The Forest of Souls

‘But my aunt couldn’t keep the shutters up, and all the time, day and night, the trucks rattled along the road, and we heard the sounds. We were in the forest, Raina and I, the day the guns stopped firing. But that was many weeks later.’

Jake sat back in his chair, letting the tension that had developed in his shoulders relax. As she had spoken, the past had touched the present. He had felt the ice of that winter, seen the steam rising from the breath of the prisoners crammed into the cellars, looked with her into the shadows of the forest.

A knock at the door ended the silence. Miss Yevanova came out of her reverie and picked up her embroidery. ‘Yes?’ she said.

The nurse, Mrs Barker, came in. ‘There’s been a message for you,’ she said. ‘From Miss Harley.’ She looked at Jake as she spoke.

Jake made to stand up, but Miss Yevanova waved him back to his seat. ‘And she says…?’

Mrs Barker looked anxious. ‘It’s as she told you,’ she said. ‘They’ve…taken the action she warned you of.’

‘I see.’ Miss Yevanova sat very still. Her voice was cool and level, but the colour had left her face. ‘It is only what we expected,’ she said.

Mrs Barker caught Jake’s eye with an implied warning. He gave her an imperceptible nod, and looked again at Miss Yevanova. ‘I’ll…’ he began.

She interrupted him. ‘There is no need for you to leave, Mr Denbigh.’ She turned to Mrs Barker. ‘Did Miss Harley…?’

‘She said she’d phone as soon as she had any news,’ Mrs Barker said. ‘And I really think…’

Miss Yevanova raised her eyebrows. ‘That is all, Mrs Barker.’

She waited until the housekeeper had left, then turned to Jake. He saw that some colour had returned to her face. ‘I will tell you another story, Mr Denbigh. And then you will tell me what you think.’ He started to speak, but she silenced him with a raised hand. ‘Listen. The phone call, the message, was about the son of a close friend–a friend who is now dead. My son Antoni has no children. I think of Nicholas sometimes as the grandchild I do not have. He…’ She stopped speaking, and sat very still for a moment before she resumed her story. ‘I was warned that this was going to happen, but I hoped it would not. There is no easy way to say this. Nicholas has been arrested on a charge of murder.’

Murder? Jake looked at her blankly. ‘What happened?’

Her voice had the same dry distance as when she recounted the stories from her past. ‘Early this morning, a woman was found dead in a house in the Derwent Valley. It is an isolated location, and Nicholas was working there. It is an irony that I helped him to get the job. I was concerned at once that the police might believe he was implicated–he was there, you see, and they prefer an easy solution. That phone call was from my solicitor. As I feared, Nicholas has been arrested.’

‘Have they charged him?’

She shook her head. Her expression was bleak. ‘But they will, if they can. He makes a convenient suspect. I have little faith in them.’

It was true enough–they could get it wrong. Jake thought about some of the cases he’d come across. But if they’d arrested this man there had to be more to the story than the simple outline she had given him. He realized that there must be something she wanted him to do, or she wouldn’t have told him. ‘How can I help you?’ he said.

Her gaze was steady. ‘Mr Denbigh, you have professional contact with the police, do you not?’

‘I have done.’ He’d done his share of crime reporting, and he’d kept his contacts up. Cass worked for the local force in a civilian capacity. But he needed to disillusion Miss Yevanova at once about any ability he might have to influence events. ‘I can’t change what’s happening,’ he said.

‘I’m aware of that,’ she said. ‘But I would like to know what the police are planning, how their minds are working. I want to know why they suspect Nicholas.’

Was she asking him to investigate the crime? ‘Maybe a private detective…’ he began, but she shook her head impatiently.

‘I have every confidence in the solicitor I have instructed. But the police worry me. I want to know what they are thinking, how they are interpreting what they find. Are these questions you could ask?’

It wouldn’t be the Manchester force dealing with it. He ran his list of contacts through his mind. He had some ideas about who he could approach. ‘Give me the details,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

As he stood up to leave, she handed back the photographs. ‘Why did you show me these?’ she said.

‘I need to know where they were taken. I thought you might be able to help me.’

