CARLA BANKS

The Forest of Souls

For Volodia Shcherbatsevich, Masha Bruskina and Kiril Trous, murdered by the Nazis in Minsk, 26 October 1941

And also for Doug.

And what of the wolves, she’d say, the nine wolves that in the winter’s grey stone dawn would smash their bones against the door, hammering like hungry seals until the door splinters and the baby is got at–even from the cradle even from its precious sleep

And listen…there are men As bad as wolves who no door —no matter how solid the oak– will keep out.

From ‘My Mother’ by John Guzlowski

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

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.

The light had faded as Helen worked. She looked up from the page she was studying, her eyes aching from the cramped script. The old library was dark, apart from the pool of yellow cast by the desk lamp on the table beside her. Something had distracted her. She lifted her head, listening. The silence closed around her, the smell of damp, the mustiness of old paper, the chill of the abandoned house. But she knew what she’d heard. It had been the click of the door closing.

There was someone else in the library.

She’d arrived at the old house later than she had planned. She thought she knew the route to the Derwent Valley–thirty minutes, maybe forty-five if the traffic was heavy. It took her less than thirty minutes to get to the far side of Glossop, the small commuter town on the edge of the Pennine hills. The sun was touching the horizon as she reached the top of the Snake Pass and dropped down into the valley at the other side. Last summer, she and Daniel had brought the children out here. They’d flown the kite that Finn, just eleven, had designed and made. ‘Chip off the old block,’ Daniel had said, proud for once of his studious son.

The road swept round and the valley opened up in front of her. Ladybower Dam lay ahead, the hills reflected in its black mirror. The road wound away to the east under the shadow of trees, the heather moors stretching away beyond. She turned off into the wooded depths of the Derwent valley. The road was narrower here, and her car bumped over the rough surface. The sky had clouded over, and rain began to spatter across the windscreen. The trees closed around her and the road was just the arcs of her headlights in the shadows–ruts and potholes, and a rabbit frozen for a moment in the brightness.

She checked the piece of paper on the seat next to her. The house was about two miles along this road, round the head of the dam. She was driving deeper into the forest and she peered through the windscreen as the car bumped and lurched.

The road turned, and she had to negotiate a gate with a red sign: PRIVATE ROAD, NO ENTRY EXCEPT FOR ACCESS. To her left, silhouetted against the evening sky, she could see the towers of the dam wall above the trees, turreted and massive. Ahead, the road became a track, shadowed by the still, dark trees.

She slowed down more, trying to pick out landmarks. She passed stone gateposts, a high wall, another gate that opened on to a muddy drive, then she was back into the wild. Past the houses, the directions said. Another half-mile up the valley. It was hard to gauge the distances when she was driving so slowly.

Her headlights picked out the incongruous homely red of a letter box, and then she saw gates to her left. She stopped and leaned across, trying to read the lettering carved into the stone posts. OLD HALL. She’d made it. She negotiated the turn. The drive bent sharply back and ran steeply up between the trees. And then she was clear of them, and she saw the house for the first time.

It was massive against the darkening sky. The blank windows stared back at her. The stone was patchy with white lichen, and stained where water had run down from the broken gutters and fall pipes. This wasn’t a house that was loved. Or one that loved. The thought jumped into her mind, startling her.

The rain was a fine drizzle that chilled her skin and seeped through the protective covering of her coat. The door was solid wood, sheltered by a stone canopy. The bell push looked old. She pressed it without much expectation and waited. Nothing happened. She’d thought there would be something more…official? More organized. She tried the bell again, then hammered on the wood. Come on. Come on. Water dripped on to the stone, splashing her feet.

She was about to knock again when the door opened. She’d heard nothing through the heavy timbers. A man, presumably the caretaker she’d been told about, stood there. He was holding a torch.

‘I’m Helen Kovacs,’ she said. ‘You should be expecting me.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was working. I didn’t hear you.’ He didn’t look more than twenty. She’d been expecting someone older. Her head barely came up to his shoulder as she stepped past him. Despite the icy weather, he was in his shirtsleeves. She wondered what it was about young men that made them impervious to the cold.

The smell of the house closed round her, a smell of damp, of mildew, of rot. There was no light. The entrance hall was an echoing dimness. She could just make out a staircase that swept up in front of her to a shadowed gallery.

‘This way.’ He shone the torch in front of him. ‘Watch where you’re going. Something’s shorted the lights. I was just trying to fix them.’ He led her through long corridors towards the back of the house, pausing every so often to make sure she was following. In the faint light, she could see dark panelling, damaged in places and rotted away. The ceiling arched above her, and she thought about the tiny semi she shared with Hannah and Finn–that she used to share with Daniel as well–characterless, perhaps, but comfy and warm. She shivered.

‘How long has it been like this?’

He paused halfway along the corridor, and pulled a bunch of keys out of his pocket. ‘Since the guy who lived here died, I suppose,’ he said as he tried a key in the lock of the double doors in front of him. It stuck, and he had to jiggle it to free it. He tried another key. ‘I don’t go in here much.’

This kind of deterioration took years. The last owner of the house, a reclusive Russian scholar, had died just a few months before. ‘It’s a pity,’ she said, ‘that it’s been left like this.’

‘He was a bit of a nutter by all accounts. Thought the KGB was after him. Shut himself away here. He lived in the back of the house, let the rest fall apart.’ The key turned and he gave a grunt of satisfaction as he pushed the doors open and stepped through. He shone his torch around. ‘You’re right. It’s a shame. It must have been beautiful once.’

The library. She was in Gennady Litkin’s library. In the twilight, the room was filled with shadows. The high ceiling and the rows of bookcases gave an illusion of space, but as she managed to get a sense of the scale, she realized it was smaller than it seemed. There was a smell of damp and old paper. She looked up. The ceiling was ornate but the plasterwork was damaged. She could see stains and patches, places marking the incursion of water.

She walked slowly down the aisle, looking at the high shelves and the panelled walls. The shelves were piled with boxes–box files, cardboard boxes sagging at the seams, old shoe boxes, a treasure trove of papers from the past, and one that would probably never be fully explored. As she looked round the shelves closest to her, she realized she had never understood how vast Gennady Litkin’s collection had been.

He had died intestate. The collection–books, paintings, letters, diaries, legal documents, photographs–was being archived and would probably end up scattered among various universities and museums. The house was nearly empty now, and once the last details of the estate were sorted out, it would be sold. Even in its dilapidated state, it must be worth a fortune.

She looked at the boxes with growing anxiety. ‘Has everything been packed up?’ She had the reference from Litkin’s eccentric filing system to help her, but if the papers had been sorted and stacked, it would be useless. It would take years to go through all of this.

The young man looked at her and then shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m just here to keep an eye on the place.’

‘What’s your name?’ She should have asked sooner.

‘Nick,’ he said.

‘Nick.’ She held out her hand. ‘Do you live here?’

He touched her outstretched hand briefly. ‘Just until March. They’ll have it cleared then.’

‘It must be lonely.’ He looked very young to be shut away in the isolation of the old house.

‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the van–I go down to the village. I can go into town if I want, but it’s all right here. It’s a great place for walking.’

‘You like that?’ she said. She used to go walking a lot before she and Daniel got married, before Finn was born.

He nodded, looking suddenly enthusiastic. ‘I did the Pennine Way last summer.’

‘That’s serious walking.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing. What I want to do is go to the US, do the Appalachian Trail.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That’s serious walking.’

He grinned. ‘You said it.’

She’d have liked to go on talking, but she had work to do. ‘I’d better get on.’ Officially, she was here to look at the records from a long dissolved mining company. ‘I’m looking for the ledgers for the Ruabon Coal Company,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’ He’d obviously been briefed. ‘Everyone wants to look at those. It’s about the only thing anyone knows about. They’re over here. I got them down for you.’

She followed him down the aisle to where two sets of shelves formed a kind of nook. She looked at the boxes that filled the shelves. Some of them were labelled, but the ink had faded. She leaned in closer to try and read the words.

Suddenly, a light came on. She turned round. Nick was balancing a desk light on an empty ledge. Its long neck was too high to fit and it stuck out awkwardly, making its position precarious. He shook his head, obviously unhappy with the arrangements. ‘That’s the best I can do. You’ll have to use this. I’m sorry. I’m working on the lights now.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I wondered how I was going to manage. Listen, before you go, there’s something else I want to have a look at–I’m not sure where to start.’ It hadn’t occurred to her that Litkin’s system might have been disrupted. ‘I’m looking for some stuff from the last war. There’ll probably be a diary, and some letters…I know they’re in this library somewhere. Maybe you’ve seen…’ Her voice trailed off as she looked round the crammed shelves.

He steadied the light with his hand. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s all just, you know…’ He gestured around him. ‘Papers and stuff.’

She looked back at the boxes on the shelves, wondering what to do. Then she noticed something she hadn’t seen before. In the light, faint pencil markings on the boxes had become visible. 112.33 OTE. She knelt down to get closer. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s his filing system.’ She ran her fingers along the boxes. ‘It goes up–the ones I want…’ She tried to track the numbers on to the next shelf, got lost and then picked it up again. She could feel the tension inside her releasing–the boxes hadn’t been put out of sequence or repacked. They were the way he’d left them. She moved along the shelves. What had he said? Third shelf from the top, halfway along…Here. A box file marked 120.43 PEKBM. She pulled it out and looked round for somewhere to put it. The young man watched for a moment. ‘I’ll get you a table. Hang on.’ He disappeared.

But the box was empty. She ran her fingers through her hair, tugging at it in frustration. She’d be lucky to get another chance at these papers. It would take forever to get the ownership status sorted out–she’d had to resort to a manufactured interest in the Ruabon Coal Company to arrange this visit. And she didn’t have a lot of time.

She went back to the shelves. The boxes were in shadow. She screwed her eyes up in the dim light, trying to read the rest of the inscriptions as she moved along the row, but it was no good, the lettering was too faded. 12_4_KBM. That could be…She lifted the box file out and moved closer to the light. She balanced it on her knee as she opened it. It contained a sheaf of papers, old and stained.

She shifted her balance to stop the box from falling, and lifted the papers out carefully, aware of their fragility. They looked like jottings for someone’s accounts–balance sheets, profit and loss. This wasn’t what she was looking for. She changed her grip to put them back, and something fell out from between the sheets on to the floor, something that had been slipped into the pile.

It was a book. She felt her heart thump, and she found herself looking over her shoulder around the dark library before she crouched down to pick it up. The cover was stiff card, marbled, and the pages were yellowed and brittle. She turned them carefully. They were covered with a minute script, neatly and economically written, wasting no space. The ink was brown with age. The writing went on and on, and then suddenly ended. The last pages of the book were blank.

She heard the click of the door, and a dragging sound. Nick came into view, pulling a small table. Instinctively, she snapped the book shut. ‘It’s a bit scruffy,’ he said, wiping the top with his sleeve and inspecting it. ‘Here.’ He pulled the table into the alcove and moved the light from its precarious balance on the shelf. He looked pleased with the result. ‘That’s better.’ Then he looked down at her crouched on the floor. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Fine.’ She stood up, dusting off the knees of her jeans. ‘Thanks.’

He hesitated for a minute. ‘Do you know how long…?’

‘Does it matter?’ she said, looking up at him.

‘I’m supposed to lock up at nine.’ He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m not going anywhere. When you’ve done, take the door on your right at the end of the corridor. I’ll be in there.’ His face was under-lit by the lamp.

‘I’ll be finished before nine,’ she reassured him. ‘Thanks.’ She put the papers on to the table.

He looked at her working arrangements with some dissatisfaction, and nodded. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ He turned and walked away up the aisle.

She sat down at the makeshift desk and went through the box file carefully. Tucked in among the accounts there was a large envelope that had probably contained the notebook. She looked inside it, holding her breath. There were sheets of paper, folded round something. She slipped them out carefully. The writing on them was dark and recent, and as she unfolded them, she recognized the hand as Gennady Litkin’s. She felt a stab of disappointment.

But they had been folded for a purpose. They were wrapped round a thin bundle of letters written on fragile paper that was starting to crumble along the edges. She pulled the shade of the desk lamp down, redirecting its beam. It was a cheap one, and the mechanism that was supposed to hold it in place was faulty. The slightest movement, and it lifted its head slowly, like a wading bird that had been disturbed, expanding its neck in alarm, cautious, checking.

She steadied it, then flattened out the first letter. She didn’t recognize the language at first. Russian? She only knew a few words. The script was minute. The first line had to be a salutation: My dear Captain Vienuolos…It seemed to be an acceptance of an invitation. She scanned down to the signature to see if she could work out the identity of the writer, but it was an indecipherable scrawl: P…E…She pulled the lamp closer, and the light flickered. Who are you? Who were you? But there was no answer.

