The Woodcutter (15 page)

‘What did you do?’

‘I moped all over Christmas. Must have been unliveable with. Dad headed off to the Dog as often as he could. Then New Year came. Time for resolutions about changing your life, according to the guys on the telly. I started fantasizing about leaving home, having lots of adventures, striking it rich by finding a gold mine or something, then returning, all suave and sexy like one of them TV presenters, to woo Imogen. Only she wouldn’t know it was me till she’d been overcome by my manly charms. Pathetic, eh?’

‘We all have our dreams,’ said Alva, recalling her teenage fantasies of collecting a best actress Oscar.

‘Yeah. I’d like to say I set off to chase mine, but it wouldn’t be true. I just knew that, whatever I wanted, I wasn’t going to get it hanging around in Cumbria. So I set off to school one morning with everything I owned in my sports bag and all the money I could raise in my pocket. And I just kept on going. The rest as they say is history.’

‘I’d still like to hear it,’ said Alva.

‘Come on!’ he said. ‘You strike me as a conscientious little researcher. The meteoric rise of Wilfred Hadda from uncouth Cumbrian peasant to multi-millionaire master of the universe has been charted so often you must have got it by heart!’

‘Indeed,’ she said, reaching into her document case. ‘I’ve got copies of most of the articles here. There’s general agreement on events after your return. But their guesses at what you did between running away as a poor woodcutter’s son and coming back with your rough edges smoothed and enough money in the bank to launch your business career make speculation about Lord Lucan read like a Noddy story. Anyone get close?’

‘How would I know? I never read them. Which looks best to you?’

‘Well, I’m torn between the South American diamond mine and the Mexican lottery. But on the whole I’d go for the
Observer
writer, who reckons you probably got kidnapped by the fairies, like True Thomas in the ballad.’

That made him laugh, a rare sound, the kind of laugh that made you want to join in.

‘Yeah, go with that one,’ he said. ‘Away with the fairies, that’s about right. Did he have a good time, this Thomas fellow?’

‘It was a strange place they took him too,’ said Alva. ‘Hang on, he quotes from the ballad in his article. You’ll have to excuse my Scots accent.’

She opened the file and began to read.

‘
It was mirk mirk night, there was nae stern light,

And they waded through red blude to the knee;

For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth

Rins through the springs o’ that countrie
.’

When she finished he nodded vigorously and said, ‘Oh yes, that guy knows what he’s talking about. So how did Thomas make out when he got back?’

‘Well, he had a bit of a problem, Wolf,’ she said. ‘The one condition of his return was that thereafter he was never able to tell a lie.’

Their gazes locked. Then he smiled, not his attractive winning smile this time, but something a lot more knowing, almost mocking.

‘Just like me then, Elf,’ he said. ‘That old lie-detector mind of yours must have spotted long ago that you’re getting nothing but gospel truth from me!’

‘Gospel? Somehow I doubt if your runaway years had much of religion in them!’

‘You’re so wrong, Elf,’ he said with a grin. ‘I was a regular attender at chapel.’

‘Chapel?’ she said. ‘Not church? That’s interesting. None of the speculation in the papers suggested a religious dimension to your disappearance.’

‘For God’s sake,’ he said, suddenly irritated. ‘Can we get away from what those fantasists dream up? Look, Elf, I’m trying to be honest with you, but if I say there’s something I don’t want to talk about, you’ve got to accept it, OK?’

‘OK, OK,’ she said making a note. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. Age twenty-one, you’re back with a suitcase full of cash, talking like a gent, no longer sucking your peas off your knife, and able to tell a hawk from a handsaw. How did Imogen greet you?’

‘She asked me to dinner at the castle. There were two or three other guests. Sir Leon was very polite to me. Lady Kira watched me like the Ice Queen but hardly spoke. I joined in the conversation, managed to use the right cutlery and didn’t knock over any wine glasses. After dinner Imogen took me out into the garden, allegedly to cast my so-called expert eye over a new magnolia planted to replace one that hadn’t made it through the winter. Out of sight of the house she stopped and turned to face me. “Well, will I do?” I asked. “Let’s see,” she said. And stepped out of her dress with the same ease that she’d stepped out of her shorts and trainers on Pillar Rock all those years ago. When we finished, she said, “You’ll do.” Couple of months later we married.’

