The Woodcutter (4 page)

He shuffled the statements together, put them in a folder, and smiled. His split lip must have hurt but it didn’t stop his smile from being as slyly insinuating as ever.

‘Don’t think we’ll need to involve your secretary, Sir Wilfred,’ he said. ‘We can give your memory a jog by showing you some of the stuff you were paying for.’

Then he opened a laptop resting on the table between us, pressed a key and turned it towards me.

There were stills to start with, then some snatches of video. All involved girls on the cusp of puberty, some displaying themselves provocatively, some being assaulted by men. Years later those images still haunt me.

Thirty seconds was enough. I slammed the laptop lid shut. For a moment I couldn’t speak. I looked towards Toby. Our gazes met. Then he looked away.

I said, ‘Toby, for God’s sake, you don’t think . . .’

Then I pulled myself together. Whatever was going off here, getting into a public and recorded row with my solicitor wasn’t going to help things.

I said to Medler, ‘Why the hell are you showing me this filth?’

He said, ‘Because we found it on a computer belonging to you, Sir Wilfred. On a computer protected by your password, in an encrypted program accessed by entering a twenty-five digit code and answering three personal questions. Personal to you, I mean. Also, the images in question, and many more, both still and moving, were acquired from the Internet company InArcadia and paid for with various of your credit cards, details of which you have just confirmed.’

The rest of the interview was brief and farcical. Medler made no effort to be subtle. Perhaps the little bastard disliked me so much he didn’t want me to cooperate! He simply fired a fusillade of increasingly offensive questions at me – How long had I been doing this? How deeply involved was I with the people behind InArcadia? Had I ever personally taken part in any of the video sessions? and so on, and so on – never paying the slightest heed to my increasingly vehement denials.

Toby sat there silent as a statue during all this and in the end I forgot my resolve not to have a public row and screamed, ‘For fuck’s sake, man, say something! What the hell do you think I’m paying you for?’

He didn’t reply. I saw him glance at Medler. Maybe I was so wrought up I started imagining things but it seemed to me Toby was looking almost apologetic as if to say, I really don’t want to be here doing this, and Medler gave him a little sympathetic smile as if to reply, yes, I can see how tough it must be for you.

I was at the end of my admittedly short tether. It was a toss up whether I took a swing at my lawyer or the cop. If I had to rationalize I’d say it made more sense to opt for the latter on the grounds that my relationship with him was clearly beyond hope whereas I was still going to need Toby.

Whatever, I gave Medler a busted nose to add to his split lip.

And that brought the interview to a close.

iv

My second journey to my cell was handled less courteously than the first.

The two cops who dragged me there then followed me inside were experts. I lay on the floor, racked with pain for a good half hour after the door crashed shut behind them. But when I recovered enough to examine my body, I realized there was precious little visual evidence of police brutality.

I banged at the door till a constable appeared and told me to shut up. I demanded to see Toby. He went away and came back a few minutes later to say that Mr Estover had left the station. I then said I wanted to make the phone call I was entitled to. How entitled I was, I’d no idea. Like most people my knowledge of criminal law was garnered mainly from TV and movies. The cop went away again and nothing happened for what felt like an hour. I was just about to launch another assault on the door when it opened to reveal Medler. His nose was swollen and he had a couple of stitches in his lip. In his hand was a grip that I recognized as mine. He tossed it towards me and said, ‘Get yourself dressed, Sir Wilfred.’

I opened the bag to see it contained clothing.

I said, ‘Did my wife bring this? Is she here?’

He said, ‘No. She’s gone to stay with a Mrs Nutbrown at her house, Poynters, is it? Out near Saffron Walden.’

I sat down on the bed. OK, so Johnny Nutbrown’s wife, Pippa, was Imogen’s best friend, but the notion that she was running for cover without even attempting to contact me filled me with dismay. And disappointment.

It must have showed, for Medler said roughly, as though he hated offering me any consolation, ‘She had to go. Your daughter was being taken there. The press would have been sniffing round her school in no time. They’re already camped outside your house.’

‘Yes, and whose fault is that?’ I demanded.

‘Yours, I think,’ he said shortly.

