The Woodcutter (39 page)

This was truly bewildering.

‘But why . . .?’

‘Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I love my daughter, Ms Ozigbo, but a father’s love isn’t blind. Fred Hadda was a decent man, a loyal worker and a good friend. I’d seen what it did to him when the boy vanished for all those years. That was down to what Wolf felt about Imogen. When he came back and I saw it was all going to start up again, I couldn’t stand by and let Fred’s boy destroy himself, could I? But in the end . . . Well, what’s done’s done. Better get you out of here before we get noticed.’

He feels spied upon in his own house, thought Alva. She still wasn’t altogether clear what lay at the bottom of the old man’s attitude. There was neither the time nor was he a suitable subject for subtle psychological questioning, so she took the direct route.

She said, ‘Sir Leon, I’m still not sure what you’re saying. Did you feel that this was a mismatch for social reasons? That Wolf would feel out of his depth by being transplanted from one class to another?’

She had learned that, even in twenty-first century England, class still mattered.
Cherchez la femme
might apply in France, in England it was usually
cherchez la classe!

‘What? No, of course not,’ he replied, a touch indignantly. ‘Used to be the case if you didn’t go to the right school, you were always playing catch-up. Maybe there’s still a bit of that around, but a chap like Wolf, he’d catch most of them up and be whizzing by in no time at all. In fact, that’s what he did, wasn’t it? No, this was personal. Imogen wasn’t right for him. He was always going to get hurt.’

‘And Imogen?’

‘Imo? I love my daughter, Ms Ozigbo. Funny thing, though. In forty years I’ve never seen her cry. Not even as a baby. Funny.’

If true, this was pretty amazing. Though it might just be a physiological oddity.

She asked, ‘And did you say anything about this to Wolf directly?’

‘No point. He wasn’t going to take any notice, was he? When the blood’s bubbling along a boy’s veins, first thing that goes is his hearing, eh?’

He turned her away from the window and for the first time she saw the photos in the silver frames. Lady Kira featured prominently. She obviously believed that family photos on the desk were as intrinsic a part of the traditional gent’s study as hunting trophies on the wall.

In one of the photos she stood looking down possessively at a pretty girl leaning forward to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. The girl had such a look of Imogen, it had to be her daughter, thought Alva.

She picked up the photo and said gently, ‘It must have been a terrible shock to you, losing your granddaughter.’

Immediately she wished she hadn’t spoken. The old man’s face, indeed his whole body, seemed to shrivel up as if in a desperate attempt to contain an emotion that might rip him apart if he let it out. Here was a man born into wealth and privilege, with all the attendant comforts and opportunities tossed into his cradle. Yet Alva felt she was looking at the kind of pain and despair you usually glimpsed on your TV screen after some momentous life-shattering natural disaster.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said wretchedly. ‘It’s just that she looks so lovely in the photo.’

‘What photo?’ said Leon, taking refuge from his grief in irritation. ‘Got no photo of Ginny here. Couldn’t bear it.’

‘But this one here,’ said Alva, holding up the frame. ‘Isn’t that her?’

‘Don’t be silly. Of course not. That’s Imo.’

‘Imogen? Your daughter?’ said Alva incredulously, trying to count the candles.

‘That’s right. Fourteenth birthday. Fourteen going on forty, isn’t that what they say about young girls today, eh?’

Fourteen! Imo’s age when she and Hadda first met.

There was only one thing wrong. She’d discounted the possibility that this might be Imo because this girl bore no resemblance whatsoever to her mental image of the skinny pre-pubertal creature who’d allegedly offered herself to Hadda on Pillar Rock. This was a healthy young teenager whose scoop-neck top revealed as she bent forward to blow out the candles a pair of very well-developed breasts.

There are times when even a psychiatrist can receive too much information.

Despite Sir Leon’s obviously growing eagerness to get her out of the study and off the premises, she stood transfixed, staring at the photo.

She needed to talk further with the old man, she needed to talk again to Imogen, above all she needed to confront Hadda.

But in what order and in what manner she ought to do these things wasn’t clear.

