The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  She’d been thinking more about what made a place home. ‘I like space around me,’ she said. ‘This is too…’ she gestured up at the high buildings that were walling them in ‘…confining. That’s why I decided to live in Glossop.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s always the city for me.’

  They met the crowds again once they were on Deansgate. People were rowdier now, amiable enough, but with an edge to their exuberance that was fuelled by the alcohol they had drunk. She could hear the sound of singing, and the sound of breaking glass. A police car cruised slowly along the street.

  It took ten minutes to reach the multi-storey where she’d parked. Their footsteps echoed in the cold air as they followed the strip of walkway up to the second level. The lights were yellow and flickered slightly, making a low, metallic buzz. There was a smell of urine and the air tasted of oil. She was glad of his company. It wasn’t a good place to be alone.

  ‘This is mine,’ she said, as they reached her battered Polo. ‘It’s put in a few years.’

  ‘At least it’s still here,’ he said.

  She laughed, but she wouldn’t be the first person to return to her parking space and find her car gone. This was why she hadn’t bothered to get herself something better when she came back. Why provide thieves with expensive cars?

  He waited until she was sitting at the wheel with the engine running, then he leaned forward as she wound down the window. ‘Thanks for this evening,’ he said. ‘I suppose I ought to apologize for abducting those photos.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ If he hadn’t picked them up, she might never have seen them. ‘Have a good trip. Enjoy the package tours.’

  He grinned. ‘It’ll be interesting,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure about the rest. Watch out for maniacs on your way back. It’s Saturday–they’ll all have had a skin-full. Is your passenger door locked?’

  ‘It’s always locked,’ she said, but she reached across to check. She looked up at him. ‘Goodbye, then.’

  He leaned down and gave her the briefest of kisses, his hand lightly touching her arm. They looked at each other in silence, then he said, ‘I’ll call you when I get back, okay?’

  She could see him watching her as she drove away.

  It was almost eleven by the time Jake got home, and he was too wide awake to think about sleep. He’d enjoyed the evening, even though he hadn’t found out much more about Marek Lange. Faith Lange was protective of her grandfather, but Jake had noticed some interesting anomalies in her account of her childhood with him. Jake could pick the topic up with her when he got back. He might have a better idea then of what he was looking for.

  He began to sketch out a diagram on a piece of paper. Marek Lange was linked via Minsk to Sophia Yevanova. She in turn was linked to Nicholas Garrick and through him, to the right-wing fanaticism of his father, David Garrick-Smith. On the edges of this was the murder of Helen Kovacs.

  Jake looked at the schema he had drawn. He couldn’t see any patterns forming, any links of which he had been unaware. He couldn’t even tell if these were true connections, or just the connections that happenstance threw up all the time.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he wrote Faith’s name in on the edge of the diagram, then put a question mark beside it. She was in that web somewhere.

  He was looking forward to seeing her again–and not just because she gave him a route to Marek Lange’s background. He wanted to get to know her better. He realized he was moving into dangerous ground–if he found out something interesting about Lange, he was going to follow it up, no matter what it was. He gave a mental shrug. Sometimes, behaving like a shit was just part of the territory. He’d resigned himself to that years ago.

  He checked his messages. There was one from Adam Zuygev, his contact in Minsk. He listened to the message:

  Hello, Jake. This is Adam. I will be at the office on Monday until four o’clock. Phone me when you arrive and we can arrange to meet. There is a protest rally that afternoon, which means that the police will be arresting people. This will be at a distance from your hotel, so we should have no difficulty.

  Okay, forewarned was forearmed. Protests, arrests, beatings and disappearances were part of the daily round in Belarus. He wasn’t there to get tied up in current politics, but he wondered if it would be worth taking a look at the rally and risking some photographs. On the other hand, he didn’t want to spend his brief visit in jail. It was too late to phone Adam back. He made a note to do it the next day.

  There was a message from Cass as well. She was more succinct. You ‘re a shit, Jake. Fair enough.

