The Woodcutter (52 page)

1

There had been snow off and on all through January, with particularly heavy falls in the east. At the end of the month, day temperatures began to rise and soon the wind-planed drifts that had turned the gardens of Poynters into a surreal sculpture park began to thaw to a grubby slush. The landscape that for so many weeks had something other-worldly about it now had the look of a tract of no-man’s land in some wintry war.

For some reason Johnny Nutbrown associated this deterioration with Wolf Hadda’s visit. His sense of euphoria after the encounter had been reinforced the following day when Pippa had taken a call from their solicitor.

Johnny was still in bed when he heard her scream of rage from below.

‘Bad news, dear?’ he asked unnecessarily when she erupted into the bedroom.

‘That Scotch git, he’s backed out of the sale!’ she yelled. ‘Family problems. If I could get my hands on the bastard, I’d fix it so he never had any family problems again!’

Inside, Johnny was jubilant. Good old Wolf, he’d called it right. You could always rely on Wolf.

But he took great care not to let any of this show on his face.

He had resolved not to tell Pippa anything about his meeting with Wolf, but in the end, as she went on and on about the failed sale as if it were the end of the world, he decided that describing the encounter with the stress on how well it had gone, how unthreatening Wolf had been, might reassure her.

He rapidly saw how wrong he had been.

‘He was here? He was in our garden? Oh Jesus wept, you had your gun, why didn’t you just shoot the bastard?’

‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘Can’t go around shooting people, even if I wanted to. Look, love, he was fine. And if he’s fine, everything’s fine, no need for us to sell up and head off into the sunset as if we had Interpol on our heels and we were running for our lives!’

She shook her head and said with an intensity that was worse than her screaming, ‘You fucking moron. Can’t you get it into your stupid head that’s exactly what we’re doing, and it’s something a fucking sight worse than Interpol we’re running from!’

After that she’d redoubled her efforts to sell the house, at the same time fixing a definite date early in spring for their move to the States, whether the house were sold or not.

As the days went by and the snow began to melt, Nutbrown found that his euphoria began to melt too. His wife’s will had always been stronger than his. He’d been happy to accept this and come to regard it as a kind of protective barrier against the world’s ills. Now at last he began to appreciate that if even her strength sank in face of this unspecified threat, perhaps there was something out there he ought to be afraid of too. Like a man who has never been ill, he found it hard to understand the meaning of the early symptoms of the potentially fatal disease that has infected him. Eventually, slowly, he came to recognize that for the first time in seven years he was feeling prickings of guilt at the way he’d treated his former boss and colleague and friend. Now the eight hours of untroubled sleep he’d enjoyed all his life started to decay like the snow. He awoke in the dark at one, two, or three o’clock in the morning, and that was the end of his night’s rest. Fearful of waking Pippa if he lay there, tossing and turning, he took to slipping out of bed and going down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea laced with brandy and would sit there, thinking about things, till the dawn. The closed book of the past now opened to him, not as a continuous narrative, but in disconnected fragments that were sometimes identifiable as his own memories, but frequently seemed to belong to someone else. One scene that played itself again and again was of Wolf being woken by the arrival of the police that autumn dawn all those years ago and being dragged from the home he was never to enter again.

So when one dark morning early in February he heard the ringing of a doorbell accompanied by a thunderous knocking, he sat some moments longer at the kitchen table, trying to work out whether the noise originated at his own front door or in his mind.

It was the sound of Pippa yelling his name from upstairs and demanding to know where the hell he was that put the disturbance firmly in the here and now.

He stood up and went to the front door and opened it.

He was just in time. There was a large uniformed police officer standing there wielding one of those battering rams Johnny had seen on the telly. He looked disappointed at being deprived of the chance to use it.

A man in plainclothes edged him aside. He held a warrant card and some printed papers before Johnny’s eyes.

‘DI O’Reilly,’ he said. ‘Mr Nutbrown, is it?’

