The Woodcutter (53 page)

He found page six.

It was full of photos of Nikitin at receptions and parties, in the company of many well-known faces from the worlds of politics, or showbusiness, or sport. The headline above them all was
WHAT’S HE TREADING INTO THEIR CARPETS?

The main copy started on the next page. He ran his eyes down the columns with the speed of long practice and under his breath he said, ‘Oh shit!’ again.

Kitty’s journalists were past masters and mistresses in the art of blurring the boundary between speculation and accusation. But there was stuff here that went so far beyond that boundary that they would hardly have dared print it unless they believed they had the wherewithal to back it up under a legal challenge.

The feature finished with a promise that the next day’s edition would contain some
really
shocking revelations.

We’ll see about that! thought Estover grimly.

He was already working out the grounds of his application for an injunction. Kitty Locksley might have persuaded her bosses that she had enough to take a run at Nikitin, but that was very different from persuading a judge that she wasn’t just flying kites. And while the paper’s lawyers were preparing their case for a lifting of the injunction, Estover, who had files on all the major newspaper editors and owners, would be working out the combination of threat, bribe, and called-in favour best suited to getting the whole thing nipped in the bud.

Imogen, now wearing a pale blue kimono, came into the kitchen and refilled her mug. When she sat down opposite him, he pushed the paper across to her.

She glanced over it, then said, ‘Is it as bad as it looks?’

‘Not nice but manageable,’ he said confidently. ‘I’ll slap an injunction on them to put a brake on tomorrow’s edition. That will give us a breathing space to wheel the big guns into position.’

‘Meaning?’

‘As you know, Pasha’s got friends. Important friends. Important enough to make even a newspaper owner take stock of how he sees the rest of his life.’

‘So, suppression not rebuttal.’

‘Always less risky,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Mrs Roper.’

The housekeeper had placed a crowded plate before him. He reached for the tomato ketchup and squirted his initials cursively across the fry-up.

‘You won’t forget Pippa and Johnny?’

‘I don’t even know if they’ll need me yet.’

‘They’ll need you,’ she said confidently. ‘And they’ve contacted you. Pasha hasn’t.’

‘That’s true,’ he said, raising the first forkful of bacon to his mouth. ‘I’m surprised. Perhaps he’s had a hard night and his people are afraid to rouse him with bad news.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, as if she thought this unlikely.

He finished his breakfast at a leisurely pace, drank more cups of coffee, browsed through more of the papers.

Imogen nibbled at a slice of toast and kept up a desultory conversation with Mrs Roper.

Finally he rose, said, ‘Lovely breakfast as always, Mrs Roper,’ and left the kitchen.

As he dressed, the phone rang again. It stopped almost immediately.

He continued dressing. It was eight fifteen and the sky was now bright. February was generally regarded as the most dismal of months, but sometimes it held the promise of spring, he thought.

In the kitchen he found Imogen doing the
Guardian
crossword.

He said, ‘Pasha, or Pippa again?’

‘Pippa.’

‘And?’

‘They’ve been arrested. They’re taking them to Cambridge.’

‘Good God!’ he said. ‘What for?’

‘Drugs.’ She said it so casually that for a moment he didn’t take it in. ‘
Drugs
? I know Johnny usually has a small stash of coke around the place, just in case he ever feels reality is beginning to break in, but I can’t believe they’d do a dawn raid for that.’

‘No. I think they probably did it for what, from Pippa’s account, looks like half a hundredweight of the stuff found under the cistern in their attic.’

‘Jesus wept! You’re joking? No, you’re not. What did you tell them?’

‘I told them you were on your way.’

‘What? Look, I can’t, not till I start the ball rolling on this Nikitin business.’

‘He hasn’t asked you to do anything, has he?’

‘No, not yet, but there’s probably a simple explanation . . .’

‘There probably is,’ said Imogen. ‘But till you hear it, you have two of our oldest friends who are expecting you. Head to Cambridge, Toby. Stay there if you have to. It might be a good idea to stay there even if you don’t have to.’

