by Jo Allen
Death in the Woods
Jo Allen
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Also by Jo Allen
Acknowledgments
Author Copyright Jo Allen 2021
Cover Art: Mary Jayne Baker
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be resold or given away.
* * *
This story is a work of fiction. The characters are figments of my imagination and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Some of the locations used are real. Some are invented.
Created with Vellum
Foreword
All of the characters in this book are figments of my imagination and bear no resemblance to anyone alive or dead.
The same can’t be said for the locations. Many are real but others are not. I’ve taken several liberties with geography, mainly because I have a superstitious dread of setting a murder in a real building without the express permission of the homeowner, but also because I didn’t want to accidentally refer to a real character in a real place or property.
So, for example, you won’t find Jude’s home village of Wasby on the map; you will find the village of Lazonby but its pub, the Golden Cage, is an invention. Lacy’s Caves and the Long Meg stone circle are real but Geri’s cottage is not.
Although I’ve taken these liberties with the details I’ve tried to remain true to the overwhelming beauty of the Cumbrian landscape. I hope the many fans of the Lake District will understand, and can find it in their hearts to forgive me for these deliberate mistakes.
One
It was a day for dying.
Izzy Ecclestone had been hanging around in Cave Wood for hours, smoking the occasional spliff and, as her brain grew hazier, musing on the inevitable end of everything. She’d been sitting for some time in a clearing with her back to a tree, her eyes on a view that was half undergrowth and half sunset, while the shadows of the trees wrapped their stealthy fingers around her soul. Now, as the late summer daylight clung on like an unwanted guest, the time for thinking lapsed and the moment for action was upon her.
Death comes slowly like a soft slipper to a tired foot, she wrote in her notebook, pressing too heavily so that the nib of her mechanical pencil snapped and the sliver of graphite spat into the grass. That was it, a fitting last line to a short life.
Leaving the stub of the cigarette spluttering to extinction on bare earth, she got up and stumbled her way back through the woods towards the stone circle and the oak that the locals called the Sentinel Tree. Around her, the shadows deepened to green on the way to soft, all-consuming black. Sly things moved within them — birds late to roost, perhaps, or bats, or moths with their wingspans as large as the palm of her hand. Still clutching notebook and pencil, she picked her way over-carefully across the soft forest floor, catching her foot from time to time in twisted roots and fallen branches. As she emerged from the woods a little way down the slope the darkness gave way to grey light, but even that would fade away in minutes as night came rolling over the lip of the Pennines and filtered into the valley.
She stopped. From outside the thin margin of the woods, where the undergrowth gave way to a track and eventually to civilisation, someone was watching her.
Many things scared Izzy but ghosts weren’t among them. Next to the prospect of a long life in a doomed world the dead had nothing to offer that would hurt her, and none of the many ghosts she’d seen before had seemed remotely threatening. Around her, the woods shivered in a narcotic haze as she stopped and faced down the shrunken figure who confronted her. She lifted a strand of barbed wire with the back of her forearm and squeezed through the gap, oblivious to the pain she should have felt when it snagged the back of her wrist.
At the top of slope, the stone circle of Long Meg and her Daughters stood purple against the skyline. A host of fairy stories floated in Izzy’s brain, interweaving like the swirls of smoke she’d inhaled. Here on the cusp between life and death, fantasy and reality, anything was possible. Fascinated, she edged closer to the grey figure. ‘Are you Long Meg?’
‘No.’ It was a woman. Izzy’s senses were comfortably blunt but she could see that much, though the darkness and the figure’s grey and shapeless clothing showed her little more. ‘My name is Raven.’
Izzy’s chest contracted in disappointment as a terrible thought came to her, that somehow she’d been drawn over that line into the afterlife without having the courage to take action for herself. She spared a brief thought for the people she’d left behind and how they’d never know what had happened. She’d disappear. They’d search the banks of the River Eden all the way to the sea and never find her body, assuming she’d been washed away by the ever-rolling waves, her soft flesh picked away by the creatures of the deep. In reality she’d be where she always was, a shadow among the shadows, watching as they searched, waiting until it was her time to lure the living through the ever-shifting boundary that kept them apart.
There really was no need to be afraid of the dead. ‘Are you a ghost?’
‘No.’ Raven shuffled forward into what passed for the light. ‘Not yet.’
Then if she was no ghost, Izzy herself was not dead. In the centre of the sprawling circle, the skeleton of the Sentinel Tree stood watching, waiting for Izzy to choose her moment and hang from its branches. ‘Do you think you will be one day? A ghost, I mean?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the woman, with confidence. ‘We all will. But for me it’ll be sooner rather than later.’
