The Woodcutter

Elf

i

Now this really was interesting, thought Alva Ozigbo.

He’d moved from the first person past to the second person present.

Did this bring him closer or move him further away?

Closer in a sense. The first instalment had been a pretty straightforward piece of storytelling. The detail he recalled, the emotional colouring he injected, all suggested this was a version of that distant morning frequently rehearsed in his mind. In fact, rehearsed was the mot juste. Like a dedicated actor, he had immersed himself so deeply in his role of innocent victim that he was actually living the part.

She’d done some serious research since she took over Hadda’s case. In fact, when she looked at her records, she was surprised to see just how much research she’d done. She’d turned her eye inwards to seek out the reason for this special interest. Like her analysis of Hadda, that too was still work in progress.

She recalled Simon Homewood’s advice when she had started here on that dark January day in 2015. It had surprised her.

‘Many of them will tell you they are innocent. Believe them. Carry on believing them as you study their cases. Examine all the evidence against them with an open, even a sceptical mind. You understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, but I don’t understand why you’re saying it,’ she’d said.

He smiled and said, ‘Because that’s what I do with every prisoner who comes into my care at Parkleigh. Until I’m absolutely convinced of their guilt, I cannot help them. I want it to be the same for you.’

‘And how often have you not been convinced?’ she’d asked boldly.

‘Twice,’ he said. ‘One was freed on appeal. The other killed himself before anything could be done. I am determined that will never happen again.’

So she’d gone over the evidence against Hadda in the paedophile case with a fine-tooth comb. And she’d persuaded Giles Nevinson of the prosecutor’s office to do the same. ‘Tight as a duck’s arse,’ he’d declared cheerfully. ‘And that’s water-tight. Why so interested in this fellow?’

‘Because he’s…interesting,’ was all she could reply. ‘Psychologically, I mean.’

Why did she need to add that? How else could she be interested in a man like this, a convicted sexual predator and fraudster with a penchant for violence? It was on record that in his early days at Parkleigh he’d come close enough to ‘normal’ prisoners for them to attempt physical assault. His crippling leg injury limited his speed of movement, but he retained tremendous upper body strength and he had hospitalized one assailant. Transfer to the Special Wing had put him out of reach of physical attack, and verbal abuse he treated with the same massive indifference as he displayed to all other attempts to make contact with him. In the end a kind of contract was established with the prison management. He made no trouble, he got no trouble.

He also got no treatment. While he wasn’t one of those prisoners who staged roof-top demonstrations to protest their innocence or had outside support groups mounting appeals, he never took the smallest step towards acknowledging his guilt. Perhaps it was this sheer intractability that caught her attention.

With the Director’s permission, she had visited Hadda’s cell at a time he and all the other prisoners were in the dining hall. Even by prison standards it was bare. A reasonable amount of personalization was allowed, but all that Hadda seemed to have done to mark his occupancy was to Blu-Tack to the wall a copy of a painting that looked as if it had been torn out of a colour supplement. It showed a tall upright figure, his right hand resting on a lumberjack’s axe, standing under a turbulent sky, looking out over a wide landscape of mountains and lakes. Alva studied it for several minutes.

‘Like paintings, do you, miss?’ enquired Chief Officer Proctor, who’d escorted her into the cell.

‘I like what they tell me about the people who like them,’ said Alva. ‘And of course the people who paint them.’

If there were a signature on the painting, the reproduction wasn’t good enough to show it. She made a note to check and turned her attention to the rest of the cell. Only its emptiness said anything about the personality of its inmate. It was as if Hadda had resolved to leave no trace of his passing. She did find one book, a dog-eared paperback copy of The Count of Monte-Cristo. Seeing her looking at it, Proctor said sardonically, ‘It’s all right, miss. We check regularly under the bed for tunnels.’

Later in the prison library she asked for a record of Hadda’s borrowings and found there were none. Years of imprisonment with little but his own thoughts for company. He was either a man of great inner resources or of no inner life whatsoever.

