The Silent Forest Read online

  THE SILENT FOREST

  A Jo Wheeler Mystery

  Guy Sheppard

  © Guy Sheppard 2019

  All rights reserved.

  Guy Sheppard has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author.

  Cover design & typesetting by Socciones Editoria Digitale

  www.socciones.co.uk

  Bristol. Sunday, November 24, 1940

  That dull drone in my ears is deafening. It’s half monotonous machine and half grumbling monster as it thrums over St Peter’s Church and shakes me rigid – it feels far too massive, cumbersome and heavy to stay in the sky. Whole colonies of maddened bees are swarming my way? My other thought is a growl of thunder. But this noise is everywhere in the walls, in the floor and in my bones. I twist and turn on my polished wooden pew because the very air itself is beginning to tremble all around me. Whatever this is, it’s not usual.

  My wristwatch says 6.30 p.m. Reverend Lovegay’s booming voice breaks off from reading Evening Service. He gazes in awe at the fiery flicker that suddenly illuminates the nearby stained glass window like daylight – it could be a light from hell.

  Next minute he’s urging us politely but firmly to find refuge in the vaults of nearby St Peter’s Hospital. Still everyone is surprisingly slow to stir. Others insist on arranging their hymn books on their shelves quite neatly. The person beside me can’t find their gloves. We’ve all grown a bit blasé about false air raid alarms, so why should this one be any different?

  But not me. Not this time. I’m first to wrench open the heavy church door and stride down the road.

  That doesn’t mean I’m not as stunned as the rest of the congregation. I can’t think straight, either. All those heavy ack-ack guns starting up at Bath and Weston fill me with confusion and panic.

  I break into a run even as something else screams, whistles and hits a house close by me. It flares like an obscene firework in an upstairs window. Frantic screams break out as shadowy hands claw at blazing blackout curtains. I summon the courage and dive past. Whatever just hit home went straight through the roof. A red clay tile smashes to smithereens at my heels, slashes the back of my boot. I utter a cry: it’s half profane oath and half childish yelp.

  But that’s not the worst of it. Something singes my hair and scorches my cheeks. A blizzard of burning embers blows my way like hot fireflies.

  Reverend Lovegay was right – no one can afford to get caught in the open. I have to be more careful.

  These first German planes must be dropping some sort of flares in their thousands. Half the city is going up in flames. One canister misses its target and explodes in the road not two hundred yards before me – it spills its load of thirty-six metal cylinders like toys on the tarmac. The individual sticks might be small but each incendiary burns like crazy. On the angry air comes a pungent smell – of burning aluminium and iron oxide.

  Well, I don’t know what to say.

  I’m suddenly haunted by the conviction that I’ve taken a wrong turning.

  I can’t see much for smoke and flame. Can it be? That street up ahead is mine.

  Castle Street is aglow already.

  A half-naked woman staggers from a blazing doorway, clutches her face and screams, ‘My eyes! My eyes!’

  But I have no time for her. Each firebomb is fuelling a ferocious firestorm.

  Can’t you see what’s happening?

  This whole idea’s crazy.

  Better get myself to the nearest shelter, I’d say.

  Yes, but my baby and husband are right in the middle of all this.

  I should be at home with them this very moment – the three of us should be safe and sound in the stone cellar of our sweet-shop.

  That blind woman is a terrible warning.

  ‘Emmy! Jack! I’m coming.’

  ONE

  Gloucester, Autumn 1943

  As Sam Boreman struck another match in the cathedral’s gloomy nave, he wondered whether his innocent action would attract the one-eared woman’s attention. To do any good, each flame had not only to burn but to dazzle. Ordinarily it would be too normal, too commonplace? Not worth a second glance. But for a ten-year-old boy who knew bad things, this was no mere prayer candle he was lighting.

  Each bright little beacon was a signal-fire, somewhere between a guide and a warning, should she glance his way? They both knew she wouldn’t. There had to be something slightly solemn, even broken-hearted, about her walk up and down the north aisle. But for the miniature bull terrier at her side, she might have chosen to be alone. No matter how oppressive the weight of surrounding grey stone, she seemed happiest pacing cold shadows cast by towering pillars.

  Those words on her crimson and gold badge said FIRE WATCHER, he noted, while those on her white-on-blue armband said FIRE GUARD. The black cat Craven “A” packet of ten in her blackberry coloured fingernails gave her a somewhat rebellious air, as if here was someone who didn’t care too much for authority. She puckered her bright red lips and waggled a cork-tipped cigarette at her stainless steel Zippo lighter that she worked with one hand. She broke her own rules in this place of prayer.

  Sam reached across the ranks of votive offerings to place his hot candle in its waxy hole. His nervous breaths caused its flame to waver dangerously on its crooked black wick. Had he not already tried to do the right thing and confess all? Yet here he was. Even his school teacher had warned him not to be so stupid. ‘But, ma’am, I’ve seen things. In the Forest. I don’t know what to call it. I never even knew it existed.’ She’d literally looked at him as if he were possessed by the devil.

