by Anne Perry
She hated the thought of lying to him. “I don’t know. I’m not totally sure. Do you think so?”
“Not really,” he admitted. “War kind of uncovers lots of things you didn’t know were there. Maybe whoever killed Sarah didn’t have anyone to stop them, and they simply lost it…so bad that all the fury and the pain they’d ever felt just boiled up to the top, and by the time they got their wits back again it was too late.”
She could not think of an answer. She turned the idea over and over in her mind.
“I’ve had men tell me about fear,” he went on. “Men who wanted to be brave and charge over the trench wall and attack, but their legs just wouldn’t move. They’d soil themselves from plain physical terror. They’d have died rather than do that, but they just couldn’t control it. Their bodies betrayed them, not their minds or their hearts.” He turned toward her. “Could rage or humiliation be like that, too, d’you reckon? Maybe if you felt so helpless, so…so put down, laughed at, not as good as the rest of the guys, that you just lashed out where you could. Anything to get back to where you were in control of something, that actually you didn’t see that you’d lost it for real?”
They were within a couple of miles of the trenches. The sky had cleared; a thin moon shed light on the wet road.
“Do you know who did it, Wil?” she asked quietly. “I think you should tell the truth.”
“No, I don’t.” There was no hesitation or wavering in his voice. “But I think quite a few of the men could have. The urge to have a woman can be pretty powerful, and Sarah didn’t mind using how…how pretty she was. Put her down a bit, and she could get her own back by making you awful uncomfortable. I’m not saying that makes anything right, it doesn’t,” he added quickly. “But if you know you could die, or get so shot up you might as well be dead ’cause no woman’s ever going to look at you, or maybe you’ve been injured so you can’t anyway, then you might look at things differently.”
“He didn’t just rape her, Wil,” she said softly. “He butchered her, and left her lying on the rubbish as if she were waste as well, along with the amputated limbs! That’s more than even the worst frustration anyone can feel. It’s hate.”
He sat very still, letting out his breath slowly. “Jesus! I didn’t know that…” He was breathing hard, and for a moment he sounded as if he was going to be sick.
“Wil?” As she turned to look at him, she veered wildly close to the edge of the road, sending the ambulance bucking and slewing across the craters. She pulled up sharply. “Sorry.”
“I didn’t do it, Judith!” he said haltingly. “I just know that everybody’s scared, not only the women.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Do you know if anyone is lying to protect someone else?” she asked him. “Maybe someone they owe a really big debt, like having pulled them off the wire or carried them back from no-man’s-land? That would be something you’d pay for the rest of your life, wouldn’t it!”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s why pretty well everyone’s happy to think it’s one of the Jerries.”
“But what if it isn’t?” she insisted. “We can’t hang somebody who didn’t do it because it’s convenient. Surely to God we are better than that?”
“It isn’t that easy,” he replied. “Haven’t you ever owed anybody something? Something so big you can hardly breathe for the weight of it. You have to pay debts like that. You have no choice.”
“You know something, Wil!”
“I hear wounded men talk,” he admitted. “You don’t, because you’re up here driving, but I spend a lot of time with some of them.”
“What do you know? I’m not moving until you tell me.”
“I can walk back from here better than you can.”
“Wil!” she protested desperately.
“I know how some of the men feel,” he answered. “That’s all. I told you I don’t know who did it. I don’t. Hell, Judith, if I did I’d have said when they had your brother!”
“Yes. Yes, I know.” She eased the engine into gear again and straightened the wheels on the rutted road. They still had more than a mile and a half to go.
When Judith pulled the ambulance in and parked it, Wil went to help the orderlies with the new wounded, and she began the usual maintenance of the vehicle. She was in the back tidying and cleaning the stretchers and sweeping the floor when she heard footsteps outside in the mud, and a moment later a shadow blocked the light at the door.
She looked up and saw a familiar silhouette that made her heart jolt and her stomach tighten far more than she wished. She wanted to be in control of her emotions, but as Wil had said, her body let her down. She was hot and cold at once, and her hands were clammy.
“Can I help you?” Mason asked.
“Not really, thank you. I’m just about finished,” she said a trifle more coolly than she had intended. Although perhaps it was for the best. She did not want to hope, or imagine, that she could see in him a tenderness or a belief that was not there. “What’s the news from the front? Where are we now?”
“About two miles from Tournai, the last I heard,” he replied. “The fighting’s still pretty heavy.”
“Yes, I know. We’re still getting quite a few of the casualties.”
“I heard you found the man who murdered the nurse. It was one of the Germans.”
She kept on looking at the ambulance stretchers even though there was nothing more to do to them. “They’ve arrested him, but they haven’t collected all the evidence to charge him yet. He’s under guard more to protect him, I think.”
Mason was silent for a moment or two. She stepped out of the ambulance, taking his hand because he offered it, and it would have been pointed had she refused it. She found herself absurdly self-conscious. His physical nearness intruded on her concentration, and she was angry with herself for allowing it.
“But he did it?” he said at last as she closed the doors. They turned toward the tent where there was most likely to be hot tea. The night had closed in, and the wind was harder and colder from the east.
“I don’t know.” She knew the admission would leave questions he would be bound to ask, and answers that would betray more of her emotion than she wanted to share, but she refused to lie to him.
They were inside before he replied. “You don’t think he did, do you?” That was a challenge. “Why? Because you’re afraid it’s what everybody wants?”
