The Woodcutter (46 page)

‘I was told if I got the job I’d need to sign the Official Secrets Act. They stressed this wasn’t just a formality. If I contravened the Act, the consequences would be severe. Very severe. I believed them, and I’ve never stepped out of line. But I’m stepping across it now, ducks, so I hope your guide’s honour is still intact!’

It wasn’t Alva’s honour that was being troubled, it was her credulity.

‘You’re telling me you were a spy or something glamorous like that?’ said Alva with a scepticism that another woman might have found offensive.

All it got from Doll was another cockatoo screech.

‘Glamorous, me? Don’t be daft!! Worked in a run-down office in Clerkenwell. Can’t tell you exactly where, or I’d have to kill you, but we referred to it as the Chapel, ’cos the building was converted from a disused Methodist chapel.’

‘And Wolf worked in the office with you?’ asked Alva, wondering what kind of undercover department took sixteen-year-old runaways on as office boys.

‘Of course not,’ said Doll impatiently. ‘Just listen, will you? Like I said, where I sat, the Chapel wasn’t at all glamorous. But then, I wasn’t out in the big wide world doing an Indiana Jones. I just sat at a computer, putting together bits and pieces of information.’

‘What kind of information?’ asked Alva.

‘Oh, this and that,’ said Doll vaguely. ‘Pay wasn’t all that good, but on the whole I enjoyed the work. We all like knowing things that other people don’t. Must be the same in your job, dear. Maybe that’s why we understand each other.’

‘I wish,’ said Alva. ‘Did your husband work there too?’

‘Ed? No. But it was through the Chapel we got together. After I’d been working for them a year, my boss, JC (not that one, ducks, nothing religious about the Chapel), told me the Chapel needed a solicitor they could use for the occasional job, someone too low profile to be noticed. He wondered if I’d come across anyone who might fit the bill during my time running errands at the chambers. Ed came into my mind, I don’t know why. He was very small beer, but even small beer solicitors have clients who need big-time barristers occasionally. Specially the kind of clients Ed specialized in.’

‘What kind was that?’

‘Bankers
manqués
, Ed calls ’em. People who think other folks’ money is better off in their pockets. Anyway, JC had him checked out. Later, when I got interested in Ed personally, I took a peek at the results. God help me, I suppose I knew more about the man I eventually married than any other woman in history!

‘But you don’t want a blow-by-blow account of our courting. Eventually I told JC we wanted to get married. He said he was fine with that, Ed had signed the Act too, and it was better for me not to have to lie about my job.

‘We’d been married a couple of years when Wolf came along. You’ve heard that story. Upshot was, I told JC all about the boy, said I wanted to find him a job, asked if JC had any advice. He said he’d like to meet Wolf, so one lunch hour we met up in a pub. JC was good at getting people to talk to him. He soon had Wolf eating out of the palm of his hand. And Wolf . . . well, as you know, he didn’t have to work at being liked.

‘A couple of days later JC told me it was fixed, said he’d arrange for Wolf to be picked up the following morning. And that’s what happened. Next morning he packed the few bits and pieces we’d got for him while he was staying with us, thanked us both very much, and left. And that was the last we heard from him for a dozen years or more.’

Doll fell silent. Was it a painful memory? Or was she just trying to work out how much more she could tell?

Alva said casually, ‘This JC, your boss. Were those his real initials by any chance?’

Doll gave her that shrewd look again and said, ‘Can’t tell you that, dearie. I’m already telling you a lot more than I should.’

Casual isn’t going to get me anywhere, thought Alva. So let’s try direct!

‘OK,’ she said. ‘In order not to trouble your conscience, and in case we’re being bugged, let me declare here and now that you have never told me anything to make me think this man JC’s full name might be John Childs.’

For the first time, she felt she’d laid a glove on Doll Trapp.

‘Well, you really are full of surprises,’ she said. ‘Interesting theory. I’d be careful who you share it with. Now, where was I?’

That’s all the confirmation I’m going to get, thought Alva.

She said, ‘You were telling me you got a boy you were concerned about a job with what sounds a very morally ambiguous organization run by a man whose sexual tastes incline to the Greek. Then you managed to lose contact with him for over a decade.’