‘The first one is a peasant house. As I told you, there were many such. I have no idea where it might be. But this one–’ Her fingers touched the photo of Marek Lange, the young man standing proudly in his uniform. ‘I can tell you about this one.’ Her face looked sad. ‘It was taken in Minsk.’

Sophia Yevanova sat watching the fire. The coals shifted, scattering ashes on to the hearth and sending sparks flying up the chimney. The evening was drawing in and the shadows pooled in the corners of the room. She looked up at the icon on the wall, then her eyes went back to the red glow at the heart of the dying fire.

She sometimes thought that all the comforts around her were no more than ramparts she had built against the past, walls that she had braced and strengthened over the years.

Sometimes those years seemed closer than the present. When she had talked to Jake Denbigh, she felt as though she was walking again under the trees of Kurapaty. She had felt the leaf-mould under her feet, and smelled the pine resin on the breeze. Just for a moment, she had been afraid to open her eyes, in case she would find herself back there.

And now the shifting coals were drawing faces in the flames. She watched, and didn’t watch, for the face she was afraid she might see and the face she still, after all these years, wanted to see, the face of the man she had loved, the face of her son’s father, dead so many years before.

The cushions on her chair had slipped, and her back was starting to ache. She made herself sit up straighter. The discomfort was a useful antidote to fatigue, and she could feel her leg starting to twitch and jump, a sure sign that she was tired.

She heard the sound of doors opening and closing, of people talking in the corridor, Mrs Barker’s low voice, and the authoritative tones of her son. She listened to them with a resigned amusement–did they think she was deaf as well as ill? Antoni was asking about Jake Denbigh’s visits, something he’d paid little attention to before, and Mrs Barker was telling him, in her muted, self-effacing way, about the events of the day. Antoni would not be pleased. He was not a patient man–but then she hadn’t brought him up to be patient.

She heard his footsteps moving along the corridor as he came to greet her. She switched on her light and picked up her sewing. She didn’t want him to find her sitting idle in the dark. It would worry him. She sat up straighter, ignoring the stab of pain in her back, and smiled as the door opened.

‘Antoni,’ she said, holding out her hand.

He took it and looked down at her, his face shadowed. ‘You look tired,’ he said abruptly. ‘I understand that journalist visited you again today.’

‘He is a pleasant young man.’ She shifted to ease her discomfort. ‘I enjoy talking to him.’

He made an impatient sound and went down on one knee to rearrange her cushions, positioning them so that they supported her back. ‘Better?’ He assessed her with his eyes. ‘Good. It’s the man’s profession to make himself pleasant. Mrs Barker, I can understand, but I thought that you would be impervious to the power of a smile.’

‘I will have plenty of time to resist young men with charming smiles when I am in my grave. In the meantime, allow me the few small vices I can still enjoy.’ She studied his face as she spoke. He was the one who looked tired. His eyes–suddenly she was looking into his father’s eyes, and had to drop her gaze before he could see her expression change–his eyes looked weary and shadowed.

He put his hand on her arm. ‘It would be better for you if you didn’t see this man again. I can easily arrange it. You don’t have to be troubled.’

‘It doesn’t trouble me,’ she said. ‘It’s Nicholas I’m concerned about.’

He gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Nicholas Garrick is not your responsibility. You paid his hospital bills. You found him work. Don’t you think you’ve done enough?’

She watched the fire. The coals shifted again, and the flames licked up. ‘No.’

‘There’s no reasoning with you,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and change. I’m free this evening. There’s a performance of Der Rosenkavalier on Radio 3. Shall we listen to it?’

Back in the days when she was well, they used to go to the opera together. They’d been to La Scala when he had lived in Milan, to the Metropolitan in New York, to the Royal Opera House during his time in London. As her illness confined her more, prevented her from travelling, he would come to her and they would attend performances at the Manchester Opera House. Now, she was dependent on the radio schedules.

After he left, she sat looking out of the window at the night. The rain spattered against the glass and blew across the roofs. Behind her, the hot coals hissed.

Baba Yaga

This is the story of the witch in the woods.