She turned to the diary. There was a label on the front of the book, peeling at the edges, and handwritten in ink that had faded. She could barely make it out. The writing was Russian again and for a moment, she felt discouraged; then she realized that Gennady Litkin must have written it. She carefully transliterated the letters she could read. There were two words and what looked like dates. The last letter was . The first one was M, then A. The third letter–she couldn’t make it out. The ink had faded. The second word…Good, she had what there was. Ma_y _ro__ene__19_2-_944. It didn’t mean anything.

She opened the book. It was, as Litkin had told her, written in Lithuanian. Even though she’d been studying the language for years, she found the writing hard to decipher, and she remembered that Litkin had said something about making a translation. She looked at the pages of modern notes, suddenly hopeful, but of course, they were in Russian. If Litkin had translated the diary, he had written in his own language. Her Lithuanian should be sufficient. She applied herself to the diary again.

Her head was starting to ache by the time she’d read the first few pages. She checked her watch. It was after seven. She had been here for almost two hours. She hesitated, reluctant to pull herself away, but she wanted to check on Hannah who had been complaining of earache and a sore throat.

She switched on her phone. The beep as it found the network was an intrusion from the 21st century. She keyed in Daniel’s number, but his answering machine took the call. She left a message, feeling relieved that she wouldn’t have to talk to him. ‘It’s Helen. I’m just checking that the kids are okay. I’ll see you on Thursday.’ His usual day for having the children.

She was just getting back to the letters when her phone rang. It was Daniel. ‘I was working out front,’ he said. ‘Any reason why they wouldn’t be okay?’

She didn’t want to row. ‘Hannah felt poorly. And it’s not their usual night…’

‘Right. It isn’t. And you dump Hannah when she’s ill.’

She felt a stab of anxiety. ‘Ill? Has the earache…?’

‘She’s fine, since you’re so worried. They need their routine, Helen. Except when it suits you.’

‘I told you. I had to work. Like you do, you know? When you get a late call?’

‘Oh, sure, old letters and bits of paper. What does your wife do, Mr Kovacs? Oh, she’s got a BA in old shopping lists.’ There was a moment’s silence, then he added. ‘And a PhD in banging the boss.’

Not that again. ‘I’m working,’ she said. ‘Are the kids okay? That’s all I wanted to know.’

‘I told you. They’re fine.’

‘Can I speak to Hannah?’

‘It’s a bad line. She won’t be able to hear you.’

‘I’ll be home by nine. I’ll phone when–’

‘She’ll be in bed.’ His voice was cold.

‘I know. I’d just like to say–’

‘I’ll tell her you called.’ He hung up.

She felt depressed after the call. She and Daniel couldn’t even have a civil conversation about the children. At least it looked as though she wouldn’t have to take time off to go to the doctor’s with Hannah. She wouldn’t have to cancel her meeting with Faith.

She looked at the letters spread out on the desk in front of her, and at the diary. She was about to make a decision. She couldn’t finish reading these here. She’d assumed there would be some kind of copying facilities–the word ‘library’ had conjured up a different image from the one that had confronted her. But no one knew the letters and diary were here, so no one would miss them. She could slip them into her bag and take them away to study at her leisure. It would be okay–she was a bona fide scholar, and she could quietly return them when she’d finished with them. No harm done.

And that was when she heard the sound. It was–it had been–the soft click of the door. ‘Nick?’ she said. There was no response. She paused with the notebook closed over her finger. ‘Hello?’ she said.

Silence whispered back. And in the silence…Was she imagining it?–the faintest sound of breathing, of something moving through the darkness like silk. She stood up, suddenly uneasy. ‘Who’s there?’ She picked up the lamp to lift it higher, to expand the area of light, but the cord pulled tight. She put it down on the desk and moved slowly back down the aisle, the high shelves looming shadows in the darkness.

Now her imagination was playing tricks, making movements in the dark corners of the room, making soft sounds like footsteps behind her. She spun round, looking back along the aisle to the pool of light that marked the place where she had been working. ‘Hello?’ she said again.

The aisle was empty, running back into the shadows. But she’d heard…

Then there was someone behind her and before she could move something snaked round her neck and pulled tight. Her breath was cut off and her hands clawed futilely at the thing that bit deep into her flesh, feeling the slipperiness of blood under her fingers. Blood? My blood? And her legs were starting to tremble as she twisted and struggled for air and there was no one behind her as her flailing arms hit out and the darkness was darker and…

And the circle of light from the desk lamp crept up the wall, illuminating the shelves, up and up until the balance mechanism caught, and the light froze, fixed upwards at the stained and ornate ceiling where a plaster cherub, half its face gone, dispensed grapes from fingerless hands and the stains darkened as the rain penetrated and dripped on to the papers spread out below.

2

When Faith was a child, she thought that she lived in a forest. Her grandfather’s house, where she spent her childhood, was surrounded by trees, beech and sycamore and chestnut, their heavy leaves shielding it in summer and their branches standing like guardians when the winter stripped them bare. The garden was a playground of green tunnels and damp leaf mould where the sun would sometimes break through and dapple the ground with sudden colour–the vivid green of a leaf, the scarlet of a berry.

The house itself was a place of dark corridors and closed-up rooms, cold and rather comfortless. But she could remember the evenings she spent with her grandfather when he read to her from his book of fairy tales with pictures of witches and goblins, dark paths and mysterious houses in forest glades. And he would tell her stories about his own childhood in a house built deep in a forest, somewhere far away.

And she could remember the way his face would change sometimes as he talked. His voice would falter and then fall silent, and he would pat her hand absently and say, ‘That is enough, little one.’ He would go to his study and the door would close behind him with the finality of silence…

Faith woke suddenly, sitting up in bed, the quilt that had tangled round her as she slept sliding on to the floor. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, then the confusion cleared. She was in her house in Glossop, where she had lived for just a month. It was still dark. She could see the square of the skylight above her, and the silhouettes of the bedroom furniture emerging from the gloom. She switched on the lamp, flooding the room with warmth and colour. Dreams of her childhood faded from her mind.

Her bedroom was an attic, with slanting walls and odd nooks and corners. It was the first room she’d decorated once she’d bought the house, stripping off the dingy wallpaper and painting everything white, adding colour with throws and blinds so that even on this dark winter morning, the rain beating on the skylight above her head, the room looked warm and welcoming.

She went down the winding staircase to the bathroom. Her head felt muzzy with sleep as she stood under the shower, so she turned the temperature down and woke herself up with a blast of cold water. She wrapped herself in a towel, shivering as she went quickly back up the stairs. A spatter of rain blew across the window.

It was the start of her second week in her new job at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Manchester. She had recently been appointed as a senior research assistant to the director, the eminent historian and political philosopher Antoni Yevanov. It had been a hotly contested post that she had won after a gruelling three-day interview. She knew that a lot of people were surprised when she was appointed–they thought that at thirty-two, she was too young, that she didn’t yet have the experience–and the professional knives were out.

She dried her hair. It had grown over the summer, and it hung heavy and dark to her shoulders, so she pulled it off her face and secured it with a clip. She hesitated as she tried to decide what to wear. The day was going to be bitty–she had a meeting first thing, she had an article to complete for an academic journal about the role of statistical analysis in historical research, and there was a departmental meeting at four, which would be the first she had attended at the Centre. She knew the importance of first impressions.

After a moment’s thought, she chose a cream skirt and a tailored jacket. She’d be walking a lot today–the corridors of the Centre, the campus–so she opted for shoes with a low heel. She was tall enough to get away with it.

It seemed strange to be back in Manchester. Faith had spent her childhood in the city, brought up by her grandfather who lived in the affluent suburb of Altrincham, but there had been no sentimentality in her decision to return–the opportunity of working with Antoni Yevanov had been incentive enough.

Her attachments to the city were simply a bonus. It was good to be near her grandfather again, and she was working with her oldest friend, Helen Kovacs. The thought of Helen brought a frown to Faith’s face as she packed her work bag. Helen was still struggling in the early stages of her academic career–she had left academia after she had graduated, and had only recently returned and completed her PhD. It was hard in the current climate for a woman in her thirties with children to compete against the unencumbered twenty-three-year-olds who were applying for post-doctoral appointments now. Faith’s meeting this morning was with Helen, and it would be the first time she’d had to act in her position as Helen’s line manager.

Faith and Helen had met at the prestigious grammar school they both attended. It prided itself on its academic excellence and appealed to parents who wanted their children to have a traditional education. The uniform they wore was supposed to iron out any differences of background that the children brought to the school, but the adolescent jungle of status and conformity operated there just the same.

Faith, who lived with her immigrant grandfather and had no visible parents, was an object of suspicion. Helen, whose parents were working class and who lived on a modern housing estate in Salford, was a complete outsider. Her father was a builder who was earning just enough to buy his daughter what he believed would be the best education for her. Helen’s accent was wrong, her clothes were wrong, she lived in the wrong place and had the wrong parents. The pack turned on her.

The two girls, with the well-honed survival instincts that six years in the school system had given them, had drawn together. They were both bright, they were both athletic, and Faith soon discovered that Helen had a dry wit and a talent for sharp mockery that matched her own. They had seen off their tormentors and established a friendship that had endured into adulthood. They had gone to Oxford together, shared a flat through their student years, seen each other through the ecstasy of first relationships and the subsequent heartbreak. And even though their lives had gone down different paths since then, they had stayed close.

Faith went into the kitchen and put some bread in the toaster. There was coffee left from the night before. She poured some into a mug and put it in the microwave. As she watched the light of the LED, her phone rang. She checked the number. It was her mother. Katya Lange rarely phoned her daughter. Their contacts tended to be Christmas and birthdays and the occasional good-will call that Katya was hardly likely to make at 7.45 in the morning.

Puzzled, she answered it. ‘Hello?’

‘I’m glad I caught you.’ Katya’s voice was brisk. ‘Listen, Faith, there’s a bit of a problem with Marek.’

‘What is it? Is he ill?’ Her grandfather, Marek Lange, was in his eighties. He was stubbornly independent and would accept almost no help, though Faith had tried often enough to persuade him.

‘Nothing like that. You’d be the first to hear. It’s this journalist…’

Faith sighed. She really didn’t want to have this conversation again. A journalist, a man called Jake Denbigh, wanted to interview Grandpapa for a series of articles he was writing about changing attitudes to refugees. Marek Lange, a Polish refugee who had fought on the side of the Allies in the last war, had attracted his interest.

The interview seemed a valid enough enterprise to Faith. She’d read some of Denbigh’s articles and she’d heard him once or twice on late-night discussion programmes on Radio 4. As far as Faith could see, the interview would be something her grandfather would enjoy. He was an opinionated man, and would relish the chance to express his views. She thought it would add a bit of variety to a life that was becoming more and more circumscribed by old age, but Katya had been against it from the start.

‘I told you what I think,’ Faith said now. ‘It’s up to him. It’s nothing to do with me.’

‘It’s more urgent than that,’ Katya said. ‘Marek’s agreed to do the interview. It’s happening this morning.’

‘Well–good for him.’ Her toast was done. She hunted round for the spread.

‘I’m not so sure. I’ve had a bad feeling about this from the start. I don’t trust this Denbigh man, so I looked some stuff up. A few months ago, he got involved in a witch-hunt in Blackburn about a man they said was an ex-Nazi. It got nasty.’

‘Oh.’ That gave Faith pause for thought. Her grandfather had escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland to join the Polish Free Forces in England in 1943. He had arrived alone, his family and his past lost in the chaos behind him. All that was left were the stories he used to tell her when she was a child, stories about his own childhood, a childhood that had been obliterated as surely as the cities of Europe had been razed in the final destruction of that conflict. His war years in occupied Europe were something he never spoke of, ever.

If Jake Denbigh’s focus was Nazis, especially if he was looking for lurid headlines, then Faith shared her mother’s misgivings. ‘He isn’t going to talk to any journalist about it,’ she said slowly. ‘He wouldn’t discuss it with his own family, never mind a stranger.’ She sometimes thought it would have been a good thing if he had done, but now it was probably best left where it was, sealed away in his mind.

‘I wish I shared your confidence,’ Katya said. ‘This man is a professional. It’s his job to get people talking.’

‘I’m not confident. I just don’t know what to do. It’s still up to Grandpapa in the end.’

‘I thought…’ Katya said, the tentative note in her voice triggering Faith’s alarm system, ‘…that maybe you could go over. Sit in on the interview. Then if this Denbigh person tries anything…’

Perhaps she should. ‘I’ve got meetings today. It depends what time they’ve arranged the interview.’

‘Eleven,’ Katya said.

She was meeting Helen at nine–that would take less than an hour, with luck. She’d pencilled in the rest of the morning for writing the article…she could work on that tonight, cancel her plans for the evening. She’d still need some time to prepare for the meeting, but it was doable. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’

She checked the clock as she put the phone down. It was almost eight–she’d better get going. Her meeting with Helen today was a professional thing, part of her new role. If the two women hadn’t known each other so well, it could have been tricky.