She didn’t try too hard not to sound accusatory.

Doll said defiantly, ‘No moral ambiguity about the Chapel, ducks. That’s for plonkers who don’t care to know what the security services are doing, but are bloody glad to know they’re doing it. As for the Greek stuff, no worries there. All in the mind with JC. Sublimation, isn’t that what you people call it?’

She spoke with utter certainty. Alva felt she’d need several close consultations with Childs before she shared it. And in view of her growing suspicion just how completely she’d been deceived by Hadda, perhaps even that wouldn’t be enough!

She said, ‘You must surely have asked how Wolf was getting on?’

‘Of course I did. JC would just smile and say, “Fine, fine. He’s doing well.”’

‘And you were happy with that? What about records? They must have kept track of what their employees were up to.’

Doll grinned and said, ‘I can see you’re as nosey as I am, dear. That’s why we get on so well. Yes, I did take the odd peek in some well-hidden corners of my computer.’

‘And?’

‘I can’t be sure, they used codenames at the Chapel – claimed it was good security, but I reckon it was mainly like little boys liking nicknames! After a while I noticed references to someone tagged the Woodcutter. Could that be Wolf? I wondered. I recalled how it had amused my boss when he asked Wolf what else he could do besides climb vertical walls, and he said he could chop down trees.’

‘Is that all? You didn’t probe deeper?’

‘Not wise in the Chapel, going where you didn’t oughter,’ said Doll. ‘If you really want to know what he did in his Chapel years, you’ll have to ask him yourself.’

‘I may do that,’ said Alva. ‘How did you and Wolf make contact again?’

Doll said, ‘It was 2001. We’d been really busy in the Chapel since Labour got in and Tony started brown-nosing the Yanks. I worked longer and longer hours without really noticing. And that meant I didn’t notice what was happening with Ed.

‘His clients were always demanding. I don’t know which were worse, the out-and-out villains or the poor bastards that life and circumstance were pushing under. He still got work from the Chapel from time to time, but that wasn’t exactly stress-free either.

‘To cut a long story short, Ed had a booze problem. I knew he liked a drink. OK, that’s a long way from needing a drink, but there’s an unbroken thread running between them, and I was too busy to see it being spun out.

‘As he got more and more stressed out by his case-load, Ed turned to the booze to help him out. My wake-up call was finding a bottle of vodka hidden in the lavatory cistern. I confronted Ed with it. He denied all knowledge at first, but when that wouldn’t wash, he denied it meant anything sinister. But now a whole pattern of behaviour began to make sense. I screamed at him like a fishwife. Not the clever thing to do. Knowing I knew meant he just didn’t have to bother to hide the problem any more. After a particularly bad binge, I got him to promise he’d turn himself in to Alcoholics Anonymous. I stood over him while he rang up and arranged to go to a meeting with a counsellor. I’d have taken him there myself, but there was so much on at work. Big mistake. On his way to the meeting, he remembered he was representing a client at the magistrates’ court.

‘Hardly need tell you the rest. He took a couple of drinks to steady his nerves. Then several more for no good reason other than he was a helpless piss-artist.

‘Unfortunately no one spotted how rat-arsed he was before he got into the court. He made a real idiot of himself. When the magistrate told him to sit down, he became abusive. And when the court bailiff tried to escort him out, he became violent.

‘It made all the papers. Looked like the end of his career. He’d be charged, fined, even imprisoned, certainly disbarred. I think he was suicidal. I know I was.

‘And then this fifty-thousand-pound car pulls up outside our house and out steps this smart young fellow in a three-thousand-pound suit and when I open the door he takes me in his arms, gives me a big kiss and says, “Hello, Doll. You’re looking great.”

‘It was Wolf. Or as he was now, Sir Wilfred Hadda. He’d read about Ed in the morning papers, cancelled everything and headed straight round to see us.

‘I still can’t believe what he did, I still don’t know how he did it. But in a couple of days it had ceased to be a scandal. Ed was some kind of modern saint who’d broken down under the pressure of too many good works; the magistrate was happy, the Law Society was happy, and best of all Ed was shut away in the country’s top addiction clinic, receiving film-star-level treatment for his alcoholism.

