearty honesty; it was the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness . . . How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight . . . How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken! . . . Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days . . .

Charles Dickens:
The Pickwick Papers

1

Like most men, ex-DI Medler imagined that he’d once enjoyed Christmas.

In his case the enjoyment must have been brief and infantile, for that miasma of disillusion, disappointment, cynicism and scepticism which men call maturity descended early on the boy, Arnie.

Indeed he was only six when he decided that a year of fulltime education was more than enough for the cultural, spiritual and intellectual needs of a growing boy and resolved to hand in his resignation from Wapping C of E First School with immediate effect.

He first shared this resolution with his gran, Queenie Medler, who appeared to Arnie as a benevolent old lady full of wisdom and insight, and to her many admirers across the bar of the China Clipper on Wapping Wall as a right little cracker, game for anything.

Queenie advised him to sleep on it. He flew into a childish tantrum, the burden of which was that he found the prospect of another ten years of education unbearable and wished passionately that he could be grown up and rich enough to lie in bed as long as he fucking well liked, answerable to no man.

Queenie had chuckled at the same time as she lightly clipped his ear and told him to watch his language and be careful what he wished for as the gods who like a laugh might just make it come true.

Well, they had, and now, forty years on, he thought gloomily that the bastards must really be laughing.

Early retirement to a sunny clime with a pension pot sufficiently deep to keep him in comfort till the end of his days. That was all he’d wanted. That was his adult version of his childhood wish. And that was what he’d got.

He’d also got boredom. And he’d got a wife who saw no reason why not being married to a football star should stop her spending like a WAG. And he found that in ex-pat social circles, the crooks treated him as a cop and the straights treated him as a crook.

He’d never been a man who made friends easily, or indeed thought he needed them, but he’d come to realize the truth of what some cynical Frog philosopher probably said, that it wasn’t enough to get what you wished for, there had to be someone around who envied you for it.

Tina’s friends and relatives didn’t count – they were, on the whole, a bunch of wankers. As to his own acquaintance from the old days, in the beginning one or two, lured by the thought of a freebie in the sun, came to stay and confirmed that he’d got it made, which was good, but rarely came a second time, which was puzzling.

His encounter with Davy McLucky had turned into a real egotitillating treat, all the better because it had started so unpromisingly, with the ex-DC naturally showing little enthusiasm at running across an ex-boss who’d never done him any favours. But after reluctantly accepting an invite to come out to the villa, McLucky had not been able to conceal his growing envy as he was taken on the grand tour. Even Tina had played a part. Roused from her customary domestic lethargy by the sight of a new man, she’d led the way, waggling her bum and shaking her tits in a manner that certainly caught McLucky’s attention.

His tongue loosened by a couple of bottles of Rioja, McLucky had bemoaned the contrast between his fate after retirement –
gloomy fuckin’ Glasgae ’n’ squalid fuckin’ divorce cases! –
and Medler’s –
sunshine ’n’ tottie ’n’ fuck all tae do but booze ’n’ fornicate yer fuckin’ life awa’!
Medler had rubbed it in by assuring him that this life could be his too, presenting a balance sheet of property values and living expenses as if they were dirt cheap, knowing full well that they were a million miles outside of McLucky’s range.

Maybe he’d overdone it. Maybe he always overdid it. Certainly the next day his guest had shown no enthusiasm when pressed to stay longer, not even when the pressure had been applied by Tina’s melonic breasts.

Arnie hardly knew the guy, he’d only invited him to the villa to parade his comparative wealth, yet when McLucky said he was going home, he’d felt utterly bereft.

That had been more than a week ago. He was used to troughs of depression but usually he managed to drag himself back to the surface in a couple of days. This time, however, he felt himself sinking in darkness deeper and deeper, beyond all hope of day.

Now it was Christmas Eve, the season for friends and family and universal jollity, and here he was, sitting on the terrace overlooking his pool, with a fag in one hand and a glass of cognac in the other, wondering how the hell he was going to spend the rest of his life.

Tina wasn’t here. Far from a devout Christian, she nevertheless adhered to the superstitious patterns of her upbringing by attending services at the English Church on Easter morning and at midnight on Christmas Eve. Afterwards no doubt she would be inveigled into having a festive drink with some of her friends. People liked Tina, and they liked her all the more he guessed, when he wasn’t around.

Well, that didn’t bother him. He didn’t know how far she strayed, but he knew she wasn’t going to risk straying so far she couldn’t find her way back to the source of all comforts. There were plenty of guys out there who’d like to give her one, but not many who’d want her to stay on in the morning to give her another. Perhaps it might be a good thing if she did find an alternative bankroll. Perhaps that would give him the incentive to change his life around.

He almost wished it would happen, that something,
anything
would happen, to jerk him out of this state of enervating depression.

Be careful what you wish . . .

‘Hello, Mr Medler. And a happy Christmas to you.’

On to the terrace stepped a figure of nightmare. Literally in that he saw it occasionally in his nightmares. The scarred face, the eye-patch, the gloved right hand . . .

Only the gloved left hand differed significantly from his guilty imaginings.

There
it was sometimes pointed at him accusingly.

Here
it carried a small and shining axe.

Two hours later, Tina Medler’s taxi drew up at the main gate of the villa. She’d had to pay a small fortune to get the guy to come all the way out here, and he’d insisted on having the fare upfront. The least the bastard could do was get out from behind the wheel and open the door for her.

On the other hand, if he did that he might notice that she’d been comprehensively sick all over the rear seat. Fortunately the racket of his clapped-out engine had covered her discomfiture. She pushed open the door, pulled her already short skirt up even higher and managed a not too undignified debouchment. The driver was clocking her lacy briefs.

