The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  Miss Yevanova would like to see this. He’d asked Adam for a copy so that he could show it to her. He wondered how she was. Mrs Barker had said she was better, and Garrick had expressed no alarm about her condition when they’d met the other night, but her obviously failing health worried him. He wanted to see her and had no intention of letting Antoni Yevanov stop him.

  He reached for the phone, then hesitated. He didn’t want to tie up the line before Burnley got in touch. He picked up his mobile, then thought better of it. If Burnley called, he’d have to cut his call to the Yevanovs short, and he didn’t want to do that. He’d have to wait. He checked the time. It was ten o’clock. His day was disintegrating into bits and pieces. So far, he’d achieved very little. It was going to be one of those days of hanging around and drinking coffee.

  He lit a cigarette and was about to make himself another cup of coffee when the entry-phone rang. He was wary of unannounced callers. He’d used the device often enough himself to get into a secure building, ringing all the bells in the knowledge that someone would be stupid enough to buzz him in. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Nick Garrick.’

  Garrick. Jake’s mind leaped into overdrive. Something was wrong. ‘Come up,’ he said, and pressed the release button. He switched on the coffee machine then went to the front door. Garrick was coming along the corridor. As he watched, Jake was reminded of the time they’d first met at the station. Garrick moved slowly, as if he was carrying a burden that was far heavier than the backpack hitched over his shoulder. He acknowledged Jake with a nod, came in to the lobby and dumped the backpack on the floor. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he said.

  ‘What’s up?’ Jake shoved the backpack out of the way with his foot and closed the door. He ushered Garrick into the room and waited. If you give someone advice…

  Garrick’s eyes shifted around the walls, came back to Jake’s, then moved away again. ‘She’s…’ he said. ‘She…You don’t know, do you?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘I didn’t think they’d tell you.’ He rubbed his hand across his eyes.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Nick. What?’ But he knew before Garrick spoke.

  Sophia Yevanova was dead.

  ‘She died in the night,’ Nick said. ‘They found her this morning.’ He sank down into a chair and put his head in his hands.

  Jake’s mind was blank. He couldn’t accept it. To distract himself, he went through to the kitchen and made coffee. He heaped sugar into one cup and gave it to Garrick, who looked as if he was in shock. ‘What happened?’ he said.

  She had been old, she had been ill–but he just couldn’t accept it. She was so strong and so determined. Jake had seen the translucence of her skin and the tell-tale tinge of blue around her mouth, but death seemed alien in connection with her. She would have greeted the Grim Reaper with an imperious wave of her hand and told him to await her convenience. In his mind, she was vividly alive, sitting upright in her chair refusing to acknowledge the effort it took, the jewelled colours of the icon gleaming in the shadows behind her. His eyes felt hot and heavy.

  The last time they met, he had talked to her about things she found distressing. He could remember the parchment white of her face as she listened to him. He shouldn’t have been so quick to tell her about the dark side of the city he had seen. He could have told her about the cafés, the boulevards, the river, drawn her a picture of the city that now stood where she had once lived. Instead, he’d told her about Kurapaty, about the war, about Maly Trostenets.

  Garrick swallowed some of the hot coffee, coughed, and swallowed again. ‘I didn’t see her yesterday–I went for an interview in Leicester and she was asleep when I got back. Mrs Baker found her when she went in this morning. Yevanov threw me out. I didn’t know where else to go.’

  …you are responsible for them. ‘I can put you up for a couple of nights,’ he said absently. ‘Give you a chance to find somewhere.’

  ‘It won’t…I brought you something. You’re the only person who…’

  Jake wasn’t listening. His mind was replaying his last encounter with Miss Yevanova. He seemed to be specializing in this–intruding into people’s grief, digging around in the middens of their lives. He’d done it to Sophia Yevanova, and he’d done it to Faith.