Then her phone rang. Sir Leon grimaced at the sound. She took it out and glanced at the display. It was Elvira.

Checking up on my putative date, she guessed. Well, she can leave a message!

Sir Leon now took a firm grip on the situation and her elbow, and a minute later she was outside the house with the door closing in her face.

She still hadn’t got her thoughts in order. Not to ask Imogen more questions while she was here seemed a missed opportunity. Perhaps she should go back into the house and press for answers. But when she glanced back at the house to its general air of unwelcomingness were added the sight of Lady Kira’s face peering down from an upper window and Mr Nikitin’s from a lower.

She got into her car and let what she had learned scroll across her mind, trying to assess its significance and turn it into usable data.

The main items were:

One: Imogen said Ginny wasn’t Hadda’s child. True or false?

Two: Leon said he had objected to the marriage for Hadda’s sake, not for his daughter’s, and class had nothing to do with it. Almost certainly true, she judged.

Three: at fourteen, Imogen was a mature girl with a well-developed bosom. Definitely true!

So what to do?

She could drive back to Manchester and ponder. She could get out of the car and bang on the door and demand readmittance. She could head round to Birkstane and lie in wait for Hadda. She could . . .

She shook her head impatiently. Choice is a largely delusional concept, her tutor used to say. Whether in politics, morals or shopping, we have far less than we imagine. In the end what we have to do often doesn’t even figure on our list of pseudo-options.

She took out her phone and played her mother’s message and was yet again reminded how right her tutor was.

‘Alva! Where are you? You’ve got to get back here as soon as you can. Your father’s much worse. They think he’s going to die!’

10

Wolf Hadda liked to believe he had his feelings under tight control. You didn’t survive a long stretch in jail by letting your imagination roam free. Deal with the minute and let the hour look after itself. A man can dig his way out with a teaspoon, but only if he takes it one scrape at a time. But if you let yourself relax too much, sometimes feelings and imagination can sneak up and take you by surprise.

He had spent a good part of the afternoon talking with Davy McLucky, then he had diverted on the way home to a supermarket. It was a couple of weeks now since he’d given Luke Hollins a Tesco order and fresh supplies would be running low. On the way back he stopped on a high fell road to give Sneck a bit of a run and it was getting on for eight o’clock as he approached Birkstane.

Perhaps it was the pleasure of heading back to the only place in the world he thought of as home that relaxed him, but he realized that somehow over the last few miles his mind had been playing such a lively picture of reaching the turn into the Birkstane lonning and finding Alva Ozigbo’s grey Fiesta parked there that he felt a totally illogical shock of disappointment at its absence.

‘Just thee and me then, Sneck,’ he said to the dog as he brought the Defender to a halt in front of the closed barn door.

The dog jumped out and started quartering the yard, muzzle low, sniffing the cobbles and growling softly in its throat.

Wolf watched him for a moment, before climbing down stiffly. With his supermarket bag swinging from one hand and leaning heavily on his stick with the other, he limped slowly towards the house.

The kitchen felt cold and unwelcoming. He realized his fantasy had expanded insidiously to finding Alva had got the fire going and was brewing a pot of coffee. But now his earlier disappointment had turned to relief. As he closed the door, he saw a sheet of paper that must have been pushed beneath it.

He smoothed it out on the kitchen table and read the words scribbled across it.

I’m at the castle till the New Year. We ought to talk.

No signature. None needed.

He used it to help start the fire and while it got going he put the kettle on the hob, switched on the radio, turning it up loud. All this he did with a slow and laboured movement that would have caused Ed and Doll Trapp serious concern. When the kettle boiled he made himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table with his back to the small window. After a while he rose, shivering, and went to the window to draw the curtains, as if to keep out the draught.

But when he turned away he didn’t sit down. Moving now with decisive swiftness, pausing only to pluck his long-handled axe from the wall, he headed out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the bedroom on the far side of the house from the yard. This was north facing and its window was small even by Cumbrian farmhouse standards but he went through it on his back, head first, reaching up to take a grip in a crack between two of the rough granite blocks, and hauling himself out till he stood on the sill. Then he dropped down till his arms rested on the sill, reached in and retrieved his axe.