‘Despite all the family objections?’

‘We had a trump card by then. Imo was pregnant. With Ginny. Made no difference to Dad and Sir Leon. They still stood out against the marriage. But Lady Kira seemed to see it made sense and that was enough. She calls the shots at the castle. Always did. So poor Leon had no choice but to give his blessing, and shake the mothballs out of his morning dress to give the bride away.’

‘Poor Leon?’ she echoed. ‘You sound as if you have some sympathy for him.’

‘Why not? He’s married to the Ice Queen, isn’t he? No, fair do’s, he may not have wanted me for his son-in-law, but I always got on well with Leon. And he went out of his way to try to make things right between me and my dad. Just about managed it the first two times. Third time was beyond human help.’

‘I’m sorry . . .?’

Hadda said bleakly, ‘Think about it. They say things come in threes, don’t they? They certainly did for Fred. One, I disappeared for five years. Two, I came back and married Imogen against his wish and his judgment. Three, I got sent down for fraud and messing with young girls. Three times I broke his heart. The last time it didn’t mend.’

And who do you blame for that? wondered Alva. But this wasn’t the time to get aggressive, not when she’d got him talking about what had to be one of the most significant relationships in his life.

She said, ‘But the first two times, you say Leon tried to help?’

‘Oh yes. I think he recognized Dad and me were carved from the same rock. Left to our own devices, we’d probably never have spoken again! Don’t know what he said to Fred about me, but he told me that, after I vanished, often he’d go into the forest with Imogen, and they’d find Dad just sitting slumped against the old rowan, staring into space, completely out of it. Sometimes there’d be tears on his cheeks. It cracked me up, just hearing about it. So whenever I felt like telling Dad that if he wanted to be a stubborn old fool, he could just get on with it, I’d think of what Leon had told me and try to bite my tongue. Gradually things got better between us. And when Ginny was born . . .’

He stopped abruptly and glared at her as if defying her to question him further about his daughter.

She said, ‘So did Fred attend the wedding?’

‘Oh no,’ said Wolf, relaxing. ‘That would have been too much. I hoped right up till the ceremony started he’d show up. Then, once it started, I was scared he might!’

‘Why?’

‘That bit when the vicar asks if anyone knows of any impediment, I imagined the church door bursting open and Fred coming in with his axe and yelling, “How’s this for an impediment?” I remember, after the vicar asked the question he seemed to pause for ever. Then Johnny glanced round to the back of the church and shouted, “Speak up then” and that set everyone laughing.’

‘Johnny . . .?’

‘Johnny Nutbrown. He was my best man.’

‘A large step from being the nose-bleeding object of your anger,’ she said. ‘How did that come about?’

‘You mean, how come I didn’t have any old friends of my own to take on the job? Simple. I was always a loner and the few half friendships I formed at school didn’t survive my transformation, as you call it.’

‘But didn’t you make any new ones during this transformation period?’ she asked. ‘Even lowly woodcutters on a quest to perform three impossible tasks probably need a bit of human contact on the way.’

‘I don’t know, I didn’t meet any others,’ he said shortly.

Then he pushed back his chair and stood up, reaching into his blouson as he did so.

‘You’re curious about me and Johnny Nutbrown?’ he said. ‘Well, I think you’ll find all you need to know in here.’

And there it was, the next exercise book just as she’d hypothesized.

But by producing it he had once again stepped aside from talking about those missing years, so as she took the book, she felt it less as a triumph than an evasion.

Wolf

i

Let’s move on from our little diversion into childhood trauma and adolescent sexuality, shall we? Where was I before you nudged me down that fascinating side road?

Oh yes.

I’d been in a coma for the best part of nine months.

