The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  There was silence, then Garrick slumped against the wall, all the tension leaving him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Jake tentatively reached out and took the knife from his limp fingers.

  Garrick didn’t seem to notice. ‘Her…the woman’s…watch had fallen off–that gave me the idea. I set the time and smashed it. Then I sat with her. I didn’t want to leave her again. I used her phone to call the police, in case they hadn’t traced the first call. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, but I felt so ill–I think I passed out. And then the police were there.’

  But Miss Yevanova hadn’t destroyed the papers Nick sent to her. Maybe, even after all these years, she couldn’t bring herself to destroy the only memento she had of her lover. And on the night of her death, Nick had read them.

  ‘She was the one who taught me Russian. I was good at it. All those things I couldn’t do at school–history and literature–my dad thought I was stupid. But I was good at Russian.’ His face twitched. ‘And I used it to find out that she’d lied to me. I went to see her that night. It was late, it was after midnight. I knew I had to go to the police, but I couldn’t let her face that. I couldn’t let them do the things to her that they’d done to me. I had to do something to stop it.’

  Now, Jake realized what it was that had pushed Garrick to this moment. ‘You killed her,’ he said.

  Garrick’s voice was muffled. ‘She didn’t fight me. I think she wanted it.’

  Or she had been too weak to resist.

  ‘Where are they? The diary and the letters?’

  ‘They’re in my bag.’

  ‘Why didn’t you destroy them?’ With the diary and letters gone, there would be very little chance of making a case against Nick Garrick and Sophia Yevanova. It would be a hard case to make now, without Nick’s confession.

  The entry-phone rang. Jake remembered it ringing before, when he was dialling Adam’s number. He felt cold and shaky as he pressed the door release.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Garrick said. ‘People died for those. You were the one she talked to. You need to know the truth. You’ve got to tell the story. I don’t want anyone else telling it. That’s why I brought them to you before I went to the police.’

  If you give someone advice…‘If you were going to the police, why did you attack me?’

  Garrick looked at him in puzzlement. ‘I didn’t! I just had to make you listen. Before you called them.’

  ‘So who’s been calling me?’ a voice said from the doorway.

  Jake swung round. Mick Burnley was standing there, his eyes taking in the scene. ‘Thought I’d call round, find out what was so important. Looks like you should have answered your door the first time, Denbigh. What’s happened to you?’ His gaze moved between the two men.

  ‘Cut myself shaving,’ Jake said, pushing the knife out of sight among the papers on his desk.

  Burnley’s eyes went to Garrick. ‘Yeah?’

  Garrick pushed himself to his feet. ‘I’m the one you want,’ he said. ‘I want to make a statement.’

  Burnley looked at him in silence, then interrogated Jake with his eyes. Jake kept his face expressionless. ‘I’ll need a statement from you as well, Denbigh,’ he said.

  Jake had no intention of making any kind of statement yet. He had too much to do. Burnley had no reason to take him in, though Jake could see him running the possibilities through his mind. ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ Burnley said, making it a threat. He took out his phone and spoke quickly, giving Jake’s address and arranging for a car to meet him and take Garrick in. While this was happening, Jake leaned against the wall, watching the light on the water. Once, he met Garrick’s eyes and nodded to his unspoken request.

  After they had gone, Garrick cuffed between two police officers, he went to the backpack that neither he nor Garrick had acknowledged, and opened it. Inside, there was a tattered envelope containing a notebook, a sheaf of letters, and sheets of paper covered with writing that scrawled across the page, jagged and uneven where the pen had dug in. The notebook and the letters were old, the writing indecipherable to his untrained eye, but the sheets of paper were new. A translation. Nick Garrick had provided him with a translation. Jake wondered if he’d done it while Sophia Yevanova lay dead in her room.

  He spread the papers out on his desk and began to read.

  Love letters written on thin paper, so fragile it had started to crumble along the folds. They looked as though they had been folded for a long time, the creases embedded in the structure of the paper.