He looked at his wife in bewilderment. More and more these days he felt he understood her as little as her father understood her mother. But frequently she turned out to be right.

He said, ‘I’ll have to call in at the office first and make sure they’re up to speed if or rather when Pasha calls.’

Imogen shrugged.

‘If you must,’ she said indifferently. ‘By the way, if you do get to Cambridge, watch out for the media. Pippa said somehow the press and TV have got wind of the raid and they’re all over the place. That seemed to worry her almost more than anything else.’

‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘State the world’s in, you’d think they’d have better things to occupy them.’

This won him a faintly mocking smile, then she returned her attention to the crossword.

‘I’ll be off then,’ he said, stooping as if to kiss her then contenting himself with a squeeze of her shoulder.

She didn’t look up but said, almost to herself, ‘I think you’re right about the rowan. It’s going to be a long time before it grows big enough to shelter us.’

He said, ‘Don’t worry, my love. While we’ve got the Law to hide behind, there’s nothing that can touch us.’

Now she looked up.

‘But if you chop down the Law,’ she said, ‘how long does that take to grow again?’

3

Alva Ozigbo also woke early on that February morning. For a moment she lay in the darkness, in that birth moment when we don’t know who or what or where we are.

Then memory switched on and joy flooded her mind and body like the midday sun.

This morning she did not have to rise and prepare herself for the drive east to the Dark Tower.

Yesterday she had left Parkleigh for the last time!

Against her expectations she hadn’t felt any shame at her easy capitulation. Perhaps that would come later. She could, if she’d wanted to, have rehearsed the excellent reasons for her decision to go quietly – principally the threat to Wolf Hadda’s freedom and the fact that she had no concrete evidence whatsoever for her belief that the refurbishment of the prison had given Childs’s people an opportunity to embed surveillance devices in every nook and cranny. But she was too honest to give them pride of place over her recognition that she was simply relieved and delighted to be giving up her job.

Know thyself
is a good if not an essential motto for a psychiatrist. And she was ready to admit she knew herself a lot better now than when she’d first started at Parkleigh.

Her father had resisted any temptation he felt to say
I told you so!
when she gave him the news, but he hadn’t concealed his feeling that these were glad tidings.

‘Don’t you be rushing into any other job,’ he said. ‘Give yourself time to look around. And above all, Elf, give yourself time to come up here to rescue your poor old dad from this Swedish monster who’s got him chained to the wall! I’m wasting away to nothing on a diet of lettuce leaves. If she had her way, I’d spend six hours a day in a sauna, whipping myself with willow twigs. It’s my birthday this month and I bet she won’t even let me have a cake unless you’re here!’

The ‘Swedish monster’ had intervened at this point to say that she hoped her daughter would come as soon as possible as Ike was now even harder to keep under control than he’d been before his heart attack.

And Alva, hearing the love in their voices and the desire to see for themselves that she was OK, had difficulty in keeping her own voice bright and steady as she promised to come up for Ike’s birthday and stay at least a week.

She had put her feelings about Hadda and her concern about his plans and his future to one side during the past couple of weeks. Once the decision to go had been taken, she had no desire to hang around, but at the same time she wanted to make sure that the files and notes she left her successor were comprehensive and up to date. She thought of leaving some form of warning that the confidentiality of his exchanges with the inmates was not guaranteed. The problem was, if it were too general it would be useless and if it were too explicit, it would provoke questions she could not answer. Or did not want to answer.

She knew that in life there were some battles you had to fight even if the odds were insuperable and defeat guaranteed. This did not feel like one of them. OK, it was part of the ongoing and important debate about prisoners’ rights versus the general weal. But there was no torture involved here, no physical or mental abuse. This was more like the discussion of how admissible telephone tapping should be in criminal cases. People got heated about it, but no one sacrificed their own reputation or someone else’s freedom because of it.

Was this simply a self-justifying rationalization? she asked herself after her waking delight at the realization of her freedom had faded. She didn’t think so, but it was almost with relief that she moved from considering that moral question to the other and more personal issue of what she was going to do about Hadda.