I didn’t argue. What was the point? And if Imo and Ginny needed to seek refuge, there were few better places than Poynters. Johnny had bought the half-timbered Elizabethan mansion a couple of years earlier. It must have cost him a fortune. I recall saying to him at the time,
I’m obviously paying you too much!
He claimed it had once belonged to the Nutbrowns back in the eighteenth century and he’d always known it would come back. The great thing in the present situation was that it was pretty remote and Pippa, who was a bit of a hi-tech nerd, had installed a state-of-the-art security system.

I tipped the clothes he’d brought on to the bed. The jacket trousers and shirt weren’t a great match, which meant they hadn’t been selected by Imogen. Presumably Medler or one of his minions had flung them together. I ripped off the paper overall.

Medler stood watching me.

‘Looking for bruises?’ I said.

He didn’t reply and I turned my back on him. As I pulled on my underpants, there was a brief flash of light. I looked round to see Medler holding a mobile phone.

‘Did you just take a photo?’ I demanded incredulously.

I got that knowing smirk, then he said, ‘That’s a nasty scar you’ve got on your back, Sir Wilfred.’

‘So I believe,’ I said, controlling my temper again. ‘I don’t see a lot of it.’

A man doesn’t spend much time watching his back. Perhaps he ought to. The scar in question dated from when I was thirteen and running wild in the Cumbrian fells. I slipped on an icy rock on Red Pike and tobogganed three hundred feet down into Mosedale. By the time I came to a halt, my clothing had been ripped to shreds and my spine was clearly visible through the torn flesh on my back. Fortunately my fall was seen and the mountain rescue boys stretchered me out to hospital in a relatively short time.

First assessment of the damage offered little hope I would ever walk again. But gradually as they worked on me over several days, their bulletins grew cautiously more optimistic, till finally, much to their amazement, they declared that, while the damage was serious, I had a fair chance of recovery. Six months later, I was back on the fells with nothing to show for my adventure other than a firm conviction of my personal immortality and a lightning-jag scar from between my shoulder blades to the tip of my coccyx.

Was it legal for Medler to take a photo of my naked body without my permission? I wondered.

Whatever, I was determined not to let him think he had worried me, so I carried on dressing and when I was finished I said, ‘Right, now I’d like to phone my wife.’

‘First things first. Sergeant, bring Sir Wilfred along to the charge room.’

Things were moving quickly. Too quickly, perhaps. Arrest, questioning, police custody, these were stages a man could come out of with his reputation intact. There were time limits that applied. Eventually that moment so beloved of TV dramatists would arrive when a solicitor says, ‘Either charge my client or let him go, Inspector.’

But Medler was pre-empting all that.

Foolishly when I realized I was being charged with assault on a police officer in the execution of his duty, I felt relieved. I took this to mean they were still uncertain about their child pornography case. I’d passed through disbelief and outrage to indignation. Either the cops had made a huge mistake or someone was trying to drop me in the shit. Either way, I felt certain I could get it sorted. After all, wasn’t I rich and powerful? I could pay for the best investigators, the best advisors, the best lawyers, and once they got on the case I felt confident that all these obscene allegations would quickly be shown for the nonsense they were.

After the formalities were over, I was about to reassert my right to call Imogen when Medler took the wind out of my sails by saying, ‘Right, Sir Wilfred, let’s get you to a phone.’

He took me to a small windowless room containing a chair and a table with a phone on it.

‘This is linked to a recorder, I take it?’ I said mockingly.

‘Why? Are you going to say something you don’t want us to hear?’ he asked.

He always slipped away from my questions, I realized.

But what did I expect him to say anyway?

I sat down and Medler went out of the door. It took a few seconds for me to recall the Nutbrowns’ Essex number. I dialled. After six or seven rings, a woman’s voice said cautiously, ‘Yes?’

‘Pippa? Is that you? It’s Wolf.’

She didn’t reply but I heard her call, ‘Imo, it’s him.’

A moment later I heard Imogen’s voice saying, ‘Wolf, how are you?’

She sounded so unworried, so normal that my spirits lifted several degrees. This was not the least of her many qualities, the ability to provide an area of calm in the midst of turbulence. She was always at the eye of the storm.