‘Not for you,
compadre,
’ she said. ‘I’ve left you a tip in the back.
¡Felices Pascuas!’

She slammed the door so hard the glass shook. The driver made a rude gesture then sent the cab rattling away into the dark.

Seeing a light on in the villa, she pressed the bell-push and waited for the gates to be unlocked. Nothing happened. Arnie must have got himself pissed again and passed out. Stupid sod. At least she never reached that state. Always knew what she was doing, though sometimes she didn’t know why she was doing it.

She dug through the junk in her purse till she found the remote, pointed and pressed, and the gates swung open. Would have been a bugger if she’d forgotten it. Arnie was big on security and even with her skirt round her bum she wouldn’t have fancied trying to scale the garden walls with their coronet of razor wire. Best she could have hoped for was to trigger the alarm system and hope that the din roused the useless piss-artist.

She closed the gates behind her, slipped off her designer slingbacks, which were giving her gip, and walked up the smoothly paved driveway in her bare feet. Cup of coffee, fall into bed, wake up around midday tomorrow, couple of corpse-revivers, and then it would be prezzie time! Arnie tended to be a bit mean on the present front, but never mind, she’d made a couple of purchases on his behalf, and he could hardly complain so long as she showed her gratitude in the usual way, always supposing he wasn’t still too pissed to get it up.

As she approached the villa she realized the light she’d spotted was the light on the pool terrace, so that’s where she headed. She noticed to her surprise that all the metal security shutters were down. As she rounded the corner she saw the empty lounger, the low table on which stood an almost empty bottle of cognac, and shards from a shattered glass all over the tiles. One of her best crystal set, from the look of it. Useless bastard! Christmas or not she’d tear him limb from limb when she laid hands on him.

But first she had to lure him out of hiding.

She called, ‘Honey, I’m home!’

Nothing.

The bastard must really have tied one on tonight. Suddenly, fearful that he might have been stupid enough to go for a drunken swim, she peered into the pool.

Just a lilo on the surface and nothing underneath.

She felt a pang of relief. Arnie wasn’t much, but he wasn’t so little she could be indifferent to his death. The relief was already morphing back to irritation as she turned to face the villa.

Something caught her eye, lying on the tiles at the foot of the heavy security shutter that protected the patio door. Some things.

She went forward.

There were two of them.

Gloves, she thought. Odd. These December nights got chilly, even here on the Costa del fucking Sol, but surely it wasn’t so cold that Arnie, with enough alcohol in him to fuel a rocketship, would need to wear gloves? She herself, fearing to damage her long, beautifully manicured and lacquered fingernails wouldn’t dream of wearing them; she didn’t even know Arnie owned a pair of gloves . . .

And why had he placed them so neatly, almost flush up against the metal shutter . . .?

Finally her mind gave up the effort to conceal beneath this tangle of irrelevant thought the truth of what her eyes were telling her.

Not gloves.

Hands.

Severed from their arms, which were presumably on the far side of the patio shutter.

She recognized the signet ring on one of the fingers, and went down on her knees, not to look more closely but because her legs refused to support her.

She’d thought she had left all that there was to bring up on the back seat of the taxi, but now she found she was wrong.

And when she stopped retching, she raised her head to the Christmas stars and started to scream.

2

After matins on Christmas Day, most members of St Swithin’s congregation were eager to head off home to their secular celebrations. There was a good smell of roast fowl rising over Mireton, and Luke Hollins was looking forward as much as anyone to closing his front door and stretching his legs under his own well-laden table.

This was his first Christmas in the parish and by chance it was also going to be the first that he and Willa had spent alone. Usually her parents joined them, and sometimes his sister and her family. But a new baby in the latter case, and reluctance to make the long journey from Devon in the former, had left them with no one to please but themselves. And of course any members of his parochial flock who cared to put their needs before the vicar’s relaxation.

As he exchanged greetings by the door with the last of the worshippers, he saw that the castle party was still in the churchyard, over by the Ulphingstone family tomb. This was by far the most prominent sepultural monument, resembling in Hollins’s democratic eyes one of those blockhouses still visible on parts of the UK’s sea coast out of which the aged eyes of Dad’s Army peered in fearful expectation of seeing cohorts of Nazi storm-troopers goose-stepping out of the waves.

The tomb was marked off from its populist neighbours by a metal fence, its uprights shaped like Zulu assegais, its interstices filled by curlicues of cast iron in a Celtic knot-pattern, all enamelled black except for the spear blades, which were picked out in gold. Whether its function was to keep the living out or the dead in, Hollins didn’t know. But he did know he found it as offensive to good taste as it was to democratic principle.

The most recent entrant to the tomb had been, according to the lapidary inscription, Virginia, beloved daughter of Imogen, and granddaughter of Sir Leon and Lady Kira Ulphingstone.

Hollins thought of how Wolf Hadda must have felt when he came down here in the dark of night to lay his bough of rowan before the tomb and saw that his name didn’t get a mention.

The girl’s death had predated Hollins’s own arrival in Mireton. He had referred to it once at the lunch table, but had been blanked out by Kira, while Leon’s face had twisted into such a mask of grief that Hollins had found himself babbling about the church-tower restoration fund in an attempt at distraction.

The castle party were being lectured by Lady Kira, who took her family responsibilities very seriously and expected her guests to do the same. There were half a dozen of them beside the elder Ulphingstones. Quite a small house-party by Kira’s standards if this were all, which presumably it was, as you didn’t stay at the castle without processing down to the church for morning service. In fact he’d discovered soon after arrival that the verger didn’t start ringing the calling bell until he had the castle party in his sights even if this meant delaying the start of things by four or five minutes.