Reginald Hill - The Woodcutter

I was treated courteously – I even thought I detected the ghost of a smile on the custody sergeant’s lips when told I’d been arrested for thumping Medler – then put in a cell. Pretty minimalist, but stick a couple of Vettriano prints on the wall and it could have passed for a standard single in a lot of boutique hotels.

I don’t know how long I sat there. I hadn’t been wearing my watch when they arrested me. In fact I hadn’t been wearing anything but my dressing gown. They’d taken that and given me an off-white cotton overall and a pair of plastic flip-flops.

I was just wondering whether to start banging on the door and making a fuss when it opened and Toby came in. It was good to see him, in every sense. As well as having one of the smartest minds I’ve ever known, he dresses to match. Same age as me but slim and elegant. Me, I can make a Savile Row three-piece look like a boiler suit in twenty minutes; Toby would look good in army fatigues. In his Henry Poole threads and John Lobb shoes he looked smooth enough to talk Jesus off the Cross which, had he been in Jerusalem at the time, I daresay he would have done.

I said, ‘Toby, thank God. Have you brought me some clothes?’

He looked surprised and said, ‘No, sorry, old boy. Never crossed my mind.’

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘I thought Imo might have chucked a few things together.’

‘I think she may have other things to occupy her,’ he observed. ‘Let’s sit down and have a chat.’

‘Here?’ I said.

‘Here,’ he said firmly, sitting on the narrow bed. ‘Less chance of being overheard than in an interview room.’

The idea that the police might try to eavesdrop on a client/lawyer conversation troubled me less than the implication that it could contain something damaging to me.

I said, ‘Frankly, I don’t give a damn what they hear. I’ve got nothing to hide.’

‘It’s certainly true that by now you’re unlikely to have anything you think may be hidden,’ he said sardonically. ‘I understand they are still searching the house. But it’s your computers we need to concentrate on. Wolf, we won’t have much time so let’s cut to the chase. I’ve had a word with DI Medler…is it true you hit him, by the way?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said with some satisfaction. ‘You’ll probably see the picture in the tabloids. I’d like to buy the negative and have it blown up for my office wall, if you can fix that. Did Imogen tell you the media were all over the place? There must have been a tip-off from the police. I want you to chase that up vigorously, Toby. There’s been far too much of that kind of thing recently and no one’s ever called to account…’

‘Wolf, for fuck’s sake, shut up.’

I stopped talking. Toby was normally the most courteous of men. OK, he’d heard me on one of my favourite hobby horses before, but there was an urgency in his tone that went far beyond mere exasperation. For the first time I started to feel worried.

I said, ‘Toby, what’s going on? What are the bastards looking for? For God’s sake, I may have cut a few corners in my time, but the business is sound, believe me. Does Johnny Nutbrown know about this? I think we ought to give him a call…’

Nutbrown was my closest friend and finance director at Woodcutter. He was mathematically eidetic. If Johnny and a computer calculation differed, I’d back Johnny every time.

Toby said, ‘Johnny’s not going to be any use here. Medler’s not Fraud. He’s on what used to be called the Vice Squad. Specifically his area is paedophilia. Kiddy porn.’

I laughed in relief. I really did.

I said, ‘In that case, the only reason I’m banged up here is because I hit the smarmy bastard. They’ve had plenty of time to realize they’ve made a huge booboo, and they’re just hoping the media will get tired and go away before I emerge. No chance! I’ll have my say if I’ve got to rent space on TV!’

I stopped talking again, not because of anything Toby said to me but because of the way he was looking at me. Assessingly. That was the word for it. Like a man looking for reassurance and not being convinced he’d found it.

He said, ‘From what Medler said, they feel they have enough evidence to proceed.’

I shook my head in exasperation.

I said, ‘But they’ll have squeezed my hard drive dry by now. What’s the problem? Some encryptions they haven’t been able to break? God, I’m happy to let them in for a quick glance at anything, so long as I’m there…’

Toby said, ‘He spoke as if they’d found…stuff.’

That stopped me in my tracks.

‘Stuff?’ I echoed. ‘You mean kiddy porn? Impossible!’

He just looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had taken on its forensic colouring.

‘Wolf, I need to be clear so that I know how to proceed. You are assuring me there is nothing of this nature, no images involving paedophilia, to be found on any computer belonging to you?’

I felt a surge of anger but quickly controlled it. A friend wouldn’t have needed to ask, but Toby was more than my friend, he was my solicitor, and that was how I had to regard him now, in the same way that he was clearly looking at me purely as a client.

I said, ‘Nothing.’

He said, ‘OK,’ stood up and went to the door.

‘So let’s go and see what DI Medler has to say,’ he said.

So hell begins.

I’ll say this for Medler, he didn’t mess around.

He showed me some credit-card statements covering the past year, asked me to confirm they were mine. I said that as they had my name and a selection of my addresses on them, I supposed they must be. He asked me to check them more closely. I glanced over them, identified a couple of large items on each – hotel bills, that kind of thing – and said yes, they were definitely mine. He then drew my attention to a series of payments – mainly to an Internet company called InArcadia – and asked me if I could recall what these were for. I said I couldn’t offhand, which wasn’t surprising as I paid for just about everything in my extremely busy life by one of the vast selection of cards I’d managed to accumulate, but no doubt if I sat down with my secretary we could work out exactly what each and every payment covered.

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.’