The Woodcutter (44 page)

‘Oh well, you know, seven years back, I was still making my way,’ he said.

‘Really?’ she said, noting the clash between the claim of
barely remembering
and the precision of
seven years
. ‘Just shows how wrong our records can be. They’ve got you down as top stud, legally speaking, back then. Didn’t realize you were still picking up pennies with a bit of conveyancing.’

He ignored the sarcasm and said, ‘So, delightful as it always is to see you, Kitty, I fear your well-known reputation for probity will make it hard for you to claim this lunch on expenses. Retired policeman dies in Spanish accident. London solicitor may have been acquainted with him. Even your ingenious editor would be hard pushed to work that up into a story! By the way, you described the accident as rather macabre. How so?’

He spoke casually. Why was it lawyers always spoke casually when they approached something they really wanted to know? wondered the journalist.

She watched his face carefully as she replied.

‘It seems your old friend, sorry, acquaintance, Mr Medler, had taken to hitting the bottle quite hard in his retirement. His wife returned home early on Christmas morning to find he’d drunk himself silly and managed to fall in their villa. As he fell, he must somehow have triggered the mechanism that brought the heavy metal security shutters down over the sliding patio doors. Unfortunately, they were open and he fell with his arms stretched across the threshold. The first thing his wife saw when she got home was his severed hands lying on the patio, looking like they’d been chopped off with an axe.’

Now this was more interesting, thought Kitty Locksley. Either that detail had a special significance for Estover or maybe he just had a very weak stomach. Either way, she didn’t think she was going to have to pick up too heavy a bill for his lunch.

And Davy McLucky, now helmetless and sitting in a car parked across the street from the restaurant, was so entertained by Toby Estover’s expression that he took another photo to add to the ones he’d already shot of this fascinating encounter.

4

The Sunday after her conversation with the Trapps, Alva Ozigbo ate her frugal breakfast, pressed the mute button on her answer machine, and sat down on the floor of her flat surrounded by all the material she had gathered relating to the Hadda case.

The only thing scheduled for the day ahead was tea at John Childs’s house. He’d rung the previous day to say that he’d bought his godson, Harry, a copy of
Curing Souls
for his birthday and hoped she’d be kind enough to sign it. She’d said of course she would and he had then wondered in his diffident manner if she might like to do this while having tea with him the following day.

So she had all morning to trawl through the Hadda files, and seeing them laid out neatly on her floor, it struck her she was going to need all morning!

There was a hell of a lot of material here.

More, she guessed, than normal with the majority of her clients.

But that was explicable, she reassured herself, by the complexity of the case rather than any special interest in Hadda.

She didn’t feel all that reassured.

Taking a deep breath, she went back to the beginning.

Three hours later she emerged from her second complete review, poured herself a stiff gin, and in search of a temporary distraction checked her messages.

All were negligible except one from her mother sounding fraught and asking her to ring as soon as she had a moment. Since Ike had come home to convalesce, most messages from Elvira took this form, so she didn’t let herself feel too anxious, but she rang straight back. To her relief it was the mixture as before.

‘He won’t eat what he should, won’t rest when he should, says it’s all a plot to keep him away from his work and claims I’m up to my neck in the conspiracy!’ said Elvira.

As she spoke, Alva heard Ike’s rich bass distantly demanding to know who was on the phone. Elvira ignored him, the voice got louder till finally she was cut off in mid syllable and Ike’s voice cried, ‘Elf! Thank God! Send for the SAS, I’m being held here against my will! Or if you can’t do that, restore my sanity by saying something sensible.’

Alva laughed out loud, partly with relief at hearing that voice at its old decibel level, partly because she knew that this was the response her father wanted.

It was strange, she thought, that Elvira, the actress, never seemed to have caught on that her husband’s outbursts were usually purely histrionic, and all that was required of his audience was appreciative applause.

Then she recalled her growing suspicion that she’d been played by Hadda and stopped feeling superior.

Her laughing response quickly reduced the performance to a more conventional discussion of Ike’s progress. But after they’d been talking a few moments, he said, ‘That’s enough of me. How about you, Elf? You sound a bit strung out.’

He’d always been very sensitive to her moods.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve just realized a patient may have been fooling me, that’s all.’

He said, ‘Serious? I mean, you’ve not turned some nut loose who’s going around cutting people’s throats?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

‘Then why so down? Being fooled’s an occupational hazard in your business, I should have thought.’

‘I know. It’s just that I feel like I’d been fêted for translating the Rosetta Stone, only to find out later maybe I’d got it all wrong and the hieroglyphics were nothing but an Egyptian laundry list.’

He boomed a laugh and said, ‘Think of it this way. You’d find out a lot more about the Egyptians from a laundry list than the kind of high-falutin’ crap folk usually carve on monuments.’

‘I suppose,’ she said.

‘You sound like you’re taking it personally,’ said Ike. ‘Now why should that be? I seem to recall you once telling me that there was a line between professional and personal that your patients were always pressing up against and you had to make sure it was never crossed
either
way.’

God, but he was sharp!

She said lightly, ‘Daddy, didn’t we agree: you do no analysis and I’ll do no surgery?’

‘Never agreed to stand by and let my little girl get hurt,’ he said.

‘And if I want someone beaten up, you’re still the first guy I’ll call,’ she said. ‘But I need you back to full fighting fitness for that. So get back into bed and stop being an asshole to Mummy. You know she takes it personally even though it means nothing.’

‘Yeah. Maybe that’s where you get it from. Bad gene. Don’t worry, I promise to be good. You take care, Elf. I love you.’

‘Me too.’

She switched the phone off. Was Ike right? Was she taking personally something that meant nothing?

She returned to the notes she’d been making as she went through the Hadda files.

