The Woodcutter (34 page)

‘McLucky.’

‘Hadda. You left a message.’

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Nowhere. Sorry not to get back to you sooner. Let my battery run down and I’ve just recharged it. So what’s so urgent?’

A silence. The silence of disbelief? Maybe. But why should the Scot react to a very believable lie with such scepticism?

Now he spoke.

‘The old mate from my Met days that I got Medler’s address from gave me a bell. Said if I hadn’t made contact yet, not to bother. The good life’s over for Arnie. He’s dead.’

‘
What?
’

‘You didn’t know then?’

‘No, I didn’t. Has it been on the news?’

‘No, and probably won’t be. Yard’s been notified because he was one of their own, but seems there’s been a note to keep it under wraps as much as possible. Must have been a pretty heavy note as there’s nothing the press likes more than a nice grisly human interest story over the festive season.’

‘Grisly? What the hell happened?’

‘Wife found him Christmas morning. He was in their lounge. His hands were on the patio. The security shutter had come down and chopped them off. He bled to death.’

‘Jesus! Your mate tell you anything else?’

‘That he had more booze in him than a cross-Channel ferry, and the local cops reckon he was so pissed that either by accident or design he pressed the shutter control then fell forward with his arms outstretched across the patio door.’

‘That’s terrible,’ said Wolf.

‘That’s what I said. Then my mate asked me, dead casual, if it had been anything important I wanted to get in touch with Arnie about.’

‘And what did you tell him, Davy?’

‘Well,’ said McLucky slowly, ‘I know what I should have told him, being ex-job, not to mention a PI with his licence to worry about. I should have told him, I’ve been working for this guy, got form, been paying me good money to find out where Medler lived, his habits, the layout of his villa, all sorts of stuff. You might want to give him a pull, check how he spent Christmas . . .’

Now it was Hadda’s turn to be silent.

He said, ‘I think we should meet.’

‘You don’t expect me to go wandering round that fucking wilderness you live in again, do you?’

‘I’ll be in Carlisle tomorrow, could you manage that again? It’s not like leaving the kingdom; it was once the capital of Scotland, they tell me.’

McLucky wasn’t in the mood for lightness.

‘Same time, same place. I’ll be there.’

The phone went dead.

Hadda switched off and sat in thought for a few moments.

Then he picked up the file and opened it. It only took ten minutes to read. Trapp was not a man to waste words.

He finished, opened his grip, put the file inside and took out a large bottle of expensive perfume, a handsome gold-plated watch and a compact digital recorder. He was at the door when he remembered something and went to the wardrobe. From one of the shelves he took a package. It was Luke Hollins’s Christmas gift that some atavistic superstition had prevented him from opening before Christmas.

Trapp and his wife were sitting before a glowing fire in a living room that could have been a tribute to the seventies.

Hadda said, ‘I’ve got a little recording I’d like you both to listen to. Then I’ve got a sad and rather troubling story I need to tell you. But first things first. Christmas prezzie time! Sorry yours aren’t wrapped.’

He handed Doll the watch and Ed the perfume, then said, ‘Whoops, I was in prison a long time,’ and swapped them round.

They both smiled and said thanks, then watched as Hadda unwrapped his parcel.

It was a postcard-size picture stuck in a gilt frame. It showed a bearded man with a halo. He carried what looked like a small tree in one hand and an axe in the other. There was a post-it note attached to the frame.

It read:
This is St Gomer or Gummarus. The double name may come in useful if you’re ever asked to name three famous Belgians. He is the patron of woodcutters and unhappy husbands. Hope he might come in useful. LH

Hadda began to smile and finally he laughed out loud.

‘What?’ said Doll.

‘Nothing. Just my friendly local vicar. I told him I didn’t care to be preached at, so I think he’s decided, if you can’t convert them with sermons, next best thing is to have a laugh with them!’

He looked at the picture again, then nodded, and added, ‘You know, he could be right!’

4

The nearest Alva Ozigbo got to the pleasures of a traditional Christmas was the rather grisly festive atmosphere that hung over the hospital wards.

