The Silent Forest

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘I’m trying to find out.’

  ‘Or you’re some interfering, upper crust toff who thinks she can do my job as well as me?’

  ‘Nice to meet you, too.’

  The inspector’s eyes were as black as his ill-fitting suit, Jo noted grimly; he had that unappealing stare in his lean face that brooked no competition. Nothing wrong with that. He was just doing his job and he was quick to spot trouble. Don’t let it be her.

  ‘Come, come, Inspector. No hard feelings.’

  ‘I don’t like people who can’t adequately explain their presence at a crime scene.’

  ‘It’s quite a story, I must admit.’

  ‘Give your statement to the constable over there. I’ll be in touch if I need to speak to you again.’

  ‘Just so you know, this death is a fluke. More or less.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘He’s local businessman James Boreman.’

  ‘So it appears.’

  ‘What you should also know is that he owns a string of dodgy companies that employ slave labour. He’s also a black marketer and wife beater. He may even be a murderer. From the look of the tracks left behind in the snow, I’d say he was running when he set off his own trap that he set to poach game.’

  ‘Someone was chasing him?’

  ‘Or some thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow.’

  Jo sucked her lip and looked grave.

  ‘At a guess, I’d say James Boreman thought he was being pursued all right. That’s not to say he wasn’t correct, but it may all have been in his imagination.’

  ‘So it isn’t a fluke?’

  ‘That depends on what you call fluky. Either way, he dropped his rifle and ran away.’

  ‘Now you’re making no sense at all.’

  ‘I can only say what I saw.’

  ‘Good luck with that, Mrs Wheeler.’

  Jo and Sam traded looks as they walked with Freya back to Beech Tree Grange where she picked up the phone. They were agreed on one thing: the surest method of terrifying someone was to have them come face to face with their deepest, innermost fear.

  ‘I can stay with you tonight, if you wish,’ said Jo.

  But Freya was adamant.

  ‘I’ll never sleep under this roof again.’

  ‘So where will you go?’

  ‘I’ll drive Sam to my father’s place at Tunnel Cottage. That’s strange…’

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Someone else is answering my call.’

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  ‘You read today’s ‘Citizen’?’ asked John, as he and Jo took their seats with several hundred other carol singers in Gloucester Cathedral.

  Jo peered through her pillbox hat’s gossamer veil that she wore at a jaunty angle. This evening, the nave was a mixture of shapes and shadows. While a few strategically positioned lanterns twinkled atmospherically high up on stone arches, the tiny flames of candles down below rendered everyone all lit faces and little else in the deliberate dimness. They were ghosts that reeked of coal smoke, cigarettes and badly washed clothes in this enormous, medieval auditorium.

  The way she saw it, this was a night for celebration. In her bag was a present for Noah.

  Never mind that John was talking far too eagerly and loudly. She didn’t even know what he meant.

  Any headlines had to wait.

  Not to John they couldn’t.

  ‘The police have acted on our investigation.’

  ‘Good to know.’

  ‘Is that all you can say? You should consider yourself a hero.’

  Jo shivered inside her belted, double-breasted gabardine trench coat. She had taken care to fasten all ten buttons, but still the wide lapels and storm flap did not quite keep out the biting chill. Access to the cathedral this Christmas was not by the South Porch but via the cloisters. As a result, the draught was nearly killing her. She could just make out the newspaper’s front page: “Police arrest sister of well-known local businessman”.’

  ‘Spare me the hero bit, please.’

  ‘Really, you should read this. Police have raided the caravan site and factory we visited in the Forest of Dean and released the workers. Tia Boreman is to be charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice as well as black marketeering.’

  ‘They’re not wrong, are they.’

  ‘How’s Freya’s father doing?’

  It was John again, giving her another nudge in the ribs.

  ‘The last I heard, the hospital was treating him for frostbite on two toes.’

  ‘If Nora and Thibaut hadn’t arrived in time he might not have been so lucky. And we would never have known who attacked him down that abandoned coal mine.’

  ‘Tia denies all knowledge, of course.’

  Jo’s gaze wandered higher and higher in the nave. Light and darkness hung in the balance. It was both humbling and frightening. A monument to forgiveness. Hundreds of singers were gathering in the gargantuan stone cave built for people by people, but from another time.