  But as he remembered his last encounter with Sophia Yevanova, he realized it was not quite as damning as he believed. She had chosen the direction of the conversation. It had stirred up some painful memories, but she’d wanted to talk about them. She’d been interested, she’d asked about Zialony Luh. The colour had returned to her face as they talked and she’d become more animated. Until…Until he’d told her about the museum, and he’d told her about Maly Trostenets. That was when she’d gone pale and breathless. She’d said, ‘Of course.’ He’d taken that as acknowledgement of a place she knew about all too well, but now he thought about it, it looked more like realization. Maly Trostenets! Of course…What had she realized?

  And now she was dead.

  Oh, shit.

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

  The hospital was at the weary end of the night shift. The ward was dimly lit, the staff at the nursing station spoke in low voices, machines beeped and hummed. In the middle of this, Grandpapa lay still, shrunken and reduced on the hospital bed. He was sleeping, but his face was flushed and congested, and his breathing was laboured.

  ‘He’s got a chest infection,’ the nurse told Faith. ‘He’s stabilized a bit since I called–the antibiotics are kicking in, but he’s very ill–you understand what I’m saying?’

  Faith understood. She sat by his bed and took his hand. He looked peaceful, and she was grateful for that until she remembered her own wild dreams and knew that the appearance of peace was deceptive. ‘It’s Faith, Grandpapa,’ she said. She didn’t know if he heard her or not.

  Around her, the life of the ward went on. She sat with him and watched.

  * * *

  Jake left Nick in the living room and went into his office. The two young girls in the photo watched him as he picked up the phone and fumbled one-handed with his address book, trying to find the number. He had to contact Burnley, or failing that, one of the team investigating Helen Kovacs’ death. He couldn’t understand what the connection was–he just knew there was one. There was someone who didn’t want the name of Maly Trostenets to be linked to…what? There was no one left. Sophia Yevanova was dead. Marek Lange was dying. The story was ending.

  Tell me. He directed the thought like a prayer to the girl in the picture, the girl whose life was to spiral into the chaos of war, the girl who was now dead. Tell me. He directed the thought at the serene, doll-like face of Raina, the other child, the one whose life was to end in the horrors of the gulags.

  And she answered.

  Slowly, he put the phone down, then picked it up again and dialled Adam Zuygev’s number. He heard the entry-phone sound, but he didn’t have time for that now. The photo in front of him told its secret, and he couldn’t see anything else.

  R. Yevanova and S. Yevanova. The caption was there to read, obscure, because it was written in an unfamiliar alphabet. He would have seen it days ago when Adam first showed him the picture, if he’d only had his wits about him. He could remember Adam teasing him about missing an obvious detail in a photograph because he’d misread falsely familiar letters.

  The scribbled caption, the names, Raina and Sophia. But in the picture, they were the other way round, Sophia and Raina. He waited impatiently until Adam picked up the phone.

  ‘The photo,’ Jake said. ‘Which one is Sophia?’

  ‘The fair-haired one,’ Adam said. ‘It says on the picture. You recognized her, anyway.’

  He could remember their meeting in the café when Adam had shown him the picture–two girls. They were Raina and Sophia, Adam had said, but he hadn’t said which was which, and nor had Jake as he looked. He hadn’t seen the story the picture told.

  Sophia, pretty, blonde Sophia had been the brave one–
she had joined the partisans and had been betrayed by her cousin. She had ended the war in the camps.

  Raina, dark-eyed, beautiful Raina, had collaborated, had worked with the fascists, and as the Red Army approached, she had fled, taking the identity of her cousin, who she must have believed dead. And she had taken as well enough valuables to set her and her child–whose child?–up with a comfortable life in the west. The icon. Whose had it been? Someone whose life had ended in the occupation? The only thing of value…apart from my son.

  The initials that Helen Kovacs had jotted down, wherever they came from, they weren’t the Latin symbols P. E. They were the Cyrillic letters P. E. that transliterated as R. Ye. Raina Yevanova.

  Sophia, the real Sophia, had survived. She had lived to pay the penalty that her cousin had incurred and had died in the gulags. Had there been no one who could confirm her identity? Or was there no one left? And maybe the authorities, Stalin’s forces, just didn’t care. There had been a collaborator, Raina Yevanova. They had a collaborator whose name was Yevanova. They had someone to punish. That was good enough.