The balloons and decorations stopped short of Intensive Care but nowhere was beyond the reach of the sucrose notes of old Christmas hits seeping out of the in-house radio system. When she arrived, she’d found her father scheduled for angioplasty the following day and her mother in a state of near collapse. Alva was prepared for this, being aware since childhood that Elvira’s way of dealing with bad situations was to anticipate the worst, as if by embracing it, she could avert it. Her gloomy prognostications were uttered in a tone which her husband and daughter had often theorized would surely have won her a part in that Bergmann movie if only she could have produced it at the audition.

The operation went well, and by Boxing Day patient and wife were both making a good recovery. Indeed, Ike Ozigbo already seemed bent on proving the truth of the old adage that doctors make the worst patients, and his surgeon, Ike’s registrar, told Alva that her father should be ready to move back home by the New Year, adding ‘and that’s by popular appeal!’

Elvira’s superstitious gloom having achieved its goal, she reverted to her usual brisk efficient self. Her husband’s health naturally still preoccupied her mind, but other concerns were now allowed to surface, principle among them being a probing inquisitiveness about the state of her daughter’s sex life.

Even in her time of deepest Scandinavian depression, she had registered that Alva was taking phone calls from a man. This was Wolf Hadda, who rang twice, once on the evening of her departure from Cumbria to check she’d reached Manchester safely, the second time a couple of days later. Moving out of range of her mother’s hearing but not her speculation, Alva found herself going into what seemed later to be unnecessary detail about Elvira’s behaviour. Hadda said, ‘I’m with your ma here. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, that’s sound sense. Inside, we’re all hoping for the best. So feed the hope and put up with the rest. But I’m teaching my granny to suck eggs.’

Alva said, ‘None of my grannies was English. Do English grannies suck a lot of eggs?’

He said, ‘It’s a condition of service. Listen, I just wanted to say . . .’

What he just wanted to say was drowned in a burst of noise.

She said, ‘Say again. I didn’t get that.’

He said, ‘Sorry, radio on. Look, I’ve got to dash. You take care.’

Then he was gone, leaving her looking at her phone and wondering whether she should check the radio schedules to see if there was anything on that might be broadcasting a noise like a loudspeaker announcement on a railway platform or in an airport.

Of course she didn’t. Her life was too busy for luxuries like reading the
Radio Times
.

But she felt disappointed when he didn’t ring again and found it difficult to analyse why.

Two days after Boxing Day, things (meaning Elvira) had settled down enough for Alva to think of accessing her London apartment phone to check on messages. She’d made sure everyone likely to want to contact her had known she’d be away, so there weren’t many, and only one that held her attention. It had been left the previous day.

‘Dr Ozigbo, this is Imogen Estover. I thought it might be useful for us to talk. I’m up here at the castle for a few more days, then I’ll be back in London.’

She left her mobile number and the message ended. Her voice had been cool, almost expressionless, but Alva would have recognized it even if she hadn’t given her name.

Useful.
To whom, she wondered as she saved the mobile number.

She thought of ringing back that same evening, but decided to sleep on it.

Next morning as she helped Elvira with the breakfast dishes, her phone rang.

The display showed a Cumbrian number. Either Hadda or his ex-wife, she guessed as she put it to her ear. But she was wrong. It was Luke Hollins.

She went out of the kitchen into the garden. It was chilly, but here she could keep an eye on her mother through the window with no risk of being overheard.

‘Dr Ozigbo, hi, I’ve been meaning to ring to see how your father is, but it’s been a busy time for me. So how are things?’

She’d rung him before Christmas to explain why she hadn’t contacted him as promised before leaving Cumbria.

After she’d brought him up to date on Ike, he said, ‘That’s good to hear. You’ll be staying on there for a while?’

‘I was always planning to stay till the New Year,’ she said, not adding her mental rider, unless my mother has driven me to flight with her catechism about my private life!

‘Good. That’s good.’

He wants to tell me something but is reluctant to pile more stuff on me during a family crisis, she thought. There was only one possible topic.

She said, ‘How are things at Birkstane?’

That turned on the tap. He told her about his encounter with the Ulphingstones on Christmas Day.