  No, the woman with one ear had to be his best hope, if only he had the courage. Dressed in long brown coat and scarf, she conjured up images of the ghostly monks of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter going about their daily services. She flared like a moth in shafts of white light that pooled below the Great East Window’s empty, stone tracery.

  His head already buzzed. He could feel a panic attack coming on. If it wasn’t the fire watcher’s eyes that followed him everywhere, it was others. They latched on. That was because impressive monuments bore witness to violent and bloody deeds that most definitely did still haunt dark corners now. Whether it was the effigy of a king or a crusader, or the statue of monk Serlo, founder of the very slabs on which he stood, they all kept vigil on behalf of eternal time.

  Or he fancied he heard the jeers of mischievous Civil War soldiers, the ear-shattering reports of their muskets and the clip-clop of tired horses upon the nave’s grey pavement.

  For, whatever tragedy this cathedral was witnessing right now had been carved much earlier in stone – he craned his neck and saw a curly-haired apprentice with open arms and twisted knee forever plunge with a frozen scream to the floor of the south transept far below.

  But it was no good. The very reason he had come here was the same reason he should leave as soon as possible. The minster’s guardian angel carried her gas mask over her shoulder and settled her unwieldy steel helmet on her head as she emerged in front of the choir. He listened to her shiny black boots tap the stones. Patrolling.
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br />   She hissed a few words to her mangy dog and disappeared in the direction of the south aisle. By way of response, the ugly, partly bald bull terrier sat down panting within sight of the burning candles. It remained fixed to a grimy stone slab, as if in its own act of religious devotion. An animal like that, once roused, could be hard to dissuade. He couldn’t say if it was his keeper or protector.

  Relax. There was no reason to worry.

  Oh, but there was.

  Seconds later a shadow appeared at his shoulder. It was the mutilated woman, smelling of jasmine, rose and lilac. She’d used the dog to distract and outflank him.

  ‘You hungry, at all?’

  ‘….’

  ‘I take it that’s a yes.’

  The unfamiliar wrapper in her outstretched hand caught his attention.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a Hershey Bar.’

  ‘What’s a Hershey Bar?’

  ‘It’s chocolate, silly. Go on, take it. It won’t bite you.’

  ‘All I ever get is liquorice or fruit gums.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t know any American GIs.’

  ‘Don’t you want it?’

  ‘It tastes too sour and tangy for me.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘If anyone asks where you got it, tell them that Jo Wheeler gave it to you. And don’t throw the wrapper on the floor.’

  It was all over in a few seconds, before she departed as swiftly as she’d arrived. Who else would have done that? Nobody. It was a blatant bribe from someone who wanted him gone – she was like every other treacherous adult he’d ever met? She threw him the bar of milk chocolate the same way she tossed her dog a bone?

  But that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have come clean with her about something.

  *

  ‘You seen the brat, or what?’

  Jo stopped dead and looked round. Anyone with an ounce of sense could see that she was in no mood to chat right now, but not the verger John Curtis, who was refusing to get out of her way in the cathedral’s chilly cloister. Red-faced and agitated, he buttonholed her beside one of the perfectly preserved stone receptacles once used for towels in the monks’ lavatorium.

  ‘Seen who?’

  ‘The boy, damn it. He’s lighting more prayer candles.’

  ‘That’s what people do.’

  ‘But why does he have to light so many?’

  ‘How the devil should I know?’

  There came that twitch in John’s lip that she’d come to expect and dread. Ever since he had lived through the London Blitz, he had given up his job publishing bibles and prayer books in the capital and moved to this new, distinctly less well paid position in Gloucester Cathedral. It was seeing other people’s children blown to bits in front of his eyes that had destroyed his belief in pacifism. As a result, at the age of thirty-five he’d belatedly tried to enlist as a soldier, but his poor eyesight had let him down. That’s how badly he needed to rethink things now. Other people might say he was, like her, still in shock. If the war ended in victory – if it ever ended, that is – then there might be a slim chance of them both forgiving the bombers. She hadn’t the foggiest idea when that would be.

  She admired his stubbornness, though. God might have deserted this world at the present time, but John Curtis still thought it his duty to help protect His place of worship. Not that it was without considerable risk, not when a ten-hour bombing raid had practically levelled Coventry Cathedral of St Michael in November 1940. Since then there had been the so-called ‘Baedeker’ raids. The enemy was using the well-known international guidebook to target cathedral cities all over England. Exeter had been badly hit on 24 April 1942 and Canterbury had burned on May 31. It could conceivably happen here in Gloucester any day soon. As caretaker to these hallowed walls John was making himself a target. He’d be here when the bombs fell, which worried her sick.

  ‘Do me a favour, Jo. Get rid of him. It’ll be blackout in half an hour.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I don’t like it. Why isn’t he in school? Who is he? Does he have his Identity Card with him, I wonder?’

  ‘The parents look after the cards of all children under sixteen. You know that.’

  ‘So where are they? Do they even live in Gloucester?’

  ‘Perhaps they’re d…’ A wave of guilt broke over Jo for even having this conversation. Her heart raced. Perhaps someone the boy knew had just died in an air raid. Perhaps someone was suffering. Maybe the boy himself was terminally ill. Speculation knew no bounds.

