The Silent Forest

by Guy Sheppard

  SEVEN

  It could be a rotten business rustproofing guns for the army, Raoul discovered, as he donned his clumsy rubber gloves and leather apron. Next minute, with a deft swing of his shovel, he began to scoop white dust from a sack and decant it carefully into the tank’s hot liquid beside him.

  A sour taste filled his mouth, while his tongue was all bumps and cracks like rough sandpaper.

  There was an awful churning in the pit of his stomach and his head throbbed.

  He was confused, heady, even giddy. He wondered whether it was just the searing heat from the workshop’s gas burners or the haze of chemicals in the air that made him feel so peculiar. Or the steam. The sickly steam. It wasn’t always that easy to breathe.

  His constant retching and choking recalled the seasickness he’d suffered when his boat sank during the hurried evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, two and a half years ago. His chest tightened as he relived the day he failed to pluck his brother and fellow soldier, Pierre, from the treacherous tide. France might have fallen to the Germans, but the Devil was not done with him yet – he was still punishing him. And he deserved it.

  In this hell.

  The viscosity of the liquid in the tank was his biggest cause for concern because it was liable to erupt like lava. He could not afford to let the solution dry out, yet to add water from a bucket was to play a cruel game of chance. The crimson salts soon hissed and spat at him like a nest of vipers.

  One hot spray of liquid could cook his eye’s cornea in an instant. One drop of boiling caustic soda could burrow to the bone.

  But today all he could think about was the manner in which Mr Devaney, the factory foreman, treated him – he could not but resent the fact that he was no better than a slave.

  His spade stirred the thick layer of crimson sludge in the bottom of the tank – his blade detonated intermittent plumes of steam like geysers to release heat from the burners below. The tank’s rusty metal sides shivered and quaked most alarmingly as their metal plates expanded.

  ‘Why?’ he cried out each time he prodded molten fire. ‘Why should I, who should never have been plucked from the English Channel when I was going under for the last time, expect to have any dreams left now?’

  Thousands of French soldiers like him had made it safely to England, but he would gladly have given up his life to save Pierre. Had he not promised their mother to keep him safe?

  Now he simply didn’t want to fight any more.

  It hadn’t always been like this, but people were inferring that ‘his sort’ had surrendered to the enemy far too quickly. They had the nerve to say that French armies hadn’t had the stomach to fight Hitler’s advancing tanks when he personally had helped destroy Panzer after Panzer at Hannut in Belgium, even though they had been heavily outnumbered.

  He shovelled faster. The more reason he had to condemn himself, the more motive he had to toil hard.

  To work was to forget. Of that much he could be sure.

  Not that he had much choice. Clearly, unmistakeably, he saw loom over him the broad, ugly shadow of the pipe-smoking foreman – dark, threatening, demonic, forever attendant! The rifle bolts he was working on had to be coloured black to stop them reflecting the sun on desert battlefields in North Africa. One flash of bare, silvery metal could betray a man’s position from miles away, get him ambushed. It was said they were destined for a special raiding squadron called the 2nd S.A.S. whose training camp and headquarters were only thirty miles north of here, in Hereford.

  Raoul bowed his head. He shunned Devaney’s contemptuous gaze and smell of tobacco. Remained silent. For now.

  Monday, November 25 1940

  I hobble past more bombed out buildings. It can’t be far in this lunar landscape, but I’m struggling to recognize anything anywhere. I try to focus on one step at a time before I lose my nerve completely. I didn’t sleep last night. Even now, to close my blood-soaked eyelids is to feel a black fog stifle me, blanking out the smoky sky. The smell, taste and feel of the burning ruins constrict, suffocate and fill my chest with pain until I can barely go on. All strength drains from me.

  Someone, somewhere, has bandaged my head, but I can’t say who or when.