Sneck stood alert, watching him.

He said, ‘Guard!’

It was a stronger command than
Stay!
In Sneck’s mind
Stay!
had a time-limitation clause. After ten minutes max, he’d reckon it had expired and start thinking independently. With
Guard!
he’d stay all night and attack anyone who came near.

Now, hanging one-handed, Hadda lowered his body full length then dropped the remaining five feet to the ground.

Picking himself up, he made for the old forest wall, climbed over it with silent ease and went a couple of yards into the trees. Here he turned south and moved parallel to the wall till he was opposite the side of the barn.

Now he emerged from the forest and climbed back over the wall and waited.

A man emerged from the barn and flitted silently across the yard. He was dressed in black and in his right hand he carried a gun.

Slowly he turned the handle of the kitchen door then flung it open and stepped inside.

A moment later he reappeared and made a signal. A second man came out of the barn as the first went back into the house.

So, two of them. The first had expected to surprise him in the kitchen. That having failed, he was now going to search the house, and he’d called up the second to watch his back.

Could there be a third? Doubtful. If so, a pair of them would probably have made the initial sortie.

He didn’t waste time debating the point, reaching his conclusion and the second man crouched by the kitchen door almost simultaneously.

The man must have heard something, for he turned – which was unfortunate for him. Instead of the stunning blow to the base of the neck that was intended, he took the full force of the axe’s shaft across his Adam’s apple. There was usually only one result of such a blow, but Hadda was in too much of a hurry to check it out.

The kitchen was empty, the living room too. The second man had gone up the stairs. If he opened the door of the bedroom which Sneck was guarding, the dog would attack. And a bullet moves quicker than even the fastest dog.

Hadda went up the stairs not bothering to try for silence. The man was pushing open the bedroom door. He glanced round as he heard Hadda’s approach. Then Sneck hit him with such force he was driven back across the narrow landing. He’d instinctively raised his left arm to ward off the attack and he screamed as Sneck’s fangs tore through the fabric of his tight-fitting top and dug into the flesh beneath. But his right arm was still free and he raised his weapon to put the muzzle to the dog’s head at the same time as the axe blade drove down through his skull.

The gun went off.

The man slid to the ground, blood and brains trickling down his face. Sneck lay on top of him, his teeth still fixed in his arm. Hadda dropped the axe and knelt down beside the dog. There was a smell of scorched hair coming from a burn line between his ears, as though someone had laid a hot poker there. But the eyes that looked up at Hadda were as bright as ever.

‘OK, you can let go now,’ he said, and turned his attention to the man.

‘Damn,’ he said. Then he looked closer. Death, especially when caused by a blow from an axe, changes features somewhat, but there was something familiar about the face.

He stood up and went back down stairs. When he checked out the second man in the yard, he said, ‘Damn,’ again.

It seemed a long long time ago that he’d driven down the lonning, buoyed with a foolish hope that he’d find Alva Ozigbo waiting to welcome him.

Instead he had two dead men on his hands. He wasn’t sure yet how he felt about that. Disappointed didn’t seem to do it.

‘Good job you’re not here, Elf,’ he said to the dark sky. ‘I don’t have time for psycho-analysis right now!’

He set to work. The living first.

He checked Sneck’s burn mark. It didn’t look too bad. He smeared some antiseptic cream along the line of the bullet, then commanded the dog to lie down in the kitchen.

Then the dead.

He went through their pockets and found nothing, but in the barn he found a small back-pack containing two mobile phones, a Toyota key, and the OS sheet for the area. The key he pocketed, the phones he set aside for later examination, the map he opened. There was a cross on the unclassified road about half a mile north of where the Birkstane lonning turned off. He brought the place to his mind. There was an old track there, no longer used, leading to one of the sad heaps of stones that marked where a thriving hill farm had once stood. Some scrubby woodland offered good temporary shelter for a vehicle. Then they would have walked back along the road and down the lonning and, realizing he wasn’t home, settled to wait.