The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  There it was again. ‘Marek?’ she whispered.

  She could feel the hairs on her arms start to rise. Something was wrong. She turned to go back, then stopped. She was almost there. If the danger was here, then Marek would be in danger too. She had to warn him. She moved quickly now, her eyes darting from shadow to shadow. The walls closed in around her, high, cutting off the light of the moon. A voice inside her was insistent with its warning: Get away! Get away!

  The distillery was at the far end where the roads met. It was derelict. It had been damaged in the bombing, and had been abandoned ever since. She was at the gates now, the place where she and Marek had said goodbye, over two years ago. High above her, the bear danced on the arch. There was no one there. Where was he? The road was empty in front of her. She looked back. Silence and shadows. He was near. She could almost sense him. ‘Marek?’ she whispered.

  ‘Eva!’ It was like a breath of silence in her ear, and he was there, tall, strong, but thinner, so much thinner, and his face…In the penumbral light, her brother looked old.

  ‘Marek…’ she said.

  He put his arms round her. ‘Eva!’ Then he looked at her. ‘You’re so thin.’

  So are you! she wanted to say, but there was no time. ‘Marek. It isn’t safe here! We’ve got to go. It isn’t safe.’

  ‘I know. Listen to me–someone is watching you. Someone will give your name to the police soon. They may have it already. You have to get out. Tonight.’

  She felt a wash of cold flood over her…give your name to the police…‘Tonight? But–’

  His whisper was urgent. ‘Eva. You have to get out. I tried to get here sooner but I couldn’t. We can get down the river, I’ll–’

  She hushed him. She’d heard something. A sound in the darkness behind her, in the derelict building. ‘There’s something wrong,’ she whispered. ‘Something–’

  And the light was blinding her. A voice was shouting and Marek grabbed her arms and pushed her into the shadows through the gates. ‘Go! Now, Eva! Go!’ and she was running, weaving around piles of rubble, her feet tripping on the uneven ground, and she could hear his voice, and there were shouts and the sound of shots behind her, and then Marek’s voice stopped.

  Marek! She skidded round a corner, the walls of the building in front of her, walls to either side. She could hear running feet behind her. Marek! There was a path that ran down the side of the building, that led to the street on the other side. If she could get through, she might be able to lose them, but she’d turned the wrong way in her panic and she was trapped, no, there was a door, a door she could get through and out the other side, Marek, Marek, the door was blocked. She threw herself against it but it was solid. Back, she had to go back, find her way through. She spun round, but the light was shining straight into her eyes, and then she saw them, the soldiers, and they had their guns pointing at her.

  Slowly, she raised her arms above her head. She could feel herself shaking. Marek? What had they done with Marek? The soldiers relaxed now they could see her. One of them ran his hands over her, looking for a weapon. The others laughed and spoke to each other in their own language. She heard the sound of voices shouting in the night, and then a shot. Someone cried out.

  She tried to run towards the sound. Marek! One of the soldiers swung his fist and knocked her to the ground. Something smashed into her hip and she curled up, her voice swallowed in the pain. He kicked her again then they pulled her to her feet and half marched her, half dragged her to a waiting truck.

  There was no sign of Marek, but she could see on the ground as they threw her into the back of the vehicle, a pool of something that gleamed black in the moonlight.

  Marek!

  23

  Faith woke suddenly from a restless dream in which Helen kept telling her, You don’t know what you’re doing. Finn walked away from her down a long corridor. She was awake in a dim light, and something hard was digging into her back. She struggled to sit up, completely disorientated. Her mouth was dry and her neck felt stiff.

  She’d fallen asleep on the settee. The combination of fatigue and wine had been too much for her. It was almost midnight. She ought to go up to bed, but the thought of the cold darkness upstairs was chilling. And now, of course, she was wide awake. She remembered what Jake had said about his father’s illness, when he couldn’t sleep. I used sit up until three in the morning smoking too much and wondering if there was any news. She might as well find something to distract her until sleep caught up with her again.

