The Woodcutter. Reginald Hill

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      ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Procedure.’

      He looked at her curiously.

      ‘You don’t think he’s a risk?’

      ‘To himself, you mean? No. But there has to be some sort of reaction.’

      There was, but its nature surprised her.

      He started talking.

      Or at least he started responding to her questions. He was always reactive, never proactive. Only once did he ask a question.

      He looked up at the CCTV camera in the interview room and said, ‘Can they hear us?’

      She replied, ‘No. As I told you when we first met, the cameras are on for obvious security reasons, but the sound is switched off. This is a condition of my work here.’

      The question had raised hopes that in the weeks that followed were consistently disappointed. He began to talk more but he never said anything that came close to the confessional. References to his daughter were met by the old blankness. She asked why he hadn’t applied to go to the funeral. He said he wouldn’t see his daughter there but he would see people he didn’t want to see. What people? she asked. The people who put me here, he said. But he didn’t even assert his innocence with any particular passion. Again the mountain image came into her mind. Climbers talk of conquering mountains. They don’t. Sometimes the mountain changes them, but they never change the mountain.

      But she persevered and after a few more months of this, there came a session when, as soon as he came into the room, she had felt something different in him. As the door closed behind Prison Officer Lindale, she got a visual clue as to what it was.

      Usually when he sat down, he placed his hands palm up on the table, the right one black gloved, the left bare, its life and fate lines deep etched, as though he expected his fortune to be read.

      This day his hands were out of sight, as though placed on his knees.

      She said, ‘Good morning, Mr Hadda. How are you today?’

      He said in his customary quiet, level tone, ‘Listen, you black bitch, and listen carefully. I have a shiv in my hand. Show any sign of alarm and I’ll have one of your eyes out before they can open the door.’

      Shock kept her brave. Only once had she been attacked, shortly after she’d started work here. A client (she refused to talk of them as prisoners), a mild-mannered little man who hadn’t even come close to the kind of innuendo by which some of the men tried to imply a sexual relationship with her, suddenly lunged across the table, desperate to get his hands on some part of her, any part of her. The best he’d managed was to brush her left wrist before the door slid open and a warder gave him a short burst with a taser.

      Since then there’d been no trouble. Only Alva knew how frightened she’d been. When Parliament passed the Act a year ago permitting prison officers to carry tasers after the great Pentonville riot of 2014 she had been one of those who protested strongly against it. Now her certainty that if she pushed back her chair and screamed, the taser would be pumping 50kV into Hadda’s back long before the shiv could get anywhere near her eyes, gave her the strength to respond calmly, ‘What is it you want, Mr Hadda?’

      He said, ‘What I want is to fuck you till you faint, but we don’t have time for that. So I’ll have to make do with you kicking your left shoe off, stretching your leg under the table, placing your bare foot against my crotch, and rubbing it up and down till I come.’

      The part of her mind not still in shock thought, You poor sad bastard! You’re banged up with all the other deviants. Can’t you find someone in there to service you?

      She was still wondering if she could bring this situation to a conclusion without testing what level of voltage was necessary to subdue a mountain when Hadda smiled – that was the first time – and placed his empty hands palm up on the table and said, ‘I think if they were going to come they’d have been here by now, don’t you agree?’

      It took a second or two to get it. He’d been testing her assurance that the watching officers could not hear what was being said. Her mind was already exploring the implications of this, and she did not realize that her body was shaking in reaction until the door slid open and Officer Lindale said, ‘You OK, miss?’

      ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just got something stuck in my throat.’ And subsumed her trembling into a bout of coughing.

      He said, ‘Like some water, miss?’

      She shook her head and said, ‘No thanks. I’ll be OK.’

      When the door was closed again, Hadda said, ‘Sorry about my little charade. What you need is a stiff brandy. I suggest we cut this session short so you can go and get one.’

      She was still struggling with the after-effects of the shock and now she had to adjust to the new tone of voice in which he was addressing her.

      Somehow she managed to keep her own voice level as she replied, ‘No, if you’re so keen to be sure we’re not being listened to, I presume that means you’ve got something you’d like to say.’

      ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘What I’ve got is something for you to read. OK, I’m convinced you’re telling the truth when you say there’s nobody listening to us. Now I’d like your reassurance that nobody else will read this or anything else I give to you.’

      As he spoke, he pulled from his prison blouse a blue school exercise book.

      This was a shock different in nature from the threat of a shiv attack but in its way almost as extreme.

      With many of her clients, she suggested that if they felt like putting any of their feelings or thoughts down on paper before their next meeting, this could only be to the good. Nobody but herself would see what they wrote, she assured them, an assurance some took advantage of to lay before her in graphic detail their sexual fantasies.

      Hadda had simply blanked her out when she first suggested he might like to write something. She’d repeated the suggestion over several weeks, then at last she had given up.

      So this came completely out of the blue. It should have felt like a breakthrough, but she didn’t have the energy to exult.

      She realized Hadda was right. What she wanted to do now was get away to somewhere quiet and have a stiff drink.

      She said, ‘I promise you. No one will read anything of yours, unless you give permission. All right?’

      ‘It will have to be,’ he said, handing her the book.

      She took it and held it without attempting to open it.

      ‘And this is…?’ she said.

      ‘You keep saying you want to understand how I ended up in here. Well, this is the story. First instalment anyway.’

      She stood up, glanced at one of the cameras, and said as the door opened, ‘I look forward to reading it.’

      Then she’d headed straight back to her flat, had the longed-for stiff drink after which, rather СКАЧАТЬ