The Woodcutter (6 page)

Charm was perhaps the most potent weapon a pederast could possess.

But it was a weapon Hadda could hardly be conscious of possessing or surely he would have brought it out before now to reinforce his lies?

He said, ‘I remember interesting. That’s the word they use out there to describe things they don’t understand, don’t approve of, or don’t like, without appearing ignorant, judgmental or lacking in taste.’

She noted the intensity of
out there.

She said, ‘In here I use it to describe things I find interesting.’

They sat and looked at each other across the narrow table for a while. At least she presumed he was looking at her; his wrap-around glasses made it difficult to be certain. She could see herself reflected in the mirrored lenses, a narrow ebon face, its colouring inherited from her Nigerian father, its bone structure from her Swedish mother. Also her hair, straight and pale as bone. Many people assumed it was a wig, worn for effect. She was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved sweater that neither obscured nor drew attention to her breasts.
Don’t be provocative in your dress,
the Director had advised her when she started the job.
But no point in over-compensating. If you turned up in a burka, they’d still mentally undress you.

Did Hadda mentally undress her? she wondered. Up to their last session she’d have judged not. But what had happened then had stayed with her for the whole of the intervening seven days.

It had started in the usual way. She was already seated at her side of the bare wooden table when the door on the secure side of the interview room opened. Prison Officer Lindale, young and compassionate, had smiled and nodded his head at her, then stood aside to let Wilfred Hadda enter.

He limped laboriously into the room and sat down on the basic wooden chair that always seemed too small for him. Her fanciful notion that his rare smile was like wintry sunshine on a mountain probably rose from the sense of mountainous stillness he exuded. A craggy mountain, its face bearing the scars of ancient storms, its brow streaked with the greyish white of old snows.

It was well over a year since their first meeting, and despite her own extensive research that had been added to the file inherited from Joe Ruskin, her predecessor at Parkleigh, she did not feel she knew much more about Hadda. Ruskin’s file was in Alva’s eyes a simple admission of failure. All his attempts to open a dialogue were simply ignored and in the end the psychiatrist had set down his assessment that in his view the prisoner was depressed but stable, and enforced medication would only be an option if his behaviour changed markedly.

Alva Ozigbo had read the file with growing exasperation. The system it seemed to her had abandoned Hadda to deal with his past himself, and the way he was choosing to do it was to treat his sentence as a kind of hibernation.

The trouble with hibernation was when the bat or the hedgehog or the polar bear woke up, it was itself again.

Hadda, she read, had never admitted any of his crimes, but unlike many prisoners he did not make a thing of protesting his innocence either. According to his prison record, verbal abuse simply bounced off his monumental indifference. Isolation in the Special Unit had meant that there was little opportunity for other prisoners to attack him physically, but on the couple of occasions when, hopefully by accident, the warders let their guard down and an assault had been launched, his response had been so immediate and violent, it was the attackers who ended up in hospital.

But that had been in the early days. For five years until Alva’s appointment in January 2015 he had been from the viewpoint of that most traditional of turnkeys, Chief Officer George Proctor, a model prisoner, troubling no one and doing exactly what he was told.

The Chief Officer, a well-fleshed man with a round and rubicund face that gave a deceptive impression of Pickwickian good humour, was by no means devoid of humanity, but in his list of penal priorities it came a long way behind good order and discipline. So when he concluded his verdict on Hadda by saying, ‘Can’t understand what he’s doing in here’, Alva was puzzled.

‘But he was found guilty of very serious crimes,’ she said.

‘Yeah, and the bugger should be locked up for ever,’ said Proctor. ‘But look around you, miss. We got terrorists and subversives and serial killers, the bloody lot. That’s what this place is for. Hadda never done any serious harm to no one.’

It was a point Alva would usually have debated fiercely, but she had already wasted too much time beating her fists against Proctor’s rock-hard shell of received wisdom and inherited certainties. Also she knew how easy it would be for him to make her job even harder than it was, though in fairness he had never done anything to block or disrupt what he called her
tête-à-têtes,
which he pronounced
tit-a-tits
with a face so blank it defied correction.