  Thanks to censorship by the Ministry of Information it is terribly hard to know what’s really happening. It would be a relief to be able to say that while we have been utterly devastated, other places remain unscathed. But newspaper headlines simply say “Germans concentrate on west towns”, which is an insult since everyone knows that it was Bristol that got hit yesterday. Such deliberate vagueness might deny the enemy details of damage done, but it doesn’t help morale. Everyone here is feeling totally abandoned.

  Doesn’t look good.

  Eleven days ago, when whole areas of Coventry were flattened, The Ministry of Information did not hold back then, it gave the raids maximum airtime on the radio and front page coverage in the national newspapers. So why not be truthful about everywhere else? It’s a fine line to tread between stirring up patriotic resistance and fuelling despair. Today I heard people talking in shops and at tram stops. ‘Of course we can’t win. We’re only a small country’ or ‘We won’t win this war unless we have underground shelters – it will drive us all skatty.’ A chorus of dissent is building. I feel the same.

  I’m so frightened to come back to Castle Street. The broken walls are not just bricks and mortar but visible proof of a lost world which I so recently inhabited. That prevailing smell has to be escaping gas? It’s not just my own physical pain. This is where happiness and hope lie buried, along with my loved ones.

  No one can predict the future, but at this moment all I know instinctively, horribly, is that I feel like a different person.

  I’m in a tail-spin.

  It’s all a dark, bloody dream. A woman dressed in a dusty coat and torn headscarf heats soup in an open-air cauldron at the side of the road. Another, older woman sits on a mountain of rubble and takes time to light a much-needed cigarette. Elsewhere a little girl is busy rescuing a black and white doll’s house from the wreckage of her home. She breaks into a big smile at my approach. She’s delighted with the toy house which, miraculously, appears to be totally undamaged. I gaze back at her, aghast. But I get it. These aren’t people whose spirit is hopelessly broken, they’re just carrying on.

  EIGHT

  It was just gone midday when the sun in the otherwise wintry sky cast a welcome glow over Westbury-on-Severn, the half timbered Red Lion Inn and its beer garden. Having missed most of Sarah’s funeral she was determined not to return home without downing at least one drink. Or two. That’s not to say she wished to chat to any of the mourners at the bar. Another ten minutes and she, Jo Wheeler, would be gone.

  She was about to let Bella lick the last of the stout from her glass, when a middle-aged man lurched from one table to the next while desperately trying to stay upright across the lawn. It didn’t work. Next minute he crashed into a parasol beside her.

  The drunk was definitely fixing her in his blurry focus.

  He had all the right in the world to breathe straight in her face.

  Hers alone, in his opinion.

  There was something he had to say to her and no one else?

  ‘You Jo Wheeler? You that fire watcher my wife liked so much?’

  Her heart sank, but what was she supposed to do? His voice was slurred, not to mention over-excited. He clawed wildly at empty air like someone drowning. Damn it. There was no escape. Not that she could think of.

  This had to be Sarah’s husband, Bruno.

  ‘I am a fire watcher, yes, but strictly speaking only within the environs of Gloucester Cathedral.’

  ‘That’s not what I heard.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I heard you tried to rescue a child from a burning house in Bristol. Newspapers called you a hero.’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘You’re the one do
ing all the talking.’

  Bruno tore loose his tie and his single-breasted CC41 Utility jacket, with its skimpy lapels, already hung off one shoulder. His bloodshot brown eyes, wide and unfocused, had in them a mixture of disbelief and panic. His mop of gingery hair, much ruffled, was all over the place, his cheeks were inflamed with a livid blush as he hammered the wooden planks in the garden table with his fist. The beer in his glass went flying.

  ‘Sarah should never have died. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘You tell me this now, because?’

  Bella, who had not yet finished licking stout off her nose, rushed forward to face Bruno with a snarl. She did not like the widower’s ugly look, his loud voice, his deliberately provocative stance.

  She heard Jo bark her name.

  Too late now.

  She had hold of Bruno’s heel.

  ‘Leave, Bella!’

  It was every dog’s duty to defend its owner.