Helen had left Oxford with a First, but instead of pursuing the academic career she had planned, she had come back to Manchester to marry Daniel Kovacs. This decision had been beyond Faith’s comprehension. Helen was pregnant, but that didn’t seem to be a good reason to give up her academic carer. Faith didn’t like Daniel–he was attractive, but there was a watchful hostility about him, a coldness that made him a strange choice for the warm, vivacious Helen. Despite Faith’s misgivings, Helen had been unstoppable. She had asked Faith to be godmother to their son, Finn, who had been born six months later, and this had gone a long way towards healing the slight breach in their friendship.

Their lives had taken different routes after that. Helen had stayed near Manchester, moving with Daniel to Shawbridge, one of the small cotton towns on the outskirts of the city, to live on a road that was not much different from the one where she had grown up. Daniel’s work as an electrician was thriving, and Helen became a full-time housewife and mother.

Faith had stayed at Oxford to work on her PhD. She took her duties as godmother seriously, visiting as often as she could, writing letters, sending cards and presents, surprised at how much she enjoyed Helen’s baby, who grew up into a bright, serious little boy. Five years later, Helen’s second child, Hannah, was born. Faith decided she had been wrong. Helen seemed happy with her life, with her children and with her enigmatic husband.

But then Helen had got restless. She decided that she wanted to take up her career again, and despite Daniel’s opposition had embarked on a PhD. Once she had completed that, she had landed a three-year research post at the Centre for European Studies. She had been lucky to get it. Her search for work was confined to Manchester. Even this level of commuting was difficult as Daniel insisted that his work hours made it impossible for him to deliver or collect the children to and from school.

And then, just a few months ago, after twelve years of marriage, she had left Daniel.

Faith pulled her coat around her as she left the house. It was one of those bleak January days. The wind was whipping the clouds across the sky and blew gusts of rain against her face. She threw her bag on to the back seat and edged out into the rush hour. The grey winter streets made her think longingly of Mediterranean landscapes, of blue skies and warm breezes. One day she was going to work somewhere where the sun shone for more than six weeks a year, somewhere that had warmth, light and space.

Stuck in the stop-go queue into the city, she tried to focus on the meeting she had with Helen in half an hour. Helen was currently working on a paper for a major conference in Bonn, in May. The paper was supposed to be complete by the end of the month–the organizers wanted camera-ready copy in advance–and Helen had fallen behind.

It was understandable. Her life was in chaos. Daniel, outraged by her departure, was fighting her for custody of the children and for the house. He was being as difficult as he could be about child support, and Helen’s salary barely covered her expenses. On top of this, the crucial deadline for the Bonn paper had been too much for her, and she had appealed to Faith for help.

Faith ran possible solutions through her mind as she negotiated the roundabout on to the M67. She wanted to manage it so that it didn’t become a big issue to Antoni Yevanov. Helen’s position at the Centre was vulnerable in the face of ongoing cuts. Her appointment was due for review at the end of her first year, and its continuation depended very much on her successful completion of the paper and the reception it got at Bonn.

The traffic was heavy all the way, and it was almost nine by the time she got to the university. There was a queue for the car park and she was tempted to look for a space on the street, but she wanted a fighting chance of seeing her car again. The rain was falling hard by the time she managed to park. She could feel the rain dripping off her umbrella and trickling down inside her collar as she hurried across campus to the Edwardian façade of the Centre for European Studies. She pushed open the glass doors and entered the lobby, blinking the rain out of her eyes.

The warmth of the building enclosed her with its smell of new carpet and paint. The soothing murmur of activity filled the air, a subdued clatter from keyboards, the distant sound of doors opening and closing, the clunk and hum of the lift. She paused on her way through the lobby to catch her breath, and looked at the display boards. Amongst all the fliers for conferences in Madrid, Paris, and New York there was a glossy poster for the forthcoming Brandt Memorial Lecture. Antoni Yevanov: ‘After Guantanamo–International Law from Nuremberg to the 21st Century’. She made a note in her diary. She wanted to go to that.

A group of post-grad students were clustered outside the library. They looked across at her and smiled. Faith had given her first lecture the week before, and her face was becoming known. One of them, a tall young man with fair hair, detached himself from the group and came across. He said rather diffidently, ‘Faith, have you got any time today? Could I come and see you?’

She gave him a shrewd look, pretty sure what he wanted. She recognized him now: Gregory Fellows, one of the stars of the post-grad intake. He was due to deliver a seminar on his work to the group who monitored and evaluated research carried out under the auspices of the Centre. He was very bright, but most of his energies, Faith had been reliably informed, were focused on his work as a drum and bass artist. She was pretty sure he was looking for a postponement of the seminar. He’d need a good excuse. ‘My office time is at three,’ she said. ‘I can see you then.’

His face fell. ‘I wasn’t planning on being in all day,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you could…’

‘Three o’clock,’ Faith said. He gave her a wry smile of acceptance and she hurried up the stairs, aware that it was already after nine. She unlocked the door of her office, puzzled at Helen’s absence. She was only a few minutes late. She phoned Helen’s extension, but there was no reply.

Helen worked in one of the small cubicles on the other side of the building. All the research assistants were based down there–one of them might know where she was. Faith went along the corridor, her progress snagging on people who wanted to talk to her, either to set up meetings or to lobby her support for various projects that were being discussed that afternoon. She fielded these as diplomatically as she could, and asked if anyone had seen Helen, but no one had.

Helen’s cubicle was empty. The desk was tidy, the computer shut down. There was no coat on the hook, no bag under the desk. A photograph on the side of the computer made a splash of colour. Faith looked at it. It showed Helen, her eyes screwed up against the light, with her arms round her two children, Hannah, small and dark-haired like her mother, and the taller, more solemn Finn.

There was a pile of books on the desk–presumably in preparation for the meeting. Faith glanced through them; they were all standard texts about the role of women in National Socialism, except for one. The Memorial Book of Mir. Mir?

But no Helen. She checked the time. It was well after nine. She tried calling Helen’s home number but there was no reply. Then she tried Helen’s mobile. It was engaged. Faith let out a breath of frustration. She scribbled a note on a yellow post-it and stuck it on the monitor, then went back downstairs to the secretary’s office. She wanted to check the teaching schedules.

Trish Parry, Antoni Yevanov’s secretary, glanced up when Faith came through her door. ‘Can I help you?’ Her voice was cool. She had been unfriendly and obstructive from the day Faith arrived. Faith assumed it was to do with the fact that she had been given the job, rather than the internal candidate, but Helen had offered an alternative explanation. ‘She’s okay with the men. It’s the women she doesn’t like. She thinks they’re rivals for Yevanov’s affections.’

‘You mean she and Yevanov…?’ It seemed unlikely to Faith, though Trish was certainly attractive in a neat, English rose sort of way.

Helen grinned. ‘In Trish’s dreams,’ she said.

‘Have you seen Helen Kovacs?’ she said to Trish now.

Trish barely looked up. ‘Not this morning. She said she might not be in. Something about an appointment.’

‘Has she phoned?’ It wasn’t like Helen to leave people in the lurch.

Trish shrugged. ‘She mentioned it yesterday afternoon. Before she left. Early.’

Faith couldn’t understand why Helen hadn’t contacted her, unless…maybe she’d been relying on Trish, and Trish hadn’t bothered to pass the message on. ‘Did she ask you to let me know?’

‘Caroline deals with things like that, not me,’ Trish said coolly.

Faith didn’t say anything. Technically, Trish was in the right. There was a procedure for reporting absences. She made a mental note to warn Helen not to give Trish ammunition, and looked at her watch. She might as well start work on the article. If she left at ten thirty, she should get to Grandpapa’s by eleven, just about.

‘Let me know if Helen phones,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in my room.’

‘Just a minute.’ Trish picked up the phone and keyed in a number. ‘Professor Yevanov, I’ve got Faith Lange here.’ She listened, then said, ‘She isn’t in. Again.’ Another pause. ‘Are you sure? Faith can give me the–’ Her eyes narrowed slightly as they moved to Faith. ‘Yes. I’ll tell her.’ She put the phone down abruptly. ‘He wants to see you,’ she said.

‘Now?’ Faith was surprised. Since her arrival, Yevanov had been devoting his time to his ongoing commitments in Europe, and was rarely available. Faith’s contact with him had been minimal.

‘Of course not. He can see you this afternoon at one.’

Faith raised her eyebrows slightly at Trish’s tone. ‘One o’clock then.’

As she headed back to her room, she tried Helen’s mobile again, but this time it was switched off.

The 999 call came in at 8.45 a.m. The operator listened to the crackling line, and repeated her message. ‘Emergency. Which service?’ There was no response, just the hiss that told her the line was open. The call was coming through on a cell phone–probably stuffed in someone’s bag or pocket without the keypad locked. She wished the people who did this knew about the time and the money it cost when…

But now she could hear something. A hitching, gasping sound as though someone was out of breath after running, or…frightened, the panicky sound of someone who couldn’t get their breath but was trying not to be heard. ‘Emergency,’ she said again. She kept her voice calm and level. ‘Can you tell me where you are? I need to know where you are.’

The gasping breath again, then a voice tense with strain. ‘I–’ There was a clatter as though the phone had been dropped.

The line cut out.

3

Jake Denbigh came out of the shower drying his hair. He wrapped the towel round his waist and headed for the kitchen area, checking the fax as he passed it.

He switched on the coffee machine and put a couple of oranges through the juicer. His head was aching. He’d been up late the night before–Cass had dropped in. They’d shared a bottle of wine, then opened another, and later she’d experimented with the girder that ran up through the centre of the flat–a warehouse conversion on the river–trying out its potential for pole dancing. Evenings with Cass tended to be strenuous.

He turned on the radio, listening with half an ear as he poured out cereal and pressed the button on the espresso, letting an inch of rich, dark coffee trickle into the cup. The news was typical for the times–trouble in the Middle East, renewed terrorist activity–Jake sometimes thought that if the human race had an overwhelming talent, it was the capacity to make an already difficult life even harder, often in the name of some uncertain glory to come. Jake had no problems with the idea of an afterlife–he thought that a universe that contained Jake Denbigh was a better place than a universe that didn’t, but in the meantime, he planned to enjoy the life that he had.

He flicked the switch on the radio to get the local news. A Manchester United story was running as lead, followed by an armed robbery the night before. Nothing that interested him. He took the papers out of the fax and flicked through them–notification that his visa for Belarus was through and his passport was in the post. That was a relief. He’d been worried his plans were going to be held up by the bureaucracy of the last Stalinist state. The rest weren’t urgent–he put them in his in-tray for later. He switched on his computer, and got out his tape recorder and mike. He checked the batteries, spares, tape supply and recording levels. He had an interview later that morning.

Jake made his living as a writer and journalist. He’d lived in Manchester for two years now, brought there by a regular slot on a radio programme that was produced in the city, and a weekly column with the local paper, a current affairs piece with a European slant. These days, his interests were shifting more and more towards writing. Broadcasting was good–it got his name out there and he enjoyed it–but it was sound-bite analysis and he was finding its black-and-white simplicity frustrating. He’d published a book on the Rwandan genocides a year ago, looking at the historical impetus behind the horror. It had done well, and now he was seriously researching a second book, this one focusing on the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe.

He checked his e-mail. There was a message from Cass–she must have sent it when she got back the night before. He frowned. She’d taken a risk sending that from home. Cass lived with someone, and the last thing Jake wanted was for that relationship to go up in smoke for what was, after all, just a casual fling for both of them.

He opened her message and gave a half-smile as he read it: Was that Pole-ish enough for you? His current commission was about as Polish as it got. He was writing a series of articles for a monthly journal on immigration into the UK. The final one, which he was currently researching, looked at the experience of wartime immigrants. He’d put the story of the Jewish immigrants to one side–that warranted an article of its own–and instead focused on the Eastern Europeans: émigré Poles, Russians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians. A motley crew, some of whom had made their escape after the Nazi invasion and fought on the side of the Allies, others who had survived the occupation and had arrived after the end of hostilities. He’d spent the last few days interviewing old men, teasing the information he wanted from the welter of disconnected recollections.

Jake’s interest in the occupation of Eastern Europe had begun a few months ago when he’d covered a story about a Lithuanian refugee called Juris Ziverts. Ziverts had been accused of collaboration in the Holocaust, and Jake had befriended the old man. Now, months later, two things stuck in his mind. One was the level of ignorance that existed about the events of Eastern Europe in the last war. The other was the man Ziverts himself.

On Jake’s desk next to his computer was a wooden cat. It was black, half-crouching with its tail raised. It was a replica of one of the statues from the roof of the Cat House in Riga. Ziverts had carved it from memory as a memento of the city he had left behind. He had given it to Jake on their last meeting, pushing it towards him with emphatic nods. It was a gift, made in thanks, though what Ziverts thought he had to be grateful for, Jake didn’t know.