During the early stages of my so-called recovery, I’ve no idea what proportion of my time I spent out of things. All I do know is that every period of full lucidity seemed to provide the opportunity for a new piece of shit to be hurled at me.

I rapidly came to see that, far from things going away while I lay unconscious, they had got immeasurably and by now irrecoverably worse.

Let me lay them out, not in any particular order.

The charges against me had multiplied and intensified.

It seems that during the panic caused by my false terrorist attack warning to the Magistrates Court, several people had been injured and one had died. Didn’t matter that like me he was a prisoner waiting to face committal proceedings, that he too tried to escape in the panic, slipped on the stairs, and suffered a heart attack from a long-standing condition, the bastards still added a charge of manslaughter to the offence of making a hoax terrorist call which was worth a long jail sentence in itself.

In addition, the bus driver had been severely traumatized, several of his passengers had been hurt, two patrons of the pavement café had been hospitalized, and the driver of the Range Rover turned out to be a barrister, and he was orchestrating a whole battery of civil claims against me.

But these were the least of my troubles. In face of these charges there was nothing to do but put my hand up and plead guilty, only offering in mitigation the tremendous strain the manifestly ludicrous allegations of paedophilia had put me under.

Except they were no longer manifestly ludicrous. In fact they had moved on from the passive downloading of pornographic images to devastating accusations that I was actively involved in the whole revolting business, both as commercial organizer and active participant.

The InArcadia website, it was alleged, had been set up and maintained by money channelled through one of my off-shore companies. Some of the video footage obtained from InArcadia was identified as having been shot at various of my overseas properties. And in several scenes of a particularly revolting nature, there were glimpses of a naked back that bore a scar similar to mine.

There had been a steady leak of much of this material into the public domain and I’d already been tried, judged and condemned by the media, a verdict that must have seemed confirmed by the news that Imogen had started divorce proceedings.

And was this the end?

No, Elf, you bet your sweet life it wasn’t!

Back in 2008 we could all hear the rumblings of the approaching economic storm. I admit I was rather smug about it and arrogantly assumed Woodcutter was soundly enough rigged to ride it out. When I woke from my trance, I found the tempest had struck with even greater force than anyone had anticipated and the economies of the Western world were in tatters.

Had I been around, I might have been able to do something to limit the damage to Woodcutter.

Or, as the
Financial Times
put it, ‘Possibly if Sir Wilfred’s grubby paw had still been on the helm, he might have been able to steer the most seaworthy of his piratical fleet into some extrajudicial haven, but left unmanned in those desperate seas, they either sank with all hands or were boarded and taken in tow by the local excise men.’

In times of crisis, journalists often erupt in flowery excrescence.

To continue in the same vein, as far as I could make out many of my old shipmates had leapt overboard clutching whatever portable pillage they could, while others had surrendered to the invading officers and saved their own worthless carcases from the yard-arm by offering them mine!

My initial assumption had been that the morning raid on my house was part of a Fraud Office investigation, and I recalled my airy reassurance to Toby that there was nothing for them to find.

Now I had the Fraud Office crawling all over my affairs and finding all kinds of crap! The worst of it was that I couldn’t remember in most instances whether I knew it was there or not. The trauma of the accident had left so many gaps both physical and mental that my degree of recovery was always in doubt. But
I can’t remember
is not a line of defence that wins much sympathy from a stony-faced financial investigator.

But none of these events and accusations hit me like the news that Imogen was planning to divorce me. And even that wasn’t the end of the trauma. The very next day they broke the news to me that Fred had suffered a serious stroke and while I had been lying in my coma, he’d been lying in the twilight state of the stroke victim.

I was desperate to see him, but I wasn’t fit to travel even if the authorities had given me permission. DC McLucky was very helpful here, bringing me the phone and getting me connected to the Northern hospital where Dad was a patient. According to the consultant I spoke to, Dad’s condition was still extremely serious. He wasn’t willing to even estimate just how far any recovery process might take him.

Fred and I had slowly moved back towards each other after the rift over my marriage. Ginny made the difference. In a way I’m glad he wasn’t around to hear of her death.