After a year in post, she wasn’t sure how much good she’d done in relation to the killers and terrorists, but as far as Hadda was concerned, she felt she’d made no impression whatsoever. They brought him along to see her, but he simply refused to talk. After a while she found that her earlier exasperation with what she had judged to be her predecessor’s too easy abandonment of his efforts was modifying into a reluctant understanding.

And then one day when she turned up at Parkleigh, the Director had sent for her.

‘Terrible news,’ he said. ‘It’s Hadda’s daughter. She’s dead.’

Alva had studied the man’s file so closely she did not need reminding of the facts. The girl, Virginia, had been thirteen when her father was sentenced. She had never visited him in prison. A careful check was kept of prisoners’ mail in and out. He had written letters to her c/o his ex-wife in the early days. There had been no known reply and the letters out had ceased though he persevered with birthday and Christmas cards.

Joe Ruskin had recorded that Hadda’s reaction to any attempt to bring up the subject of his relationship with his daughter had been to stand up and head for the door. Grief or guilt? the psychiatrist speculated. Hadda’s predilection for pubescent girls had led the more prurient tabloids to speculate whether she might have been an object of his abuse, but there had been no suggestion of this either in the police investigation nor in the case for the prosecution. Ruskin had demanded full disclosure of all information relevant to the man’s state of mind and crimes, but nowhere had he found anything to indicate that details had been kept secret to protect the child.

Now the Director filled in the details of Ginny’s life after her father’s downfall.

‘Her mother sent her to finish her education abroad, out of the reach of the tabloids. Her grandmother, that’s Lady Kira Ulphingstone, has family connections in Paris, and that’s where the girl seems to have settled. She was, by all accounts, pretty wild.’

‘With her background, why wouldn’t she be?’ said Alva. ‘How did she die?’

‘The worst way,’ said the Director. ‘There was a party in a friend’s flat, drugs, sex, the usual. She was found early this morning in an alley behind the apartment block. She’d passed out, choked on her own vomit. Nineteen years old. What a waste! Alva, he’s got to be told. It’s my job, I know, but I’d like you to be there.’

She’d watched Hadda’s face as he heard the news. There’d been no reaction that a camera could have recorded, but she had felt a reaction the way you feel a change of pressure as a plane swoops down to land, and you swallow, and it’s gone.

He hadn’t been wearing his sunglasses and his monoptic gaze had met hers for a moment. For the first time in their silent encounters, she felt her presence was registered.

Then he had turned his back on them and stood there till the Director nodded at the escorting officer and he opened the door and ushered the prisoner out.

‘I’ve put him on watch,’ said the Director. ‘It’s procedure in such circumstances.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Procedure.’

He looked at her curiously.

‘You don’t think he’s a risk?’

‘To himself, you mean? No. But there has to be some sort of reaction.’

There was, but its nature surprised her.

He started talking.

Or at least he started responding to her questions. He was always reactive, never proactive. Only once did he ask a question.

He looked up at the CCTV camera in the interview room and said, ‘Can they hear us?’

She replied, ‘No. As I told you when we first met, the cameras are on for obvious security reasons, but the sound is switched off. This is a condition of my work here.’

The question had raised hopes that in the weeks that followed were consistently disappointed. He began to talk more but he never said anything that came close to the confessional. References to his daughter were met by the old blankness. She asked why he hadn’t applied to go to the funeral. He said he wouldn’t see his daughter there but he would see people he didn’t want to see. What people? she asked. The people who put me here, he said. But he didn’t even assert his innocence with any particular passion. Again the mountain image came into her mind. Climbers talk of conquering mountains. They don’t. Sometimes the mountain changes them, but they never change the mountain.

