The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  Faith pulled a stool from under the worktop and sat down, resting her head on her hand. In her mind, she could see a TV screen with silent footballers moving across a green pitch, the crowd waving and shouting in the stands. She saw Finn, his hands between his knees, his head bowed. She made Dad go. She never talked to us. She saw Hannah sitting on the floor with her modelling clay. We can’t have my party till my mum comes back. She’s coming back on Thursday.

  She had to keep contact with the children. Helen would have relied on her to do that. Later, she would phone Daniel. She didn’t know what she was going to say to him, but she would get to see the children over the weekend. Somehow.

  The phone rang as she was trying to work out the best way to approach this. It was Katya.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you to call,’ she said. She sounded edgy.

  Faith twisted her hair round her finger, wondering if her mother had heard about Helen, if that was why she was expecting a phone call. It seemed unlikely–Katya and Helen had never met, so even if Katya had seen the news stories, she was unlikely to make the connection. ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Marek.’ Katya’s voice was sharp with impatience. ‘You promised to call.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ The interview with Jake Denbigh. It seemed like an eternity ago. ‘I did.’

  ‘I don’t think a message counts as getting in touch,’ Katya said. ‘And Marek isn’t answering the phone either.’

  Grandpapa hardly ever did. ‘Try this morning,’ she said. ‘It’s one of Doreen’s days.’

  ‘I’ll do that later. Well?’

  ‘Well what? I said everything there was to say in the message. The interview went fine, there was nothing about the war and I think he quite enjoyed it. I think it did him good. He needs something like that. I don’t think he’s looking after himself properly.’

  ‘Oh, Marek’s always been a law unto himself,’ Katya said dismissively.

  After her mother had rung off, Faith went back upstairs, sat down at her desk and switched on her laptop. There was something she wanted to try. She got the photocopy the police officer had given her the day before and looked at the notes that Helen had made: 120.43 PEKBM; P. E.; Ma_y _ro__ene__. She set up a crossword programme that could find whole words from incomplete ones, and typed in the word fragments.

  The programme made no sense of the two words together, offered Macy, Many, Mary Maty, Mazy for the first one, and nothing at all for the second. She tapped her pen against her teeth. It was only what she’d expected. The programme couldn’t really handle proper names.

  But the problem nagged at her. Suppose it wasn’t a name. Suppose the first word was many. Then the last one would end in ‘s’…Many _ro__ene_s. But _ro_ _ene_s wasn’t a word. The programme couldn’t find any matches. Many…many…She studied the piece of paper closely. The writing was a scribble. Suppose the ‘r’ was actually an ‘h’–it was possible. The first ‘e’ was almost closed. An ‘a’? She tried the new permutations and got choiceness, shortness. She was about to discard it, when she looked more closely at the second ‘e’. It was scrawled into the adjacent blank. Suppose it wasn’t ‘e’, but ‘d’? She tried again. This time she got browbands, croplands–right, that made a lot of sense–and thousands…

  For a moment, she thought she’d made a discovery. Many thousands. But many thousands of what? It didn’t mean anything. The police would have done all of this anyway.

  The phone rang again. She snatched it up, glad of the distraction. ‘Faith Lange.’

  It was Trish, phoning from the Centre. ‘Professor Yevanov asked me to phone you,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Oh?’ She’d been expecting a message from the Centre, but not one directly from Yevanov.

  There was a pause. ‘He wondered how you were,’ Trish said, her voice sounding a bit forced. ‘He said there’s no need to come in.’

  ‘Is the Centre open today?’ There was no real reason why it shouldn’t be.

  There was that same silence, then Trish said, ‘Yes, but there’s no need…’

  ‘Okay,’ Faith said. She was puzzled. ‘Thanks for phoning.’

  After she’d rung off, she thought about what Trish had said. It was kind of Yevanov to offer her time off, but she didn’t need it. Helen’s…death wasn’t an illness that needed recovery time–it was a permanent part of her life, something she would have to live with, get used to. She’d planned to go in today as soon as she knew what was happening. She would be more useful in her office instead of sitting at home, unable to concentrate on her work, going over and over events she only half understood, playing detective games with crossword programmes.

