The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill Page A

in Essex just outside London. As if determined that it would be to penology what cathedrals were to religion, its architect incorporated into the design a single massive tower, visible for miles around in that flat landscape, a reassurance to the virtuous and a warning to the sinful.
    Rapidly overtaken by the capital’s urban sprawl, it continued pretty well unchanged until the 1980s when even the Thatcher hardliners had to accept it was no longer fit for purpose. Closed, itlanguished as a menacing monument to Victorian values for a decade or more. Everyone expected that eventually the building would be demolished and the site redeveloped for housing, but then it was announced, in the face of considerable but unavailing local protest, that under the Private Finance Initiative, Parkleigh was going to be refurbished as a maximum-security category A private prison.
    It would be a prison for all seasons, enthused the developers. Outside dark and forbidding enough to please the floggers and hangers, inside well ahead of the game in its rehabilitatory structures and facilities.
    Its clientele was to be category A prisoners, those whom society needed to be certain stayed locked up until they had served out their usually lengthy sentences. In 2010 Wolf Hadda was sent there to popular acclaim. Five years later he was joined by Alva Ozigbo, to far from popular acclaim.
    There were two main strikes against her.
    As a psychiatrist, she was too young.
    And as a woman, she was a woman.
    Outwardly Alva treated such objections with the contempt they deserved.
    Inwardly she acknowledged that both had some merit.
    At twenty-eight she was certainly a rising star, a rise commenced when she’d worked up her PhD thesis on the causes and treatment of deviant behaviour into a book with the catchy title of
Curing Souls.
This attracted attention, mainly complimentary, though the word
precocious
did occur rather frequently in the reviews. But it was a chance meeting that brought her to Parkleigh.
    Giles Nevinson, a lawyer friend who hoped by persistence to become more, had invited her to a formal dinner in the Middle Temple. While she had no intention of ever becoming more, she liked Giles. Also, through his job with the Crown Prosecution Service, he was a useful source of free legal advice and information. So she accepted.
    Giles spent much of the dinner deep in conversation about thebreeding of Persian cats with the rather grand-looking woman on his left. As he explained later, it was ambition rather than ailurophilia that caused him to neglect his guest. The other woman was Isa Toplady, the appropriately named wife of a High Court judge rumoured to be much influenced by his spouse’s personal opinions.
    Alva, obliged to turn to her right for conversational nourishment, found herself confronted by a slightly built man in his sixties, with wispy blond hair, pale blue eyes, and that expression of rather vapid benevolence with which some painters have attempted to indicate the indifference of saints to the scourges they are being scourged with, arrows they are being pierced with, or flames they are being roasted with.
    He introduced himself as John Childs and when he heard her name, he said, ‘Ah, yes.
Curing Souls.
A stimulating read.’
    Suspecting that, for whatever reason, he might have simply done a little basic pre-prandial homework, she tried him out with a few leading questions and was flattered to discover that not only had he actually read the book but he did indeed seem to have been stimulated by it.
    Some explanation of his interest came when he told her that he had a godson, Harry, who was doing A-level psychology and hoping to pursue his studies at university. Childs then set himself to pick Alva’s brain about the best way forward for the boy. It is always flattering to be consulted as an expert and it wasn’t till well through the dinner that she managed to turn the conversation from herself to her interlocutor.
    His own job he