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