  It was a relief to get out of the house. She drove quickly, taking the back roads to beat the traffic, and arrived at the university within half an hour. The Centre was tranquil in the winter sun, the windows reflecting the light. The lobby buzzed with the activity of the working day.

  She took a deep breath before she went into the general office to collect her post. The clerical assistants knew she had been Helen’s friend and greeted her with expressions of shock and disbelief–Faith, so awful…can’t believe it…They were sympathetic and concerned. But to Faith, it was like reading from a script. She listened, and responded with her lines. All she felt was distance.

  She picked up her letters and extricated herself. Just as she was leaving, one of them said, ‘Professor Yevanov was asking for you earlier. We thought you weren’t coming in.’

  ‘Okay,’ Faith said. She hesitated in the corridor. She’d been planning to go up to her room, but if Yevanov had wanted…Maybe he’d told Trish to phone when he found out she wasn’t there, and now, of course, he would assume she’d taken up his offer of a day off.

  She went along the corridor to Trish’s office and tapped on the door before opening it. Trish was talking on the phone. She glanced across at Faith, then looked again. ‘I’ll get back to you on that,’ she said, and put the phone down. ‘Faith–I wasn’t…we weren’t expecting you.’

  ‘I understand that Professor Yevanov wanted to see me.’

  ‘Oh, he just wanted to know how you were,’ Trish said. ‘I’ll tell him you’ve come in, when he’s free.’

  Before Faith could say anything, she went on, ‘Gregory Fellows–he’s one of your research students, isn’t he? He came in earlier to ask if he could cancel his seminar, after what’s happened. He knew Helen quite well.’

  Faith shook her head in disbelief. She’d told him on Wednesday that the seminar had to go ahead, and now he was trying to use Helen’s death as an excuse.

  ‘I told him that would be all right,’ Trish looked up and caught Faith’s glance. ‘You weren’t here,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll have to uncancel it.’ Faith thought about all the ways Gregory could make this difficult. ‘Okay. We’ll postpone the seminars for a week. He can do it then. I’ll let the other post-grads know. And please, unless it’s an emergency–’

  ‘Faith.’

  The voice came from behind her. Faith swung round. Antoni Yevanov was coming out of his office, looking surprised. ‘I didn’t expect to see you today. I wanted to talk to you. Are you free now?’

  ‘Professor,’ Trish said. ‘You have a meeting with–’

  He looked impatient. ‘John will understand. Tell him I’ll be available in half an hour.’ He followed Faith into his office and closed the door behind him. He leaned against it and looked at her. ‘How suddenly these things happen,’ he said. Then he shook his head. ‘Please, sit down.’ He waited until she was seated, then pulled his own chair towards her. ‘I’m glad you came in,’ he said. ‘I know that you and Helen were close. I was concerned about you.’

  ‘I’ve known her…it feels like forever,’ Faith said.

  He nodded. She met his gaze, and he tilted his head in query, an invitation to go on talking.

  ‘She was my oldest friend,’ Faith said. ‘I’m godmother to her son.’ A godmother who had been unable to protect him or even offer much con
solation. She had a sudden vision of Finn–not the withdrawn youth from yesterday, but the toddler with huge eyes who had stared at her in solemn interest from his mother’s arms.

  Yevanov was listening, his chin resting on his hand, his finger curled round his mouth. ‘The fairy godmother with no power to grant wishes,’ he said. ‘Or not the wish you would like to grant.’

  He was looking into the distance and she got the impression he was thinking about something else. ‘There is something I would like to do,’ he went on. ‘Which is another reason why I wanted to see you today. I’m away for most of next week and by the time I come back it will be too late. Helen never had the chance to make the impact on the academic world that I’m certain she could have done. She published very little. She had plans for her thesis, but those will come to nothing now. Faith, I would like some kind of contribution to go forward to Bonn from Helen. It mattered a lot to her, and I would like her name to be recorded in their annals. The problem I have is that the paper isn’t complete. Ideally, I would like some kind of presentation so that her paper can still appear in the proceedings.’

