The Woodcutter (31 page)

Luke Hollins spoke, almost with relief.

‘He was drawing it out as fast as it was paid in, and storing it in that tin chest.’

‘Spot on, Padre. I reckon he didn’t want it in his account, polluting his hard-earned wages. As for letting it lie to gather a bit of very useful interest, perish the thought! No, he drew it out and stored it away, and when he died, his will declared me the sole heir of all his estate. As you probably know, both of you, because he died after all the dust had settled around the ruin of my business, and my creditors had reluctantly agreed that they’d screwed me for every penny they could, then I was able to inherit that estate free of charge, which is how I come to be living in these palatial surroundings.’

‘You seem to find them comfortable enough,’ said Alva.

‘Indeed I do. I’m not complaining. After my years as a guest of Her Majesty, bedding down with Sneck in the barn would have seemed comfortable. Anyway, to cut a long story short, poking around in the attic to rid myself of a couple of rats’ nests, I came across Dad’s old tin chest. Imagine my surprise when I opened it to see it was full of money. I rapidly worked out what it was. A quick check of Dad’s old bank statements confirmed my guess. I took legal advice as to what to do . . .’

‘Mr Trapp?’ wondered Alva.

‘The same. He confirmed there was no obstacle to my hanging on to the money.’

‘The Inland Revenue and Social Services might not agree,’ said Alva.

‘Only if I didn’t inform them,’ he replied. ‘Or perhaps I mean only if I did. Anyway, there you are. Any questions?’

Alva looked at Hollins. The vicar looked at the ground.

‘Quite a lot of the money seems to have gone,’ she said. ‘What have you been spending it on?’

‘Good question. This time I won’t enquire after possible answers as one of you might say something that would cause us to fall out. I’ve provided myself with a stock of decent liquor, as you’ve both observed. My ancient Defender is surprisingly sophisticated under her rustic bonnet. Don’t let the noise fool you. I left a few loose bits to create a good rattle, and they’re pretty noisy beasts anyway!’

‘And that’s all? Doesn’t add up to a great deal, it seems to me.’

‘An accountant as well as a lawyer and a psychiatrist!’ he mocked. ‘There have been other expenses. For instance, I like to make donations where I think the money might do some good.’

Hollins now raised his eyes and said, ‘There was a couple of hundred quid stuffed into the church donations box last month . . .’

‘Mea culpa,’ said Hadda.

The vicar said, ‘Well . . . thank you. I’m very grateful.’

He looked, thought Alva, rather less surprised than he should that somehow this crippled man, this self-defined hermit, this local ogre, had entered the village and visited the church unobserved.

‘So, good wine and good works,’ she murmured. ‘It seems a reasonable balance.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Hollins.

And Sneck let out a low rumbling growl that might have been taken for approval.

‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Hadda. ‘Now, I daresay you’d like to talk among yourselves and, as I have things to do, I’ll leave you to it for a while.’

He drained his coffee and headed for the door, Sneck at his heels.

‘That went well, I thought,’ said the vicar.

‘Yes. Thank you for joining me in quizzing him about what he might have been doing with the money,’ said Alva tartly.

‘I thought he’d take it better from you, being his psychiatrist,’ said Hollins apologetically. ‘He doesn’t care much for me coming the old C of E parson with him, as he puts it. But you have to admit, he did give a perfectly logical explanation.’

‘You’re not letting yourself be influenced by his donation to church funds, I hope,’ said Alva.

‘Of course not,’ he said indignantly.

‘But it didn’t seem to surprise you much that a man in his condition had been able to visit the church unobserved?’

‘No. The truth is, when I found the money, my first thought was of Mr Hadda,’ admitted Hollins. ‘That same morning I noticed that someone had planted a couple of rowan sprigs, heavy with berries, in the churchyard. One was on his father’s grave, the other in front of the Ulphingstone tomb where his daughter is interred.’

‘Why rowan?’ wondered Alva, recalling that Hadda had referred to a rowan tree in the garden of his Holland Park house.

‘My wife knows about such things,’ said Hollins. ‘She told me that in folklore the mountain ash is considered a strong defence against evil spirits, and also it can prevent the dead from rising and walking the earth. But I couldn’t be certain it was Mr Hadda, until now. So what do you think, Dr Ozigbo? Are you happy with his explanation?’