Giles Nevinson during his trawl through the case files on her behalf had come up with an inventory of all the material removed from Hadda’s house at the time of the initial raid. It was the books and DVDs confiscated that she was interested in. There was nothing here that the prosecution had been able to use to support their case, but they suggested that, pre-accident, Hadda’s taste had been for the kind of story in which a tough, hard-bitten protagonist fought his way through to some kind of rough justice despite the fiendish plots and furious onslaughts of powerful enemies.

This could account for his choosing to present the police raid and its sequel in the form of the opening chapters of a thriller with himself as the much put-upon hero.

But in Alva’s estimate the form disguised its true function.

For Hadda this wasn’t fiction, it was revelation, it was Holy Writ! If ever any doubts about the rightness of his cause crept into his consciousness, all he had to do was refer back to this ur-text and all became simple and straightforward again.

But he hadn’t been able to keep it up when it came to writing about his emergence from the coma. Here the tight narrative control was gone. Even after the passage of so many years, that sense of confusion on waking into a new and alien landscape remained with him. His account of it was immediate, not historical. Hindsight usually allows us to order experience, but here it was still possible to feel him straining to make sense of blurred images, broken lines, shifting foci.

There was some shape. Each of the two sections climaxed at a moment of violent shock. The first, his recognition of physical change; the second, his discovery of his wife’s defection. Nowhere in his account of his waking confusion, nor in the aftermath of these systemic shocks, was there the slightest indication that he was moving out of denial towards recognition.

But these were early days. She was pretty certain she now had every scrap of available information about Wolf Hadda, but what did it add up to? Very little. The significant narrative of the mental and emotional journey that had brought him to Parkleigh could only come from within.

Her hope had to be that, by coaxing him to provide it, she might be able to lead him to a moment of self-knowledge when, like a mountain walker confronted by a Brocken Spectre, he would draw back in horror from the monstrous apparition before him, then recognize it as a projection of himself.

She liked that image, and it was particularly apt in Hadda’s case. From her study of his background she knew he’d grown up in the Lake District where his father had been head forester on the estate of his father-in-law, Sir Leon Ulphingstone. Lots of fascinating possibilities there. Perhaps the almost idealized figure in the painting on his cell wall was saying something about his relationship with his father. Or perhaps it was there as a reminder to himself of what he had been and what he now was.

With the help of an artistic friend, she’d identified the artist as the American, Winslow Homer. The painting was called The Woodcutter. She’d tracked down an image on her computer. It was accompanied by an old catalogue blurb.

In Winslow Homer’s painting, the Woodcutter stands looking out on a panorama of mountains and lakes and virgin forest. He is tall and muscular, brimful of youthful confidence that he can see no peak too high to climb, no river too wide to cross, no tree too tall to fell. This land is his to shape, and shape it he will, or die in the attempt.

She could see what the writer meant. And of course Woodcutter had been the name of Hadda’s business organization. Significant?

Everything is significant, her tutor used to reiterate. You cannot know too much.

I’m certainly still a long way from knowing too much about you, Wolf Hadda, she thought as she watched him limp slowly into the interview room. She’d wondered in George Proctor’s presence if it might not be possible to equip him with a walking stick. The Chief Officer had laughed and said, ‘Yeah, and I’ll put in a requisition for a supply of shillelaghs and assegais while I’m at it!’

He seemed even slower than usual today. As he settled on to his chair, she looked for signs that he was impatient to discuss the second episode. That would have been indicative; she wasn’t sure of what. But there were no signs, which was also indicative, though again she wasn’t sure what of.

His face was expressionless, the dark glasses blanking out his good eye. For all she knew, it could be closed and he could be asleep.

She said loudly, ‘How do you feel now about your disfigurement?’

If she’d thought to startle him by her sudden bluntness, she was disappointed.

He said reflectively, ‘Now let me see. Do you mean the Long John Silver limp, or the Cyclopean stare, or the fact that I’ll never play the violin again?’

She nodded and said, ‘Thank you,’ and made a note on her pad.

‘What for? I didn’t answer your question.’

‘I think you did. By hyperbole in respect of your leg and your eye. Silver was a murderous cutthroat who’d lost his entire leg, and the Cyclops were vile cannibalistic monsters. As for your hand, nothing in your file suggests you ever could play the violin, so that was a dismissive joke.’

‘Indicating?’

‘That you’re really pissed off by being lame and one-eyed, but you’ve managed to adapt to the finger loss.’