  ‘And you need someone to finish it.’

  His eyes assessed her as he nodded in agreement. ‘It would just be a case of putting together the complete paper from her draft, and presenting it at the conference.’

  Presenting it. She hadn’t thought about that. ‘I may not be able to answer all the questions.’ If a paper attracted controversy, or even a lot of interest, it could be attacked vigorously from the floor. It was part of the rigour of the discipline. An academic had to be prepared to defend her position.

  He shook his head. ‘I am sure you could handle it, but I wouldn’t expect much discussion. And if you were there, you could do a short presentation on the software you have developed. I have discussed it with the organizers, and they are very keen. They are aware of the circumstances, but I have to confirm this soon.’

  ‘I’ll do it. Of course I will. But I’ll need access to Helen’s data.’ The police had taken her computer. She could remember the man carrying it down the steps, the bright photograph flapping in the breeze.

  ‘They’ve copied her document folder,’ he said. ‘Trish has the disk. There’s one more thing: you will need to work to the original deadline–that can’t be altered. It will mean having both papers finished a fortnight today, so I would like to see you to discuss the drafts…’ He glanced at the board where the ongoing work of the Centre was listed ‘…Thursday next week. Can you manage that?’

  Faith thought quickly. Her own work was no problem–she’d just need to update her previous paper and set up a demonstration. She could do it in half a day. Helen’s paper might be more tricky. Helen had said that her draft was almost complete. If so, it would just be a case of finishing it off from Helen’s notes and checking the references. If not…‘I’ll need to see exactly how far Helen had got,’ she said.

  Yevanov’s phone rang, and he picked it up with a weary glance of apology at Faith. Placing his hand over the receiver, he said, ‘I will have to take this call. Let me know about Helen’s paper by Monday.’

  She got up to go. ‘I’ll get started on it now.’

  He waited until she left the room before he resumed his call.

  Trish watched her narrowly as she closed Yevanov’s door behind her. ‘Professor Yevanov said you have the copy of the disk the police left.’

  Faith didn’t know what Trish had been playing at earlier. She hadn’t told Faith that Yevanov wanted to see her. If Faith hadn’t decided to come in anyway, then the chance would have gone. Yevanov would have let Helen’s paper go. ‘It’s lucky I came in,’ she said.

  ‘He told me it wasn’t important.’ Trish’s face was indifferent. She unlocked the small cabinet behind her desk and took out a CD-rom labelled Kovacs, 20 Jan. She passed it to Faith with an odd smile on her face. ‘You’ll have to take a copy of it and let me have it back.’

  Faith had more important things to worry about than Trish’s small-minded pettiness, but she couldn’t seem to get it out of her head. She remembered the complication she now had to deal with about the post-grad seminars and, instead of going back to her room, she went down to the basement where the technicians’ room was housed.

  Gregory Fellows did some part-time work for the Centre as a technician to top up his grant, but mostly, the other students had told Faith, because it gave him access to sophisticated music software that wasn’t available on the networked system. With a bit of luck, she’d find him there.

  The lab was at the back of the building, in an antiseptically clean room that was devoted to computers. It was all hard surfaces–no leather or cloth here, nothing that could harbour dust. The chief technician looked up from his work. ‘Morning, Faith. How can I help you?’ Faith had made a point of getting to know the technicians as soon as she arrived, knowing that their good will could make life a lot smoother.

  As she suspected, Gregory was there. She saw him fading towards the door of the room as she talked to the chief.

  ‘Don’t go, Gregory,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘I’ve got…’ he began.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  He subsided on to a bench and Faith went across to him. As she got closer, she saw that he looked ill. He was pale and his eyes were bloodshot and sore. He looked like someone who hadn’t slept. She wasn’t the only person who was bereaved by Helen’s death. This young man–he could only be about twenty-two–had probably never experienced death before, and now a friend of his had been murdered. She modified what she had planned to say. ‘I know this has been a dreadful shock,’ she said, trying to keep her voice gentle, ‘but you have to keep going.’