‘Yes?’

‘I have a warrant to search these premises, Mr Nutbrown. Right, lads.’

He stepped into the hallway, not quite pushing but certainly edging Johnny aside.

Behind him came at least a dozen others, some in uniform, some in plainclothes. Slushy snow slid off their shoes on to the floor. Pippa’s not going to like that, thought Johnny.

He was right. She came down the stairs like St Michael descending on the dragon. Perhaps if she’d started demanding explanations or questioning the legality of the warrant, DI O’Reilly would have been able to put up stronger resistance. But her focus was entirely on the state of the invaders’ footwear.

Within half a minute she had them all out of the hall and queuing up to wipe their feet on the rug at the entrance before they came back in.

Only then did she take the warrant from the DI’s hand and study it carefully.

When she’d finished reading it she said to her husband, ‘You’d better ring Toby.’

He said, puzzled, ‘Bit early, isn’t it, old girl? He’s probably not up. Anyway, not sure if Toby’s going to be much use here.’

She let out a snort of fury and exasperation.

‘For God’s sake, Johnny! Don’t you understand anything?’ she said, and went to the phone herself.

For once she was wrong. It wasn’t just Johnny’s usual disconnection from reality that was at work here.

He couldn’t have given her and verse on how he understood it, but understand it he did: today something was ending, and something was starting, something that not even the cleverest of solicitors was going to be able to put right, something that meant nothing was ever going to be the same again.

2

Toby Estover mounted the scaffold unhesitatingly, not because he was brave but because his legs moved independently of his mind, which was screaming,
Run! Run for your life!

Waiting by the block with his back to him was the executioner. His right hand, which had only two fingers, was resting lightly on the shaft of his long-handled axe and he was gazing out across a wide panorama of mountains and lakes and virgin forest that somehow looked familiar.

Through his terror, Estover felt a pang of indignation. Surely his imminent execution was more important than admiring the fucking view! But he couldn’t get any words out, his mouth was totally preoccupied with trying to suck into his lungs all the air that should have been his over the next forty years, all the air that should have been anybody’s, all the fucking air in the earth’s atmosphere, fuck everybody else, fuck global warming, fuck every fucking thing!

When his legs reached the block, they came to a halt and his knees folded and he knelt. Then his back muscles dissolved and he fell forward, prone, his Adam’s apple pressing against the nadir of the block’s shallow dark-stained U.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the executioner’s feet turn, he saw the shining blade rise out of sight, he saw the mountains and the lakes and the forest.

Then he heard the
whoosh!
as the blade came sweeping down.

And as he died, he woke up and was surprised to find that all the sheets and pillow were soaked with was sweat, not blood.

Two other things he eventually registered.

He was alone and the telephone was ringing.

He was not surprised to find he was alone. After a fortnight he was getting used to it.

He’d come to bed one night to find that Imogen had moved all her stuff into another bedroom, the room that had once belonged to her daughter.

The move had coincided with his announcement that he had got a new secretary, but he couldn’t believe it had anything to do with this. For seven years she had seemed happy to share the large master bedroom, despite the fact that their moments of sexual intimacy had become increasingly rare. This had been due to a combination of her growing indifference and his own health problems which meant that a regular desktop servicing in the office was more than enough to satisfy his sensual needs.

There had been no warning of the move, no dispute, no debate. He guessed something had happened during her stay in Cumbria. What, he couldn’t guess, and he knew there was no point in asking. This was the way that Imogen worked. No drama attended her decisions, just a quiet inevitability. He’d barged into her new bedroom one morning and found her sitting on the bed, holding a rag doll that had been a favourite of Ginny’s. She wasn’t clutching it to her but holding it out before her and staring at it, as if she hoped it might start talking. She didn’t even glance his way and after a moment he’d left. He hadn’t entered the room since.

The phone stopped. Either it had rung long enough to switch over to the answer machine, or someone had answered it.