  He could do with getting some sleep. He’d arranged to visit Sophia Yevanova in the morning, and he was driving to London overnight. His plane left at six a.m. on Monday, so he would need to be at the airport by four. He was going to go short of sleep tomorrow. But he wasn’t tired, he felt restless and dissatisfied. He looked at Juris Ziverts’ carving, a wooden replica of one of the two cat statues that adorned the pointed towers of the Cat House in Riga. About a hundred years ago, the owner of the house had had a dispute with one of the guilds across the road and had turned the cats round, pointing their raised tails at the guild building, to great scandal and consternation in the city. ‘To bare the backside at authority, see?’ Ziverts had said, his hawkish face lighting up with his smile. But Juris Ziverts was dead.

  Jake tried not to think about the old man too often. After the tabloid article had come out, the police had come under pressure to reopen the case. The evidence against Ziverts was so thin and so unreliable that the case would almost certainly have been thrown out of court, if it had ever got there, but the fact of the investigation was enough to prove his guilt in the eyes of some people. Ziverts had died a few weeks after Jake had first met him. The hostility in the press, the graffiti on the wall of his house, and finally, a series of vandalisms culminating in the wrecking of his greenhouse and the flowers to which he had devoted so many years, had left him a broken and broken-hearted man.

  Jake had written his article. His editor hadn’t wanted to publish it. ‘We don’t defend old fascists,’ he’d told Jake. Jake had threatened to take the article elsewhere, publicizing the fact that his own paper refused to publish it. It had been a gamble, and one that had come close to costing him his job. In the end, it had appeared with an editorial disclaimer. Jake wasn’t sure what good it had done. None, he suspected. As suddenly as the furore had erupted, it vanished. No one cared.

  There was no point in thinking about it. As he’d said to Faith, there was nothing he could do to change it. He poured himself a larger whisky than was probably wise and switched on his computer. He read through his notes, making himself focus on the story that Sophia Yevanova had told him a few days before, of her evening walk past the building where the NKVD held prisoners awaiting death.

  In his mind, he could see the street on that winter’s night, the sidewalk shining with frost, the air frozen to stillness. And in the light from the pre-war lamps, cold and intermittent, a young girl hurried from light to shadow, light to shadow, not wanting to pass the barracks-like building with the gratings in the ground. He could see the steam rising from them, drifting away into the night air. And he could see the girl hunch herself over as she tried not to think about what that rising cloud of human breath meant.

  His eyes moved back to the diagram he had drawn. Marek Lange. Sophia Yevanova. Nicholas Garrick, child of a warped man with a warped ideal.

  The ghost fingers reached out, insubstantial, dead and gone.

  The message light was flashing on the phone as Faith let herself in through the front door. She dumped her bag and hung her coat up. She felt a bit flat now the evening was over, and found herself wondering what Jake Denbigh was doing at this moment. Probably much the same as she was.

  She realized she was starving and went into the kitchen. The bread was a bit stale so she put a slice in the toaster, and cut herself some cheese. She’d only had one drink with Jake, so she took a bottle of wi
ne out of the fridge and poured herself a generous glass.

  The blinds were open and she went across the room to close them, pausing to look out at the small paved yard and the squares of light that marked her neighbours’ houses. She shut the blinds and felt the security of the house close around her.

  The phone rang, making her jump. It was well after eleven–late for a casual call. She picked it up. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Faith?’ It was Jake Denbigh. ‘I’m just checking you got back safely.’

  It was an oddly old-fashioned courtesy that touched her. ‘Yes. Thank you. And you?’

  ‘Well, I had to wade through wall-to-wall drunks, but they were yuppie drunks, so that’s okay.’

  She laughed. ‘What time are you leaving?’

  ‘Not till late. My flight leaves at the crack of dawn, so I’ll drive down overnight.’ His tone was light, but there was an undertone of something else, as though he was very tired.