What Alva was thinking was that if Hadda had planted the rowan in his London garden as a defence against evil, it hadn’t been very effective. Also that in her eyes he’d once more become a prime suspect in the case of the foaming beer!

What she said was, ‘I think Mr Hadda is maybe even more complex than we’d thought. For instance, I think the real reason he’s left us to have a chat by the fireside is that Sneck told him he had another visitor.’

She put her theory to the test by rising and going out into the yard.

She was right. He was standing by the open gate in deep conversation with a tall thin man. The visitor spotted her and said something. Hadda turned, saw Alva watching them, said something to the newcomer, then the two men walked towards her across the yard.

‘Elf, we have a traveller in distress,’ said Hadda. ‘Mr . . . sorry, I don’t know your name?’

‘Murray,’ said the man, in a distinctive Scots accent. ‘Donald Murray. Sorry to trouble you. My sat nav’s gone on the blink.’

‘Never trust technology, eh? Let’s get you into the warm and I’ll show you the way on a good old-fashioned map. Padre, this will be a busy time for you. I’ll not be needing an order till after the festive dust has settled. So, Merry Christmas.’

Hollins, who’d followed Alva into the yard, took his dismissal with Christian fortitude.

‘Thank you . . .’

Rather hesitantly he reached into the capacious pocket of his heavy cagoule and produced a rectangular packet wrapped in red-and-green Christmas paper.

‘I came across this,’ he said. ‘Thought you might like it. A Merry Christmas to you, too.’

‘A present? Well, thank you, Padre. I’m touched.’

Alva said to Hollins, ‘I’ll walk you back to your car.’

They walked up the lonning in the kind of silence that gradually magnifies sound. The crunch of the frozen grass beneath their feet, the eerie whistle of a circling buzzard scanning the earth for the corpse of any creature that hadn’t made it through the night, the baaing of a distant sheep, the rustle as the morning sun thawed the first tiny icicles from the upmost branches of the hedgerow hollies and sent them slithering through the frosted leaves; these and a myriad other small indistinguishable sounds united and increased till Hollins shrank them all back to near nothingness by speaking.

‘That man . . .’

‘Mr Murray?’

‘Yes, him. You recall the reason I chanced upon the money chest was I went upstairs because his mobile rang?’

‘But it stopped as you got into the bedroom . . .’

‘Yes. But there was a message. I listened to it.’

‘Ah. You chanced to listen to it,’ said Alva, gently mocking the priest’s defensiveness about prying into Hadda’s affairs. She smiled to show she didn’t blame him. Crimes such as Hadda’s meant a forfeiture of trust which in turn could provoke acts that were at least intrusive.

‘It was a man speaking. He had a Scots accent. He sounded very like Mr Murray.’

‘An accent can be deceptive.’

Hollins said, ‘You mean all Scots sound the same? Sounds a touch racist to me, Dr Ozigbo.’

She glanced at him and saw that now he was smiling. Getting his own back. She’d reserved judgment on Hollins, but she found she was quite liking him.

‘I take it your fine ear detects distinctions?’ she said.

‘No, but one of my best mates at college was from Glasgow. So is Mr Murray, and so was the man on the phone.’

‘And so are a million other people. You’ll need to fine it down a little.’

‘Well, it certainly wasn’t my mate,’ he said. ‘Look, all I’m saying is they sounded very much the same.’

And if they’re the same, why is Wolf Hadda trying to hide the fact that he knows this man? Alva asked herself. His behaviour in bringing him into the house to show him the way had already struck her as atypical. And he’d only done it when he’d realized it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid a meeting with her.

‘So what did the message say?’ she enquired.

‘Something about making contact and going to a villa,’ said Hollins. ‘I think it was from abroad as he said he’d stop off in London on the way back and check things there. He didn’t much like where he was, called it an elephants’ graveyard and said he was glad that Hadda was paying for it.’

Alva, keeping anger but not reproach out of her voice, said, ‘And you didn’t think this was worth telling me till now? You must have looked at the possible implications.’

‘In my business, when you rush to judgment, you end up crucifying people,’ said Hollins.

