The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  ‘We could have used them…’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t have time for that. I’ve got a lot to take care of here.’

  Faith bit back her comment. She and Daniel had never got on, but he was right. He had too much to deal with. She could have helped him, but he’d made it clear that her offers were unwelcome. ‘What’s happening now?’ she said.

  He sighed. ‘I dunno. First they say they’ve got him, then they let him go. There’s an inquest in a couple of days, then we can have the…you know.’ The funeral. He didn’t want to say the word.

  ‘You’ll let me know, won’t you? When it is?’

  He didn’t look at her. ‘It’s just for family. We don’t want a load of work people turning up.’

  ‘I’m not “work people”,’ Faith said. I’ve known Helen since she was a child. ‘I’d like to be there.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Well, do you want those papers or don’t you?’

  The abrupt change of topic threw her. She’d wanted him to go on talking about Helen. It would give her a chance to discuss the children. ‘I’ll take them with me,’ she said. ‘There might be some stuff the university can use.’

  ‘Do what you like with them,’ he said. ‘I don’t want them.’ He moved towards the table as if he was going to carry the boxes to the car and get rid of her.

  ‘Wait,’ she said.

  He stopped and looked down at her. He was a big man with a solid, muscular build. His face was expressionless. ‘What?’

  She made an inarticulate gesture. ‘Helen. She’s dead. We both care and we aren’t talking about her.’

  ‘What’s to say? Everything got to be work with her in the end. She got herself killed chasing after work. Her family, my family, it was all fucking–sorry–it was all work.’

  At least he was talking. ‘Your family came from Eastern Europe, didn’t they?’

  ‘My grandparents were Lithuanian,’ he said. ‘Came over after the war. Do you know, when she met me, when we got together, she started learning Lithuanian.’ His face was a mixture of incomprehension and exasperation. ‘She said if we ever had kids, it’d be part of their heritage. You know the stupid thing? I don’t speak a word of it and neither do my folks. But she wouldn’t let up. She tried to get my dad to tell her the stories his dad used to tell him. As if he could remember. Then there was that stuff about all those old letters and things she found in my Dad’s attic. “It’s history,” she says. “It’s Hannah and Finn’s past.” I got my dad to burn them.’ He rubbed a hand across his face. ‘They were my nan and granddad. They weren’t…’ He hunted round for words. ‘They weren’t someone’s thesis. They weren’t history. Everything had to be work.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Faith didn’t know what else to say. The silence hung awkwardly. Before he could turn the talk back to business, she said, ‘How are Hannah and Finn?’

  He looked at her, then looked away. ‘They’re with my folks,’ he said.

  ‘I know. I just want to know how they are.’

  ‘They’re okay.’

  ‘Daniel…’ He’d opened up a bit. Maybe he’d listen. ‘I’m Finn’s godmother. I’ve known both of them since they were born. They’ve lost their mother, and I’m worried about them. I’d like to see them and I think they’d like to see me.’

  ‘Oh, do you?’ He turned towards her and stood facing her, standing square, his arms folded. Suddenly he was hostile. ‘Well, I’m their dad and I decide who they see and who they don’t.’

  ‘I know that. I do. But what’s so terrible about me seeing them? I don’t understand. Helen would have wanted me to…’ As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she knew she’d made a mistake.

  His face went cold. ‘Helen would have wanted? Don’t you tell me what Helen would have wanted. She wanted a lot of things. And she didn’t think about the kids then.’ He moved towards her, his finger pointing at her. ‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘I can remember when we first met. You were there with all your posh school and your fancy voice and all that Oxford shit. “Oh, Helen, it’s all so amazing, you can’t leave now.”’ His mimicry was cruel. ‘You didn’t want her to have anything to do with me. You looked at me like I’d come round to collect the bins, like I was a bit of rough that Helen needed to get out of her system. And it was all Faith’s got to be godmother, Faith’s coming to stay, Faith this, Faith that. You were always fucking there. I was sick of it then and I’m still sick of it.’ There was something deliberate about his anger, as though he was working himself up on purpose. His proximity was designed to intimidate her as he moved closer, making her aware of his heaviness and the bulk of his muscle. She could see his arms tensing.

