Reginald Hill - The Woodcutter

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.