‘Maybe that’s because I don’t get the chance to play much golf in this place. Mind you, I’ll be able to cap Sammy Davis Junior’s answer when asked what his handicap was.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not into golf.’

‘He said, “I’m a black, one-eyed Jew.” I’d be able to say, I’m a one-eyed, one-handed, lame, paedophiliac fraudster.’

‘And how much of that would be true?’

He frowned and said, ‘You don’t give up, do you? Eighty per cent at most. The physical stuff is undeniable. As for the fraud, I walked some lines that seemed to get re-drawn after the big crash and I’m willing to accept that maybe I ended up on the wrong side of the new line. But I’m not in word or thought or deed a paedophile.’

She decided to let it alone. Accepting he might have been guilty of fraud had to be some kind of advance, though from her reading of the trial transcripts, the evidence against him here had looked far from conclusive. Perhaps his lawyer had got it right when he tried to argue that the huge publicity surrounding his conviction on the paedophilia charges made it impossible for him to get a fair hearing at the fraud trial. The judge had slapped him down, saying that in his court he would be the arbiter of fairness. But by all accounts Hadda had cut such an unattractive and non-responsive figure in the dock, if they’d accused him of membership of al-Qaeda, too, he’d probably have been convicted.

She knew how the jury felt. He had made no effort to project a positive image of himself. Even after he started talking to her, all she got was a sense of massive indifference. This in itself did not bother her. It was a psychiatrist’s job to inspire trust, not affection. But it did puzzle her if only because in jail her clients usually fell into two categories – those who resented and feared her, and those who saw her as a potential ally in their campaigns for parole.

Hadda was different. Though he had by now served enough time to be eligible for parole he had made no application nor shown the slightest interest in doing so.

Not of course that there was much point. A conviction like his made it very hard to persuade the parole board to release you back into the community, particularly when your application was unsupported by any admission of guilt or acceptance of treatment.

But at least he had started writing these narratives. That had to be progress.

And there was something about him today, something only detectable once he’d started talking. An undercurrent of restlessness; or, if that was too strong, at least a sense of strain in his self-control.

She said, ‘Wilfred…Wilf…’

Both versions of his name felt awkward on her lips, smacking of the enforced familiarity of the hospital ward or the nursing home. His expression suggested he was enjoying her problem.

She said, ‘…Wolf.’

He nodded as if she’d done well and said, ‘Yes, Elf?’

Her sobriquet came off his tongue easily, almost eagerly, as though she were an old friend whose words he was anxious to hear.

She said, ‘How do you feel about Imogen now?’

He frowned as if this wasn’t the question he’d been looking for.

‘About the fact that she divorced me? Or the fact that she subsequently married my former solicitor and friend, Toby Estover? Wonder how that worked out?’

He spoke casually, almost mockingly. A front, she guessed. And she also guessed he might have a pretty good idea how it had worked out. Modern prisons had come a long way from the Bastille and the Chateau d’If, where a man could linger, forgotten and forgetting, oblivious to the march of history outside. She’d checked on the happy pair, telling herself she had a professional interest. Estover was now, if not a household name, at least a name recognized in many households. He was so sought after he could pick and choose his clients, and the fact that he seemed to pick those involved in cases that attracted maximum publicity could hardly be held against him.

As for the lovely Imogen, she was certainly as lovely as ever. Alva had seen a recent photo of her in the Cumbrian churchyard where her daughter’s ashes were being placed in the family tomb. Not an event that drew the world’s press, but a local reporter had been there and taken a snap on his mobile. By chance he’d got a combination of light, angle, and background that lent the picture a kind of dark, brooding Brontë-esque quality, and the Observer had printed it for its atmospheric impact rather than its news value.

She said, ‘I just wondered what you feel when I mention her name?’

‘Hate,’ he said.

This took her aback.

He said, ‘You look surprised. That I should feel it, or that I should say it?’

‘Both. It’s such an absolute concept…’

‘It’s not a bloody concept!’ he interrupted. ‘It has nothing to do with intellectual organization. You asked what I felt. What else should I reply? Contempt? Revulsion? Anger? Dismay? A bit of all of those, I suppose. But hate does it, I think. Hate folds them all neatly into a single package.’