He stood watching the early light on the water, his eyes narrowed in thought, then he shrugged, and sat down at the desk. The clock on his monitor told him it was seven twenty-nine–a minute before his planned start to the working day. He had an interview at eleven with Marek Lange, a Polish expatriate whose story should be interesting. Pole-ish enough…

Most people thought of the émigrés as lumpen factory fodder. Jake knew the stereotype–vodka-swilling, brutal and stupid. In fact, they had entered British society at all levels: artists, scholars, teachers, philosophers, entrepreneurs–and criminals. The country they had chosen to make their home was substantially different because they had come here. Lange was the archetype of the entrepreneur, and Jake needed his story. But, as always happened with any project that had gone smoothly, the last bit was proving the most difficult.

Setting up the interview had been hard enough. Lange didn’t answer his phone and didn’t respond to messages. But something must have got through, because suddenly Jake had Lange’s daughter on the phone who had told him brusquely that her father did not want to be involved. Jake had been planning to give up on Lange–there were other people who would fit the profile he wanted–but this opposition aroused his interest. He’d been prepared to persist, but then Lange himself had phoned, apologizing for his earlier silence and agreeing to an interview. Maybe the daughter had been laying the law down there as well, in which case, Jake owed her thanks. He opened the relevant file on his screen and read through the information he’d managed to get hold of:

Marek Lange

Born: 1923

Place of birth: Litva, Poland

Father: Stanislau Lange

Mother: Kristina Lange

Arrived in UK 1943. Joined Polish Free Forces Marital history: married 1955, divorced, 1961. Ex-wife died, 1963

Children: Katya Lange, born 1959

He tapped his fingers on the desk. There was plenty of material relating to Lange’s interests after his arrival in the UK, the period he wanted for the article. Jake would have no problems writing a gung-ho profile of a man who’d acquitted himself bravely in the last years of the war and had worked hard and successfully afterwards. But his life before 1943 was frustratingly vague. And this part of Lange’s story might tie in very well with the new book Jake had embarked on shortly after his first meeting with Juris Ziverts.

Ziverts’ dilemma had opened Jakes eyes to the other refugees, those who had arrived quietly, camouflaged among the thousands who were trying to escape the chaos of Europe and rebuild their shattered lives, those whose papers were in suspiciously good order, and who talked little about their past. These were the people with something to hide and it was their stories that Jake wanted.

Eastern Europe had suffered under the sway of two ideologies: Stalinism and fascism. The storm that had erupted when the two systems collided had been terrifying in its intensity and its brutality. Thirteen million people had died in the war years alone. The millions who had died under Stalin had never been accurately counted, and the majority of the perpetrators had never been brought to book.

Jake didn’t want to write about the lost chance for justice–victors’ justice, many would have said. He wanted to tell the story of the human cost. His work had given him access to the people who had lived with the Soviet behemoth to the east and the rising darkness of fascism to the west. He needed a hook on which to hang his story, and Juris Ziverts had led him to it: the story of Minsk.

Minsk, a city with a history going back to medieval times, had suffered the worst that both regimes could offer. North of the city, on its outskirts, was the Kurapaty Forest, where 900,000 people had been systematically slaughtered by Stalin’s soldiers. And the city itself had been devastated by the Nazi occupation. By the time the Nazis were driven out, a quarter of the population was dead.

Belarus, or Byelorussia, or Belarussia–it was a country with more names than a fugitive. He’d dug around a bit. And he had unearthed a Belarusian émigré living in Manchester. Sophia Yevanova was an invalid who had been housebound for several years. He’d gone to see her with no great expectations. What could an ailing babushka have to tell him? But he had come away from their first meeting captivated and enthralled, as had, he suspected, every man who had crossed Sophia Yevanova’s path for most of her seventy-five years.

Illness confined her to her room in the spacious old house she shared with her son, the eminent historian, Antoni Yevanov. She was sharp, she was witty, she was unnerving and she was beautiful, and she had woven stories for him that had captivated him for far longer than the hour he had assigned to the meeting. She was from Minsk, and had lived through what may have been one of the most horrific occupations of the 1939-45 war.

At thirteen, she had endured Stalin’s terror. At fourteen she had joined the partisans fighting against Hitler’s armies. She had ended her war in a concentration camp, but she had survived. And she had made it to England to give birth to her son, the child of her partisan lover who had died in the camps. Jake wanted to tell her story. He wanted to tell the story of the city that she had described with such passion and such regret–the sweep of history focused through the eyes of one woman.

Her son, Antoni Yevanov, was a recent catch for the city’s university. It was the articles heralding his arrival that had first drawn Jake’s attention to Sophia Yevanova. Yevanov, an expert in international law, had been involved in setting up the war crimes hearings at The Hague. What the mother had experienced in one era, the son was trying to redress in another.

Jake opened his work file and scanned the draft of the chapter he’d been working on the evening before, before Cass’s arrival had interrupted him: The allegiances of the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) in the Second World War are not as straightforward as those of the western European alliances. The Soviet occupation of these countries was harsh and repressive. The Nazi invasion of 1941 was seen initially as a liberation. This was a major factor behind Baltic collaboration in Nazi atrocities against civilians.

His phone rang. He tucked the handset under his chin, and went on reading. ‘Jake Denbigh.’

The notorious 12th battalion of the Lithuanian police carried out massacres of civilians…

‘Mr Denbigh, this is Katya Lange.’

Marek Lange’s daughter. Jake had a good idea what this was going to be about. ‘How can I help you, Ms Lange?’

…in the Ukraine and Belarus, including massacres in the Pripyet Marshes, Mir, Slutsk, Baranoviche and, notoriously, Minsk.

‘I understand you’re interviewing my father this morning.’

‘That’s correct,’ Jake said. He deleted ‘notoriously’ and moved on to the next paragraph.

Sadly, they were assisted in many cases by members of the local police forces.

‘I thought I made it clear…’ He heard her intake of breath. ‘My father isn’t well,’ she said abruptly. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’

He sighed, and gave her his full attention. ‘It’s just an interview, Ms Lange.’

‘About what, exactly?’

‘It’s about the experience of being an immigrant.’ He’d already told her this.

‘He had a bad time in the war,’ she said. ‘Before he escaped. He doesn’t like to talk about it.’

‘My remit is immigration,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in what happened to him after he reached the UK.’ He clicked open his research notes on Marek Lange and scrolled the list of dead ends he’d encountered while trying to establish what Lange had been doing in occupied Eastern Europe in the years leading up to his escape:

No record Litva–check spelling

Only reference: Litva–Grand Duchy of Medieval Belarus and Lithuania.

No record of Lange family as per your profile–NB records incomplete–war damage.

…cannot trace…

…no record…

‘Well, I’m not happy. I’ve asked my daughter to sit in on the interview. I don’t want you to begin until she is there.’

‘Okay, your daughter will be there. Thank you for letting me know.’ He hung up. Forewarned is forearmed. His appointment with Lange was for eleven. It looked like he’d better get there a bit early.

The Snow Child

This is the story of how Eva was born.

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.

In the forest, there was a clearing. And a man called Stanislau built a house in the clearing, a house of timber. And Stanislau and his wife Krishna lived in the house, where their first child, Marek, was born.

Stanislau planted trees in the clearing, cherry trees and plum trees, and he dug a deep well. The water that came from the well was clear like crystal, sweet and cool.

And Stanislau, Krishna and Marek lived in the forest and they kept chickens, and Krishna had a garden where she grew potatoes and cabbages. Marek gathered mushrooms in the forest, and they all picked the cherries and the plums that Stanislau took into town to sell. They were content.

Except that there were no more children. Marek grew big and strong, a happy boy with fair hair and a ready smile. And then, five years later, in the depths of winter, Eva was born. The last child, a little girl. The night of her birth, there was a storm that made the trees bend, the branches lashing through the air as the wind whooped and swirled.

Stanislau struggled through the forest to the village to find the midwife, and Marek stayed with his mother in the wooden house while the storm raged outside. By morning, the world was still and silent, and Eva lay beside her mother, wrapped in her shawl, and the snow fell for six days.

‘You have a sister now,’ Stanislau said to Marek. ‘You must take care of her.’

The winter passed and spring came to the forest. Marek liked to sing to the baby and tell her stories while she lay in her cradle under the trees and waved her hands, trying to catch the sunlight that danced in the leaves. And the time went by, and Eva began to crawl, and then she could walk, and Marek would take his sister into the forest where he could show her the trees and the birds and the animals that walked the paths, because the forest was vast and quiet–there were not many people, not then. There were foxes and squirrels and rabbits.

And the witch.

He taught her to beware of the witch who lived in the dark places in the forest.

4

The caller had stayed on the line long enough for a trace. The call had come from somewhere in the remote hills on the far side of the dams. It was a lonely place, used by walkers and picnickers in the summer, but isolated through the winter months. The hills tended to mask phone signals. There was only a small area in which a mobile would work reliably. The trace centred on the one building in this area, a house that was marked on the map as ‘The Old Hall’.

According to the records, the owner of the house had died recently, and it was empty, under the care of court-appointed executors.

The number of the mobile gave no clues. The house looked like the most promising location. There was a caretaker in residence and the phone was still connected. No one responded when the number was called.

But just after nine, before a car could be despatched, another call came through. This time, someone spoke. It was a male voice, incoherent with panic. ‘She’s dead! Please, you’ve got to…I didn’t…She’s dead!’ He could barely get the words out.

The operator’s training took over. Her voice became calm and matter-of-fact. ‘Where are you?’

‘The library. In the library. She’s…’

‘I need to know where you are,’ the operator said again. ‘We’ll get someone to you. Tell me where you are.’

‘It’s too late.’

The voice moved from panic to leaden certainty. For a few seconds, he was silent, and they thought they’d lost the connection, then he came on the line again and gave them the location.

The Old Hall.

It was after a car had been dispatched that the full details of the second call were checked. The first call had come through on an unregistered cell phone. It was a pay-as-you-go, and they hadn’t been able to link it to a name.

The phone on which the young man, half-weeping, had begged for help was not the same phone. It was later in the day that they managed to get a name for it. It belonged to a woman called Helen Kovacs.

Jake Denbigh checked the A-Z that was open on the seat beside him, and swung his car round the next turning, into a crescent where the houses were set back among the trees and behind tall hedges. He parked and got out of the car, checking numbers on the gateposts.

Marek Lange’s house looked neglected. The gate was open, collapsed on its hinges, pushed back against the overgrowing shrubs. The drive was rutted and muddy, last autumn’s leaves trodden into the ground. The front of the house was thick with ivy that obscured some of the upstairs windows. The ground-floor windows were under siege from privet and laurel that pressed against the glass. Lange must like his privacy. Jake rang the doorbell and stepped back, looking up at the house. Add a few thorns, a turret or two, and Prince Charming could hack his way through into the enchanted castle where the sleeping princess…

The door opened suddenly, and a woman stood there. She was short and thick-set, and her face was unwelcoming. The princess was out, but apparently the wicked witch was at home. Was this Lange’s granddaughter? It couldn’t be. This woman must be in her late forties at least. The daughter? Unlikely. He smiled and held out his hand. ‘Jake Denbigh. Mr Lange is expecting me.’

‘He didn’t say anything to me about it.’ The woman shrugged. ‘You’d better come in.’

Definitely not the daughter. Not the guardian relative at all. He followed the woman–who hadn’t introduced herself–across the dim vestibule where the stairway ran up to a half-landing. The house was cold, and he shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. A man was coming down the stairs, moving with a slight shuffle.

‘Mr Lange?’ It had to be Marek Lange. He was a tall man, well built, but with the stoop of age. He was wearing a cardigan and heavy trousers. He had bedroom slippers on his feet. Jake held out his hand. ‘I’m Jake Denbigh. It’s good of you to see me.’

The old man settled his glasses on his nose and subjected Jake to a close scrutiny. His eyes were a faded blue and his hair was white, but still thick. His face was severe, but whatever he saw must have satisfied him because he held out his hand in response to Jake’s. ‘You are early.’

‘I thought the traffic would be worse than it was,’ Jake said.

Lange nodded once, accepting Jake’s explanation. ‘You would like coffee?’ he asked. He took Jake’s coat–which Jake was reluctant to relinquish in the chill–and held it out to the woman, who must be some kind of help, Jake decided. There was no sign of the guardian relative.

He declined the offer of coffee. He didn’t trust what might emerge from any kitchen run by the grim-faced woman. Lange opened a door and led the way through. Jake followed him. The room in which he found himself overlooked the back of the house. It smelled of dust and age, but it was large and well proportioned, with French windows looking out over the garden.

The garden was overshadowed by trees, except for a small lawn and a flowerbed close to the window. Lange gestured towards two heavy armchairs that stood on either side of the fireplace, and Jake sat down, running his eyes over the bookcase that filled the alcove beside the chimney-breast. The books were without jackets, and the writing on the spines was faded, but Jake thought he could see at least one that was written in Cyrillic script. The shelves were dusty.

‘So…’ Lange’s eyebrows came together as he studied Jake. ‘How can I help you?’