  ‘Whatever Tia says, it was her idea to flood the bodies in acid to render them unrecognisable. Freya overheard her discussing a plan very like it at her party.’

  John traded his newspaper for the Christmas song sheet in his coat.

  ‘I don’t get it. Why dump bodies down a mine? Why take the risk?’

  ‘Why not? Through bad luck, bad health or desertion from the armed forces most of Boreman’s employees had ceased to function socially. Few people were going to miss them if they disappeared.’

  ‘You think he had them killed?’

  ‘As good as. They died from accidents sustained at work in his factory. I saw the conditions in Lydney – they were lethal.’

  ‘That’s all there is to it?’

  ‘Think about it. If James paid for a doctor to tend to his injured workers, all sorts of questions would have been raised that would have led straight back to him. Angela and Raoul weren’t the only ones to be dumped somewhere obscure, I bet. Doctors are a nosy lot. They like to ask how you came by your injuries. A worker only had to mention his name and he was in trouble. Don’t forget he stole their ID and Ration Cards. That way everyone was rendered helpless, at his beck and call. They were never human beings to James Boreman. Not really. He always kept them at arm’s length. Better to dispose of a body or two in the Forest’s most secret places where no one would ever find them, than risk ruining his business model. All that changed when he met Jim Wilde underground. That’s when he tried to kill him with his own hand.’

  ‘He made his money from fear.’

  ‘Yet fear killed him.’

  ‘Not before his wife suffered horribly.’

  ‘Second that.’

  ‘Who’d have thought it? James was held up to be such a brilliant businessman.’

  ‘We both know he wasn’t.’

  John looked for tunes he knew on his song sheet and his eyes narrowed when he came to ‘Hark! The herald angels sing’.

  ‘You look terrific by the way. Pregnancy is doing you some good at last.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘You look quite bonny.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Your face is a better colour. Not so pasty.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve stopped being so sick every morning. I put it down to not going to “The Women’s League Of Health And Beauty” any more. I’m doing beer yoga instead.’

  ‘Say that again?’

  ‘It’s all my own invention. One day it will really catch on. I do yoga and sip Guinness. It makes it less intimidating.’

  ‘The beer or the yoga?’

  ‘I’ve only dared try it a few times so far.’

  ‘We should definitely see that film together.’

  ‘….’

  ‘So what are you going to do over Christmas?’ asked John, hurriedly.

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Are you moving bac
k home? What about New Year? Where will you have the baby? Or are you going into labour one night when you and I are fire watching at the top of the cathedral tower?’

  ‘With those steps!’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘First things first. I’ll go and see my brother, naturally. Meanwhile, my father wants me to help him persuade my mother to go to a tuberculosis sanatorium at Salterley Grange to help her recuperate! But will she go? Hell, no! Nor is she about to forgive my fall from grace any time soon.’

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’

  ‘Apparently rats in my house are what I deserve.’

  ‘And the baby’s father? What will he say when he finds out?’

  ‘I’m beginning to think I’ll go it alone.’

  John flattened his song sheet back on his knee.

  ‘It says here the Mayor of Gloucester is treating us to a talk tonight as well as the Bishop.’

  ‘It’s not so good.’

  ‘The mayor?’

  ‘The rats.’

  ‘I’m glad we’ve got that clear.’

  Suddenly Jo saw Sam and Freya take their seats in the row just in front of her. They had only spoken once since the night of James’s death, when she had given Sam a dozen cigarette cards depicting trains.

  One thing struck her at once – Freya was wearing a different perfume. No more smelling of verbena. She turned and gave her a smile. It was a smile the like of which she had not seen her give before. At first it baffled her totally. Then she realised. The grin was different because a shadow had lifted from her whole face. The new look spoke volumes. The routine of saying as little as possible every day for years, lest she provoke some boorish reaction in her husband, had ended. She’d had less voice because James had claimed more say in their lives. She’d had little pick of what to do, wear or how to bring up their boy because he had exercised infinite choice for them all. He’d ruled his family like some evil beast but now he was gone.

  Tonight she seemed ‘more her’. She was never going to regret it. As if she could finally see herself now she felt strong.