  She didn’t want to look at Grandpapa’s papers, not at this bleak time of the night. Her laptop was still set up on the table. She switched it on and scrolled through her files. Work was the one part of her life that was still under her control. Numbers could be trusted. Numbers were things she could handle.

  She worked for an hour, the flicker from the screen becoming soporific. The storm had blown out, the rain had stopped and the night had the silence of deep cold. Even with the heating now working, she needed the heavy sweater to keep warm. Her eyes were getting heavy, and she thought she might be able to sleep.

  She leaned back in the chair, massaging her neck. It was getting on for one, time to go to bed. She decided to make herself a warm drink and was just standing up when her phone vibrated on the table beside her. She looked at the number, and picked it up. She knew what was coming.

  ‘Miss Lange? It’s Janet from the hospital. Your grandfather’s taken a turn for the worse.’

  Jake’s mind had been working fast as he left the Lange house, trying to make sense of what he had found. When he got back to his flat, he got out the papers that Cass had given him and went through them until he found what he was looking for.

  Here. This was what Faith had been talking about: Helen Kovacs had been making notes while she was working, and the investigating team had not been able to decipher them:

  Ma_y _ro__ene__.

  He stared at the writing blankly. It could be a coincidence. Why would Helen Kovacs have been interested in Maly Trostenets? And if she was, why was the name incomplete? There was nothing to indicate that Kovacs’ murder was related to her research–it seemed to be a second string in the police investigation–but as far as he could tell, there was nothing they had found in the library that made any reference to Maly Trostenets, to Minsk or to the 1939-45 war. He went through the papers carefully a second time. There was nothing.

  He could see two possibilities. The first one was straightforward: Kovacs’ notes had nothing to do with the death camp. The similarity was pure coincidence and meant nothing. The second one…whoever had killed Helen Kovacs would have had time to check through the papers she was studying and remove any incriminating references while Nick Garrick lay in his self-induced stupor. But the killer had missed the note–in which case it meant a great deal.

  Either way, it was something the police needed to see. He had to get this to the investigating team. He picked up the phone to call Burnley, then hesitated. The notes were not in the public domain. If the information came from him, Burnley would want to know where Jake had got it, and how he knew it was significant. He wasn’t stupid. He would remember that Jake had been interested and had been asking questions. He’d start hunting around and Jake knew that Cass would have been careless. Then she’d be in deep shit with the police, and with her boyfriend as well. There was no innocent explanation that would cover her passing him confidential documents.

  Jake thought quickly. He could tell Ann Harley, Garrick’s solicitor. It was legitimate for her to have this information. She would be aware of those notes–they’d have questioned Nick about them. He couldn’t call her now–it was nearly midnight. He made a note to contact her first thing, then he sat back in his chair, letting his mind run over what he had just found. He couldn’t understand how information about Maly Trostenets would be significant.

  Jake was well enough informed about the Nazi death camps, but he’d never heard of it before his visit to Minsk. He knew from his
recent research that it had been one of five camps, along with Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka II, that had existed purely to exterminate, but unlike the other four, its name was barely known. Out of curiosity, he Googled it and came up with only a hundred references, several of which took him to the same page. Then he tried searching for the others. He got seventeen thousand hits for Belzec and Chelmno, almost fifty thousand for Sobibor and over seventy thousand for Treblinka.

  Maly Trostenets wasn’t a secret–but it had been too far east, too hidden in the lands that had come under the shadow of Stalin’s rule. He wondered where Helen Kovacs had come across it. He looked at the diagram he’d pinned on to his notice board, the one he’d drawn before he went away, attempting to link the disparate threads. He added Maly Trostenets and stared at it again. He linked it to Helen Kovacs’ name, then drew the line across to Faith. She and Kovacs had been friends at school. Kovacs must have met Marek Lange. She was a historian. Suppose she had picked up on the Minsk connection and followed that through…

  And now she was dead.