She was convinced he was innocent. Her duty was therefore to make public her belief, argue the case, get the investigation reopened, mount an appeal . . .

All of which sounded very straightforward if it weren’t for the fact that she could not rely on any of those who should have been her supporters – Doll and Ed Trapp, Davy McLucky, Wolf himself – to stand alongside her.

And this brought her to the next, even more pressing question.

What was Hadda planning to do – and what ought she to do about it?

To hell with it – enjoy your first morning as a free woman! she told herself.

She flung back the duvet and got out of bed.

Dawn was tinting the sky an ochrous pink. London was rumbling back to full consciousness. She washed and dressed then went into her kitchen.

The room could do with a good spring clean, she judged as she sat and ate her breakfast. One way and another with all the pressures she’d endured over the past couple of months, she’d let things go. In fact the whole flat needed a good going over. Her awareness of the symbolic implications of this decision did not make it any the less a factual truth. The place had a neglected look. Leave it much longer and it would be downright grubby! She imagined what Elvira, with her Nordic standards of hygiene, would say if she walked in now.

She’d promised her parents she would drive north in time for her father’s birthday. That gave her three days to set her apartment to rights. And some good hard non-cerebral work was just what the psychiatrist had ordered!

By mid-morning she had reduced the relative order of the flat to chaos, but at least it was well on the way to being clean chaos. When her doorbell rang, she was up a stepladder, dealing with a spider’s web of Shelobian proportions. She thought of ignoring the bell, but it rang again insistently.

Grumbling, she descended and went to the door.

It was John Childs. He stood there, looking even more neat and tidy than usual by contrast with the confusion behind her, his sweet smile neither broadening nor fading as he took in her bedraggled appearance.

‘I had pictured you taking your ease on your first day away from the toils of employment,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should have known better.’

With Homewood it had been easier to maintain the pretence that her departure was by mutual agreement on reasonable grounds.

With Childs she saw no reason for such pretence.

‘What do you want?’ she asked coldly.

‘To apologize,’ he said. ‘And to talk to you about Wolf.’

This, she acknowledged, was perhaps the only formula that could have got him into the flat. She suspected no matter whose door he knocked at he would always have the right formula.

She let him disinter a chair and she didn’t offer him coffee, partly because she did not want to make him feel welcome, but mainly because until she shifted everything she’d taken out of her cupboards back into them, the kitchen was a no-go area.

‘So, apologize,’ she said.

‘I am truly sorry to have recruited you to the job at Parkleigh under false pretences. I am sure that by now a combination of your own sharp intellect and the information supplied by the estimable Chief Officer Proctor will have filled in the picture. Any damage to your self-esteem from the discovery that you were recruited less for your positive qualities and more because of your youth and inexperience should be repaired by your own awareness, even more than my reassurance, that you have performed your duties in an exemplary fashion and with a skill far beyond your years. The glowing testimonial Simon Homewood will no doubt provide will be no less than the truth and no more than you deserve.’

He paused. She gave an ironic little clap that reminded her she was still wearing rubber gloves.

‘Nice apology,’ she said. ‘Must have taken you half an hour off the Phoenicians to prepare it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve never really mastered the art of sounding spontaneous, even when that’s exactly what I’m being. I’ve truly enjoyed our ongoing relationship and I truly regret that it has probably come to an end.’

‘Probably!’ she exploded.

‘Life is fuller of surprises than certainties,’ he said. ‘And the more I got to know you, the more I suspected you were going to surprise me. So, that’s my apology. All of us are to some degree driven by grim necessity. In my job she is, alas, almost a permanent companion. Let’s move on to Wolf.’

‘Yes, let’s,’ she said.

‘I assume you are pretty well au fait by now with the circumstances that led to his jail sentence?’

She nodded.

‘Good. What happened was of course regrettable, but because of the way things worked themselves out, also inevitable, I fear. Had I been aware earlier what was going on, I might have been able to do something, but by the time I became involved, it was out of my hands.’