I said, ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry, we’ll soon get this nonsense sorted out. How about you? Is Ginny with you? How is she?’

‘Yes, she’s here. She’s fine. We’re all fine. Pippa’s being marvellous. There’ve been a couple of calls from the papers. I think that once they realized I’d gone, and Ginny had been taken out of school, they started checking out all possible contacts. They really are most assiduous, aren’t they?’

She sounded almost admiring. I was alarmed.

‘Jesus! What did Pippa say?’

‘She was great. Pretended not to have heard anything about the business, then drove them to distraction by asking them endless silly questions till finally they were glad to ring off.’

‘Good. But it means you’ll have to keep your heads down in case they send someone to take a look for themselves. I blame that little shit Medler for this, he obviously alerted the press in the first place . . .’

She said, ‘Perhaps. But it was Mr Medler who suggested I got Ginny out of school, then helped smuggle me out of the house without the press noticing.’

This got a mixed reaction from me. Naturally I was pleased my family were safe, but I didn’t like having to feel grateful to Medler. Still, I comforted myself, it was good to know that Imogen’s powers of organization included the police.

I said, ‘I’m glad to hear Medler’s got a conscience. And if the media turn up mob-handed at Pippa’s door, we’ll definitely know who to blame, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’ll know who to blame. Wolf, I need to ring off now. I’m expecting a call. I rang home to let them know what was going on. I didn’t want them to start hearing things through the media. I spoke to Daddy but Mummy was out. She’s expected back for lunch, so Daddy said he’d get her to ring me then.’

I bet she’ll enjoy that! I thought savagely. My mother-in-law, Lady Kira Ulphingstone, had never been my greatest fan, though things improved slightly after the birth of Ginny. I suspect she vowed to herself that her granddaughter wasn’t going to make the same ghastly mistake as her mother, and she was clever enough to know that pissing me off all the time might put Ginny outside her sphere of influence. So superficially she thawed a little, but underneath I knew it was the same impenetrable permafrost.

My father-in-law, Sir Leon, on the other hand, though he was a Cumbrian landowner of the old school with political views that erred towards the feudal, had demonstrated the pragmatism of his class by making the best of a bad job. Unlike my own father, Fred. He and Sir Leon had been united in absolute opposition to the marriage, the difference being that Fred’s disapproval survived the ceremony. I can’t blame Dad. After putting him through the wringer by vanishing for five years with only the most minimal attempt at contact, I’d returned, and while he was still trying to get his head round that, I had once more set my will in opposition to his. Any hope of getting back to our old relationship had died then and things had never been the same between us since. That had been the highest price I paid for my fairy-tale happy ending. For fourteen years I had judged it a price worth paying. I was wrong. And though I didn’t know it yet, I was never going to get the chance to tell him so.

I said, ‘Well, we can’t have Mummy getting the engaged signal, can we? But if the journalists start bothering them up there, do try to stop Leon setting the dogs on them. Listen, you couldn’t give Fred a ring, could you? The bastards are likely to have him in their sights too. I’d do it myself soon as I get out of here, but I’m not sure how long that will take.’

‘I asked Daddy to make sure Fred knows,’ she said.

God, she was efficient, I thought admiringly. Even at moments of crisis, she took care of all the details.

She went on, ‘You’re expecting to be out . . . when?’

‘I don’t know exactly, but it can’t be long,’ I said confidently. ‘You know Toby. He’s helped get serial killers, billion-dollar fraudsters and al-Qaeda terrorists off. I’m sure he can sort out my bit of bother.’

I was exaggerating a bit, less about Toby’s CV than my confidence in his ability to sort out my problem. I recalled the way he’d looked at me. Perhaps he was just too high powered for something like this.

‘Is he there with you now?’ said Imogen.

‘No, he left after . . . after my interview.’

I hesitated to tell Imogen that I’d assaulted Medler a second time. She’d find out soon enough, but no need to give her extra worry now.

‘Then I’ll hear from you later,’ she said.

‘Of course. Listen, don’t ring off, I’d like a quick word with Ginny.’

There was a pause then she said, ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. She’s very bewildered by everything that’s happened, naturally. So I gave her a mild sedative and she’s having a rest now.’