The Woodcutter (59 page)

She made for the door. From the hearth came an enquiring growl.

She turned and looked at Sneck.

‘Why not, boy?’ she said. ‘To tell you the truth, I’ll be glad of company!’

4

Imogen stood on top of Pillar Rock looking down at the Liza winding its way along the valley bottom two thousand feet below and recalling the first time she had climbed up here more than a quarter of a century before.

Then she had simply trailed along beside Wolf, not certain where he was going, just knowing there was a life force in this young man that she wanted a share of.

Well, she’d certainly got her share, sucked him almost dry some might say, though he had got his fair share of all that she had to offer too.

No, not his
fair
share, because fairness didn’t enter into it.

He had stepped out of his world into hers, but it had been both impossible and undesirable that he could step all the way.

Impossible because, despite all the social cosmetology of the modern democratic era, it remained as true as it had always been that the
arriviste
could never really arrive.

And undesirable because for Wolf to have completely adapted to the moral code of her circle, which was basically
do what thou wilt shall be all of the law,
he would have had to sacrifice so much of what made him Wolf that he’d no longer have been worth having.

The wind was blowing hard up here. She sat down with her back to it. She was well insulated by several layers of clothing, but its chilly fingers still probed through to her warm flesh. Suggesting the Rock as a rendezvous point had not been the cleverest idea she’d ever had. Why had she done it? In one sense it was typical of the way she’d conducted a great deal of her life, an instinctive decision made without reference to reason or consequence. But at the same time it was also atypical, a reaching out of the random in search of a pattern.

Here it had all started. Here it would all end.

How it would end, she could not foretell. Her efforts to see him at Christmas had been coloured by the assumption that she would still have power over him, based on her awareness that he still had power over her. Her sense that he was making a conscious effort not to see her had confirmed her assumption. But after what had happened to Toby and the Nutbrowns, things had moved on. A first step had been taken, and she knew from her own life how much easier a second step was.

Curiously, her increased sense of risk made her all the more determined to confront him head on. She enjoyed danger as long as it was in her face. What she didn’t like was relaxing in her bath and hearing the buzz of an invisible wasp. Or to put it more poetically (she sometimes tried at poetry) all she wanted was to be able to stroll through the woodlands of her future without constantly straining her ears to catch the distant sound of an axe.

Was she a cold-hearted bitch, as a discarded lover had once called her? She’d examined the accusation closely and did not think so. Indeed, compared with her mother, she felt she was a creature of impulse and feeling. They had so much in common yet there were ways in which they were incomprehensible to each other. When Kira declared that the only thing better than having Wolf back in jail would be to have him buried deep in his grave, she was simply stating what she felt. To Imogen, neither of these was a desirable solution. What she wanted was to find a way for the pair of them to accept the collapse of their relationship and walk away from the wreckage comparatively unscathed.

There was a chance, albeit a small one, that her breakfast exchange with Kira might have provided a faint hope of finding such a way.

And another hopeful factor was the possibility that Wolf might even have something to walk away
to
as well as from. Men traditionally fell in love with their nurses, so why not with their psychiatrists?

Finding the black woman at the house again had been a surprise. When Alva Ozigbo came to the castle after Christmas, Imogen hadn’t considered the possibility that she might have any interest in Wolf other than a professional one. After all, from her point of view, he was a convicted paedophile/fraudster whom she had certified safe to return to the community, so naturally she had a vested interest in keeping a close eye on him.

Now Imogen wished she’d taken rather more notice of her as an individual. She was certainly striking. Attractive? Possibly. Imogen tried to see her through male eyes. She herself wasn’t too sensitive to the sexual aura of other women. In the interest of total experience she and Pippa had once spent a night together, but while there had been certain advantages in relating to a body that had the same geography and responses as your own, it had not been something she wanted to do again.

But she could see how Alva Ozigbo, with that combination of black skin, ochrous hair and fine bone structure, might turn some men on. Wolf? She wasn’t sure. He had been so totally fixated on herself that she had never heard him express even a theoretical interest in another woman. She was one hundred per cent sure he’d never been unfaithful to her, even when his travels had kept him away from home for months on end. The pent-up passion released on his return had given her some of the sensual highs of her life, though after he’d been at home a while, his attentions began to make her feel a touch claustrophobic.

Had he ever suspected this? She thought not.

And she was absolutely sure he’d never suspected her of being unfaithful. His reaction would have been, to say the least, extreme. She had been very lucky for fourteen years that no malicious tongue had sought to set him straight. Perhaps his natural unselfconscious likeability had protected him. It would have been like hurting a child.

Or perhaps it had been his other defining quality, the sense of raw power seething beneath the surface and looking for an outlet, that had kept him safe. If ever there was a man whose first reaction might be to kill the messenger, it was Wolf!

But eventually, inevitably, he would have found out.

She knew her friends.

They might hold their peace for years but in the end, like the scorpion in the fable, they would have to sting, because it was in their nature.

This certainty that the marriage was living on borrowed time had been one of the factors that made it easy to go along with Toby and Pippa when they’d revealed their survival scheme. When necessity rules, regret is as pointless as resistance.

One way or another, Wolf was going to jail and the marriage was finished.

One way, she would be penniless.

The other, she wouldn’t be.

Where was the choice in that?

To say she saw him condemned without a pang would have been untrue. To say that this pang kept her awake at nights would have been untruer. Only two things kept her awake and they were sex and toothache.

No, that was the kind of smart untruth she’d grown too used to pushing away people with. After Ginny died, she hadn’t slept soundly for months without the help of pills or alcohol. Though, curiously, she now found that since moving into Ginny’s old room, she slept like a child.