  ‘That was a long time ago.’ Faith didn’t try to deny what he had said. She had thought from the time she first met him that he wasn’t good enough for Helen, that he would hold her back, keep her tied to her roots instead of letting her escape into the wider world. And she’d been right. Helen had been born on a Manchester estate and she’d died living in a run-down cotton town a few miles from where she was born.

  ‘You don’t change, do you? I’m telling you–stay away from my children. I’m not having you filling their heads with all your shit. Take all this fucking stuff, all this–’ he gave a contemptuous gesture towards the box on the table–‘paper away with you and don’t come back.’

  He moved towards her and, for a moment, she thought he was going to hit her. He saw her flinch, and a look of satisfaction crossed his face. He picked up the box, carried it to the door and threw it on to the path. ‘You want that stuff?’ he said. ‘You get it.’ He came back to where she stood frozen by the table. ‘Right,’ he said. He was panting. ‘Get out.’

  He grabbed hold of her arm. She jerked herself free. ‘Don’t touch me.’ She could taste acid in her throat. She moved deliberately, picking up her coat and her bag. She didn’t want him to see how much he had frightened her. She turned back to him as she reached the door. ‘If you try that sort of stunt with the children,’ she said, ‘you’ll be in trouble. I’ll make certain of that.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see you try.’ He slammed the door on her, making her stagger, leaving her to pick up the damaged boxes and the papers that were spilling out on to the ground.

  Sophia Yevanova’s house looked welcoming in the bright winter morning as Jake pulled into the drive. He saw Antoni Yevanov’s BMW parked outside the house and prepared himself for another confrontation, remembering his dismissal the day before. The prospect depressed him. He had no desire to cross swords with the professor again so soon.

  But he was taken straight to Miss Yevanova’s room. Her eyes were shadowed and her face was pale, but she greeted him warmly, her hand outstretched in welcome. ‘Mr Denbigh. I am delighted to see you.’ She inclined her head to Mrs Baker, who was waiting by the door. ‘We will have tea later,’ she said.

  She waited until the door closed, then turned to Jake. ‘Please, sit down. Now, what news do you have?’

  ‘I sent some papers through to your solicitor,’ he said. He’d hesitated about using the papers that Cass had given him. He doubted, from his quick skim, if there was anything there that Ann Harvey didn’t already know. ‘And I’ve talked to people who’ve been working on the case. I don’t have good news,’ he said. ‘But it’s not all bad.’ He explained the police stance, and the anomalies that were–so far–keeping Nick out of custody.

  She gazed out of the window when he had finished speaking, her hands falling still. ‘In the absence of another witness…’ she said, almost to herself. She looked at Jake. ‘And that witness will not come forward. We know that. It would be an unhappy outcome if Nicholas were to go through life with the shadow of unproven hanging over him.’

  As Juris Ziverts had. No charges had been brought against the old man, but he had been judged and found guilty in a wider court, and he had not been able to live with that.

  Sophia Yevanova was watching him. ‘That, too,
is a life sentence,’ she said.

  Jake nodded. ‘I know, but it doesn’t have to be like that.’

  ‘It’s…unfortunate I chose that evening to call him. My mind was on my own concerns. If he had not been unsettled, then he would not have behaved the way he did. This is why the police suspect him.’

  The overdose. Jake hadn’t been sure if she knew about that.

  There was a sheaf of papers on the table beside her. She picked them up. ‘They are checking my phone records,’ she said. ‘I was not able to give them exact times for the call. I have been going over these myself to see if I can remember anything more, anything of the conversation that might help.’ She hesitated. ‘Mr Denbigh, would you look at this and tell me the times–the print is ridiculously small, and my eyes are no longer as good as they should be.’

  Jake took the paper, which turned out to be an itemized phone bill. He checked the dates until he found the day that Helen Kovacs had died. On that evening, Sophia Yevanova had called Garrick at seven twenty-five–almost the same time Helen Kovacs had phoned her ex-husband. The call had ended at forty-eight minutes past. Twenty minutes. Jake kept his eyes focused on the paper, not letting his face give anything away. The call had been very short to have had the effect on Garrick that he claimed. He looked at it again while his mind sorted through things to say, and he realized that he’d misread it. The call hadn’t ended at seven forty-eight, it had ended at eight forty-eight. They’d talked for over an hour.

