I like what they tell me about the people who like them, said Alva. And of course the people who paint them.
If there were a signature on the painting, the reproduction wasnt 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, Its all right, miss. We check regularly under the bed for tunnels.
Later in the prison library she asked for a record of Haddas 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 Haddas 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, Haddas 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 Alvas estimate the form disguised its true function.
For Hadda this wasnt 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 hadnt 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 wifes 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 Haddas case. From her study of his background she knew hed 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, shed identified the artist as the American, Winslow Homer. The painting was called The Woodcutter. Shed tracked down an image on her computer. It was accompanied by an old catalogue blurb.
In Winslow Homers 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 Haddas business organization. Significant?
Everything is significant, her tutor used to reiterate. You cannot know too much.
Im 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. Shed wondered in George Proctors presence if it might not be possible to equip him with a walking stick. The Chief Officer had laughed and said, Yeah, and Ill put in a requisition for a supply of shillelaghs and assegais while Im 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 wasnt sure of what. But there were no signs, which was also indicative, though again she wasnt 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 shed 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 Ill never play the violin again?
She nodded and said, Thank you, and made a note on her pad.
What for? I didnt answer your question.
I think you did. By hyperbole in respect of your leg and your eye. Silver was a murderous cutthroat whod 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 youre really pissed off by being lame and one-eyed, but youve managed to adapt to the finger loss.
Maybe thats because I dont get the chance to play much golf in this place. Mind you, Ill be able to cap Sammy Davis Juniors answer when asked what his handicap was.
Im sorry, Im not into golf.
He said, Im a black, one-eyed Jew. Id be able to say, Im a one-eyed, one-handed, lame, paedophiliac fraudster.
And how much of that would be true?
He frowned and said, You dont 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 Im willing to accept that maybe I ended up on the wrong side of the new line. But Im 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 theyd accused him of membership of al-Qaeda, too, hed 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 psychiatrists 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.
Hadda was different. Though he had by now served enough time to be eligible for parole he had made no application nor shown the slightest interest in doing so.
Not of course that there was much point. A conviction like his made it very hard to persuade the parole board to release you back into the community, particularly when your application was unsupported by any admission of guilt or acceptance of treatment.
But at least he had started writing these narratives. That had to be progress.
And there was something about him today, something only detectable once hed started talking. An undercurrent of restlessness; or, if that was too strong, at least a sense of strain in his self-control.
She said, WilfredWilf
Both versions of his name felt awkward on her lips, smacking of the enforced familiarity of the hospital ward or the nursing home. His expression suggested he was enjoying her problem.
She said, Wolf.
He nodded as if shed done well and said, Yes, Elf?
Her sobriquet came off his tongue easily, almost eagerly, as though she were an old friend whose words he was anxious to hear.
She said, How do you feel about Imogen now?
He frowned as if this wasnt the question hed been looking for.
About the fact that she divorced me? Or the fact that she subsequently married my former solicitor and friend, Toby Estover? Wonder how that worked out?
He spoke casually, almost mockingly. A front, she guessed. And she also guessed he might have a pretty good idea how it had worked out. Modern prisons had come a long way from the Bastille and the Chateau dIf, where a man could linger, forgotten and forgetting, oblivious to the march of history outside. Shed checked on the happy pair, telling herself she had a professional interest. Estover was now, if not a household name, at least a name recognized in many households. He was so sought after he could pick and choose his clients, and the fact that he seemed to pick those involved in cases that attracted maximum publicity could hardly be held against him.
As for the lovely Imogen, she was certainly as lovely as ever. Alva had seen a recent photo of her in the Cumbrian churchyard where her daughters ashes were being placed in the family tomb. Not an event that drew the worlds press, but a local reporter had been there and taken a snap on his mobile. By chance hed got a combination of light, angle, and background that lent the picture a kind of dark, brooding Brontë-esque quality, and the Observer had printed it for its atmospheric impact rather than its news value.
She said, I just wondered what you feel when I mention her name?
Hate, he said.
This took her aback.
He said, You look surprised. That I should feel it, or that I should say it?
Both. Its such an absolute concept
Its not a bloody concept! he interrupted. It has nothing to do with intellectual organization. You asked what I felt. What else should I reply? Contempt? Revulsion? Anger? Dismay? A bit of all of those, I suppose. But hate does it, I think. Hate folds them all neatly into a single package.
But what has she done to deserve this? she asked.
She has believed the lies they told about me, he said. And because she believed them, my lovely daughter is dead.
All Alvas previous attempts to get him to talk about his daughter had been met with his mountainous blankness, but now for a moment she saw the agony that seethed beneath the rocky surface.
She said in her most neutral tone, You blame her for Ginnys death?
He was back in control but within his apparent calm she sensed a tension like that intense stillness of air when an electric storm is close to breaking.
Maybe, he said. But not so much as I blame her bitch of a mother.
She noted that, despite the intensity of the negative feelings hed expressed about Imogen, he was reluctant to lay full responsibility for the girls death upon her. Whatever bonds there had been between him and his wife must have been unusually strong for this ambiguity of feeling to have survived.
You hold Lady Kira responsible?
Oh yes. Everything tracks back to her. She never wanted me to have her daughter. And now she has helped deprive me of mine.
And she did this, how? By helping with the arrangements for her to finish her education in France, out of reach of our prurient press?
She deliberately let a trace of doubt seep into her voice, hoping to provoke further revelation of what was going on inside his mind, but all she succeeded in doing was bring down the defences even further.
He said indifferently, If youd ever met her, youd understand.
This for the moment was a dead end. Leave the mother-in-law, get back to the wife, she told herself.
She said, If, as you claim, you are innocent, then someone must have framed you. Do you have any idea who?
The question seemed to amuse him.
I have a short list of possibilities, yes.
Is Imogen on it?
The question seemed to surprise him. Or perhaps he simply didnt like it. She really must find a way to get into this key relationship.
What does it matter? he demanded. Which is worse? That she went along with a plot to frame me? Or that she actually believed I was guilty as charged?
Be fair, said Alva. The evidence was overwhelming; the jury took twenty minutes to find you guilty
Twelve strangers! he interrupted. Twelve citizens picked off the street! In this world were unfortunate enough to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with a squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, Im sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.
Wow! she thought as she studied him closely. That rolled off your tongue so easily, its clearly been picking up momentum in your mind for years!
His voice was still controlled, but his single eye sparkled with passion. What was it he said he felt about his ex-wifes behaviour?
Contempt.
Revulsion.
Anger.
Dismay.
These were all necessary elements of that condition of self-awareness she was trying to draw him to. Perhaps by transferring these emotions away from himself to his ex-wife, he was showing her he was closer than shed thought. His strained parallel with Mandela was also significant. A man of dignity and probity, imprisoned by a warped regime, and finally released and vindicated after long years to become a symbol of peace and reconciliation. It was as if Haddas denial could only be sustained by going to the furthermost extreme in search of supportive self-images.
Hopefully, if he continued far enough in that direction, he would eventually come upon himself unawares. And then it would be up to her to direct him away from self-hatred into more positively remedial channels.