‘So there you are, my dear,’ concluded Doll Trapp. ‘If you can’t see now why we know Wolf has to be totally innocent of all those dreadful things they sent him down for, then maybe you should retrain for another line of work!’

6

John Childs sat in his study working on his book.

At the head of a fresh sheet of paper he wrote
Chapter 97
in the same immaculate hand with which he had inscribed
Chapter 1
nearly forty years ago. Sometimes he looked back a trifle ruefully at his chosen title,
A Brief History of the Phoenician People,
but a delicate sense of irony prevented him from changing it.

A man as meticulous in thought as in script, he calculated that his
Brief History
would take another seventeen years to complete. If he, and the market for books like his, survived till then, he did not anticipate troubling the best-seller lists. In fact it amused him to think that his largest readership might prove to be those colleagues from departments cognate with his own who had been clandestinely checking out the script from time to time just to make sure he wasn’t composing a
roman à clef.

Something scratched against the window pane. He rose to draw back the curtains and open the French window leading on to a small balcony overlooking Regent’s Park.

‘You could just have rung the bell,’ he said.

Wolf Hadda stepped into the room.

‘Hello, JC,’ he said. ‘I needed the exercise.’

The two men looked at each other critically.

‘You’ve aged,’ said Hadda.

‘And you have . . . well, you look better than you ought to,’ said Childs. ‘From all accounts you are extremely fit. Does your training regime permit alcohol?’

‘In moderation.’

‘Then let me get you a moderate scotch. Have a seat.’

Hadda sank into a recliner chair and spun round to take in the whole room. His gaze ran along the photos on the wall – Childs Senior in tropical kit, looking very serious; a boy he knew to be John Childs standing with a young Arab who had his arm round his shoulder; and then the young men, some casual, some formal; and among them a gap.

‘
Et tu Brute
,’ he said. ‘I see I’ve been banished.’

‘What? Ah, yes. A temporary security precaution. Here, let me remedy it.’

He handed Hadda a glass and opened a drawer in his desk. Then he paused, frowning for a moment as if something about the contents had caught his eye. Finally he took out a framed photograph and went to hang it in the space on the wall.

‘There,’ he said. ‘All as it should be.’

‘Yes, nothing changed. A few more photos, of course. And the manuscript pile looks a little thicker. The Phoenicians doing well, are they?’

‘Steady progress,’ said Childs, returning to his seat. ‘You always had a good memory, Wolf.’

‘Better than ever now, I find.’

‘Then you will remember that I have never wished you anything but good.’

Hadda smiled and said, ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’

‘Is that one of your old Cumbrian saws?’ said Childs. ‘I hope so. It seems to imply a recognition that grim necessity takes precedence over all things.’

‘A heavy interpretation of one of my Great Aunt Carrie’s favourite catchphrases. But, now I come to think of it, I seem to recall you pleaded grim necessity the first time the good you always wished me didn’t come through.’

‘True. Though in recompense I did help you instead to get your heart’s desire.’

‘And look how that turned out.’

Childs wrinkled his brow as though contemplating a close philosophical analysis of this proposition, but before he could speak, a mobile trembled in Hadda’s pocket.

‘Sorry,’ he said, taking it out.

He examined the display then said, ‘Excuse me,’ and stepped back out on the balcony, pulling the window to behind him.

‘Hi, Davy,’ he said.

He listened for a few moments then smiled.

‘She’s nobody’s fool. I’m sorry I had to make her mine. What to do? Well, you could gag her and lock her in the attic, I suppose. But failing that, I think the best thing is for you and Doll to tell her everything she wants to know. And you won’t forget to withdraw your offer for Poynters? Good man. Cheers, Davy.’

He switched off and came back into the room.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

‘That’s OK. Especially as it seems to have been good news.’

‘Still so easy to read, am I? Even with my rearranged face! Ah well.’

He sat down again and took a sip of his drink.

‘Now what were we talking about? Oh yes. Grim necessity. Which I presume was your reason for your decision not to intervene, even when you knew for certain I’d been fitted up. In fact, you chose to connive at making the cover up water-tight. Necessity must have been really grim that week.’

‘You were in an apparently moribund state. What good would it have done you to set about proving your innocence?’