The way in which they differed from her original case notes was the input of new information. Not that this amounted to much.

Imogen Ulphingstone at fourteen hadn’t been the skinny, early pubescent girl that Hadda had described having his first sexual encounter with on Pillar Rock. She had been a rapidly maturing young woman with a bosom already giving promise of the perfect breasts Hadda had been distracted by in his first piece of writing.

Sir Leon hadn’t objected to the marriage to protect his daughter from Hadda but to protect Hadda from his daughter, and by implication his wife.

So, not much. But it meant she’d needed to take a fresh look at what Wolf had actually written. And she had to admit that her own brief encounter with the two Ulphingstone women had left her with some sympathy for the old man’s point of view.

And now the clarity of her original interpretation and analysis had been brought into doubt. The whole thing began to resemble one of those drawings in which a slight change of perception turns a goose into a rabbit. It was all a matter of focus. Her initial perception had been of a paedophile in denial gradually coming to a horrified awareness of what he had done. But change that to an innocent man coming to a realization that his only hope of getting early release was by faking the process, and the whole thing made just as much sense.

She cast her memory back to her developing relationship with Hadda. Her delight when he’d given her the first piece of writing. She had taken his racy description of the events leading up to the accident as clear evidence that he was still in denial. She had never for a second considered the possibility that this might in fact be the plain truth.

And she had almost certainly let her scepticism show. She recalled the way he’d looked at her before producing his second piece, the description of waking from the coma.

She’d seen this as a definite step forward. And maybe this was exactly the way Hadda wanted her to see it. But only if her reaction to the first piece showed him there was no hope of convincing her he was innocent.

Once he’d taken this path there was no way back. He had played his part perfectly, written and spoken his lines in a way that persuaded her she was guiding him against his will to confront his Brocken spectre. Whereas all the time, he was leading and she was eagerly following . . .

She couldn’t believe it, she wouldn’t believe it. How could she, the professional, have been fooled by a . . .
woodcutter!
He’d surely have needed expert assistance as to which strings to pull . . .

Then she remembered finding a copy of
Curing Souls
in the bedroom at Birkstane, and the speed with which he’d removed it from her.

Why? A good reason would be that it was heavily annotated.

The bastard had used her own book to get inside her mind, her professional thought processes!

But why the hell was she so pissed off at the thought that this man she felt something for, even if she wasn’t yet sure what, might turn out to be innocent of the disgusting crime he’d been sent down for? Wouldn’t revelation of his innocence more than make up for the fact that he’d fooled her?

Or maybe of course he was simply even more cunning and manipulative than child molesters usually were.

Alva shook her head angrily.

She needed to put all that personal stuff out of her mind. She was a professional and she had a professional interest here. But even as she made the assertion, she knew she was not going to act professionally. That would mean taking her concerns to the proper authorities – the probation service and/or the police. And of course, if she had serious reason to believe a client was likely to commit a crime, she would have no choice.

But, she reassured herself, you don’t! If anything, you’re beginning to consider the possibility that a client may have been the object of a crime.

OK, she answered herself, then at least you ought to talk this over with someone whose informed judgment you respect.

Like who?

Her father would normally have been high on her list, but not in his present state. He’d already detected that something was worrying her. If once he got a sniff that what lay at the bottom of her problem was her inappropriate feeling for a convicted pederast . . .

No, Ike was out. Elvira was never in.

And not a colleague.

She knew only too well what another psychiatrist’s advice would be. Go to the authorities, get them to initiate a formal investigation. The trouble there was, whatever it produced in the long run, its first fruit would be the return of Hadda to custody. In her mind’s eye she saw him drinking his strong black coffee in the kitchen at Birkstane, logs crackling in the hearth across which Sneck lies, gently snoring, while outside the winter wind sends volleys of hail against the panes . . .

Jesus! She was thinking Christmas-card sentimentality now! But she knew she could not be responsible for dragging him away from that without better reason than she had so far.

Not so long ago she might have contemplated an off-the-record chat with Homewood, but having already experienced the irritatingly proprietary attitude probably spawned by his new domestic situation, she had no desire to invite him further down the road of intimacy.

And also there was still the nagging question of how he seemed to know what he couldn’t possibly know. She had gone over the exchange again and again and almost persuaded herself that she’d simply misinterpreted something quite insignificant.

Then an inner voice said, Just like all that stuff at Ulphingstone Castle? Right!

So who could she talk to?

One possibility remained and she was seeing him this afternoon!

At four o’clock precisely she rang the bell of Childs’s front door. As always, he greeted her with an ego-stroking delight.

‘Dr Ozigbo, hello. Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’

‘And you too, Mr Childs,’ she said.

Would their relationship ever move on to a more casual form of address? she wondered. After more than two years, she doubted it, and in fact she didn’t mind. There was something pleasantly old fashioned in this friendly formality. It implied the closeness of equality without the dangers of intimacy, though to ask his advice in this instance might bring her perilously close to the borderline between the two.

‘Let’s go up to my study again,’ he said. ‘I always think the climb works up the appetite so well.’

On their way up the stairs, he said, ‘So how are things going back at work? Settled comfortably into the routine again, are you?’

She said, ‘Well, yes and no. Actually there’s something I’d really like your advice about, if you don’t mind me bringing my problems along to a Sunday tea-party.’

‘You interest me strangely,’ he said. ‘And one good turn deserves another. Now, here we are.’

They had reached the top landing and entered the study. On his desktop lay a pristine copy of
Curing Souls
.

‘Perhaps you would like to inscribe it while I get the tea,’ he suggested. ‘Then we can sit down together and mull over this problem of yours.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What would you like me to write in the book?’

‘Oh, something encouraging,’ he said vaguely. ‘I know he will be so delighted to have your signature and your support.’