  ‘Long day,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve had worse. Listen, I’ll call when I get back, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Have a good trip.’

  After he’d rung off, she sat in the chair by the phone, enjoying her wine and thinking about Jake Denbigh. It was a long time since she’d met a man who really interested her.

  The message light caught her attention with its insistent flash. She pressed the button and wandered back to the kitchen as she listened to the messages. There were two from friends, expressing shock and sympathy about Helen. The third one started with silence, then Grandpapa’s voice spoke. She put her glass down and came back quickly to the phone. It wasn’t like him to call. It definitely wasn’t like him to leave a message.

  Faith…I…You are there? I…Doreen doesn’t…The silence came back, along with the hiss of the machine, then his voice spoke again. Camellia is flowering. You must come and see.

  There was a click and the message ended. She stood in the hallway staring at the answering machine. He’d never been good with them, rarely leaving messages at all. She couldn’t work out why he had phoned. Doreen. He’d said Doreen doesn’t. Doreen doesn’t what?

  She looked at her watch. It was getting on for midnight, far too late to call. It would take an hour to drive, and she was probably over the limit with the glass of wine she’d just had. She bit her lip in indecision. The best thing she could do was go to bed and phone him first thing.

  But she lay awake for a long time, her mind going over and over the message and her ears alert for the sound of the phone.

  13

  Faith woke with a headache and a sense of nagging worry. Grandpapa. She checked the time on her radio. It was just after eight, too early to phone him–he was rarely up and about before nine. She listened to the regional news as she showered. There was a terrorist threat that was affecting the London trains, another football scandal was brewing, and the police claimed to be close to making an arrest in connection with a recent armed robbery. Helen’s murder wasn’t mentioned.

  Her mind flashed back to the evening before. She’d been sitting in the bar with Jake, and she’d told him about Helen. Just for a moment, he’d gone very still. She hadn’t noticed at the time–maybe the wine had been stronger than she realized–but she could remember it now.

  She puzzled over it as she dried her hair, but she couldn’t come up with any answers. She didn’t know enough about Jake Denbigh to work out what his agenda was, but it was a useful reminder to be wary in any further contacts with him.

  By the time she was dressed–jeans and a sweatshirt, her weekend uniform–it was nine o’clock. She dialled Grandpapa’s number, waiting for him to answer. The phone rang eight times, nine times, ten times. She could feel the tension in her fingers.

  ‘Hello?’ Grandpapa’s voice. Relief flooded her.

  ‘It’s Faith,’ she said. ‘You phoned last night. I was worried.’

  ‘Phoned?’ He sounded puzzled.

  ‘You left a message, remember? Something about Doreen, and the camellia.’

  ‘Camellia. Yes, she is flowering. You must come and see.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised. ‘But what was it about Doreen?’

  ‘She doesn’t come,’ he said, his voice sounding puzzled again.

  ‘Yesterday? She didn’t come yesterday?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know…’

  ‘Grandpapa, it was Saturday. She doesn’t come at the weekend. She’ll be there tomorrow.’

  There was silence as he thought about this. ‘Saturday. I had forgotten.’ She was relieved to hear him laugh. ‘When you are my age, little one, this day, that day, who knows? Just…foolish old man.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘I can come across today if you want.’

  ‘Fine, I am fine. No. You come on Wednesday. I will make the treat.’

  That meant draniki again. This time, she intended doing the cooking.

  ‘I’ll come on Wednesday anyway. Why don’t I drop in today? I want to see the camellia.’

  ‘And the old man in his dotage?’ He was always quick to spot any over-protectiveness, any attempt to manipulate him.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I want to come across because I’m worried about you and I want to make sure you’re all right.’

  ‘And you have made sure,’ he said with finality. ‘I will see you on Wednesday.’

  ‘Grandpapa…’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  He wasn’t going to budge. She sighed, letting him hear her exasperation. ‘Wednesday, then. I’ll come straight from work. I’ll be there by six.’