But she persevered and after a few more months of this, there came a session when, as soon as he came into the room, she had felt something different in him. As the door closed behind Prison Officer Lindale, she got a visual clue as to what it was.

Usually when he sat down, he placed his hands palm up on the table, the right one black gloved, the left bare, its life and fate lines deep etched, as though he expected his fortune to be read.

This day his hands were out of sight, as though placed on his knees.

She said, ‘Good morning, Mr Hadda. How are you today?’ He said in his customary quiet, level tone, ‘Listen, you black bitch, and listen carefully. I have a shiv in my hand. Show any sign of alarm and I’ll have one of your eyes out before they can open the door.’

Shock kept her brave. Only once had she been attacked, shortly after she’d started work here. A client (she refused to talk of them as prisoners), a mild-mannered little man who hadn’t even come close to the kind of innuendo by which some of the men tried to imply a sexual relationship with her, suddenly lunged across the table, desperate to get his hands on some part of her,
any
part of her. The best he’d managed was to brush her left wrist before the door slid open and a warder gave him a short burst with a taser.

Since then there’d been no trouble. Only Alva knew how frightened she’d been. When Parliament passed the Act a year ago permitting prison officers to carry tasers after the great Pentonville riot of 2014 she had been one of those who protested strongly against it. Now her certainty that if she pushed back her chair and screamed, the taser would be pumping 50kV into Hadda’s back long before the shiv could get anywhere near her eyes, gave her the strength to respond calmly, ‘What is it you want, Mr Hadda?’

He said, ‘What I want is to fuck you till you faint, but we don’t have time for that. So I’ll have to make do with you kicking your left shoe off, stretching your leg under the table, placing your bare foot against my crotch, and rubbing it up and down till I come.’

The part of her mind not still in shock thought, You poor sad bastard! You’re banged up with all the other deviants. Can’t you find someone in there to service you?

She was still wondering if she could bring this situation to a conclusion without testing what level of voltage was necessary to subdue a mountain when Hadda smiled – that was the first time – and placed his empty hands palm up on the table and said, ‘I think if they were going to come they’d have been here by now, don’t you agree?’

It took a second or two to get it. He’d been testing her assurance that the watching officers could not hear what was being said. Her mind was already exploring the implications of this, and she did not realize that her body was shaking in reaction until the door slid open and Officer Lindale said, ‘You OK, miss?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just got something stuck in my throat.’ And subsumed her trembling into a bout of coughing.

He said, ‘Like some water, miss?’

She shook her head and said, ‘No thanks. I’ll be OK.’

When the door was closed again, Hadda said, ‘Sorry about my little charade. What you need is a stiff brandy. I suggest we cut this session short so you can go and get one.’

She was still struggling with the after-effects of the shock and now she had to adjust to the new tone of voice in which he was addressing her.

Somehow she managed to keep her own voice level as she replied, ‘No, if you’re so keen to be sure we’re not being listened to, I presume that means you’ve got something you’d like to say.’

‘Not now,’ he said. ‘What I’ve got is something for you to read. OK, I’m convinced you’re telling the truth when you say there’s nobody listening to us. Now I’d like your reassurance that nobody else will read this or anything else I give to you.’

As he spoke, he pulled from his prison blouse a blue school exercise book.

This was a shock different in nature from the threat of a shiv attack but in its way almost as extreme.

With many of her clients, she suggested that if they felt like putting any of their feelings or thoughts down on paper before their next meeting, this could only be to the good. Nobody but herself would see what they wrote, she assured them, an assurance some took advantage of to lay before her in graphic detail their sexual fantasies.

Hadda had simply blanked her out when she first suggested he might like to write something. She’d repeated the suggestion over several weeks, then at last she had given up.

So this came completely out of the blue. It should have felt like a breakthrough, but she didn’t have the energy to exult.

She realized Hadda was right. What she wanted to do now was get away to somewhere quiet and have a stiff drink.

She said, ‘I promise you. No one will read anything of yours, unless you give permission. All right?’