Jake had been over this once already on the phone, but he was used to the forgetfulness of old age. ‘I’m writing an article about people who came to this country during the war,’ he began.

Lange waved this aside impatiently. ‘Yes, yes, you already tell me this. People who came to this country during the war–there are many such. So, Mr Denbigh, I ask you again: How can I help you?’

Jake suppressed an appreciative grin and reminded himself that old though Lange was, he had been a ruthless and successful businessman in his day. ‘I wanted the experiences of someone who’d built up a successful operation like yours from scratch, in a strange country. I wanted to talk to you about what it was like starting again.’

Lange cleaned his glasses as he thought about this. A book that had been lying on the arm of his chair fell to the floor with a thud. ‘Well, maybe I can help you,’ he said eventually. ‘But it was a long time ago. I have little to tell.’

Or little that he chose to tell. Jake raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ he said. He leaned forward and picked the book up from the floor.

Lange gave him a sharp look. ‘Maybe you had better ask your questions,’ he said. ‘We will see.’

Jake looked at the book in his hands. It had fallen open and he glanced at the page. Baba Yaga. He read on: Once upon a time, deep in the dark forest where the bears roamed and the wolves hunted, there lived an evil witch…Okay, that was appropriate. He closed it and looked at the cover. Russian Fairy Tales.

But he needed to move on. He wanted to get Lange talking while he had him on his own. He hadn’t been convinced by the daughter’s claim that Lange had been traumatized by his early war experiences and was unable to talk about them, and now that he had met the old man, he was even less prepared to accept it. Lange’s reputation spoke for itself and it didn’t look as though age had taken much of his edge. A man like that didn’t deal with trauma by hiding from it.

Jake started off with some personal background. Lange had lived in Manchester for almost sixty years. His marriage had ended in divorce and his ex-wife had died over forty years before. Lange steered away from the personal and talked about his work. He’d devoted himself to making a success of his business, making contacts in Europe when the market was there, travelling further afield as the markets changed. Like many men of his generation, he didn’t seem to have had much time for family life. ‘You’ve got just the one child?’ Jake said.

Lange paused. ‘I have a daughter,’ he said distantly. Then he smiled for the first time. ‘And the granddaughter. Faith.’

He was starting to relax his guard. Jake circled closer. ‘Your life must have changed completely when you arrived here. You went into industry–why did you choose that? I’m interested in how people adapt to these circumstances.’ He kept his voice casual.

‘Industry, yes.’ Lange’s glance at Jake was sharp. ‘The war had led to some new processes. There were opportunities for anyone who cared to take them.’

‘It’s interesting that you managed to spot them when so many people didn’t. Was it your training? In your home country?’

‘I was a peasant, Mr Denbigh, and then over here, I was a soldier. That is training enough for anyone.’ He was sitting stiffly in his chair, and his voice had become distant. Jake decided not to push it any further for now.

‘Tell me what it was like when you first arrived in Manchester,’ he said. ‘It must have been very different from the way it is now. I never saw industrial Lancashire. It was all gone before I came here.’

Lange sat in silence as if assessing Jake’s request, looking for the hook. ‘I have the pictures’ he said. ‘First people I work with, first places.’ He didn’t move from his chair.

‘I’d like to see those,’ Jake said. Pictures were always useful for triggering reminiscences. They might give him an opening to push Lange further back, to catch him at a moment when he might start talking about his past.

Lange nodded briefly, then got up and left the room. Jake heard him talking to someone and checked his watch. It was after eleven. Had the guardian relative arrived? He heard Lange’s voice: ‘…is not necessary, Doreen. I tell you this before.’ His tone was peremptory. Then the door opened again and Lange returned carrying a box. He came back to his seat. ‘Is so long…’ he muttered, half to himself as he opened it.

Judging by the dust on the lid, it hadn’t been touched in ages. Jake moved his chair across. It contained a few paper wallets, orange-brown with dark stripes, marked ‘Kodak’. Jake looked at Lange for permission, then began going through them. Lange evinced no interest. The pictures were disappointing. Black-and-white photos of factories and production lines with the occasional picture of Lange surrounded by different groups of overalled men. Jake began discreetly checking to see if anything more interesting had been slipped in at any time. He could remember his own grandfather’s habit of putting loose photographs in with more recent sets.

And his intuition paid off. Tucked away among some negatives that had been undisturbed for so long they had stuck together, were two small prints, grainy monochrome, faded and damaged. He took them out and looked at them. The first one showed a group of people–a family? It looked like a typical peasant family to Jake–standing in front of a small house. It was hard to make out the details. The woman’s hair was pulled back from her face and she wore a long dress and apron. She held a young child–about four, maybe–in her arms. Standing next to her, there was a boy who looked as if he might be ten or eleven. Lange? Jake glanced across at the old man. It was hard to tell.

The second one was slightly larger and cut with a deckle edge. He checked the back quickly. It looked as though something had been written on it, but whatever it was, it had faded beyond legibility. It showed a young man in uniform standing in front of a building–the boy from the first photograph? If it was, he was older now, in his late teens or early twenties. This picture was unmistakably of Lange.

He held the first picture out. ‘Your family?’ he said.

After a brief hesitation, Lange took the photograph. His fingers brushed the woman’s face, and then the child’s, tentatively, as if the picture was a reflection in water that would disappear at his touch. He stared at it in silence for a full minute, then reached for the box and started going through the envelopes himself, impatiently gesturing Jake to silence.

Jake waited. Lange’s reaction to the picture was odd and had aroused his curiosity. He kept his observation discreet, letting his eyes wander over to the French windows and the garden beyond. The rain had stopped, and the day had the brightness of early spring. Unlike the front, the back garden was carefully tended, a strange contrast to the shabby, neglected house. Someone had been working on the rose bed by the window. A spade was propped against the wall, and a fork was dug into the earth. The plants had been pruned, and the remaining leaves shone with health.

‘When we are children,’ Lange said suddenly, ‘we live in a forest. My papa go there because Mama is ill. He has to clear land, build his house. He makes the orchard–cherry trees and plum trees. I am born there.’

‘When was that?’ Jake knew the answer, but he wanted to hear what Lange would say.

‘Many years ago.’ Lange’s brows drew together as he spoke. ‘In the forest,’ he said. ‘So beautiful. And in a clearing, the timber house and cherry orchard. There was no water, so Papa build a deep well. And Mama got better. And then I was born.’ The room darkened as the sun went in. ‘It’s gone now, the orchard, the forest.’

Jake wanted to let the old man stay in this moment of quiet reflection, but time was short. He pushed on. ‘And this one?’ he said, pointing to the photo of the young man in uniform. ‘This is you?’ It must have been taken in ’38 or ’39–just before the outbreak of the war. Jake couldn’t recognize the uniform.

But the old man seemed not to hear him. His eyes were focused on the photograph that Jake was holding out to him, but his face was blank. ‘That winter, everyone is afraid. Fear makes people…made me…’ He was looking directly at Jake as he spoke, but who or what he was seeing, Jake wasn’t sure. ‘I should not have done it,’ he said. ‘The bear at the gate…I was there.’ He turned to Jake with a sudden intensity. ‘I was there. And the little one…’ Jake couldn’t decipher what he said next. At first he thought the old man was speaking gibberish, then he realized that he had lapsed into another language–Polish? But it seemed oddly familiar to Jake.

The photographs dropped from the old man’s hand. Jake caught them before they fell to the floor. ‘Are you all right?’ He remembered the daughter’s warning about Lange’s health; he hadn’t taken it too seriously up until now.

Lange seemed to have forgotten Jake was there. ‘Minsk,’ he said. ‘It was in Minsk…’ He was staring at his hand where the photograph had been.

Minsk! Jake held his breath. But then the stillness of the house was broken as the front door slammed and feet tapped briskly across the wooden floor. A woman’s voice called from the hallway, ‘Grandpapa? Where are you?’ The guardian relative. Jake cursed under his breath. There was the sound of bags being dumped, movement, disturbance in the air. The past trembled and shattered in the vitality of the present.

The door opened, and the woman came in. She stopped in the doorway, her eyes taking in the scene. Jake got a quick impression of dark hair, red mouth, cool, tailored elegance. The granddaughter. Lange was levering himself out of his chair. He looked slightly dazed but the expression on his face was unmistakably one of relief.

She went up to the old man and hugged him. ‘Grandpapa!’ She studied him, her expression anxious and puzzled. Then she turned to Jake.

Jake stood up slowly, trying to hide his frustration at the interruption. Minsk. The old man had been about to talk about Minsk. ‘Jake Denbigh,’ he said.

She looked round at the recorder on the table, the scattered photographs, and her gaze came back to him. ‘You were supposed to wait for me,’ she said.

Jake shook his head. ‘My appointment was for eleven,’ he said.

She looked at Lange, who was easing himself back into his chair. He seemed quite composed now. She looked quickly back at Jake, undecided, then moved across the room to sit down on the other side of the fireplace.

‘Okay,’ she said with an effort. ‘I was late. I’m sorry. Please go on.’

Jake kept his face expressionless. Something had just dawned on him. His mind had been processing what Lange had said. He hadn’t been speaking Polish. The language Lange had used was Russian, and Jake could remember what he had said. He let the surface of his mind take over the interview as he tried to translate what he thought he had heard. ‘You said it wasn’t difficult, getting started. Tell me about it. Tell me what you did.’ He barely heard Lange’s reply. The tape was collecting it.

Lange had looked at the photo of himself as a young man in uniform, and he had said: I should have known. I did know. It was wrong.

5

Faith leaned back in her chair and listened to the verbal fencing that was going on between Grandpapa and this journalist, Jake Denbigh. When she’d arrived, Grandpapa had seemed confused and upset. Or that’s what she’d thought when she came into the room, but he’d greeted her as normal, and now seemed to be enjoying himself, sometimes evading Denbigh’s questions, sometimes using them as an opportunity for dogmatic pronouncements.

Denbigh didn’t seem unduly put out by these tactics. He was good-humoured and persistent, and gradually this paid off. She watched as her grandfather’s interest was aroused, and he began to talk seriously about the difficulties of starting again as an immigrant in a strange country, in a continent that had been ravaged by war.

‘Is it easier now?’ he was saying. ‘There is always suspicion of the stranger. People are people, Mr Denbigh.’

Before Denbigh could step in, he went off on a tangent about human nature, the urge to fear and reject anything that was different. Denbigh flashed her a quick, amused glance as he caught the thread of Grandpapa’s argument and deftly brought it back to the topic in hand. ‘Were you made to feel a stranger, Mr Lange? You’d fought for Britain.’

‘I was always the stranger,’ Grandpapa said.

There was a box of photographs on the table, which interested her. Grandpapa was not a photograph person. As far as she knew, he didn’t even own a camera. She picked up one of the wallets and began to flick through it, keeping half her attention on the interview.

They seemed to be business photos–records of official events that must go back years. She hadn’t known they existed. She had a sudden vision of Grandpapa’s life shut away and hidden in locked desks and dusty boxes, old papers in government offices, crumbling away to nothing, lost, because no one cared, apart from the restless archivists, people like Helen who would search and sift and bring the past to light.

The interview was winding up. Denbigh’s questions were moving towards the general now. ‘You’ve always had a reputation as a risk taker. It’s one of the things that made you so successful. What makes someone like you walk so close to the line?’

Grandpapa shrugged. ‘What is there to lose if the gamble fails? It is only fear that stops you.’

Denbigh looked at Grandpapa. ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘Eastern Europe was closed to us for decades. Has the new openness reunited you with your past?’

The silence stretched out. She saw that look of blankness she thought she’d seen in his eyes when she first arrived. She took a breath to intervene, but then he spoke.

‘I have never left it,’ he said.

Denbigh stood up, closing his notebook carefully. He held out his hand to Grandpapa. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Lange. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.’

‘And I you, Mr Denbigh,’ Grandpapa said.

‘I’ll see you out,’ Faith said. She followed him out of the room and retrieved his coat from the hall closet, noticing as she did so that the central heating was switched off. No wonder the house was so cold. Irritated, she pressed the button to trip the switch. Grandpapa was taking economy to ridiculous lengths these days. She needed to talk to him about that.

Jake Denbigh was waiting in the hall. She gave him his coat. ‘Was that useful?’ she asked as she unlocked the front door.

It was a formal query, but to her surprise he took it seriously. He paused in the doorway. ‘I don’t know. I think so. He’s got some stories that I’d like to hear, but I don’t think he’s going to tell them.’

‘Such as?’ she said.

‘I’m interested in Eastern Europe before the war. I’m working on a book.’

‘About Poland?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘Belarus.’

‘I don’t think there’s much he could tell you about that.’ She racked her brains. ‘The Treaty of Brest,’ she said.

He looked at her in surprise. ‘What?’

She laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I was just trying to think of anything I knew about Belarus, and that was it.’

‘It’s more than most people. What do you know about the treaty?’