  That was a secret worth killing for.

  Footsteps moved behind him and he froze as something cold touched his throat.

  25

  Jake turned his head very slowly, keeping his hands in view. The knife–a part of his mind that focused on trivialities recognized it as a knife from his kitchen–touched his neck. He knew that knife. One slash, and he would be choking to death on his own blood.

  Nick Garrick let him turn, keeping the knife pressed against him. ‘I’m sorry,’ Garrick said. Jake realized that he meant it, and felt a strange urge to laugh. Garrick was apologizing. His eyes were bright with unshed tears, but the knife stayed firm. He kicked the desk chair round with his foot and gestured for Jake to sit.

  Jake didn’t like that–once he was in the chair, his opportunity for manoeuvre would be severely restricted–but he felt the pressure of the knife increase and a slippery feeling on his neck that told him he was bleeding. He’d interviewed dangerous people before. He had to stay calm, and he had to keep Garrick calm. He told himself that if Garrick truly wanted him dead, he would be on the floor now, bleeding out, so Garrick must want something from him. He sat.

  Garrick backed away and pushed the door shut. His movements were jerky with panic. Jake could feel the adrenalin surging through him, pushing him to some kind of action, any action, but it would be suicide to try and jump Garrick now. He had to get him talking, get him to calm down, to relax his guard. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I brought it to you,’ Garrick said. ‘I thought you’d know what to do, but you called the police, didn’t you? I heard you talking.’

  Jake shook his head. ‘I called someone in Minsk, about that photograph.’ He jerked his head to indicate the picture lying on his desk. Garrick craned his neck to look at it, and Jake was reminded of the day they’d stood in the garden at the Yevanov house and talked about Sophia–Raina–Yevanova. Keep him talking. ‘What did you bring me? What did you want me to do?’

  ‘The diary. And the letters. That’s what it was all about.’ The knife pressed against Jake’s throat, just over the carotid artery. He forced himself to keep still. He was the one Garrick had come to for help, he was the one who would know what to do. He mustn’t show any signs of weakness or fear, though he could feel the panic under the surface, fighting to get out. He tried not to think about the knife wounds he had seen, or the agonizing, suffocating death that awaited him if his throat was cut.

  He repositioned himself in his chair, moving slowly as if he was trying to get comfortable. If he could brace the chair against the desk, he might be able to…The knife jerked. ‘Stop that!’ Garrick’s voice was on the edge.

  Jake froze. He could feel the blood trickling down his neck. ‘Okay. It’s okay. My leg was cramping, that’s all.’ He waited a moment. ‘I still don’t understand. Tell me.’ He tried a smile. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Garrick said. ‘You’ve got to believe that.’

  ‘Okay. Tell me. Explain it to me, because I don’t know what’s going on here.’

  Garrick hesitated, chewing his lip. His gaze went round the room, then back to Jake, but the knife was steady in his hand. Then he began to talk.

  ‘It was after the accident. She told me I could stay there when I came out of hospital, but Yevanov had moved in. I didn’t want to be around him. So she found me a job. She talked Yevanov into letting me have it. It suited everybody. I needed the work, and I wanted somewhere to live. He didn’t want me in the house. And she…’ He looked at Jake. ‘You know what she’s like. You want to do things for her.’

  Jake made a careful sound of assent. He could remember how easily Sophia Yevanova had talked him into nosing around the Kovacs investigation.

  ‘She told me that there was something she’d done in the war—she wouldn’t tell me what it was, but she said they all had to do things, sometimes, just to survive. This man, Gennady Litkin, had got hold of some papers that told the story…’

  When Antoni Yevanov had agreed to take on the job as director of the Centre for European Studies, the papers had been full of articles about him. Gennady Litkin had read the articles and had remembered the old letters and the diary he had collected years before. He had contacted Sophia Yevanova, assuming she would be interested in records of her family’s past. He may even have promised them to her, but then he had died.