And she felt a kind of childish diffidence now as she sat on top of the Rock and wondered if he would come, and if he did, what he would do. She felt a sense of danger but no real fear. If necessity drove him to harm her, then so be it. She was confident he would not want to disfigure her as he had been disfigured. Death was another matter. He had never spoken openly about the years of youthful absence, but there had been killing in there somewhere, she was sure. In the right cause, he had the power to kill.

She stared down into the valley and saw herself slowly tumbling through the air.

Of course it wouldn’t really be slow. Thirty-two feet per second, something like that, she seemed to recollect. Which worked out at a lot of miles per hour!

But how slow might it feel in the mind? Climbing, she’d often wondered about this. How many recollections and regrets could be crushed between that moment when your fingers slipped from their hold and the next when your body broke against the rocks?

Perhaps there was just time for one clear revelation, one all-illuminating insight.

Or perhaps it would go on forever. She recalled a story her father used to read to her about a thief who escaped capture by jumping over the edge of the world. She used to lie in bed after Leon had put out the light, imagining how that would feel. And the words had often played through her mind as she was climbing . . .
falling from us still through the unreverberate blackness of the abyss . . .

Falling . . . falling . . . falling . . .

A sound reached her that wasn’t borne on the gusting wind. She rose to her feet and strained her ears.

There it was again, the sound of boot on rock, from far below.

He was coming. She’d never doubted that he would.

She settled down for the last minutes of waiting.

5

Pudo Pudovkin had all the attributes of a fine chess player: a mind that could sum up several moves ahead, an ability to read an opponent, and the patience not to make a move until he was happy it was the right one. Everything, in fact, except the capacity to accept defeat philosophically. And while being a bad loser doesn’t necessarily make you a bad player, being the kind of bad loser who is likely to fly into a rage and attempt to make a winning opponent swallow his chessmen tends to leave you short of people willing to play with you.

His positive qualities, plus a large infusion of the negative one, combined to make him an excellent assassin. But on this dank February morning, he found his patience was being sorely tried.

Arriving early in the vicinity of Birkstane, he had left the anonymous grey Honda he was driving parked out of sight near the head of the lonning and made his way towards the house. He took up a position on a swell of ground about thirty yards from the building where a few scrubby gorse bushes gave him cover, and his elevation gave him a view into the yard through his compact Leika binoculars.

As the sky grew light, there’d been signs of activity within the house, and smoke had begun to rise from the chimney. Then to his amazement, the door opened and Hadda stepped out into the cold morning air, stark naked except for a towel flung over one shoulder. He headed out of sight behind the barn buildings. The sound of running water revealed the presence of a stream somewhere close. Presumably this madman was going to bathe in it!

Pudovkin shivered at the thought, but it made his job easy. The only fly in the ointment was the mangy dog trotting along at Hadda’s heel. It looked a vicious beast. Pudovkin did not care for dogs. He’d once been bitten by one in childhood. Later he had returned with a piece of poisoned meat and had the pleasure of watching the beast die in agony. Hadda’s dog would have a more merciful death. The first shot would take care of it. A naked cripple bathing in an icy stream would hardly be in any condition to take advantage of the brief respite offered by this diversion.

He was just beginning to move forward from his hiding place when he heard a distant engine. A few moments later, a black woman had come down the lonning and into the yard. Who the fuck was she? he wondered. Maybe she would leave when she found the house empty.

She opened the door and peered inside. For a moment she hesitated in the doorway. Then she turned and went in the lame man’s footsteps.

‘Fuck!’ he muttered. A man and a dog were do-able, but this woman complicated matters. Who was going to miss her and how soon? There might even be someone waiting for her in her car. In cleaning operations escape routes were vital, and in this fucking wilderness time was an essential part of any escape plan. Pudo wanted to be long gone before the deed was discovered. He needed at least an hour to get on the south-bound motorway. Any pursuit that started sooner than that could have him road-blocked off with the peasants.

He settled back into his hide. After a few minutes he heard the sound of another car engine. Jesus, he thought. This is like Oxford fucking Street at Christmas!

Shortly afterwards another woman came strolling down the lonning. This one he recognized. It was the lawyer’s wife, the good-looking blonde that Pasha Nikitin lusted after. As he’d worked on Toby Estover in the warehouse, Pudo had been satisfied the lawyer knew nothing about the newspaper article long before his boss had signalled a halt. How much, he wondered, had this had to do with the lovely Imogen? And how was Pasha going to react to the news that she was still sniffing around her ex-husband?

With great indifference, if the said ex was dead, he guessed.

But her presence was a further unwelcome complication.

As she approached the gate, there was a sound of voices and the black woman came into view, heading towards the house. The blonde stepped sideways out of sight into the hedgerow that flanked the lonning. Hadda, still naked, and his dog appeared behind the black and the three of them went inside.

The blonde woman retreated up the lonning. Pudovkin listened for the sound of a car starting up but heard nothing. Then she reappeared. This time she passed through the gate and walked into the yard. She was holding a sheet of paper in her hand as she vanished from the Russian’s line of sight into the barn, but when she reappeared a moment later, she was empty-handed.

Once more she went up the lonning, moving with an easy grace, but purposefully. This time he did hear a car start up.

Next Hadda, now fully dressed, came out of the house. He looked around carefully. Something must have alerted him, probably that fucking dog. Now he crossed the yard and went into the barn. The black woman stood in the doorway watching him for a moment before going back inside. Hadda followed shortly, in his hand a sheet of paper, presumably that left by his ex-wife, which he crumpled up as he passed through the door.

Now what was that all about? wondered Pudo. Not that he really gave a damn. His only concern was that he was freezing his nuts off stuck in this gorse bush with no way of working out how long it was going to be before he could have the pleasure of blowing Hadda’s fucking head off!