  The writing was fine italic, but the ink was faded. They should have been tied with a ribbon, kept with a pressed flower as letters of a doomed love are often said to be. The ribbon would be black, the flower one of those exotic blooms that flourishes in marshland and bogs and draws its prey with the reek of corruption.

  My dear Captain Vienuolos

  How kind of you to write. I would be delighted

  to attend the ceremony welcoming the

  General kommissar…

  My darling…

  On the darker days the thought of you…You

  know that I cannot come to the command centre.

  People will not understand. Please send a car…

  …tomorrow night! I am obsessed by the thought of it and when I leave you I will not be able to get the memory…you must come to me soon…

  The letters were written to a Lithuanian officer from his young mistress. She promised him a haven of pleasure and sweetness in the middle of a dark and deadly war. She flattered and cajoled him…to wear silk stockings for you. I cannot wear those ugly socks, not when we are together…There was talk of gifts he had given her …the necklace fits just around my waist. I will show you, next time we meet…She upbraided him for his neglect, but sweetly, with promises of rewards for a swift return.

  You neglect me! You say that you ‘must’ go to Slutsk. I am quite sure you choose to go. I will be so lonely when you are gone–what am I to do? Hurry back to me…

  You promise and promise to take me away from Minsk…to Vienna, or to Berlin. I am so, so tired of this war, war, war…

  In his last months in Minsk, the officer had been sent to work with the platoons organizing the killings in Maly Trostenets. He recorded little of what he did–his diary, translated into Russian in Gennady Litkin’s copperplate hand, talked only of ‘actions’ and occasionally of the logistical problems and the conditions at the camp. He missed his home and his family.

  Later in the week, we were given orders to clear the area. That night, they firebombed the houses and left the streets burning. I watched as the work progressed. Towards midnight, a woman with a young child in her arms ran towards the gates. She was stopped by a policeman who seized the child, who was perhaps a year old, struck it against the wall then threw it into the flames. He shot the mother dead.

  I very much wish to be home.

  But it seemed he truly loved his mistress: Now I am stationed close to Minsk, I can spend more time with my Raina…I worry about what may happen to her…He wrote about her beauty:

  …think we should have a taste for Frauleins. Not me. I love my dark-eyed beauty with her delicate body and her iron will. She can wind me round her little finger and the witch knows it!

  And he knew the danger she faced, both from her own people and from his:

  She has given up so much for me, and now they don’t trust her. She has a cousin who has gone to the forests. They live like animals and they kill our men. Now the KdS are asking questions about her. If they arrest her…I could not bear to see my Raina hanged like a dog on the streets for the eyes of the soldiers…

  He had bought Raina’s safety at a terrible price. The letters spoke of an informer. He lived in the city, and he sold his countrymen to the occupiers, to the Schutzmannschaft. He was clever–the partisans would have had him killed, but he never went near the Special Police. He took his information to the officer’s mistress, and she passed it on. Your rat has been digging in his hole again. He brought
what he found to me. I do not like doing this. But the letters were riddled with a catalogue of betrayals, small and large…old woman who has hidden fugitives in her cellar…from the ghetto to the forests……The girl from the hospital who has been taking messages…This Petr Dyakin is a disgusting man. My darling, I do not want to do this.

  Letters from the collaborator Raina Yevanova to her Nazi lover.

  He wrote in his diary as well about the letters he received from his wife, and his frustration that he couldn’t do anything about the increasing shortages that she complained about. He talked about having sent her gifts from looted cities. Times are different now.

  He wrote also–and here the writing became erratic, as though he was frightened to commit the words to paper–that the war was not going well. He seemed suddenly aware that he might be brought to account for the actions he had carried out, and that there might be other ways of seeing than the one he and his compatriots had worked with through the war. And he was worried for his mistress. Raina may pay a terrible price for siding with us against the communists.