‘Are you dying?’ Anyone she knew would have jumped on her for that, but Izzy was a believer in naming the names of dread things and of speaking the unspeakable. Life was sometimes not worth living and she had the courage to say so. Even without the uninhibiting flow of marijuana through her veins, she’d sensed she was in the presence of a fellow thinker.
‘Yes.’ Raven’s hand fluttered up in front of her almost, Izzy thought, like a soul leaving a body. ‘But very slowly.’
I don’t know what to say, Izzy’s mother might have said in these circumstances, going scarlet with embarrassment, but Izzy wasn’t floored. ‘Are you scared?’
‘Not at all. I’ve lived a long time. I’ve been very happy. And it’s not a happy world I’m leaving behind. I’ll only miss some of the people.’ Raven’s expression darkened for a moment, before it flared into tranquility. ‘And they’ll be with me soon enough.’
‘I’m ready to die, too. And that’s why. The world is such a terrible place. I’m not afraid of death, either. In fact, I positively want to die.’ Izzy looked towards the Sentinel Tree, whose shadows had blurred into the dark grey of the grass. ‘That’s why I’m here. It’s what I came here to do.’
‘And is it your time?’ Raven turned toward
s the setting sun.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘There’s a right time. I don’t know when my time will be, only that it isn’t quite yet.’
Izzy tried to walk towards her, but her feet seemed unable to meet the ground as easily as usual and she stumbled. Raven held out a thin hand to steady her and the two of them stood for a second looking westward, two scant figures, one old and one young. ‘So when will your time be?’
‘I don’t know. Time chooses you.’
That was very passive. Izzy’s dad sometimes used to chide her for that. Her mother, who was kinder, called her timid, but if there was one thing she wanted to prove to them it was that she was capable of taking control of her life, if only in the leaving of it. ‘I don’t think so. I think you have to choose.’ They had their backs to the tree now, but she could still feel it calling her. Such a beautiful shape, such dark, sinister beauty and a promise of peace. ‘It’s what people do these days.’
‘Oh.’ Raven laughed. Her voice had been thin but the laugh rang strong. ‘I don’t think just because something’s modern it’s necessarily good, do you?’
‘I think it’s the way we young people fight back. Our parents created an evil world. Our only answer is to leave them behind.’ Izzy waited for laughter, but it didn’t come. Emboldened, she carried on. ‘That’s why people are killing themselves. Did you know that? Two people — both around my age, twenty — have killed themselves around here. One of them hanged himself from a tree on Beacon Hill. I didn’t know him, but the other was a girl in my village. She jumped off the bridge in Lazonby, in front of a train.’ An odd one, because Izzy had known Tania since primary school, and nothing about the girl had ever suggested she might be contemplating taking that final step. In her heart Izzy felt a little cheated. ‘Everyone says it was a terrible tragedy, but I think they’ll be so much happier away from this world.’ Around her, the world swayed a little, flexed in and out as if it was being squeezed. She felt strange.
‘Maybe they will,’ Raven agreed. She moved a little closer, laid thin fingers on Izzy’s arm. ‘But it’s the people they leave behind. Isn’t it?’
Izzy considered. It was true her family would miss her, and of course she felt sorry for them, but there was something so intriguing about death, something so very exciting. For years she’d yearned to know what lay on the other side. Sometimes, in her dreams, she thought she saw into it, this other-worldly place where nothing was ever wrong, where the perpetual sense of calm matched the one she got from smoking weed. ‘They’ll be sad to start with but they’ll realise I won’t be sad either. It’ll be fine.’
‘I have a daughter,’ Raven said, suddenly. ‘Will you write to her for me?’
Looking down, Izzy saw she was somehow still clutching the notebook and pencil. Blood had trickled from the back of her hands and between her fingers to leave bloody fingermarks smeared on the cover. She looked back at Raven. Two strange people, caught in this half-light. Surely everything happened for a reason. And — it struck her at last — she couldn’t hang herself that day. She hadn’t brought a rope. ‘Can’t you do it yourself?’
‘My eyes aren’t so good any more,’ the older woman said, almost apologetically. ‘And I have arthritis.’ She spread her right hand in front of her to show curled fingers. ‘She’ll be wondering how I am.’
‘You can’t phone?’
‘I don’t have a phone.’
Belatedly, Izzy realised who she was talking to. This must be one of the hippies who’d set up camp in the field between Long Meg and the village of Little Salkeld, cooking on camp fires and, her mother said, doing nothing that could be regarded as useful to anyone. There was something appealing to Izzy about this approach. If you couldn’t escape the complexities of modern life, the best way surely was to let it all wash over you.
If she didn’t die, she might become a hippy. For the moment that seemed like a noble compromise. ‘Why don’t you write her a note now? I’ll post it.’