‘It gave Poland its independence in 1918,’ she said, ‘and it gave them western Belarus. Byelorussia, it was then.’

‘Which wasn’t popular with the Belarusians.’ He was looking thoughtful. ‘Whereabouts did your grandfather come from? Where was he born?’

‘Don’t you know?’ If he’d done his research, he should.

‘There was something…’ He shook his head. ‘It’s probably nothing. I’ve had some trouble tracking down the original records, that’s all.’

‘Well, a lot of them were destroyed. He lived in the east, in the forested part. There wasn’t much there. The nearest village was called Litva. I get the impression it was just a tiny place. I don’t think it exists any more.’

‘And he doesn’t talk about it?’

‘He talks about his childhood,’ she said. ‘It’s the war that he won’t discuss. I think a lot of the survivors are like that.’

He leaned his shoulder against the door jamb and looked at her, considering what she’d said to him. ‘That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve been talking to a lot of wartime refugees. Most of them want to tell their stories. They feel forgotten.’

She remembered what Katya had told her, about the ex-Nazi in Blackburn, and she wondered what it was he wanted to know. ‘Is your book about the war? Do we need another one?’

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘We don’t really need it, or you’re not really writing about it?’

He laughed. ‘Appearances to the contrary, you’re very like your grandfather. Okay, I’m working on something that’s linked to the war.’

‘Which is…?’

He kept his eyes on her but didn’t say anything. ‘…none of my business,’ she completed for him.

‘It isn’t that. It’s complicated, that’s all.’ But she noticed he still didn’t tell her what he was writing about.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m just…concerned about him. He truly doesn’t like to talk about the war.’

He nodded. ‘That’s okay. We didn’t.’

‘When will it come out? This article?’

‘Next issue,’ he said. ‘I’ll send you a copy.’ They stood in silence, looking at each other, then he pushed himself upright. ‘I’ve got to go. It’s been good meeting you. Really.’

When she’d first seen him in the gloom of Grandpapa’s living room, she’d been surprised how young he looked. Now, seeing him in the clear light, she could see the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that said thirties rather than twenties. She watched him as he walked down the path towards his car. Despite the cold, he didn’t bother putting on his coat. He slung it in the back of the car with his bag, then looked up and saw her watching him from the doorway. He raised his hand in salute, then got in the car and drove off.

She closed the door, shivering slightly in the cold. It was almost twelve. She had to be back for her appointment with Yevanov, but she could spend a bit of time with Grandpapa before she left. It was draughty in the corridor. The door into the study was standing open. That wouldn’t help. She went to close it, and heard the sound of someone moving around.

‘Grandpapa?’ She put her head round the door.

The woman from the cleaning agency was busying herself round the desk. She turned quickly as Faith spoke.

Faith had forgotten it was one of Doreen’s days. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

Doreen pushed the bureau drawer shut. ‘I’ve just done,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like to go while Mr Lange had a visitor. I didn’t know you were here.’ She came out into the hall, and went to the closet to get her coat. ‘He doesn’t like the heating on,’ she said.

‘It’s too cold without.’

‘I’ll be off, then.’ Doreen wrapped a scarf round her neck and buttoned up her coat. ‘He’s been worrying about burglars again. He had a go at me about locking the windows.’ Her gaze challenged Faith to make some response.

‘There’ve been some break-ins. You need to be careful.’ It wasn’t like Grandpapa to be nervous. ‘Is everything locked up now?’

‘I always leave it right,’ Doreen said.

Faith closed the door behind her, then checked her phone in case Helen had left a message, but there was nothing.

She went back into the front room. Grandpapa was still in his chair looking thoughtful. ‘I’ve switched the heating on,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have the house so cold.’

He didn’t respond, which wasn’t like him. The heating argument was a regular feature of their encounters. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

He didn’t seem to hear her. He was looking out of the window at the roses that grew against the glass. She remembered the dream she’d woken up to. ‘I used to help you prune those,’ she said. ‘It was my job, in the summer, remember?’

He shook his head as though he’d been thinking of something else. ‘Pruning the roses?’ he said vaguely. Then he seemed to come back to the present, and looked at her severely over his spectacles. ‘You used to pick them, not prune.’

That was true. One summer–she must have been about thirteen–she’d stripped half the blooms from his prized red rose and woven them into a crown for her hair and carried the rest in a bouquet or pinned to her dress when she went to a party. It had been the party of a girl from school who had tried to bully Helen and Faith. Helen had not been invited. The party was fancy dress, and the girl had been boasting about the Rose Red outfit her mother had bought for her. Faith had decided to go as Rose Red too, only she would have real roses. She smiled, remembering. ‘You bought me a present after that,’ she said, wondering if he’d remember. He’d never been a man for presents.

He nodded slowly. ‘A red ribbon for your hair.’ She thought he looked weary. Then he shook himself out of his fatigue and stood up. ‘You are staying?’ he said. ‘We have lunch?’

‘I can’t. I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll make some coffee.’

She went through to the kitchen, which was cold and silent. There was a sour smell that she tracked down to an unwashed cloth in the spotted damp under the sink. She dumped it in the bin. It disturbed her, the way the house seemed to be sinking into the decay of abandonment. She’d have to try–again–to get some basic maintenance done. She’d tried once or twice, even going so far as to phone a local builder, but Grandpapa had been adamant. ‘Not necessary,’ he’d said.

She’d lived in this house until she was eighteen. Katya had brought her here when she was born, and had left her here in Grandpapa’s care when she went to live in London. What Katya had been looking for, Faith didn’t know. Her mother had been an angry woman when Faith was a child, and was still an angry woman. She had never married, and had had no more children.

She shrugged off the memories and spooned coffee into a jug. She put cups on to a tray, and took it through to the sitting room where Grandpapa was tidying up the table where the photos had been scattered, tucking them into the envelopes and putting them back into the box.

‘Don’t put them away,’ she said. ‘I want to look at those.’ She put a cup of coffee on the table beside him.

‘Is just photos, sweetheart,’ he said, frowning. ‘From work–long time ago.’

‘But I’ve never seen any photos of you from then,’ she said. He was not a man who preserved memories of his life. There was no photographic record of Katya’s childhood, and what photos there were of Faith’s grandmother, Katya had taken when she had left. ‘Come on, hand them over.’

He pushed the box across to her reluctantly, and went on putting away the remainder of the photos, carefully checking each one.

He was right. The photos were dull–pictures of mill buildings, factories, industrial landscapes that had vanished years ago. But there were one or two where a young Marek Lange appeared. They must have been taken in the post-war period. He looked tall and robust, a young man full of energy and dynamism. But his face looked older. Even then, Grandpapa’s face had worn that same cold severity with which he met the world today.

He finished putting the photographs away, and sat back in his chair, frowning.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘I think I have been dreaming…’ The cup he was holding tilted slightly, the coffee spilling over the rim.

‘Careful,’ she warned.

He didn’t seem aware of her. ‘Winter,’ he said. ‘So cold…’

She mopped at the spilled coffee with a tissue. ‘It’ll be spring soon.’

‘In spring it rain,’ he said. ‘So cold, that year. They told me…I have to do it. I have to.’

‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you have to do?’

He looked at her. ‘Faith…’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He pushed himself out of his chair. When he spoke again, his voice was firm. ‘I must see to the garden.’

After he left the Lange house, Jake drove back into Central Manchester. He called in at the university library to collect a book, then walked down to Oxford Street station for coffee. He ordered an espresso and watched the people passing by outside the window as he went over what he had just learned. The waitress smiled at him as she brought his cup across. She was pretty with dark hair, which made him think of Faith Lange who’d brightened up the gloomy, rambling house.

Why was it that a man of Lange’s means had let that beautiful old house deteriorate into such dilapidation? Some old people lived in the past, he knew that. But Lange had–apparently–rejected his own past.

Whatever that past was. After meeting the man, Jake wanted to know.

Faith Lange had told him the same story the few records told, but these were all records that would have relied on Lange for their information. It was possible that a tiny village in agricultural Poland might have vanished, but without any trace, leaving no evidence of its existence? He wasn’t convinced. As for the destroyed records…not so. It was surprising, once the Iron Curtain had fallen, to find how intact the records were. As you moved further east, further into the areas that had been devastated by the battles that had raged across the land, then the gaps started to appear, but if the story Marek Lange told was true, then there should have been something.

Further east…the further east you went, the darker the story became. He lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes against the smoke as he remembered that tantalizing moment, cut short by Faith Lange’s untimely arrival. Lange had spoken Russian. Old people in times of stress sometimes reverted to the language of their childhood. In extreme cases, they could lose the language they had later learned. Something had shocked Lange, and in that moment he had switched, unconsciously, Jake was sure, not to Polish, but to Russian.

And he had been in Minsk at the start of the war. When the old man had named the city, almost as if the word had been torn out of him, a chill had run down Jake’s back.

He opened his notebook. As Faith Lange had walked into the room, on impulse he’d slipped the two black-and-white photographs between the pages. He studied them again, the mother and children standing in the doorway of the house, the young soldier in his uniform.

Jake was reminded of a photograph Juris Ziverts had shown him the first time they met, soon after the Latvian government began extradition proceedings against the old man, charging him with war crimes. Latvia and the other Baltic countries had been brutally occupied by Stalinist Russia when Hitler launched his invasion of Poland. Two years later, when the Nazis attacked the Soviets, the stage was set for tragedy. Eastern Europe erupted in a frenzy of killing as virulent anti-Semitism was compounded by a hatred of communists and the ‘lesser races’. From the Baltics, from Estonia, from Lithuania and Latvia, the death squads went forth.

And now, after decades of inaction, their governments were trying to make amends. Memories from half a century before were taxed; photographs of men, young and in uniform, were compared with pictures of aging exiles. And the fingers of accusation began to point.

Juris Ziverts lived in a small semi in Blackburn. He had welcomed Jake, ushering him into the front room of his house, a room with a patterned carpet, blown vinyl wallpaper and bric-a-brac on the narrow mantelpiece above the electric fire. There was a fuchsia on the coffee table, its frilled petals looking oddly exotic in the resolutely suburban home. Jake, looking for a neutral topic to break the ice, said, ‘That’s a beautiful plant.’

The old man’s face, heavily bearded, was hawkish, but it lit up at Jake’s words. ‘You like flowers? I too. Since I retired, I spend my days in my greenhouse.’ He poured tea for Jake, his hands trembling slightly. ‘I am so glad you have come, Mr Denbigh. There has been a mistake. I’m sure it will all be sorted out…’ He was trying to make light of it, but his tense face and trembling hands told their own story.

‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’ Jake had come to the house with no strong views about Ziverts one way or the other, but he was prepared to listen.

‘It is…’ Ziverts’ voice wavered, then came back stronger. ‘I am Latvian, Mr Denbigh. I was a refugee after the war. My family died, so I came here. I am a teacher. Of maths. I married. I worked in Manchester for forty years, then I retired.’ He hesitated and cleared his throat. ‘When I arrive,’ he continued, ‘my English was not good. My name–it was very strange to the people here. They called me George. It was easier, and they meant no harm. So I became George Ziverts.’

Jake nodded. It wasn’t unusual for Eastern Europeans to change their names. He knew a Kazimierz who had changed his name to Carl and a Zbigniew who had become John. ‘And then…?’

‘I fought in the war,’ Ziverts said suddenly.

Jake kept his tone casual. ‘The German Army?’

‘No. Never. But many of us…I…fought on the side of the Nazis when they drove the Russians out. The Soviets were brutal oppressors–we were glad to oppose them. But I was not a Nazi,’ he said. ‘We had welcomed in a monster to drive out a monster, and we paid the price. I was never a Nazi.’

Jake listened as he told his story. It was an ugly one, as were so many that came from that time, that place. The investigators claimed to have evidence that the man who was known in Blackburn as George Ziverts was in fact Juka Zivertus, former commander of one of the death squads in Belarus. Zivertus had organized the rounding up of hundreds of civilians, women and children, and had had them machine-gunned by the side of their graves.

‘Never!’ Ziverts said, his distress making his voice stumble over the words. ‘I never did such things. I never knew such things were happening. I fought the Soviets. I killed young men like myself. We have all had to live with that. I am not this man, this Zivertus, but how can I prove it? My family is dead. My friends are dead. They refuse to believe my papers. I don’t know what to do.’

Jake thought about this now, as he finished his cigarette, turning the photograph of Marek Lange round and round in his fingers. Had he believed then that Juris Ziverts was innocent? He couldn’t remember. He’d thought the case against him was thin to the point of unprovable, and he’d found Ziverts an unconvincing candidate for a war criminal. Perpetrators of such crimes–those who organized or authorized them–tended towards an unapologetic arrogance. They were in no hurry to admit culpability, but neither did they see themselves as having done anything wrong. Ziverts’ distressed bewilderment–and his horror at the accusation levelled against him–was not the response of a guilty man. The problem was that there was almost no way to prove guilt or innocence after all these years.