‘I got worried, so I called at the house on Boxing Day. Not a sign. I tried again yesterday. Still nothing. The Defender wasn’t in the barn. Of course no reason why he couldn’t have been out all day. So I was up there at the crack this morning. Nothing. There’s no escaping it, he’s not here, probably hasn’t been here since before Christmas.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ said Alva. ‘The terms of his licence don’t preclude movement within the country.’

‘Yes, I realize that, but he’d need to keep his probation officer informed, I should have thought? And definitely the police?’

‘So have you checked?’

‘Well, no,’ said Hollins hesitantly. ‘To tell the truth, I didn’t want to stir things up unnecessarily. I thought maybe you . . .’

‘I see,’ said Alva.

What she saw was how yet again the priest’s personal liking for Wolf was at odds with his pastoral concerns. She should have been irritated by his efforts to share the problem with her, but she realized she wasn’t.

She could see Elvira behind the kitchen window, still at the sink, watching her as she dried and re-dried the same cup.

She’s dying to know if there’s a man in my life! thought Alva. How would she react if I told her there were two men, one a convicted pederast, the other a married vicar!

She waved at the watching woman and raised her face to catch the morning sun still low on the south-eastern horizon. It wasn’t nine o’clock yet. The day stretched before her, full of hospital smells and Elvira’s subtle questioning. The sky was cloudless. She took a deep breath of the sharp air and it seemed to scour her mind.

The motorway wouldn’t be back to its normal overcrowded state yet. She could be back in Cumbria in a couple of hours. To do what?

Hollins said, ‘Hello? Dr Ozigbo, are you still there?’

She said, ‘Yes, sorry. Look, are you going to be around later this morning? I could come up . . .’

He said, ‘Great. That would be helpful.’

She wanted to ask him,
How exactly?
but it didn’t seem apt.

She said, ‘Till later then,’ switched off and went back into the kitchen.

‘Mum,’ she said, ‘would you mind if I ducked out of the visits today?’

‘Of course not, dear. You deserve a break. Is it something special you want to do?’

‘I thought I might take a little drive and maybe look up an old friend.’

‘Anyone I know?’ said Elvira, very casual.

‘I think you know all my old friends, Mum,’ she said.

Her mother smiled but didn’t press.

She’s spotted that there’s more going on than I’m saying, thought Alva, but naturally her interpretation’s romantic. A date, an assignation, even an affair!

She gave her mother a hug and said, ‘Great. Give my love to Daddy. I’ll be home this evening some time. Don’t wait supper for me.’

As she drove away from the house, she felt a pang of guilt at her own sense of release. It had come as a disappointment to her as a student to realize that understanding the often irrational origins of common emotions didn’t stop you feeling them. When she told her father this, he’d boomed his great laugh and said, ‘Even dentists get toothache!’

And even cardiologists have heart attacks, she told herself.

She set the guilt aside and concentrated on her driving as she swept down the slip road on to the motorway.

She soon realized she’d been wrong about the traffic, or perhaps everyone had made the same miscalculation. Her two-hour estimate rapidly stretched to three, giving her both the incentive and the time to ask herself precisely why she was doing this.

Striving for that complete honesty she looked for in her therapies, she systematically listed all her motivational springs.

First the professional: concern for a patient; concern for a community; Luke Hollins’s request for help; Imogen Estover’s desire to speak with her.

Then the personal: her fear that she might have got things wrong; her irritation at the feeling that Hadda was mucking her about; her frustration in the presence of mysteries she’d not yet been able to disentangle; her simple need to have a break from her mother’s company and hospital visits!

There it was. Can’t get any honester than that, she told herself.

Except that, as her college tutor had loved to iterate, complete honesty is like clearing a cellar. When you’ve got all the clutter neatly laid out in the back yard, don’t waste time congratulating yourself on a job well done. Head down those steps again and start digging up the concrete floor.

She dug. She knew already there was something to find. Something so deeply repressed that she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a figment of her imagination, the crocodile under the sofa that had made her sit with her legs tucked up beneath her as a child, the trolls in Elvira’s Swedish fairy tales who lived beneath the rockery in the garden. Unreal things, but her fear was real till she discovered that the simple way to dispose of them was to expose them to daylight and watch them shrivel away.