  Now he understood what Burnley had meant by an alibi of sorts. Jake had seen the forensic report–Helen Kovacs had been attacked in the library. At seven thirty, she had been talking to her ex-husband. She’d told him that she was going to be home by nine. She must have planned to leave the house by eight thirty. Which meant that she was probably attacked between seven thirty when she phoned her husband, and eight thirty–and all that time, Garrick was on the phone, talking to Miss Yevanova.

  Jake had seen the house plan in the papers Cass had given him. There were two phones in the house. One in the hallway at the front, and an extension in the small room at the side where Nick Garrick apparently had his accommodation. The library was at the other side of the house, at the back. It didn’t clear Garrick–far from it–but it confirmed the story that he’d told. To date, he hadn’t been caught in a lie, and Jake found that oddly convincing.

  He looked across at her, letting his new knowledge show on his face. ‘This is good,’ he said. ‘It isn’t proof, but it shows that Nick was talking to you around the most likely time that Helen Kovacs was killed.’

  She nodded. ‘This is what I suspected. But a witness on the other end of a phone is no witness, really. I wasn’t there. I believe that this woman brought her own trouble with her and Nicholas’s involvement was only poor luck and circumstance. But proof…is a different matter.’

  ‘It isn’t conclusive,’ Jake admitted. ‘But they know it makes their case against Nick more difficult.’

  She was watching the fire. Her eyes were luminous in her white face. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t do much.’ The little he had found had not influenced the situation.

  She looked at him and smiled. It was a smile he hadn’t seen before, a smile that lit up her face and gave him a glimpse of the girl she had been. ‘You have put my mind at rest,’ she said. ‘And that is worth thanks. Now, I think it is–what is the phrase they use?–pay-back time.’ She nodded. ‘I like that. Pay-back time. I made a bargain. I promised you I would tell you of Kurapaty.’

  It was an hour later when Jake left her. She had talked almost continually, pausing only to swallow a mouthful of the water from the glass that stood on the table beside her. Her voice had been dry and unemotional as she had told him the story of her life in Zialony Luh, in the shade of the Kurapaty Forest. He could still hear her voice in his head as he made his farewells. ‘I’ll come and see you as soon as I get back,’ he said.

  She looked tired, and Mrs Barker was hovering, so he took his leave and let himself out of the front door. There was no sign of Yevanov, and his BMW was no longer parked in the drive. It was almost noon, and the sun was as high as it would get. The cloudless sky was a deep, clear blue. He walked round the side of the house, and found himself on the lawns where he had watched Nick Garrick the day before.

  As he expected, Garrick was there, working in the garden. He looked up as Jake approached, and paused with the spade poised in his hand. He was wearing jeans, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up. He looked hot, even though the afternoon was cold. The flush of exertion didn’t hide the shadows under his eyes.

  ‘How are you?’ Jake said.

  Garrick dug the spade into the soil and straightened himself up. ‘I’m okay.’ His face was wary.

  ‘Looks like they’re keeping you busy.’

  ‘I don’t like being inside. I need to do things. Anyway, it’s best if I keep out of the way. I’m not a hundred per cent welcome here.’

  ‘Professor Yevanov?’

  Garrick didn’t say anything, but his nod was eloquent.

  Jake could remember Yevanov’s face as he’d watched Garrick working in the garden. ‘What’s he got against you?’

  Garrick turned a clod of earth over with his shoe. ‘He’s worried about Miss Yevanova, I suppose.’

  Jake let his scepticism show on his face. Yevanov’s attitude had been something other than concern.

  Garrick looked across at him, and said slowly. ‘Yeah, okay. It’s more than that. He’s never liked me. He thinks I’m like my father.’ He shook his head in frustration, and pushed his hair back out of his eyes. ‘But he’s never been like this before. Everywhere I go, my fucking father…That’s why I changed my name, but when people find out, they look at me, and I can see what they’re thinking…’

  It seemed there had been little love lost between Garrick-Smith and his son. ‘When did you change your name?’