  ‘She wanted me to find the papers and give them to her. I knew, as soon as I saw the library that it was impossible. I told her, “No one will ever look at all this.” There were boxes and boxes of papers, all mixed up, falling apart. It was junk. The archivist said so. He said it would take years to go through it all. He thought they would just store it, but I kept on looking…’

  And then Helen Kovacs had turned up, and with the information Gennady Litkin had given her, had located them at once.

  ‘I tried to phone Miss Yevanova,’ Garrick said, ‘but the signal kept cutting out. I was using a pay-as-you go phone I’d picked up in the market—it wasn’t much good. She called me back on the landline, and I told her that this woman had found them. She wasn’t surprised. I think she knew that Litkin had talked to someone. That’s why she was so concerned. She said, “I won’t have the people I care about made ashamed.” And then I knew what she was going to do. She always kept the pills to hand. She hated the idea of being helpless. She said she was never going to let the illness trap her. I had to stop her. I told her to wait. I said I’d deal with it. She’d been brave when she had to be, she’d done things she didn’t want to do. I could be like that too.’ He looked at Jake, making sure that he understood. ‘So that’s what I did.’

  Jake could see Miss Yevanova, making her decision. She would choose to die, rather than be disgraced. But she had confided her decision to Nick Garrick, who already felt the responsibility–however undeserved–for the death of his mother. He would do anything to avoid that again.

  ‘I’d seen the wire in the old kitchen. I told myself I was like a partisan. I had to make a hard decision, like Miss Yevanova had when she’d done…whatever it was she’d done. A garrotte. It looks…so quick.’ He closed his eyes and swallowed. ‘It wasn’t like that at all…I can’t stop seeing it. I can’t stop remembering. It was horrible and I couldn’t stop once I’d started. And she…it…I just…I wanted to stop, but it was too late.

  ‘I went back to the phone and told her what I’d done, that I’d got the notebook and the letters. I said I was going to call the police. She sounded…’ He looked at Jake and his face was puzzled. ‘It sounded as if she was crying. Just for a minute. But she can’t have been. She never cried. Then she said she wasn’t going to let me take the blame. She said, “This is my fault.” She told me to remember that.’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t true. She wasn’t to blame. I was.’

  Jake listened as Garrick outlined the plan Sophia Yevanova had made. The phone was to be his a
libi. He was to get rid of the mobile and dispose of the notebook and letters. ‘She said I wasn’t to burn them. She wanted to see them. She told me to put them into the post box at the end of the drive.’

  Miss Yevanova was to be his witness on the other end of the phone to the sound of an intruder. ‘Once everything was set up, I was supposed to hang up and phone the police at once. Only…’ Only there had been blood. It might be on him, and the police would check. ‘She said I’d have to be with the body when the police arrived, that I’d have to try and move her, like I was trying to help her. I said I’d do that, but I couldn’t. I rang off, and I knew I couldn’t go back there. I couldn’t stop seeing it. On and on. I wanted to make it stop. I wanted to make it not happen. I took all the pills, and it wouldn’t go away, and I drank the whisky, and I kept thinking I’ll phone them in a minute. I’ll go through, then I’ll phone them…But I didn’t.’

  The pressure of the knife increased against his throat. Jake pressed himself back in his chair and braced himself. Sideways. He’d have to go sideways and try to knock Garrick’s legs out from under him.

  ‘Then it was morning. I’d fallen asleep. Just for a minute, I thought it had been a dream. I thought it was all okay. Then I remembered. I didn’t know what to do. I dialled 999 on my phone–I wanted to call the police and tell them what I’d done, but then I knew I couldn’t, not without them finding out that she’d tried to help me. I had to make it work. For her. Someone answered, and I couldn’t say anything. I just sat there with this voice saying, “Emergency. Which service?” I knew they could trace it. I knew I didn’t have much time. I took the phone to bits and shoved them through a gap in the floorboards. I didn’t think they’d take the place apart. Then I went to the library.’