He’d told Ziverts that the whole matter was academic. The police had no convincing proof and little chance of getting any. ‘Don’t worry,’ he’d reassured the old man. There was no story for him and he hadn’t planned on returning–which was a mistake, as it turned out. But Zivert’s story had first aroused his interest in Belarus.

Jake felt oddly reluctant to return home and finish off his article with the contribution from Marek Lange. He stared into the distance, remembering how Lange’s face had frozen into blankness. The old man had held the photograph, and he’d said…Jake relaxed and let the memory form. He was in the room. It was chilly and the light was dim. Lange was motionless, staring at the picture. Everyone is afraid. Fear makes people…made me…I should not have done it. The bear at the gate…I was there. I was there. And the little one…And then in Russian: I should know. I did know. It is wrong.

I should not have done it. Done what? What should he have known, and what did he know? What had the photograph brought so shockingly to Lange’s mind? And then Faith Lange had arrived and got her grandfather off the hook. But before she came in, the old man had said something else. Minsk. It was in Minsk.

Ghost fingers touched his spine.

He had decided what he was going to do. He left the rest of his coffee and walked down the narrow steps to the street. A train clattered over the bridge above him, making the iron sing. He was going to pay a visit to Sophia Yevanova.

6

The sign on the door said ANTONI YEVANOV, DIRECTOR. Faith took a deep breath. She had never met Yevanov on a one-to-one basis before and would have liked a bit more preparation for this meeting. She’d prefer not to feel rushed and harassed, her mind still picking over the events of the morning. Yevanov had a reputation for impatience and for swift, sharp judgement.

She glanced at her reflection in the glass over a picture. She looked a bit windblown. Her hand moved automatically to smooth her hair–but she was aware of Trish’s eyes on her, and suppressed the impulse. She knocked on the door, waited for an acknowledgement, then pushed it open.

The room was spacious and airy. White walls reflected the light from a south-facing window that looked out across the campus, a stunted arcadia in a cityscape of concrete, stone and glass. It was deserted apart from a group of students hurrying out of the driving rain.

‘Dr Lange.’ Antoni Yevanov was coming across the room to greet her. He was tall–well over six foot, and she had to look up at him as he shook her hand. His face was thin, with arched eyebrows and the characteristic high cheekbones of the Slav. She knew that he must be in his fifties, but despite the few threads of grey in his dark hair, he looked younger.

He ushered her towards the desk, and pulled out a chair for her. ‘Please sit down.’ His movements were quick and vigorous. The room felt cool to her, but he was in his shirtsleeves and his tie was loosened. She noticed the jacket of his suit slung over the back of his chair, and was enough Katya’s daughter to observe the drape of good cloth and fine tailoring.

As she sat down, she took a moment to absorb her surroundings. The wall behind his desk was lined with bookshelves. A map of Europe patterned in reds and greens hung opposite the window. Faith recognized it–it had been the cover of his most recent book.

There were papers spread across the surface of the desk, and the computer monitor was flickering. He also had a laptop in front of him, on which he’d apparently been working before she arrived. A whiteboard beside his desk was covered with lists of ongoing projects.

He waited until she was sitting down, then took a seat in the leather chair behind the desk. ‘Dr Lange,’ he said again, then with a brief smile, ‘Faith. I’m sorry we haven’t had a chance to talk before. I realize that your own research is being delayed while you settle in, and I’d like to get things moving there. The software you developed when you were at Oxford gets a very favourable mention in The Journal of Statistics. I have some thoughts about the ways in which you plan to move forward with this that I’d like to discuss with you another time. I am delighted that you are joining us. Now, how are you settling in?’

‘Very well,’ she said.

He asked her about the work the people on her team were doing. She’d spent her first week making sure she was familiar with all the ongoing projects, and was able to bring him up to date.

He nodded when she’d finished, then said, ‘And Helen? Helen Kovacs?’

Faith had been hoping to skip over the topic of Helen until they had had a chance to talk. ‘She’s working on her paper. We have a meeting arranged to talk about it.’

His eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I have some concerns about it,’ he said. ‘Especially as she didn’t make it to our meeting this morning.’

‘You had a meeting with Helen?’ Helen hadn’t mentioned a meeting with Yevanov. ‘I’d arranged to see her this morning.’

He frowned. ‘She didn’t make it to your meeting either?’

‘No. She left a message with Trish that she might be held up.’ It was a poor defence at best, and Yevanov didn’t look pleased. She wondered what was going on. There were issues here of which she was unaware.

She remembered Trish’s waspish remark earlier when she was on the phone to Yevanov: ‘She isn’t here. Again.’ Helen was letting herself drift into deep water. The academic world was cut-throat. There would be very little slack allowed to anyone who wasn’t putting in 100 per cent, no matter what kinds of personal problems they might be dealing with.

He was speaking again, and she made herself concentrate. ‘The Bonn conference is a particularly important one. I have made time to attend it myself, and it is essential that any contribution we make from the Centre is of an appropriate standard. I need to confirm the status of the paper with the organizers. I understood that the research stage was complete, and it was simply a matter of writing this up.’

‘That’s my understanding.’

‘So what is the significance of the material from the Litkin Archive?’

‘The…what?’ Faith had no idea what he was talking about.

‘The Litkin Archive,’ he said again.

She felt completely wrong-footed. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

He ran his finger along the line of his jaw, frowning. ‘I was hoping you could enlighten me. The archive is a bequest from a Russian collector, Gennady Litkin. It consists mostly of wartime papers from what became the USSR, but there is some material relating to this country. It’s a fascinating resource, but completely undocumented. The Centre controls access, and I only found out this morning that Helen had formally applied to look at some papers. It is my responsibility and, normally, these applications come to me, but I’ve been away, so I don’t know what she had in mind.’ He picked up a form from his in-tray and studied it. ‘Does the Ruabon Coal Company mean anything to you?’

Faith shook her head. ‘I’m positive Helen’s research was complete. She wanted to discuss her writing schedule with me.’ She might as well clear this with Yevanov now. ‘I was going to get a few of her teaching hours covered to help her catch up.’

He nodded, as if he agreed with this. ‘But the archive?’

‘I think she must have been looking for some additional data.’

He raised his eyebrows as he studied the paper in his hand. ‘Possibly.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

‘Or maybe it was research for something else,’ she said. ‘Her PhD was on the decline of the coal industry. She was preparing it for publication.’

He was still reading the form. ‘No. She wouldn’t have got permission for unauthorized research. There are legal problems over the ownership and, until the papers are properly archived, access to the collection is closely controlled.’ He ran his fingers through his hair and tugged it in frustration. ‘I explained all of this…’ He tossed the form back on to the desk in exasperation.

His phone rang. He excused himself and picked it up. ‘Yevanov…Yes, I am aware of that…As soon as she arrives, please…’

She glanced at his bookshelves while he was talking. He had books on international law, books on the recent Balkan wars, books on Rwanda, books on Iraq. She saw a copy of Mein Kampf and heavy tomes on the Nuremberg trials. He also had, incongruously, some collections of fairy stories and folk tales, including the Russian collection that Grandpapa used to read to her. She went across to the shelves for a closer look.

Russian Fairy Tales. Faded gold lettering on green binding. She heard the phone being put down, and turned. He smiled when he saw the book in her hands. ‘You think this is an odd thing for an historian to have?’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘They’re part of history, in a way. They’re beautiful stories.’

‘They are. And they are very old, probably the oldest records we have.’ She gave him the book and he turned it over in his hands, a faint smile on his face. ‘Not many people are familiar with them these days.’

‘I grew up with them,’ she said.

He looked across at her in surprise. ‘So did I.’ He flicked through the pages. ‘“Once upon a time, deep in the dark forest where the bears roamed and the wolves hunted, there lived an evil witch…”’ He raised an eyebrow and looked at the line of books on the shelf behind him: The Nuremberg Trials; The Fall of Srebrenica; Inside Al-Qaeda. ‘It’s a simple explanation, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever come up with anything better.’ He smiled. ‘It’s unusual to find someone who knows of these. We have something in common.’ He held the book out to her.

She took it and turned the pages, scanning the familiar titles: The Snow Child, Havroshechka, The Firebird. ‘My grandfather used to read them to me.’

‘Your grandfather is Russian?’

‘Polish. He was a refugee.’

‘Then it’s interesting he read you those stories. There is little love lost between the Poles and the Russians. But we have something else in common. My mother is also a refugee, though she didn’t get out until after the war. Those were dreadful times.’

‘Is she…?’…still alive, Faith wanted to ask, but didn’t know how to word her query.

‘Her health is poor. She’s lived in this city for many years, but now she needs caring for–something she does not admit.’ His smile was rueful. Then he looked at her, and his face was cool and professional again. ‘Don’t worry about the meeting this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Helen’s problem will wait for a different occasion. I’m aware of her situation–I’ll do what I can. Once again–I’m delighted you have joined our team.’

He stood up as she moved to leave, giving a slight bow. ‘Make an appointment to see me…’ he looked quickly at the board ‘…in a couple of weeks and we can talk about your work.’ He held the door open for her. She was aware of Trish watching her as she left the office.

As soon as she was in the corridor she tried Helen’s mobile, but the phone was switched off. There was nothing she could do for now. She felt exhausted, as though she’d just run a few miles, but at least her encounter with Yevanov seemed to have gone well. It was odd that he had collections of the same stories that Grandpapa used to read to her when she was small. She had grown up with stories–Grandpapa reading to her during quiet evenings, the long walks together when he told her stories about his childhood: the house that Great-Grandpapa built, the orchard, the trains in the forest, the witch in the wood…

The Red Train

This is the story of how the trains came to the forest.

It was spring, and there were men in the forest, strangers. The sound of axes rang through the air as they cut the trees. They were clearing the land for the railway, Stanislau said. Marek took Eva along the paths to watch as the men worked, watching the tree they were cutting as it swayed and rustled, its branches whispering as it fell until it crashed down to the forest floor. And the men would shout to each other, and the chains would clank as the horses pulled away the tree that had fallen.

Eva would watch and listen. The tree seemed to struggle as the axes bit into its trunk, and then the sigh as it fell was sad, and the leaves of the other trees would rustle in agitation as the fallen one was dragged away. Sometimes the men would call to the children, and they would run back to the house in the clearing.

When the trees had gone, the rails came, long tracks that wound their way through the forest. And the men who built the rails built a bridge that crossed the river–much bigger than the wooden bridge where Stanislau led the horse carrying the orchard fruit to market.

Then the trains came, huge metal engines pulling wagon after wagon after wagon. The wagons were made of wood, apart from the wheels which were iron and sped along the track, making sparks fly up into the air. And the train carried a fire in its heart to make it go, and the fireman shovelled in the fuel and the train moved, sometimes slowly as if the engine was tired of pulling the long line of trucks, sometimes flying along through the forests, the smoke from the engine trailing behind it.

First, there was the sound of the whistle, then the smoke through the trees and the line would start to sing as the train came nearer and nearer and then burst along the track. Da da dah, da da dah, Marek would sing the song of the train. West to east and east to west, the trains ran night and day.

Eva loved the trains. Before she was old enough to walk the woods on her own, she would dawdle behind her brother, carefully, infuriatingly, holding him back from the things he wanted to do, until he became distracted and she could slip through the undergrowth and into the shadows and make her way through the trees with their shivering fronds that hung down and ran their fingers across her face and tangled in her hair.

She knew the times and the places. She would come to the clearings, the places where the trees had been cut and the ground built up with stones to carry the iron rails. And she would crouch by the line with her fingers on the rail, waiting. And then the iron would begin to hum beneath her fingers, before her ears could hear it, and she would leave her fingers there a bit longer and a bit longer, daring herself, then she would move back to the edge of the trees, waiting as the iron sang. And she would hear the beat of the engine, and sometimes the wail of its horn, and then it would be there, on top of her, in a rush of power and steam and smoke, and she would smell the burning cinders and see the men as they powered the engine, and sometimes they would see her crouched among the trees, and they would sound the horn and wave and laugh, and she would wave back, and then the train was gone, and Marek was calling with frantic anger from the forest behind her: ‘Eva! Eva!’

And she would go home with him and help Mama feed the hens, or sort the eggs, or draw water from the well. And the summer wind would blow, soughing in the trees, and she would hear birdsong and the sound of the carts bringing the men back from the fields. Nearby, the hens scratched and clucked, and bees hummed in the flowers that grew round the door.

And away in the distance, to the east, she heard the whistle of the train.

7

Jake parked his car in the road outside the Yevanov house. It was in a similar suburb to Marek Lange’s, from the same era, and built in the same style. But there, all similarities ended. Sophia Yevanova’s house was surrounded by a well-kept garden that had been planted with a view to year-round colour. As Jake walked up the drive–swept free of autumn leaves weeks ago–he admired the brilliant reds and greens of the dogwood, the yellow of the winter jasmine that climbed up the front of the house among the last leaves of the creeper, whose stalks were now almost bare.