  ‘I said leave.’

  ‘….’

  ‘You know what happened last time. No sausages.’

  Bella let go. ‘Woof,’ she said, acknowledging the gravity of the situation with a still graver frown.

  Jo hooked Bruno’s arm in hers. He was terribly shaky, confused and worried. Paranoia was no less obvious as she sat him down on a chair.

  ‘Sorry, I haven’t a clue what you’re going on about.’

  ‘Sarah always drove her car so slowly and sensibly.’

  ‘You mustn’t talk like this. Not here, not today. Not at her funeral.’

  Whatever had prompted this unseemly outburst had Bruno all fired up about something. Somebody had put some crazy notion into his head, she could say that at least. Clearly he needed to tell his version of events to anyone who would listen.

  ‘Her car didn’t just simply skid off the road and hit an oak tree.’

  ‘That’s not what the police say. They think your wife swerved to avoid a wild animal.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘She would have had absolutely no warning.’

  ‘Blast you, Mrs Wheeler.’ Unclenching his fists, Bruno clawed wildly at his hair before he dissolved into tears. ‘I’m not wrong.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Somebody knows the truth…’

  ‘Please lower your voice.’

  ‘…and I know who.’

  Jo sat him back down at the wooden table. He appeared in less need of counsel than a cuddle.

  At that moment a well-dressed couple entered the beer garden to say their goodbyes.

  ‘See you soon, Bruno,’ said the young brunette briskly. ‘We’ll give you a call.’

  Bruno clasped both hands to his face and bowed his head; he appeared completely overcome by the terrible conviction of some deep evil – a conviction which his friends found hard to fathom.

  ‘Whatever is it, old chap? What’s wrong?’

  ‘You don’t know anything.’

  ‘No need to worry,’ said Jo, quickly taking the mourners to one side. ‘Our friend here has had a bit too much to drink. He’s feeling a bit dismal. Alcohol has that effect on some people, as we all know. It’s understandable, given what’s happened.’

  ‘We should call a doctor. He looks ill.’

  ‘As I say, the beer is making him a bit maudlin, that’s all. I’ll sort it.’

  ‘Are you sure? Only we have to catch our train back to London.’

  ‘No need to apologise. Have a safe journey.’

  ‘Sarah was an excellent driver,’ Bruno called after them very loudly.

  With little hope of it doing much good, Jo rejoined her grief-stricken companion.

  ‘Do you have any more surprises? Think before you speak, Mr Smith.’

  As if on cue, the widower pulled half a dozen black and white prints from his pocket and slapped them on the table’s weather-beaten planks for her to see. His breathing quickened and his eyes narrowed.

  ‘You’re never going to believe it.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It’s worse than I thought.’

  ‘Say what you have to calmly and quietly.’

  ‘Last week I was sorting Sarah’s things when I found her PRONTOR II camera in a drawer in our bedroom. These were with it.’

  Whoever had taken the series of images had done so in the dark, hence the underexposure. Even so, they were pretty good quality, as photographs went, though she never had much time for all the fancy things cameras could do.

  They were looking at a Vulcan 5ton drop-side lorry parked in a forest of mature oaks and beeches.

  ‘Any idea whose truck it might be?’ asked Jo, trying to make out the company name painted on the cab door.

  ‘No, but keep looking, Mrs Wheeler.’ Bruno was still visibly upset but completely focused.

  Half loaded on to the lorry was a stack of neatly cut timber. That the driver was a little grey-haired man was plain enough, Jo observed. He sported long, old-fashioned sideburns and a thin moustache; he was probably in his fifties, lightly built, with a crooked right leg. He could have been a veteran of the First World War trenches. Climbing into the lorry’s cab, he didn’t seem an obvious criminal. His long-haired companion, on the other hand, was all brawn. His padded shoulders bulged inside his black donkey jacket as he threw lengths of timber about with ease. His steel-capped black boots looked enormous. This gorilla helped stack the wood in a distinctly slow, heavy and awkward way which indicated a certain stupidity or clumsiness.