  John stroked one end of his black moustache.

  ‘It’s unnatural, I tell you. What boy his age volunteers to come to church every day for a whole week?’

  ‘Tell that to the choristers.’

  Jo looked down the corridor of magnificent fan vaulting and thought of all the monks who had once chosen to find inner peace here. She still hoped to find answers, too. Being thirty years old, she was, by most people’s reckoning, well and truly ‘on the shelf’.

  It was hard to see how to disagree. Had she not once spent too long in the company of handsome Hooray Henrys who had complimented her on her exceptional beauty? Huh! They wouldn’t be doing that now, would they! She’d rebuffed innumerable offers to woo her at parties and pheasant shoots held on her father’s estate high on the Cotswolds, only to fall madly in love with someone completely different and get married.

  Look how that turned out.

  Since then she’d resisted becoming anyone’s passing conquest. Not well enough, apparently. So here she was, pregnant again. Was the father of this child likely to marry her? Not as far as she knew. Her absobloodylootely fantastic stud had a war to fight which had nothing to do with her ‘condition’. Not that she had told him yet. As if anyone deserved love when so many were dying! If needs be, she could always do what London’s mothers were doing and give the baby away at the local fish shop?

  Or so rumour had it.

  That’s because people had no time for children any more, they were already on their knees simply trying to survive. They were tired, to their souls. She could see why. Since Russian soldiers had driven the Germans out of Stalingrad and the Allies had chalked up an impressive success at Alamein in Africa, she was not the only one to hope that the war was about to enter a decisive phase. The worst of the bombing might have stopped for a while, but 1943 had proved harder than ever as shortages of just about everything had become so much worse. Why, you couldn’t even find a pint glass in some pubs, which was why she sometimes took her own jam jar with her in which to sup her beer.

  While she had few motherly instincts left – she was dreading having another child – some dark incubus did seem to pursue this odd little boy in the cathedral today. You’d think the verger could be more sympathetic.

  ‘Can’t you have a word with him, John? Man to man, and all that?’

  ‘It’s your turn to do fire watch tonight and I want to go home.’

  ‘Won’t it look a bit strange?’

  ‘Strange?’

  ‘Me stalking him, I mean.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Oh, never mind.’

  ‘Soon we won’t have a candle left in the place.’

  ‘I doubt that very much.’

  So saying, Jo whistled Bella.

  ‘That’s another thing, Dean Drew only allows Guide Dogs in the minster. He really means it this time. So do I. Bella’s as bad as the boy.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you know you love her really.’

  ‘Don’t play the innocent with me. You know how I hate it.’

  It was true, the thin little boy did resemble some sort of stray animal, thought Jo. Was it because he had nothing better to do?

  No. He came here for a reason.

  Thought God might listen, did he?

  That had to be part of it.

  And fear?

  The dark-eyed lad didn’t exactly look afraid. Nor was he badly dr
essed in his grey flannel short trousers, school cap and duffel coat. Something important had to be going through his head as he placed one candle next to another. No wish, name or spoken invocation accompanied whatever the devotee thought he was doing, though, only some never-ending humming.

  John was right: perhaps no one had ever explained to the wretched child that one candle equalled one prayer? Didn’t he know there was a shortage?

  But he became very agitated if anyone approached too closely. That humming soon became a buzzing. Like bombers overhead.

  Obstinacy was written all over his face, thought Jo, as she did an abrupt turn back to the north aisle and choir. Obstinacy was good. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t plain out of patience.

  *

  Sam’s lips trembled as he dodged vast pillars, as if darting from one enormous stone tree to another, on his way to the South Porch. His lungs beat like bellows. He knew how crazy it must look, but his mind was made up.

  Today was proving to be like all previous days. Whenever he visited this place its roof reared almost sixty-eight feet above him and its transepts yawned like a great whale to devour him whole. No ant or beetle could feel so small. So feeble. Every time it rendered him timid and dumb.

  That’s why he was leaving right now, while he still could. But what was this? The one-eared woman and her black and white dog were also heading for the font by the door? She kept looking his way. Fire watcher Jo Wheeler. She whose job it was to keep the cathedral and everyone in it safe from enemy incendiaries. Was she cross with him about something? She seemed like a person who might lash out without warning. Her hollow, chestnut-coloured eyes struck him as unpredictable, her voice even more so.

  ‘Hey, boy! Come back here! I just want to know who you are.’

  Sam bolted. If anything, he was cross with himself. Tomorrow his school would close for the foreseeable future because of the war. From now on he’d be stuck at home, could confess nothing to anyone.

  Daylight dazzled after the cathedral’s muted shades. A chill ran down his spine as the wintry air blew fresh in his face. Not that he cared. He pushed on past busy shoppers along one of Gloucester’s oldest, half-timbered streets. Many a medieval pilgrim had come this way to unburden themselves of their intolerable guilt, just like him. They’d prostrated themselves before the minster’s holy tomb of King Edward II to beg for his help.