Not far from the house in the forest where Marek and Eva lived, there was a village. After the railway came to the forest, the village began to grow, and slowly the forest around the wooden house began to vanish as the village spread.

And there were troubled times. Men came and took Papa away. They took the fruit from the orchard, and the hens. ‘They want to make us Polish,’ Marek had said angrily. ‘They want to take away our home and our language.’ Without the fruit to sell, and the hens for eggs, it was a time of being hungry.

Marek went into the forest when Mama wasn’t looking. He would put his fingers to his lips if Eva saw him, and vanish down the paths. He brought back mushrooms and nettles and rabbits, and sometimes a bird. He would pretend to Mama that it was a gift from a neighbour, or that he had found these things near to the house. And sometimes he would slip out early in the morning and then there would be milk for Eva.

Then there came a time when Marek slipped out and came back limping, and there was no milk. Eva was more hungry than she had ever been, and Mama’s hands were so white it was as if the light was shining through them. ‘Read to me,’ she would say, to distract Eva from the empty place that gnawed inside her, so Eva would sit beside her and read to her, her voice halting at first as the letters gradually shaped themselves into sounds, the sounds into words, the words suddenly leaping from the page. She read the story of the firebird, the story of Havroshechka, the story of the snow child who played in the forest too close to the fire. She read the story of Baba Yaga, the witch whose house ran on chicken legs, and whose fence was hung with the skulls of the people she had eaten.

And sometimes, Mama would fall asleep in her chair, the bump, bump of the rockers slowing to silence. Eva would tiptoe to the door and watch Marek until she saw him slip away along the path that led into the forest, and then she would follow him. Now she was older, she could walk further into the forest, but that day Marek was walking fast and she lost sight of him. She didn’t mind at first, following him along the path. She would catch up with him soon. The sun felt warm where it shone through the leaf canopy and she swung herself round the trunks of the trees, the silver of the birch and the dark, heavy pines.

A bird took fright, somewhere in the deep glades, and shrieked and clattered its way into the air. The path divided here, and she didn’t know which way Marek had gone. That way was to the railway line. She listened. The forest was still. No train, no birds, no rabbits. Just the silence of the forest around her.

The other way…She looked along the path. She didn’t know this path. Maybe Marek had gone this way. Maybe this was where Marek got the birds and the rabbits and the milk. She walked further, looking at the trees that were starting to change colour, the long fronds brushing against her face as she walked She’d never been this far into the forest before. As her feet pressed into the ground, she could smell the damp earth and the leaf mould. The breeze stirred the leaves and made the shadows dance on the forest floor. The trees whispered to her: Eva. Eva.

And she could smell something else, faint on the breeze. It was a sour, rotting smell. It reminded her of the time a rat crawled under the house to die. She stopped. The path branched again ahead of her, winding away through the trees. As she watched, the sun came out above the leaf canopy, and its rays dappled the ground that was golden with the early fall of autumn. The breeze moved the air again and she smelled the scent of the forest, and the birch fronds danced and beckoned. Eva. Eva. She turned along the winding path.

It led to a cottage, a house in a clearing, one of the houses in the deep forest that the village hadn’t yet reached. It was timber with a picket fence, and along the path, under the trees leading to the house, there were bushes, and the bushes were covered with berries.

The empty place inside Eva came alive. She looked round quickly but the house seemed to be deserted. She ran along the path, and knelt down to look at the bushes. She knew these berries. She could eat them without cooking. And there were enough to take back for everyone. She crammed them into her mouth until the empty place went away and she felt a bit sick. She began to collect berries in her apron.

But the sick feeling wasn’t just the berries. It was the smell. The smell was here, in the clearing and it was in her nose, in her hair, in her clothes, in her hands. She was inside the smell, and now she wasn’t so hungry, she couldn’t ignore it.

She looked at the house again. She could see the white fence glimmering from the shadow of the trees, and the windows were dark spaces behind. She’d never heard of a house so deep in the forest before. She crept nearer. The house was clean, well cared for, and the smell caught in her nostrils and brought tears to her eyes.