‘You can write to her for me.’ Still holding on to Izzy’s arm, Raven drew her out of the lengthening shadows just as they caught up with them. ‘Her name is Indigo. Write to her in Oxford. Waldorf College. Tell her I’m not very well and I’d like to see her before I die.’
Izzy tore the top sheet off the notebook and let it fall. She’d have forgotten the poem when she woke in the morning, but that was okay. Poems weren’t meant to be permanent and when she needed another one she’d write it. ‘I’ll do that.’
‘Could you do it tonight?’
Bewitched for a moment by a sudden sense of empowerment, Izzy toyed with the idea of offering to phone and solve this strange apparition’s problem, but it was late, well after nine, and there would surely be no-one answering the phone on the switchboard of an Oxford college. In the last of the light, she looked down at the clean sheet on the pad and wrote down Indigo, Waldorf College, Oxford. In its own way, that qualified as a poem. ‘What’s her surname?’
‘We don’t have surnames. Don’t worry. It’ll find her.’
On impulse, Izzy leaned in and hugged the woman, thinking as she did so of her own grandmother. In her arms Raven was little more than a skeleton bundled up in rags. If this was death, up close, it wasn’t the way she imagined it, or the way she read about it in the true crimes and tales of tortured suicides that sent shivers down her spine even as they fascinated her. ‘I’ll do that.’
‘Thank you.’
There was a pause and then Raven nodded as if in dismissal. In the brightening moonlight, Izzy passed beneath the bare branches of the mighty Sentinel Tree and headed off down the track towards home.
In the dawn, when the rising sun had repelled the darkness, gathering its full strength and forcing the shadows back into their lairs, Raven made her sleepless way around the edge of the trees and down among them towards the singing River Eden. She shook her head as she turned past a steep outcrop of sandstone striped like a tabby cat, thinking of the strange but appealing child she’d met the night before. So full of life, if only she knew it.
On the far side of the river the rocks were vermilion in the rising sun, but the west-facing woods were still dim. The wind stirred the branches and the branches in their turn set the shadows dancing. It was, she recognised, an unnatural dance, at odds with the light weight of the dappled leaves.
Troubled, Raven stopped. As she’d feared, the worst had happened. A few yards in from the water’s edge, a body dangled like a dummy from the branch of a tree.
She stood for a while, staring at it, before she turned and, gathering her skirt around her knees, scrambled as fast as she could back up the hill. And the wind stopped but the heavy weight of death in the trees rumbled on, a solid shadow swinging behind her, back and forth, back and forth.
Two
‘It looks for all the world like a straightforward suicide.’ Detective Sergeant Ashleigh O’Halloran turned to her boss — and lover — and crinkled her eyes, partly against the sun and partly in sheer puzzlement. ‘One I can understand. But now we have three, and in the space of a couple of months. Does that make it an epidemic?’
Did it? If it didn’t it certainly made it more of a puzzle. Jude Satterthwaite, too, frowned at the scene. He’d been dealing with death, whether violent, accidental or self-inflicted, for the better part of two decades, so long he’d become inured to it in a way that shamed him, but he wasn’t as hard as he’d thought. These days the death of a youth always struck him a little more close to the heart than it used to. He tried not to think of Mikey, the younger brother around the same age as this most recent corpse, who was the worry that kept him awake at night, the problem he couldn’t solve. ‘I don’t know the definition. But it certainly merits further investigation. Yes.’
‘Faye must think it’s serious, if she sent you down to deal with it.’
Faye Scanlon, the Detective Superintendent, had an uncanny ear for circumstances that chimed ill. She might be wrong, of course, might have scanne
d the resources available to her and decided Jude was the one with the least to do — though least never meant not enough. Or it might be more pragmatic. ‘I don’t know if it’s that. I expect she knows this kind of thing gets people stressed and she wants them to know we’re on top of it.’
He’d left his car by the ruins of the old mine by the railway line, where a uniformed police officer had been turning back interested onlookers, and walked the half mile or so to where Ashleigh had been checking over the scene. There was a second uniformed officer on the path in front of them and a CSI team beyond them on the riverside path, picking over the bones of what looked like suicide to make sure that nothing was missed, nothing slipped by.
‘Are we on top of it?’ Ashleigh asked, in unusual irritation. ‘I’m foxed by this one. I don’t mind telling you. I don’t know what we can bring to it. Three kids killing themselves? Is this really one for the police? If you ask me we should be handing it over to the psychologists.’
Jude looked beyond the uniformed officer and up into the woods where the body of the latest suicide, a young man, had recently been cut down. In the background a mortuary van revved in readiness to take it back along the broken tarmac of the old road, loud even above the rippling of the River Eden a few feet below. ‘I’d have thought you were the ideal person to answer that one.’ In the year she’d been working with him she was always the one who picked up on the nuances, always the first detective to sense when something wasn’t right.