  She felt better after speaking to him. His stubbornness was infuriating, but it was also reassuring. Going across to Altrincham would have taken a large chunk out of the day. She went out into her back garden, waving at her neighbour who was trying to dig the frozen earth. She could hear the clunk of his spade hitting the ground as she stood there enjoying the winter morning. The air was clear and she could see the hills and the glitter of frost in the high valleys. Having the Peak District on her doorstep was one of the things that had drawn her to Glossop.

  Even though she’d spent her childhood in Manchester, she’d never discovered the Derbyshire Peak until Helen had introduced her to the beauties of its remoter parts, to the dark rock edges and the bleak moorland.

  They’d spent a week together in the Peak the summer they finished at Oxford, walking in the hills, staying in hostels and small B&Bs. It had been a glorious week of blue skies, remote hills, the freedom of youth and the optimism of a new life ahead. Helen had glowed for those few short days. It was afterwards that Faith realized she must have been in the early stages of pregnancy. She had married Daniel later that summer, and that autumn, Finn had been born.

  Faith still had a stone she’d found on that holiday. It was green and striated, washed smooth by a long-gone river. It had stood on her windowsill in her room at Oxford, it had lain on the hearth in her first flat, and now it was part of her garden, back in its native setting.

  She touched it lightly, her fingers brushing over its polished surface. It was a Derbyshire stone, but it looked as alien against the millstone grit as it had among the mellow stones of Oxford.

  She wasn’t due at Daniel’s until after eleven. She suspected that this was to give him time to get the children safely packed off to his mother’s. She’d considered arriving early, but had decided to keep to the arrangement. For now, she had to play by whatever rules he set.

  She spent an hour cleaning the house, then set off for Daniel’s. Shawbridge, a run-down town on the outskirts of Manchester, wasn’t far from Glossop. It didn’t have the cachet of other commuter towns–Marple, Wilmslow, or even Glossop itself. Helen used to say that it would come into its own one day when everywhere else had priced itself out of the market, but as far as Faith could see, that day was still to come.

  The house was on the edge of the town on a quiet cul-de-sac. Faith parked against the grass verge, outside the familiar thirties semi. Daniel’s KOVACS ELECTRICAL van was parked o
utside, as she’d seen it on a hundred visits. The low hedge behind the wall and the dark-stained wood of the front door were all disturbing in their familiarity.

  She pressed the doorbell. Before, if she’d been coming to see Helen, she would have pushed the door open and called out her greeting. Now, she waited. Finally a shadow moved in the glass and the door opened.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Daniel hesitated, then stood back to let her in. For a moment, she’d thought he was going to leave her standing on the doorstep.

  ‘How are you?’ she said, stepping inside.

  He didn’t answer, but turned away towards the back of the house where the sitting room was located. She followed him through, noticing that everything was pristine and orderly, the surfaces gleaming, the floors vacuumed. Daniel had always liked everything just so, in contrast to the easy-going disorder that Helen favoured. ‘In here,’ he said.

  The sitting room was silent and empty. She looked round for evidence of Hannah’s toys that used to be strewn across the carpet, or of Finn’s latest project, but the room looked unlived in. She noticed a new TV in the corner, the huge, flat-screen model she’d seen in his house at Longsight. On the table, there was a cardboard box stuffed full of papers.

  Daniel pointed to it. ‘There,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want me to take it?’ she said. ‘I can sort through her papers here. There might be some stuff you want to keep.’

  ‘Take them,’ he said. ‘I just want it all out of the way.’

  ‘What about her books? Do you want me to have a look at those?’

  ‘No need,’ Daniel said. ‘I got a dealer to take them.’

  Faith turned her face away to hide her expression. Helen had spent a lot of time and care putting together her library, and now it was gone, just like that. It was as if Daniel was trying to destroy every vestige of her academic identity. He had never liked or understood Helen’s work. He’d resented her non-earning years at university and he’d always resented the way her work intruded into their time together.