The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill Read Free Book Online

the mirrored lenses, a narrow ebon face, its colouring inherited from her Nigerian father, its bone structure from her Swedish mother. Also her hair, straight and pale as bone. Many people assumed it was a wig, worn for effect. She was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved sweater that neither obscured nor drew attention to her breasts.
Don’t be provocative in your dress
, the Director had advised her when she started the job.
But no point in over-compensating. If you turned up in a burka, they’d still mentally undress you.
    Did Hadda mentally undress her? she wondered. Up to their last session she’d have judged not. But what had happened then had stayed with her for the whole of the intervening seven days.
    It had started in the usual way. She was already seated at her side of the bare wooden table when the door on the secure side of the interview room opened. Prison Officer Lindale, young and compassionate, had smiled and nodded his head at her, then stood aside to let Wilfred Hadda enter.
    He limped laboriously into the room and sat down on the basic wooden chair that always seemed too small for him. Her fanciful notion that his rare smile was like wintry sunshine on a mountain probably rose from the sense of mountainous stillness he exuded. A craggy mountain, its face bearing the scars of ancient storms, its brow streaked with the greyish white of old snows.
    It was well over a year since their first meeting, and despite her own extensive research that had been added to the file inherited from Joe Ruskin, her predecessor at Parkleigh, she did not feel she knew much more about Hadda. Ruskin’s file was in Alva’s eyes a simple admission of failure. All his attempts to open a dialogue were simply ignored and in the end the psychiatrist had set down his assessment that in his view the prisoner was depressed but stable, and enforced medication would only be an option if his behaviour changed markedly.
    Alva Ozigbo had read the file with growing exasperation. The system it seemed to her had abandoned Hadda to deal with his pasthimself, and the way he was choosing to do it was to treat his sentence as a kind of hibernation.
    The trouble with hibernation was when the bat or the hedgehog or the polar bear woke up, it was itself again.
    Hadda, she read, had never admitted any of his crimes, but unlike many prisoners he did not make a thing of protesting his innocence either. According to his prison record, verbal abuse simply bounced off his monumental indifference. Isolation in the Special Unit had meant that there was little opportunity for other prisoners to attack him physically, but on the couple of occasions when, hopefully by accident, the warders let their guard down and an assault had been launched, his response had been so immediate and violent, it was the attackers who ended up in hospital.
    But that had been in the early days. For five years until Alva’s appointment in January 2015 he had been from the viewpoint of that most traditional of turnkeys, Chief Officer George Proctor, a model prisoner, troubling no one and doing exactly what he was told.
    The Chief Officer, a well-fleshed man with a round and rubicund face that gave a deceptive impression of Pickwickian good humour, was by no means devoid of humanity, but in his list of penal priorities it came a long way behind good order and discipline. So when he concluded his verdict on Hadda by saying, ‘Can’t understand what he’s doing in here’, Alva was puzzled.
    ‘But he was found guilty of very serious crimes,’ she said.
    ‘Yeah, and the bugger should be locked up for ever,’ said Proctor. ‘But look around you, miss. We got terrorists and subversives and serial killers, the bloody lot. That’s what this place is for. Hadda never done any serious harm to no one.’
    It was a point Alva would usually have debated fiercely, but she had already wasted too much time beating her fists against Proctor’s rock-hard shell of received