He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later, showered and wrapped in a monogrammed towelling robe that Imogen said looked as if it had been stolen from a particularly pretentious hotel, he headed downstairs in search of breakfast.

Imogen was standing on the half-landing looking out of the window. She had a cup of coffee in her hand and was completely naked. He was reminded of the night that bastard Hadda had chopped down the tree.

‘Morning,’ he said. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘I think it’s sending out shoots,’ she said.

He stood beside her.

Out in the garden in the still dim dawn light they could just make out the stump of the rowan.

After it had been chopped down, Estover had arranged for the trunk and brash to be cleared away, but Imogen had refused to let him have the stump dug out of the lawn.

‘They are great survivors, rowans,’ she said. ‘They need to be. They cling on in places other trees would only be seen dead in. I’ve seen them growing out of north-facing rock faces at two thousand feet.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But whatever it does, in our lifetime it will just be an eyesore!’

‘It will still be alive,’ she said. ‘Wolf planted it to shelter us from evil.’

‘Yeah? Well the bastard should have done the job properly when he chopped it down and dug up the roots too!’ he said. ‘Did you get the phone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well? If you want to make me very happy, tell me it was a wrong number.’

She looked as if she might be considering the proposition, then said, ‘It was Pippa.’

‘Pippa? What the hell did she want at seven o’clock on a cold February morning?’

‘She says they’ve got a houseful of policemen with a search warrant.’

‘You’re joking, I hope?’

She shook her head slightly.

‘Jesus! What are they looking for?’

‘Who knows? Pippa says she doesn’t. She wants some legal advice, I think.’

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I said that you never gave legal advice till you’d had your breakfast. I suggested she should await the outcome of the search. Either nothing would be found and she’d be able to ring you to ask how to register a formal complaint. Or if they discovered Lord Lucan hiding in the cellar, they would no doubt transport Johnny and herself to some police station where you would join them as soon as you heard where it was.’

‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘That’s worth five hundred quid of anyone’s money. Any more of that coffee downstairs?’

‘I’m sure there will be. I’ve roused Mrs Roper to tell her you’ll be breakfasting early as you may be driving to Cambridge pretty soon.’

‘Cambridge?’

‘That’s probably where they’ll take Pippa and Johnny, isn’t it?’

‘You seem pretty sure these cops are going to find what they’re looking for.’

She said, ‘In my limited experience of dawn raids, they usually do, don’t they?’

He could think of no answer to this and continued on his way.

In the kitchen there was a pot of coffee standing on the stove. As he poured himself a cup, Mrs Roper appeared with the morning papers. The housekeeper was a hangover from the days when Wolf Hadda had been master here, and she had made it clear to Estover without overstepping any employee boundaries that she didn’t reckon he was an improvement.

‘Morning,’ she said. ‘The usual, is it?’

‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Roper.’

As the woman began preparing the bacon, mushroom and scrambled eggs that comprised the usual, he turned his gaze to the pile of newspapers. It was high, containing as it did a copy of every national daily. At the office he had people who went through them all much more meticulously than he ever did. Forewarned is forearmed, he declared to his staff, and it was certainly true that a sharp eye could sometimes spot in a small para a hint of something that might ultimately affect the economy or equanimity of one of his clients. He himself liked to do a quick scan of all the headlines, or sometimes to track through the various reportings of any case he was involved with in search of misrepresentation or bias or anything else of interest.

Today what he called the
titty tabloids
were at the top, and what he saw on the front page of the third of these made him exclaim, ‘Shit!’

‘Sorry, Mr Estover?’ said the housekeeper.

‘Nothing, nothing,’ he grunted, opening the paper.

It was Kitty Locksley’s rag, the news editor who had quizzed him about Arnie Medler a few weeks back. That had been easy enough to field, but what he read on the front page now filled him with foreboding.

The Russian Invasion. Is there more than snow on Pasha Nikitin’s boots?
See Page 6 for our Exclusive Report!