  ‘Life goes on, you mean?’ He sounded angry.

  ‘It does go on. It is. You can’t stop it.’

  He looked at his hands, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’ve postponed the seminars for a few days, okay? You’ll be doing yours next Friday.’

  She half expected an argument, but he shrugged, then nodded.

  She was going to say something else, but the technician arrived with her copies. ‘I’ve done two for you,’ he said.

  Gregory stood up abruptly. ‘Gotta go,’ he muttered. He went quickly to the door.

  The technician gave Faith an eloquent glance.

  Jake spent the morning in his flat, working. It was getting on for midday when he decided to go out for coffee. He picked up a copy of the local paper, and took a table outside in the winter sun. He ordered an Americano and settled down to read.

  The headline jumped out at him: NEO-NAZI SON QUESTIONED IN MURDER HUNT. He scanned the article quickly. This was something his contacts hadn’t come up with. Nicholas Garrick was the son of David Garrick-Smith, the notorious right-wing philosopher. Garrick-Smith had been killed in a car crash a few months before, but Jake had been familiar with the name for a lot longer than that. You couldn’t be in Jake’s field and not be aware of the things that lurked under adjacent stones.

  Garrick-Smith had been a minor academic with a reputation for eccentricity until he had written a book that had touched the Zeitgeist: Damned Lies: The politics of truth and the politics of persuasion. It had created a furore. Western governments, Garrick-Smith argued, were being held to a system that was preventing the next stage of civilization. They had been hijacked by the politics of persuasion. The politics of truth were needed to move the human race on.

  The power of science, Garrick-Smith claimed, was being restrained by the forces of primitive ideology. The doctrines of freedom and rights for all needed revisiting. For example, science had proven, he claimed, that certain racial groups were more able than others. Nature had produced HIV to reduce population numbers in the poorer parts of the world. The politics of persuasion had cowed people into seeing these ideas as unacceptable. The politics of truth would act on it.

  His work had been seized on by the far right, by holocaust deniers and b
y political parties with a race agenda. Garrick-Smith had refused to repudiate these groups. He wasn’t responsible, he said, for the way people chose to use his findings. His commitment was to the truth.

  Jake’s thoughts were interrupted when the waitress came out to check the tables. ‘You okay?’ she said. Jake was a regular customer.

  ‘I’m fine. You?’

  ‘Yeah. I got my results today.’ Like most café and bar workers, she was a student working her way through her degree.

  Jake smiled at her. ‘So how did you do?’

  ‘Better than I expected. Too many parties.’ She blew her cheeks out in a comic grimace, and propped one hip against the table, keen to chat. ‘Thought I’d go out tonight and celebrate.’

  ‘Have one for me, okay?’ He didn’t attempt to prolong the exchange. He needed to think. She lingered, making desultory swipes at adjacent tables with her cloth, then retreated. Jake forgot about her and lit a cigarette. He let his mind drift, until it settled on Juris Ziverts.

  Convinced the extradition attempt wouldn’t come to anything, Jake had kept only a rudimentary watch on the case, and it seemed he had been proven right when Ziverts phoned to say that the charges had been dropped.

  And then a tabloid newspaper had broken the story. Three local youths who had been on trial for an assault on an Asian man had been found guilty and each been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The paper contrasted the treatment meted out to the youths with the ‘leniency’ which the immigrant Ziverts had been granted, MAN ACCUSED OF WARTIME RACE HORROR WALKS FREE! They published a photograph of the old man, and of his house.

  It was bad luck. Ziverts had been the victim of the tabloid’s serendipity. He was too old and too ordinary for the story to have attracted much interest–an old man in an old war that happened far away. But British institutions were smarting under accusations of institutional racism, and Blackburn had been stigmatized as a centre of xenophobic hatred. The convicted youths were local. An immigrant who had been treated with leniency for a far worse crime was a gift. Jake went to see the old man. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see this coming. I should have done.’