She could see movement in the shadows. There was something dark hanging from the beam above the porch. The shape came clearer as she moved closer. She could see a face. The face was watching her, but the eyes were half-closed and sunken. The hair, which was white, was pulled into a neat bun, like Mama’s. And the breeze blew, and she almost expected to smell Mama, the smell of lavender and herbs that she knew so well. But the smell that the breeze carried was foul.

And as the forest breathed around her, she knew what it was. She waited, frozen, for the house to stand up on chicken legs and step towards her with deliberate but silent tread. Her hands let go of the corners of her apron, and the berries fell, unheeded, to the ground. She backed away, and again, then turned and ran down the path not stopping, not daring to look back, until suddenly she was past the trees and into the clearing, and she could hear Mama calling her, and Marek had come back from the railway with potatoes and Mama had made soup. She couldn’t eat it, though Mama scolded and worried.

Over the next few days, she heard the women talking about the old woman in the woods–‘…her boy…shot in the fighting…hanged herself…’ And they made the sign of the cross, and Mama sighed.

But Eva had seen Baba Yaga’s house, seen the fence hung with the bodies of the people she’d killed. And at night, she would lie in bed, tense, listening to the sounds of the forest, trying to pick out the scrape of chicken feet stepping across the forest floor. She could remember the way chickens walked, the way they lifted their feet, the way the tendons moved under the wrinkled skin of their legs, the way their claws stepped on to the ground with slow deliberation. And she knew that Baba Yaga’s house was hunting her through the forest, stealthy and inexorable.

She had stolen Baba Yaga’s berries and now her bones would hang on that high, white fence.

8

The following morning dawned bright and clear with the promise of an early spring. The sun was rising as Faith left for work, the winter light warming the grey stone and gleaming off the rocky outcrops on the high moors in the distance.

She was worried about Helen. She’d tried contacting her, but no one answered the phone. She’d left messages, but there had been no response. She thought back to the last time they’d talked. Helen had seemed distracted. Daniel was putting a lot of pressure on her. ‘He wants his share of the house,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t want all of this to go through lawyers and the courts. I thought we could sort it ourselves.’

‘Why don’t you just buy him out?’ Faith said. It seemed the simplest way–a clean break.

‘I can’t take on a mortgage that size. It’ll mean moving, and the kids…Now he’s saying he’s going to take me to court for custody.’ She sighed, apparently more exasperated than concerned.

‘Do you think he means it?’

Helen shook her head. ‘He’s just making smoke. He thinks we’re going to get back together. He’ll come round.’

‘Are you?’ Helen had blossomed since she had left her marriage. Despite all the worries and all the hassle, she’d seemed brighter and happier than Faith had seen her in years.

‘Sometimes I think it would be the easiest way, but…’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not going to happen.’

Faith thought about this conversation as she negotiated the traffic. Helen had been evasive about the break-up, about what had been the final trigger. Though Helen hadn’t said anything definite, Faith suspected that there was someone else in the picture. She had been astonished when she saw Helen for the first time after the break-up. Despite all the problems, she’d looked years younger. She had been the buoyant, vivacious woman Faith remembered from their university days, but a sophisticated one now, beautifully turned out, her hair styled, her clothes immaculate.

Another time–just after her birthday–Helen had been wearing a new watch with a delicate silver band. ‘Present from Daniel?’ Faith had asked, though it looked a bit subtle for Daniel.

‘No,’ Helen had said, caressing the band round her wrist. ‘Just a treat.’

A couple of days ago, Faith had met her in the lobby coming back from lunch. She was carrying a bag with the logo of one of the expensive department stores, filled with tiny boxes that looked as though they contained filmy, lacy garments, not workaday cotton.

‘I’m sick of the hausfrau image, that’s all,’ she’d said rather defensively when Faith had raised an ironic eyebrow at her.

Faith put the matter of Helen to the back of her mind, and tried to focus on putting together the budget to finance the research programme that had been approved in yesterday’s meeting. But her thoughts drifted to her own family. She’d phoned Katya the evening before, choosing a time when she was pretty sure her mother would be out, and left a message to say that the interview had gone ahead and there hadn’t been any problems. But it wasn’t the interview that worried Faith. It was the sense of a gathering futility in Grandpapa’s life, epitomized by the slow decay of the house. It was as if he had stopped caring–as if his life no longer had any use or purpose.