‘You were worried enough about the money to contact me,’ she said.

‘The money was a fact. It needed explaining. Contacting you was, I don’t know, more a way of giving myself some extra thinking time. I thought at best you might write, or email, or even phone. I didn’t expect you to turn up personally. When you did, I thought I’d wait and see what transpired – about the money, I mean.’

‘And you found his explanation satisfactory enough to still your doubts, even though you knew for sure he was lying?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’d heard the message. You knew that whatever the man on the phone, that man back there possibly, is doing, Hadda is paying him to do it. So there’s something more than good wine and good works going on here. The fact that he slipped a couple of hundred pounds into your poor box doesn’t make him a saint, Mr Hollins. Suppose rather than making a charitable gesture it was more like purchasing an indulgence? Was that what you gave him just now? A papal indulgence?’

They had reached her car. Parked behind it was the vicar’s Micra, and behind that a black BMW.

‘Got the wrong church there, I think, Dr Ozigbo,’ Hollins said. ‘Look, there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for that phone message. And you’ve only got my not-too-reliable memory to suggest that it was whatsisname? Donald Murray, who left it.’

‘We’ve got Sneck. He doesn’t accept strangers without his master’s say so, and he looked pretty comfortable with Mr Murray out there.’

As she spoke, Alva peered into the BMW. Recalling her readiness to leave her car unlocked in such a remote area she tried the door. Mr Murray wasn’t so trusting. On the back seat she saw a document case, embossed in faded gilt with the initials D.M.

Donald Murray. Right initials, but was that really his name? Something in the way he’d said it when prompted by Hadda had rung a false note. Of course it might be that too many hours spent straining to detect false notes had over-sensitized her. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever again hear someone say something she could take at face value.

‘What will you do?’ asked the vicar.

‘What will
you
do?’ she retorted.

He said, ‘Sorry, I wasn’t trying to offload responsibility. I’ll pray, and then I’ll decide. I meant, what will you do now? If you want to stay another night but not here at Birkstane, you’re very welcome to a bed at the vicarage. And we have a real shower.’

She felt reproved. She should be able to tell the difference between a man trying to marshal all known facts before making a decision and a man trying to duck responsibility.

She said, ‘That’s kind, but if I do decide to stay another night, I’ll be all right here. The shower apart, that is. I’ll ring you before I leave.’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

They shook hands and she watched as he did a three-point turn.

As he drove away, her phone started ringing.

Her mother said, ‘Alva, you are not to worry . . .’ and instantly she started worrying.

Hadda and Murray looked up in surprise as she burst into the kitchen and Sneck was on his feet in a flash, crouched low, teeth bared.

She said, ‘I’ve got to go. My father’s ill. Heart attack. Fortunately it happened at work.’

‘Fortunately?’ said Hadda.

‘He’s a surgeon in Manchester. I’ll just grab my things and be on my way.’

When she came down a couple of minutes later, Hadda wasn’t in the kitchen.

Murray said, ‘He’s outside. I hope your dad’s OK.’

No false note there. He sounded genuinely concerned.

She said, ‘Thanks,’ and left. Hadda was sitting in the Defender.

‘Don’t want you cracking your ankle running up the lonning,’ he said.

She scrambled in beside him. As he drove he said, ‘Leave me your mobile number. I’d like to be able to check on you.’

Something wrong with that picture, she thought as she scribbled it on the cover of a road map. When they got to her car, he reached into the back seat and handed her a flask.

‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘Drive for an hour and a half, stop and drink it, then drive on.’

The precision of the instruction was oddly comforting.

She got into her car. The engine again started first time. He took the blankets off the bonnet and tossed them into the Land Rover.

She turned the car, looked up at him through the open window and said, ‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘Good luck, Elf.’

He stooped to the window and his lips brushed her cheek.

It was, she realized, the first physical contact they’d ever had. What did she feel about it? Was it significant? If so, how?

There might be a time to consider these questions but it certainly wasn’t now.

Now all she could think about was her father, that huge bear of a man whose sloe-black skin seemed to pulsate with energy, lying helpless on a bed in his own hospital.

She put her lights full on and sent the car hurtling along the narrow country road.