  The direction his thoughts were taking him shook him. Lange was too frail and old to have attacked Helen Kovacs–the idea was ridiculous. He drummed his fingers on the table, suddenly uneasy.

  If something were threatening to strip Lange of his good name and his freedom, then he might have enlisted help. If he had survived by switching sides, then maybe the powerful protection that still operated around ex-Nazis might have operated for him. Jake rubbed his forehead as he thought. Why would Lange have cared? For years his life had demonstrated that he didn’t. He’d said as much to Jake: What is there to lose if the gamble fails? It is only fear that stops you. Lange had been successful because he had nothing he cared about, nothing more to lose.

  Until his granddaughter was born.

  He would care because of Faith. The story would impinge on Faith, on her life, even on her career. Lange would have cared about that. But even so, why murder? It would have been enough to get rid of whatever it was that Kovacs had found. So maybe murder had never been the plan, but someone had panicked. Then Lange would have a murderer on his hands.

  The bits were starting to fall into place. Lange was deeply troubled about something. According to Faith, he’d been showing signs of stress since the day Jake had met him. She attributed that stress to the interview, to awakened memories, but it had taken place the morning after the murder. It was possible that Lange’s distress had had nothing to do with the interview and everything to do with Kovacs’ death. And now he was ill and unable to communicate.

  Jake pressed his fingers against his eyes and forced himself to think. If he was right, then someone had killed Helen Kovacs to keep her from revealing something about Maly Trostenets, something she had found in the Litkin Archive, something that would hurt Marek Lange.

  But if the story had come out after all these years, who was there left to care? Who was still alive to point the finger of accusation, if Helen Kovacs had brought back whatever it was that had been hidden in the archive?

  And as soon as he asked the question, the answer was obvious. There was one person who would be a danger to someone with that secret, from that place, and from that time.

  Sophia Yevanova slept lightly these days. Her age and her illness dictated this–she accepted it. She required Mrs Barker to settle her for the night with her pillows supporting her, her sewing and her glasses in easy reach so that she could, if necessary, make the wakeful hours useful. Many nights, she lay silently in the darkness watching the changing patterns of the shadows against her blind.

  She had been unwell that evening. Antoni had persuaded her to take some Valium to ease the tics and spasms that were plaguing her, with Mrs Barker supporting his urgings: Come now, Miss Yevanova, just one to relax you…Now she wished she had not given in to them. The symptoms of her illness were something she could deal with–troublesome but familiar. She didn’t care for the way the drug clouded her mind, left her not completely in control of her consciousness or of her thoughts, the way it left her hovering in the wasteland that lay between sleep and wakefulness.

  She made herself focus. She could hear the wind surging against the trees, she could hear the calls of the night animals–an owl calling to its mate, the cry of a fox, the scream of the small prey whose time it was to die, the sounds…

  …of the forest. The trickling water of the marshland, the birds, the soft crunch of boots on pine needles, the sound of marching feet tramp, tramp, tramp through the city streets and the old roads that ran through the villages. The whine of bike engines and the roar of trucks, the klop-klop of gunfire and a hand drawing her away from the window, Raina…

  Her eyes snapped open. She had been drifting into dreams, and these were not dreams she welcomed. The hand on the clock jerked forward with a heavy tock and the house was silent again. Only now it seemed to be full of sounds that existed just on the edge of hearing, creaks and whispers and breathing in the shadows. Breath…

  …rising in a white mist from the gratings where the frost glittered on the pavement and the ice in the air bit viciously at her face as she hurried through the darkness, her feet clattering on the flags, klop-klop and a hand drawing her…

  Dreams again! The fabric of the present was tearing and she was falling through to where the past was waiting. Her hands reached for the light by her bed, but they fumbled, the muscles and nerves refusing to obey her. She tried to lie still, breathing quietly, taking command of herself. Her leg twitched and jumped. She stared into the darkness, holding on to alertness. She didn’t want to go to the places her mind was threatening to take her.