  Freya had forgotten about her already. Which was only right and proper. It was a relief to see her free to enjoy the spectacle. Had she, Jo Wheeler, done the right thing, though? It was all too easy to go charging into someone else’s life, but such actions had consequences. She was no King Arthur in shining armour. There were some things no one could change. James’s death was one of them. Sam was another. Together, mother and son had planned it all, she had no doubt about that. They’d carefully put the idea of the phantom boar into James’s head and driven him half insane. Like any caring parent, Freya had feared that Sam might not be allowed to be himself, that his father’s hostility would see him sent abroad for experimental treatment only to see his ship torpedoed in mid-Atlantic.

  Being different should not mean being a guinea pig.

  At no time was Sam to be considered defective.

  Or odd.

  Only gifted?

  So she’d acted.

  *

  ‘Isn’t it marvellous?’

  John was nudging her frantically, Jo realised. She stood up with the rest of the audience and her ears resonated – her eyes widened and her jaw fell open. The very air seemed ready to burst. Her lungs were breathing a collective awe as everyone instinctively leaned forward for a better view.

  At first the weight of darkness was almost too great, too oppressive as a procession of choristers wove its way through the nave. A presentiment of foreboding came with them, until only the singers’ tremulous voices, as fragile as glass, stood between her and the cavernous night that enclosed them all. Christmas trees looked lost in the void. The candle-lit procession spun web-like threads of light through the echoing gloom.

  Such great echoes were themselves distorted, repeated and swallowed as the choristers attempted to use their voices to reach the towering heights above them. No single human utterance could be sufficient to fill the space that wanted to crush it?

  Suddenly there came into her head the carved image of the stone mason’s apprentice falling to his death in the South Transept. People had died building these walls.

  But if she was struck by the fragility of those gathered together here tonight, no one’s lungs failed to cry out in full agreement as they stood shoulder to shoulder.

  Her own initial faltering vanished, too. It was not every day that so many ordinary folk got to sing together in their comical mixture of hats, turbans and scarves. The choir’s voices were already united. What began as a trickle became a flood – sounds combined to raise the volume with unparalleled acoustics. It was not just loudness but confidence. She felt her lungs swelling. With mellifluence came strength. Men and boys singing were no longer mere performers but a great current as they sang ‘Silent Night’ and the congregation joined in. Together everyone’s voices became bolder through clarity and pureness.

  Whereas in the beginning the stone void above her was all set to diminish and swallow, now the sheer flow of sound expanded to fill the greatest of spaces – such was the power and beauty of song that grew to fill it.

  Then something happened. The miracle. The scales slipped from her eyes. Next moment the darkness – that weighty adumbration – retreated and there came in its place the warmth of human company. No angry thoughts haunted these walls any longer. It was possible for light to triumph over darkness, to forgive one’s self, after all?

  As the Bishop of Gloucester began to deliver his sermon on the evils of war, John hissed in her ear.

  ‘Tell me one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What on earth will we say to Bruno Smith?’

  ‘We’ll tell him he was mistaken.’

  ‘That’s not what he’ll want to hear.’

  ‘All right, just suppose we do accept that James Boreman’s two timber thieves were involved in Sarah’s ‘accident’?’ Jo reached for a cigarette, then thought better of it. ‘Devaney and his moustachioed friend caused her to crash in a fit of very bad tailgating or they were acting on more lethal instructions – to give her the fright of her life. As they did us. My guess is that, in the heat of the moment, in the very act of being chased, she swerved to avoid some animal that dashed across the road right in front of her.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘How shall I put it? It had to be something pretty exceptional to cause her to panic like that because she was normally such a cautious driver. According to Bruno, excessive speed was the one thing she hated above all else.’

  ‘You don’t seriously think it was our mythical white boar, do you, Jo?’

  ‘The Forest alone knows what Sarah saw that awful night. But it will never say. It’ll keep its secret.’

  With that, she plucked her red and gold fountain pen from her pocket and scribbled a few words at the top of his hymn sheet: Flicks on Friday. Picturedrome. Don’t be late.

  Other mystery novels set in Gloucestershire by Guy Sheppard:

  Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall - Buy now on Kindle

  Sabrina & The Secret Of The Severn Sea - Buy now on Kindle