His life had always been his work. He hadn’t let the reins of business go until he was well into his seventies. And after that, she had been his project for a while–he had supported her through university, helped her out when she was first trying to get established and living hand to mouth on post-graduate grants. But she was independent now, had been for years. Maybe that was it. Maybe for him, life had lost its point.

She was due to see him tomorrow evening. He was making supper for her–he enjoyed making small occasions of her visits. She could talk to him about it, try and find out what was wrong. While she was at it, she meant to put pressure on him about the house–he could at least get it weatherproof. She’d seen the rainwater stains on the ceilings upstairs, and she had felt the chilly draughts from ill-fitting doors and windows. He was going to make himself ill.

Her worries about him occupied her all the way to work. She walked across the campus, the detritus of other people’s lives clamouring for attention in her head. Enough! she wanted to shout. She needed to focus on the day ahead.

As she approached the Centre, she saw that there were vehicles parked outside, cars and a van. The campus was generally vehicle free and she wondered what was going on. As she got nearer, she saw a man coming out of the main entrance, his arms loaded with files, which he put into the back of the van.

He was in uniform.

She stopped. The writing on the van came into focus. Police. And there was a police logo on one of the cars. Someone else was coming down the steps now, carrying a computer. There was a flash of colour from the side of the machine, a bright rectangle of card that flipped over as the breeze caught it. And suddenly she remembered standing in Helen’s cubicle the day before, seeing the photo stuck to the computer, the photo of Helen with Finn and Hannah, Helen squinting into the sun with her hair blowing across her face, Hannah’s cheek pressed close to hers.

That was Helen’s computer. The police were taking Helen’s computer away. And Helen hadn’t been around yesterday, had missed her meetings, not answered her phone, not replied to messages…

Faith could feel a chill inside her, a tension that twisted her stomach and left a feeling of rising sickness in her throat. She was moving again now, walking faster towards the Centre, breaking into a half-run and stopping as a woman in uniform emerged from the doorway.

‘What’s happened?’

The woman didn’t answer Faith’s question. ‘Do you work here?’

‘Yes. What’s going on?’ She looked past the woman into the lobby. It was empty and silent.

‘And you are…?’ The woman’s voice was calm. She wasn’t going to answer Faith’s questions until she knew who she was.

Faith swallowed her impatience. ‘I’m Faith Lange. I’m…’ A man came down the steps past her, carrying a box of files, Helen’s files, Faith could recognize the handwriting. ‘What’s he doing?’

The woman had a clipboard with a list of names. Faith indicated her own, trying to see past the woman as the uniformed man stowed the box in the back of the van. ‘I’m a friend of Helen Kovacs. That’s her stuff. What’s happened?’

‘Mrs Kovacs was…’

‘Doctor,’ Faith said automatically. The woman looked at her. ‘Dr Kovacs. Helen is Dr Kovacs.’ Helen always insisted on her title, probably because Daniel had been so disparaging of it.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘There’s been an incident involving Dr Kovacs…’ Her eyes checked Faith’s face for her response.

‘An incident? But she’s all right?’ She waited for the woman to offer the standard reassurances: She’s fine.

But she didn’t.

Faith tried again. ‘She’s okay?’

Still the woman refused to pick up her cue. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She paused, and in that pause, Faith understood. ‘Dr Kovacs was found dead yesterday.’

Dead. ‘But…’ She needed to explain. Helen couldn’t be dead. It was Hannah’s birthday on Saturday. Faith hadn’t told her about…They were supposed to…She was aware of a hand on her elbow as the policewoman steered her through the entrance into the Centre.

‘Do you need to sit down?’

The policewoman was young, serious, professional. She didn’t know that Faith and Helen had been close. In a way, it was easier to hear it like this. She was just doing her job, telling someone that a colleague was dead. She wouldn’t be nervous of grief, wouldn’t be embarrassed by her own inadequacy. Faith withdrew her arm, and took a deep breath to ensure that her voice would be steady before she spoke again. ‘No. Thank you. I’m all right. What happened?’