‘But what has she done to deserve this?’ she asked.

‘She has believed the lies they told about me,’ he said. ‘And because she believed them, my lovely daughter is dead.’

All Alva’s previous attempts to get him to talk about his daughter had been met with his mountainous blankness, but now for a moment she saw the agony that seethed beneath the rocky surface.

She said in her most neutral tone, ‘You blame her for Ginny’s death?’

He was back in control but within his apparent calm she sensed a tension like that intense stillness of air when an electric storm is close to breaking.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But not so much as I blame her bitch of a mother.’

She noted that, despite the intensity of the negative feelings he’d expressed about Imogen, he was reluctant to lay full responsibility for the girl’s death upon her. Whatever bonds there had been between him and his wife must have been unusually strong for this ambiguity of feeling to have survived.

‘You hold Lady Kira responsible?’

‘Oh yes. Everything tracks back to her. She never wanted me to have her daughter. And now she has helped deprive me of mine.’

‘And she did this, how? By helping with the arrangements for her to finish her education in France, out of reach of our prurient press?’

She deliberately let a trace of doubt seep into her voice, hoping to provoke further revelation of what was going on inside his mind, but all she succeeded in doing was bring down the defences even further.

He said indifferently, ‘If you’d ever met her, you’d understand.’

This for the moment was a dead end. Leave the mother-in-law, get back to the wife, she told herself.

She said, ‘If, as you claim, you are innocent, then someone must have framed you. Do you have any idea who?’

The question seemed to amuse him.

‘I have a short list of possibilities, yes.’

‘Is Imogen on it?’

The question seemed to surprise him. Or perhaps he simply didn’t like it. She really must find a way to get into this key relationship.

‘What does it matter?’ he demanded. ‘Which is worse? That she went along with a plot to frame me? Or that she actually believed I was guilty as charged?’

‘Be fair,’ said Alva. ‘The evidence was overwhelming; the jury took twenty minutes to find you guilty…’

‘Twelve strangers!’ he interrupted. ‘Twelve citizens picked off the street! In this world we’re unfortunate enough to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with a squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I’m sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.’

Wow! she thought as she studied him closely. That rolled off your tongue so easily, it’s clearly been picking up momentum in your mind for years!

His voice was still controlled, but his single eye sparkled with passion. What was it he said he felt about his ex-wife’s behaviour?

Contempt.

Revulsion.

Anger.

Dismay.

These were all necessary elements of that condition of self-awareness she was trying to draw him to. Perhaps by transferring these emotions away from himself to his ex-wife, he was showing her he was closer than she’d thought. His strained parallel with Mandela was also significant. A man of dignity and probity, imprisoned by a warped regime, and finally released and vindicated after long years to become a symbol of peace and reconciliation. It was as if Hadda’s denial could only be sustained by going to the furthermost extreme in search of supportive self-images.

Hopefully, if he continued far enough in that direction, he would eventually come upon himself unawares. And then it would be up to her to direct him away from self-hatred into more positively remedial channels.

Meanwhile it would be good if she could nudge him into a memory of Imogen in her fairy-tale princess phase. It was possible that by reliving that period when she had become the unique and obsessive object of his adoration, he might come to wonder whether it was in fact his idol that had fallen or himself.

Even if that admittedly ideal outcome didn’t materialize, this was the part of his life she had least information about, for there were few living sources but himself.

Now the passion had faded and he was looking at her assessingly.

He’s got something else for me, she thought. She knew how habit-forming this business of writing about your past could be. In many clients, it went beyond habit into compulsion. So of course since their last meeting he’d carried on writing.

But as what he wrote came closer to the most intimate details of his being, he naturally became less and less sure of sharing it with her.

So, show no eagerness. Do not press.

She said, ‘Wolf, time’s nearly up. I was wondering, is there anything I can get for you? Books, journals, that sort of thing? I should have asked before. Or something more personal. Something in the food line? Or proper linen handkerchiefs, silk socks, perhaps?’

He shook his head as if impatient at her change of subject, or perhaps at the silly notion that there could be something he might enjoy receiving, and said, ‘We were talking about Imo. I got to thinking about her after I wrote that last piece.’