  ‘It was after the accident. I wish I’d done it before, so he’d have known. But he’d just have taken it out on Mum.’

  Garrick had given Jake only the barest account of the accident that had killed his parents. ‘You were driving?’ he said.

  Garrick looked at him, the defensiveness returning. ‘Yeah. So?’

  ‘So what happened?’

  Garrick lifted the spade and jammed it deep into the soil. ‘They got killed. That’s what happened.’ He turned to face Jake and his voice was edgy. ‘I know what you’re thinking. It’s like the police. There was one of them, he said, “It’s never your fault, is it?” They don’t get it. Of course it was my fault. I know that. We were late. My father was royally pissed off about it. I knew he’d start having a go at Mum as soon as I left them. I wasn’t concentrating.’

  Jake shrugged. If Garrick insisted on feeling responsible, it was his choice. ‘The car that hit you came across the central reservation, right? So what could you have done, even if you did see it?’

  Garrick didn’t seem to hear him. ‘After…everything was so quiet. Just at first. I undid my seat-belt and got out. Then I realized what had happened and I was trying to get the other doors open, to get to them, and my father–he was just sitting there. There was blood all over him. And he looked at me. He had these pale eyes, he just looked at me as if I was…He said, “You stupid fool!” And then his eyes sort of went dull, and I knew he was dead.’

  ‘Sounds like a nice guy.’

  Garrick’s face hardened as he remembered who he was speaking to. ‘Look, what is this?’

  Jake made a swift calculation. He needed Garrick to trust him, or to trust him enough to talk. ‘I’m writing a book,’ he said. ‘About the war.’

  ‘About Miss Yevanova?’

  Jake nodded. ‘That’s part of it.’

  ‘So why do you want to know about my father?’

  ‘Because I don’t understand why she would have anything to do with him.’ It puzzled Jake, and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask her. This reluctance was unfamilia
r. He was used to asking the most awkward questions of the most difficult people.

  Garrick hesitated, then said, ‘She didn’t. She hardly saw him. They couldn’t stand each other. He was scared of her though, or he’d have stopped Mum seeing her.’ His face softened. ‘Mum was different. She knew Miss Yevanova before she ever met my father. I think Miss Yevanova tried to, you know, protect her.’

  As Jake had suspected, Judith Garrick-Smith was Miss Yevanova’s connection with the family. ‘And she brought you here?’

  Garrick shoved his hands deep into his pockets and took a deep breath. ‘Yeah. I came here a lot when I was a kid. I think Mum wanted me to get to know her, so she asked Miss Yevanova if I could come and stay in the holidays, and she let me. I think she liked having me around, you know? Dad wasn’t happy, but he didn’t dare object.’

  Jake tried to picture the huge house, the woman and the child–what had he made of it? ‘What did you do for fun? This doesn’t look like much of a place for kids.’

  Garrick looked at him in surprise. ‘You’re joking.’ He waved his arm, the gesture encompassing the wide lawn, the thicket of trees, the dense shrubbery. ‘Look at all this. I grew up in a flat. The only bit of green was a scrubby park down the road with a couple of swings. This was like heaven. The first summer I stayed–I was eight–she took me walking up on the moors. I’d never done that before, getting right out away from everything. And when we couldn’t go out, she showed me the garden. She showed me the trees that were best for climbing, and we made a rope swing. Up there–’ He pointed up to a branch that overhung the lawn. ‘I was the kind of kid who liked making things. I liked putting them together and taking them apart. I wanted to know how things worked, and she used to show me. She’s always been great with me.’ He gave Jake a warning look. He was prepared to defend her if Jake posed any kind of threat.

  Jake found himself warming towards Garrick. There was a naivety about him that was attractive but at the same time alarming. He would be vulnerable outside the circle of Miss Yevanova’s protection. He needed to grow up, to develop a few more layers of skin, or his way in the world would be hard. Jake could see why Miss Yevanova was ready to champion him, but he wondered if, in the long run, she was doing him any favours. Nick Garrick needed to learn how to fight his own battles.