As he stepped through the front door, smiling his thanks to the woman who admitted him, he felt the warmth of the house envelop him. The hallway gleamed with polished wood. Vases of spring flowers on the hall table and windowsills dispelled the winter. ‘Good morning, Mr Denbigh.’ The woman, Mrs Barker, greeted him with the warmth that befitted a favourite. She led him through to the room at the back of the house where Sophia Yevanova customarily spent her days.

She was confined to her chair, but she sat upright, as though she could rise from it with the ease of a dancer rising en point. In fact, she looked like a dancer, with the fine-boned delicacy of a classical ballerina, or like a sculpture or a painting, a work of art ravaged by time.

As Jake was ushered through her door, she put down the tapestry she was working on–every time they had talked, her hands had been restlessly occupied–and held out her hand to him. For all her elegance and composure, he thought she looked poorly–paler and more tired than the last time he’d talked to her. The illness that had imprisoned her must be making its presence felt.

‘Miss Yevanova.’

‘Mr Denbigh. How good of you to call.’

‘My pleasure.’ The courtesy was the simple truth. He took pleasure in her company.

Her dark gaze held his, then she smiled. ‘I will have tea, Mrs Barker.’ She raised an enquiring eyebrow at Jake, who nodded. ‘Mr Denbigh and I would like tea–the Darjeeling, I think. Thank you.’ The woman withdrew.

Sophia Yevanova laid her tapestry carefully on the table and waited until the door was closed. ‘I thought I had told you enough stories to keep you occupied for longer than this, Mr Denbigh,’ she said. ‘I see I must try harder.’

The last time he’d visited, they had talked about her life in Minsk as a girl, living in the shadow of Stalin’s terror. In a way, she was right. There was more than enough in everything she had already told him for a book, but so far, they hadn’t talked about the Nazi occupation. They’d touched briefly on the deaths of her fellow partisans, and her response had been unequivocal: ‘They are gone. I will not speak of such deaths.’

He looked at the wall behind her chair. An icon hung there, its jewel-like colours gleaming from the shadows. It had been the one thing of value, ‘apart from my son’, that she had brought out of Belarus. She had smiled when she said that, her eyes going to the photograph on the side table that she kept within easy reach–her son, Antoni Yevanov.

She’d told him the story. Passing by the church in Minsk after it had been looted by the fascists as they retreated from the Red Army, she’d seen the gleam of gold in the dirt and rubble, and found the icon–the virgin and child–intact and undamaged. It had been a sign. ‘I knew then that God was going to let me live, He was going to let me get away.’ She had brought the icon to England, and even in her darkest moments, she had never considered selling it.

He was struck again by the shadows under her eyes, the parchment-like whiteness of her skin. ‘You look tired,’ he said.

She arched her eyebrows at him. ‘If you tell a woman she looks tired, she will assume that you mean she looks old.’ He began to speak, but she raised her hand to stop him. ‘I am old. I am not foolish enough to pretend otherwise.’

‘I’ve got something I’d like you to see,’ he said.

‘Well then, you must show it to me.’ The tea arrived, and she took care serving it. For her, tea was an important social ritual, poured from a silver teapot into white, translucent china.

He took the photographs out of his wallet, and waited until she put her cup down on the occasional table beside her, then passed them to her. She studied the first one, the family standing outside the house, holding it away from her face. ‘There were many such,’ she said indifferently, handing it back to him.

He watched her carefully as she gave the photo of the young man in uniform the same careful scrutiny. He thought her lips tightened a bit, but otherwise she displayed no emotion. ‘Old photographs,’ she said. ‘You have been doing your research, Mr Denbigh.’

He nodded, not letting his disappointment at her lack of reaction show. He knew from past experience that she would sometimes appear to ignore something he said or something he asked, then return to it later when he’d given up hope of an answer.

‘So you are going to Minsk,’ she said.

He’d told her about his planned trip. ‘I’m leaving after the weekend,’ he said. ‘Just for a few days. Where should I go?’

She shook her head. ‘There is nothing left,’ she said. ‘Not of my city. I can’t advise you.’

‘I want to find the old city, what’s left. I can bring you back some photos, if you want. I could try and go to the village where you were sent when you were twelve.’

She smiled faintly. ‘You are assuming I want to find my past,’ she said. ‘I left it behind years ago.’

He nodded. He could understand that. ‘I’d like to hear more of your story,’ he said. ‘If you have time.’

‘Very well.’ The room was silent apart from the sound of the rain. The last time they had talked, she had given him a spare, unemotional account of her childhood in Minsk. Her parents had both been members of the communist party, but life in the city had been hard. There was poverty and deprivation throughout the country. ‘My father was a good party member,’ she had said. ‘He was also a good husband and a good man.’ She had ended her story when she was twelve, when her parents had sent her to live with relatives in a village on the outskirts of Minsk, Zialony Luh.

‘We lived in the aftermath of the revolution,’ she said now. ‘It was a terrible war. You know about the history?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve read the books.’

‘The books…’ Her smile mocked knowledge gained that way. In the dull light of the afternoon, her face was a paler shadow among shadows. ‘I remember my last weeks in Minsk. It was winter, 1937. So cold. I have never known cold like it before or since. It was as if the world had frozen in the face of what was happening and all that was to come. I remember it was late and I was hurrying to get home. I was walking along the road near the building where the police worked–these were Stalin’s police, the NKVD. The building was just ordinary offices. Many people worked there.

‘And then I saw it. Narrow openings at the bottom of the walls. They were barred, but there was no glass. They made windows, of a kind, to the cellars. And that night, there was steam rising up, out through the bars, thick in the icy air. The breath of hundreds of people, crammed into the NKVD cellars, waiting…People they had arrested. Some people that I knew, maybe. How many were packed down there, I can’t imagine…’

She looked at Jake. ‘Where did they go? The arrests never stopped.’

There was only one answer to that question.

‘We knew,’ she said. ‘But no one talked about it, or not where they thought they might be overheard. But it got so bad in Minsk, the arrests. That was when my father decided to send me to Zialony Luh, on the edge of the Kurapaty Forest.’

Kurapaty. Jake looked across at her, but her eyes were fixed on the distance, as if she had forgotten he was there.

‘I had a cousin there, Raina. She was my age, and she was beautiful. These things matter to young girls, even in such…The young are very stupid. When I got there, Raina’s mother, my aunt, tried to send me back. “It’s bad here,” she said. But there was nowhere for me to go.’ She closed her eyes.

‘This is tiring you,’ Jake said. ‘You need to rest. We can do this another time.’

She looked at him with wry amusement. ‘I think you should listen while you can. I may be ashes next time we meet. It is just–it was so long ago, but when I talk about it, it is like yesterday.’ She was quiet for a moment, then she began speaking again. ‘It was the trucks. I remember the sound of the trucks. They went by into the forest, all afternoon, all evening. My aunt kept the shutters closed tight. “It’s cold,” she said, and sealed the gaps with rags. But that night, something woke me. I was sharing Raina’s bed. I crept out, careful not to disturb her. I wrapped my shawl around myself against the cold, and I pulled away the rags and opened the shutters. And then the sounds I had half heard were clearer. It was a dry sound, over and over: klop-klop-klop and quiet. Then klop-klop-klop again. And a moaning sound that went on and on in the night, and sometimes a cry that muffled into silence. I knew the sound of gunfire. We all did. But this was so…regular, so…methodical. And then Raina woke up and she closed the shutters and pulled me back to the bed.’ Her face was mask-like, frozen with memory.

‘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?’

‘We’ll need to talk to you,’ the woman said. ‘Would you mind waiting?’ It wasn’t a request. ‘We’ve asked the staff to wait in the office.’

Faith wanted to shake the information out of the woman. What happened? Instead, she turned away and walked through the lobby. The winter light flooded the high space, the poster for Antoni Yevanov’s lecture glowing on the display board–After Guantanamo…She hesitated at the door of the office, then stepped back. She didn’t want to step into the room, listen to the voices falling silent, listen to people who’d hardly known Helen speaking with hushed excitement, listen to the speculation.

Suddenly she was overwhelmed with nausea. She could feel the cold sweat on her forehead and down her back. She went quickly into the ladies and made it into one of the cubicles before she was sick, dry retching long after her stomach was empty. Her legs felt shaky as she stood up.

There was no natural light in the cloakroom, and the mirrors over the row of basins threw back her reflection bleached of colour. The tap water was tepid and she let it run cold before she rinsed her mouth and splashed it over her face.

There was a small yard at the back of the building where the rubbish skips were lined up for collection. She let herself out of the rear entrance, glad to see that no one else was there. It was one of the smokers’ refuges, cigarette ends littering the ground and a stale smell of ash lingering in the air. She sat on the low wall by the skips and stared up at the sky. The nausea lingered like a reminder in the pit of her stomach.

Years before, the daughter of one of her colleagues had been killed. A young man had been driving along a straight bit of road, had put his foot down, then swerved to avoid something. His car had clipped the pushchair in which the three-year-old had been sitting. Faith had gone to the funeral. People wept at the graveside, but the bereaved mother hadn’t. She had stood there, cradling an infant that someone had given her to hold, and she had watched them bury her daughter. Her stillness was incandescent with a grief that was beyond tears.

Hannah and Finn. They were Helen’s world. Faith reached for her phone and tried Helen’s home number, but there was no answer. She flicked through the pages of her diary. She could remember scribbling down the number of Daniel’s phone at some time. She keyed it in, hoping it was still current. It rang several times before it was answered.

‘Kovacs.’ It was an abrupt snap.

‘Daniel, it’s Faith. I just heard about Helen.’

There was a moment of silence, then he said, ‘Faith. Yeah, it’s…I’m kind of, you know…’

She didn’t know, but she could imagine. No matter what anger there had been between him and Helen, he hadn’t wanted the marriage to end. For all the problems they’d had, Helen had felt bad about leaving him. ‘What happened? I don’t know anything. I just came into work and there were police everywhere.’

‘Work.’ His laugh was edgy and hostile. ‘Well, that’s what happened. Work. She’s out on a wild-goose chase, something for what d’you call him–Yevanov.’ He spat the name. ‘She’s on her own in some old house, and there just happens to be a pervert on the premises.’

A pervert. Did he mean that Helen had been…‘Oh, God,’ she said.

‘I talked to her,’ Daniel said. His voice sounded raw. ‘Not long before it happened. She wanted to talk to the kids. I was pissed off. I wouldn’t let her. And then this…animal…strangled her.’

Faith closed her eyes. She felt sick. ‘How are they? Hannah and Finn?’

He was suddenly angry. ‘They’ve just lost their mum. How do you think they are?’ And then the anger faded as fast as it had come. ‘It’s too much, kids that age.’

‘Daniel, I’d really like to see them. Can I come round?’

‘It’s not a good…’ He began his refusal, then stopped. ‘Look, you could help me out–if you want. I’m a bit stuck. I’ve got a job on this afternoon and I can’t leave it. The kids aren’t in school–if you want to see them, you could come round and sit with them.’

‘Of course. Give me the address and I’ll be there.’

He gave her the street name and number. ‘Get here for two,’ he said, and rang off.

The door into the yard where Faith was sitting opened suddenly. ‘Oh. There you are. They’re waiting for you.’ It was Trish, looking outwardly composed, but there was a suppressed excitement about her and her eyes were bright.

Faith stood up slowly. ‘The police?’

‘They want to talk to everyone Helen knew,’ Trish said. ‘Professor Yevanov has promised them full co-operation.’

Yevanov would have little choice but full cooperation. ‘Where is he?’ Faith asked as she walked back into the lobby. She didn’t want to talk about Helen with Trish. She could remember the satisfaction in Trish’s voice the day before when she had reported Helen’s absence. She isn’t in. Again.

‘He came in with them first thing. Then he went back into town to talk to them.’

Yevanov, with the police? She looked quickly at Trish, but she didn’t seem disturbed. ‘Why didn’t they talk to him here?’

‘They need him to look at the archive materials Helen was working on. They want to know if anything’s missing.’

That made sense, but she remembered Yevanov telling her the collection was undocumented, and wondered how anyone would be able to tell.

‘Miss Lange?’ It was the policewoman she’d spoken to earlier. ‘We’d like to talk to you now.’ She dismissed Trish with a cool smile and directed Faith into one of the small offices that were used by the admin staff.

A young police officer was waiting for her. He apologized for keeping her waiting, then asked, ‘Helen Kovacs was a friend of yours?’

Was…‘I’ve known her most of my life.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I need to ask you some questions, okay?’

Faith nodded. ‘Okay.’

At first, his questions were general–Helen’s routine, her daily contacts–but gradually they began to focus on her marriage. ‘What caused the break-up?’ he said.

Faith shook her head. ‘I don’t think it was any one thing.’ She explained that Helen had given up a secure job to become an academic. ‘Daniel never really understood that, and Helen’s work was the most important thing in her life, apart from the kids.’

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