  He outlined his plans for their escape–his, back to his wife and children in Vilna, hers, to a place beyond the reach of Soviet revenge. She will travel under the identity of her cousin, who she believes is dead. Poor Raina. She wept when I told her. It is a small untruth. The woman will surely be hanged before the next weeks are out. Raina, it seemed, was not entirely au fait with his plans: She is so lovely as she talks about our life together when this is over. I haven’t the heart to tell her I must go home.

  The diary ended abruptly with no further indication of the identity, or the fate, of the writer. It must have lain unread, with the letters he had kept, until it had come to the attention of Gennady Litkin with his desire to tell the story of the people who had suffered so terribly in the war against fascism and whose stories were the least told.

  Antoni Yevanov’s name had come to the fore locally when he had taken the Chair at the Centre for European Studies. And mentioned in the articles was his mother, Sophia. The partisan cousin of the collaborator Raina.

  And the ghost fingers had reached out.

  26

  The sky was growing darker when Jake pulled up outside the Yevanov house. Antoni Yevanov opened the door. If he was surprised to see Jake, he didn’t show it. He stepped back from the door, gesturing to him to come in. Jake didn’t want to cross that threshold. The warmth, and the smell of flowers and polish now made him think of a charnel house where the reek of decay was imperfectly overlain by perfumes. As far as he knew, Garrick had told no one else about Sophia Yevanova’s death, and in that moment before the police took him away, Jake had decided to accede to Garrick’s unspoken plea. Sophia Yevanova had been mortally ill. Her illness had killed her.

  Yevanov looked gaunt and hollow eyed. He took Jake into the study where the two men had talked just a few days before. He indicated a chair to Jake and sat down himself at the desk. ‘Well?’ his voice was indifferent.

  Jake studied him. The dark eyes and the narrow, fine-boned face came from his mother. Maybe the cold demeanour came from the same source, or maybe that was a legacy from his father. Jake had spent a few hours researching the information he’d found in the diary. It wasn’t much time and he hadn’t tracked down Vienuolos, but he’d read about the men from the Baltic states who had supported the fascists.

  He’d found a letter from Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommisar of Byelorussia to Gauleiter Lohse concerning German Jews who been sent to Minsk to be killed:

  I am certainly a hard man and willing to help solve the Jewish question, but people who come from our own cultural sphere are just not the same as the brutish hordes in this place. Is the slaughter to be carried out by the Lithuanians…?

  Vienuolos must have been a committed Nazi to have achieved officer rank–he may even have taken German nationality after Hitler’s rise to power. Such men had been consigned to the work of pacifying the civilian population behind the Nazi advance into the Soviet Union. They had participated in some of the worst atrocities, and had assisted in the destruction of Maly Trostenets as the German forces fled from the Soviet advance. One such man had been Antoni Yevanov’s father.

  Without speaking, Jake put the copies he’d made of the letters and the diary on the desk in front of Yevanov.

  Yevanov looked at him without comment, and began to read. Jake noticed that he was looking at the original diary, not the translation that Gennady Litkin had attached. As he turned the pages over, his face became expressionless and when he finally raised his eyes to Jake’s, they were unreadable. ‘I think I can work out the rest of the story.’ He picked up the papers in front of him and aligned the sheets before he secured them with a paper clip. They made a thin sheaf. ‘It’s very little to have caused such grief.’

  ‘Did you know?’ Jake said.

  Yevanov’s eyebrows arched. ‘Mr Denbigh, you are not here to ask me questions.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’ Jake knew that if Yevanov let him through the door, then somewhere, somehow, he had a lever that would make the older man talk. He just didn’t know what it was.

  ‘As you are the visitor, I hoped you might tell me.’ Yevanov picked up a paper knife and balanced it between his fingers, his eyebrows raised in polite query.

  Jake wanted the link with Marek Lange. ‘I don’t have the whole story,’ he said. ‘I have just enough to know that I don’t have it all.’