  ‘So tell me Mr Smith, why would your wife stop to photograph two men loading a lorry with planks in the dark?’

  ‘Right now the Royal Engineers are bulldozing trees like crazy from the Forest of Dean for the war effort. Nearly all of it goes for pit props since we need to mine the coal to power our ships, etcetera. What we have here are war profiteers. Somebody has done a deal with someone to sell a load of timber on the black market. Funeral directors, especially, can’t get enough sandpaper let alone sufficient wood to make coffins. In some cases, they’re having to use cardboard. They’re not the only ones who might pay well to keep their businesses going. Sarah would have hated that. The war effort is one thing, but she loathed anyone who treated her beloved Forest with disrespect.’

  ‘Sarah was someone of high principles, that’s for sure.’

  ‘More than that, she was fearless, even headstrong. Ours wasn’t a perfect marriage, I grant you, but it’s not as if we were totally estranged – she was carrying my child, for God’s sake – so why didn’t she tell me about it?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘What was she doing out there, anyway?’

  ‘Perhaps you’re asking yourself the wrong question?’

  ‘I need to understand what’s going on, that’s all.’

  ‘Can’t disagree with you there.’

  ‘Will you listen to me, or not, Mrs Wheeler?’

  ‘So she’s driving through the Forest of Dean one night when, as bad luck would have it, she comes across these men and their lorry. She stops the car…’

  ‘A red ACA Pearl Austin Seven Cabriolet.’

  ‘…and begins to photograph them framed in the light of her vehicle’s dimmed headlights.’

  ‘Until they chase her.’

  ‘But she escapes unhurt?’

  ‘As I said, she never said a thing to me about it.’

  Bruno scratched hard at his neck which caused Jo to fidget, too. He was expecting her to go along with every word he said as if it were the gospel truth, which struck her as ridiculous.

  ‘This concerns me how?’

  ‘You want to know if this can possibly have anything to do with Sarah’s death, Mrs Wheeler?’

  ‘I should say so.’

  ‘Not long after she came across that lorry – I can say this for sure now – someone left a pig’s head on her car’s bonnet.’

  ‘Like a trophy?’

  ‘Written in blood on the windscreen w
ere the words: Say Nothing.’

  ‘Any idea why that might be?’

  ‘I know it was a callous thing to do.’

  ‘Just get to the point.’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious, Mrs Wheeler? That boar was a warning.’

  ‘Sorry, you’ve lost me.’

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence. Sarah witnessed a crime being committed. Those men saw her photograph them and wanted to silence her. She never said so at the time, but they were sending her a message. A few weeks later she ends up roadkill, too.’

  Jo took a closer look at the prints. The truck’s number plate was either broken or covered in mud because she could not make out any letters, only the numbers 442.

  ‘You’ve been to the police, naturally?’

  ‘Oh yes, but these things get lost in paperwork. I even doubt they took me seriously. This war takes up all their time.’

  ‘Did Sarah have any enemies?’

  ‘Everyone loved her because she was so bubbly and kind.’

  ‘That I can vouch for.’

  ‘See here,’ said Bruno, with the same indignation in his voice that he had in his eyes. ‘Who else but these men had a motive to hurt Sarah? I reckon they set out to follow her home. I believe they went so far as to run her off the road when she next drove that way at night.’

  ‘Or she went back to gather more evidence.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But we don’t know that, do we?’

  ‘Nobody saw a thing.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘Then tell me what to do, Mrs Wheeler.’

  ‘Just to be clear, I don’t think it’s any of my business, but did anything else unusual happen in the days before Sarah’s death? Did she mention anything at all?’

  ‘Come to think of it, we were shopping in central Gloucester when she suddenly ran off into the cathedral.’

  ‘Did you confront her about it?’

  ‘I did, but she went very quiet. She behaved as if she was being followed.’