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 past himself, 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 wisdom and inherited certainties. Also she knew how easy it would be for him to make her job even harder than it was, though in fairness he had never done anything to block or disrupt what he called her tête-à-têtes, which he pronounced tit-a-tits with a face so blank it defied correction.
After a year in post, she wasn’t sure how much good she’d done in relation to the killers and terrorists, but as far as Hadda was concerned, she felt she’d made no impression whatsoever. They brought him along to see her, but he simply refused to talk. After a while she found that her earlier exasperation with what she had judged to be her predecessor’s too easy abandonment of his efforts was modifying into a reluctant understanding.
And then one day when she turned up at Parkleigh, the Director had sent for her.
‘Terrible news,’ he said. ‘It’s Hadda’s daughter. She’s dead.’
Alva had studied the man’s file so closely she did not need reminding of the facts. The girl, Virginia, had been thirteen when her father was sentenced. She had never visited him in prison. A careful check was kept of prisoners’ mail in and out. He had written letters to her c/o his ex-wife in the early days. There had been no known reply and the letters out had ceased though he persevered with birthday and Christmas cards.
Joe Ruskin had recorded that Hadda’s reaction to any attempt to bring up the subject of his relationship with his daughter had been to stand up and head for the door. Grief or guilt? the psychiatrist speculated. Hadda’s predilection for pubescent girls had led the more prurient tabloids to speculate whether she might have been an object of his abuse, but there had been no suggestion of this either in the police investigation nor in the case for the prosecution. Ruskin had demanded full disclosure of all information relevant to the man’s state of mind and crimes, but nowhere had he found anything to indicate that details had been kept secret to protect the child.
Now the Director filled in the details of Ginny’s life after her father’s downfall.
‘Her mother sent her to finish her education abroad, out of the reach of the tabloids. Her grandmother, that’s Lady Kira Ulphingstone, has family connections in Paris, and that’s where the girl seems to have settled. She was, by all accounts, pretty wild.’
‘With her background, why wouldn’t she be?’ said Alva. ‘How did she die?’
‘The worst way,’ said the Director. ‘There was a party in a friend’s flat, drugs, sex, the usual. She was found early this morning in an alley behind the apartment block. She’d passed out, choked on her own vomit. Nineteen years old. What a waste! Alva, he’s got to be told. It’s my job, I know, but I’d like you to be there.’
She’d watched Hadda’s face as he heard the news. There’d been no reaction that a camera could have recorded, but she had felt a reaction the way you feel a change of pressure as a plane swoops down to land, and you swallow, and it’s gone.
He hadn’t been wearing his sunglasses and his monoptic gaze had met hers for a moment. For the first time in their silent encounters, she felt her presence was registered.
Then he had turned his back on them and stood there till the Director nodded at the escorting officer and he opened the door and ushered the prisoner out.
‘I’ve put him on watch,’ said the Director. ‘It’s procedure in such circumstances.’
‘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