  Yevanov’s eyes measured him, but he didn’t speak. Jake edged further out, aware how thin the ground was under his feet. ‘The investigating team never went after Helen Kovacs’ research,’ he said. ‘Because they didn’t find anything in her records to point them in the right direction.’

  ‘There was no mystery about her research. Mr Denbigh, I have more important things to do with my time…’

  Jake gambled. ‘They didn’t find anything, because by the time they looked, the incriminating files had been removed. And I presume you devised a pretext for searching everything thoroughly to make sure you hadn’t missed anything.’

  Yevanov’s face was indifferent, but the paper knife was now still between his fingers as he watched Jake.

  ‘It’s hard to tamper with computer records and leave no trace, but it can be done, especially if you have control of the network.’

  ‘As you say, Mr Denbigh, if any such tampering had occurred, it would be hard to trace.’

  ‘But not impossible–if the police technicians really took the system apart. What would they find?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Yevanov said. He sighed, and flicked through the pages that Jake had given him. ‘I really had no idea about this. If I had, I would have done something, long before it brought about these tragedies. There was no need for this.’

  ‘You must have known something,’ Jake said. Enough to have removed all references to this research from Helen Kovacs’ papers.

  ‘I knew there was something in the Litkin Archive my mother was worried about. I thought–the kind of life she’d led–there had to be things she was ashamed of. The partisans, especially the women, had to do things that are hard to stomach. I didn’t care what she had done.’ His eyes assessed Jake dispassionately.

  ‘And you didn’t make the link with Helen Kovacs’ death?’

  ‘I thought Nicholas was responsible. I thought it was the way the police said–he was unstable, he’d attacked her. I didn’t want any investigation of my mother’s background. I didn’t want her embarrassed or upset. She was becoming more and more frail. I knew that Helen’s interest in the archive related to the Baltic states in the war, and I knew that might lead her to wartime Belarus. I erased any such references from Helen’s computer as soon as I heard what had happened. I can access the network from here. As it turned out, I erased a file in error. But my mother was left in peace.’ He studied his hands, frowning. ‘Or she would have been, if she had not chosen to champion Garrick. I take it the police and the newspapers will soon have this story.’

 
‘The police will get it if Garrick chooses to tell them. They won’t hear it from me.’

  Yevanov raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Your book.’

  Jake didn’t bother to deny it. ‘And now maybe you can tell me about Marek Lange,’ he said.

  Yevanov looked at him with genuine surprise. ‘Faith Lange’s grandfather?’ He shook his head. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’

  ‘Lange was in Minsk as well,’ Jake said.

  Yevanov seemed not to hear him. ‘What my mother didn’t realize,’ he said, ‘was that I wouldn’t have cared. If the story had come out, I wouldn’t have cared. I doubt anyone would. It wasn’t her fear of exposure that was driving her, it was her sense of guilt.’

  ‘And Helen Kovacs?’

  For the first time, Yevanov’s face showed a flicker of emotion. It was quickly suppressed, but Jake thought he had seen regret. ‘Maybe Helen was my mother’s last victim,’ he said.

  Faith sat on the windowsill of the high ward. The first shadows were falling across the city as the sun set and the light began to fade. From her vantage point, she could see the patterns of the streets, the sheen of damp on the roofs and the branches of the trees.

  Once upon a time, there was a forest, with birch trees that were bare in the winter and reached their fingers high up into the sky. But in summer, the leaves grew and the branches hung down in fronds. When the wind blew, the branches would wave and the leaves would dance. Then the sunlight made patterns of shadow and gold. And the tree trunks were white, like slender pillars along the paths…

  She felt tears stinging behind her eyelids. The house in the forest, the orchard, the well. It had all gone. And Stanislau, Krishna and Eva. All dust. And soon Marek would be gone too. There would be no more stories. Grandpapa’s secret. What was it, what had happened that had made him hide away from his countrymen all these years, made him give away all his money in an attempt to assuage the guilt of…what?