  The sounds of the house were clearer now, as though the antenna of her consciousness had tuned into them. The clunk of the pipes, the sound of the clock, tick silence tock silence. Sometimes its rhythms would become a voice that talked to her: Come. Now. Come. Now. Like Mrs Barker with her seductive Valium: Oh, come now, Miss Yevanova…Come now. Come now. Come. Now. Come. Now…

  And a sound that was almost like an absence, or like a sensation that came to her through the fabric and the timbers, someone moving around the house, soft feet on the stairs, pad. Silence. Silence. Creak.

  Come. Now. Come. Now.

  And the silence was moving along the corridor, was moving towards her door. Her hand reached for the light, for the bell that would summon Mrs Barker, but her treacherous muscles spasmed again and she felt the bell-push slide to the floor where it hit the carpet with a soft thud and lay where her fingers could just brush it, as far out of reach as if it had been on the other side of the room.

  She tried again for the light, and this time her hand found the switch and her face and her pillow were flooded with a soft illumination that made the room beyond even darker.

  And there was movement in the darkness. A sliver of faint grey that widened and then vanished abruptly as the door opened and was closed. The spasms in her muscles grew more acute, but her mind wouldn’t focus properly, it wheeled around and around, the house, the forest, the breath in the night, the gunshots, the house, the…

  The footsteps moved closer, and she felt the softness of a pillow on her face, welcomed, for a moment, its deceptive gentleness before it was pressed firmly down.

  24

  Jake got up at seven. The sun rose over the water as he dressed and made himself coffee. He called Ann Harley at eight thirty but got her secretary. Miss Harley was out of the office all day. No, it wasn’t possible to give Jake a contact number. Yes, she would pass on a message asking Miss Harley to contact Jake, and she would emphasize that it was urgent, but Miss Harley was in meetings all day…

  He banged the phone down, frustrated. He couldn’t wait on Ann Harley. He didn’t have the names of the investigating team and didn’t want to go through all the rigmarole of making contact as a member of the public. He knew from past experience that the information would take its time to trickle through the system. Burnley was now his best bet. He would recognize the importance of wha
t Jake was telling him and get it to the right person. He’d have to warn Cass and help her devise a cover story.

  Once again, he was frustrated. Burnley was out. Jake left a message asking him to make contact urgently, and then tried Cass’s number. She was either in transit or not answering her phone. He left a message. There was nothing else he could do.

  He checked through his post while he was waiting for Burnley’s call. There were letters from a couple of publishers expressing an interest in his book and asking him to get in touch to discuss it. We’d like to move quickly on this one. Stalin is hot, one letter said.

  The day before, this would have been a cause for celebration. A few weeks ago when Cass had complained about the amount of time he was devoting to the project, he’d promised to take her out and buy her champagne if he got a deal. That wasn’t going to happen now. He felt a moment of regret for the time when it had just been fun–an easy, uncommitted–what? Friendship? They’d never been friends, and now never would be. A relationship? It had never really been that, for him. It had been sex–that was the interest they had shared at the beginning–they’d wanted each other. He had been stupid to think that would go on being enough for her.

  The message light was blinking on the phone. He pressed ‘play’, hoping that his message had reached Burnley, but it was from Adam, his voice faint over the international line: I think I might have something on your people. My friend at Hrodna says he has found a reference. I’ll get back to you once I have the details. I’ve sent you some photographs as well.

  Jake had been waiting for these. He checked the fax. Adam had sent him pictures from the site of Maly Trostenets, with a note: I thought you might want these. As you will see, Maly Trostenets is mostly pasture and farms today. There is a memorial of a kind, but nothing remains of the camp.

  The Kurapaty Forest and Maly Trostenets. How many cities in Europe had two such sites on their outskirts? Adam had sent him another photograph as well, the picture he’d seen before, of the cousins Sophia and Raina on the cusp of adolescence. He looked at the young faces, and wondered what they would have done if they had known what the future held for them.