“No. I…” What could she say that made any sense, yet did not betray who Schenckendorff was? That she could not do, whatever lies it cost. She was already bitterly aware of Mason’s dark view of war’s futility and the senseless pain of it. The hurt of realizing that he did not share any of her faith—blind, admittedly—in some kind of inner victory was cut too deeply into her mind ever to forget, even for a moment. There was a shadow inside him that separated them, no matter how much she liked him, or even loved him. Joseph had said he would never make her happy. She had momentarily hated Joseph for that, probably because in the depths of her belief, the passion and the light that made her who she was, she already knew it was true.
Mason was waiting. There was an urgency and a gentleness in his eyes that she had not seen before. He was waiting for her to speak, wanting to understand.
“I talked to him quite a lot.” She started with the truth. “I was helping one of the nurses. Before he was accused, of course. His foot was pretty badly injured, but apparently he could stand on it. I’ve seen men do extraordinary things when they were so terribly wounded you wouldn’t have expected them to live, let alone crawl for miles or fight. There just…wasn’t any anger in him. You must have to be terribly angry to rape and then kill.”
He studied her face. She felt increasingly self-conscious but did not look away. She had to force emotion away from herself, crush the hope inside, in case he saw it and understood. Friendship was everything. She would give him that, but love was far too dangerous, too consuming of reason, judgment, the courage or
purpose to go on after it was betrayed.
“What are you going to do about it?” he asked finally.
That was not at all what she had expected him to say. She had been waiting for an argument as to why she should leave the matter to the police. She looked for mockery in him, and saw none.
“Try to find out who is lying to protect someone else, before they take Schenckendorff away,” she answered. “Everybody’s afraid, and there are…loyalties, debts that seem bigger than blame for a crime. We all want to resolve it in whatever way is least painful to us.” She thought of Wil as she said it. She was still aching with surprise at the depths of himself he had trusted her with. She had been blind to much of him beyond his easy, smiling face, his good humor, the way she could rely on him always being there. How many other people had she not bothered to understand?
“We’ve faced so much together, we think we know one another,” she went on. “But we don’t. We know the duties, the courage, and the personal habits. We probably wouldn’t even recognize one another on the street in civilian life, when you can wear what you want, choose your work—or at least some of it—make whatever friends you like. Here friendship is the one sure sanity. Do you think it’ll last, afterward?” The answer to that mattered more than almost anything else. She had not even dared ask it before. She should have asked Joseph or Wil, not Mason. What sort of answer did she expect? Perhaps the loneliness was what all of them were afraid of, after this was all over. And for her it was even worse than many others. She could never go back to the life she had once expected, to domestic happiness like her sister’s or her mother’s, no matter how much she loved anyone, even Mason. And would any man love the kind of woman she had become? War had released her. She was something better or worse, but forever different.
“Some friendships will always last.” Mason did not waver from her gaze when he said it. “The good ones. Sometimes we’ll want to forget all this, but at other times we’ll need to remember, because we’ve seen things other people can’t even imagine. Who else would we share it with? We can’t tell anyone.” She stared at him. “We’ll need somebody who understands why we laugh and cry when we do,” he went on. “Why we look at a tree in bloom and can’t take our eyes off it. Why cruelty to a horse makes us want to beat the person who did it until they can’t stand. And why we sometimes feel guilty to be alive and whole when so many of the best men we knew are here under the mud, and will never come home.”
She nodded, aching with too much memory and sorrow to speak. She put out her hand and touched his face, then self-consciously snatched it away again.
He smiled slowly, and the hope in his eyes dazzled her.
The following day Judith drove more men south and west to larger hospitals. She was only just pulling in at the Casualty Clearing Station when Joseph came splashing across the mud toward her, his face drawn with anxiety.
She scrambled out. “What is it?”
“They’re sending Schenckendorff out the day after tomorrow,” he said desperately. “In roughly thirty-six hours. They’ll try him immediately and he’ll be hanged.” He did not add all the other things that were racing through both their minds. Was he guilty or innocent? Was the Peacemaker really who he said he was? Was he telling the truth, and had the Peacemaker deliberately engineered this way of exacting revenge? Or was he lying, to make them all try to expose the wrong man, perhaps destroying him, and freeing the real Peacemaker? Or was it all coincidental, the ultimate farce of the whole affair?
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Judith sat on the cot in her bunker and tried to think. Nothing made any sense that was absolute and unarguable. Every possibility they had thought of depended upon so many accounts that might be lies or mistakes, it dissolved the moment they tried to prove it.
Now it seemed Sarah must have been killed later than they had thought, if Benbow really had seen her after four o’clock. Yet from the state of the body, the blood, and her coldness when she was found at half past six, she had already been dead at least two hours. So she must have been killed between four and half past.
Were any of the guards telling less than the exact truth, intentionally or not? Any of them could have been alone for a while, if his partner had been called away by some alarm or emergency; and if both had, then it was at least possible that any of the wounded Germans who were able to walk, other than just Schenckendorff, could have come out of the hut and killed Sarah. If she had jeered at them about what would happen to their women, that could have been reason enough.
She shivered. Inside, the bunker was sheltered from the wind, but it was small, enclosed in the earth like a tomb, and the clay always seemed to carry the damp with it. It smelled stale and cold.
How long did it take a man to rape a woman and then slash at her with a bayonet? Judith had no experience with anything like this kind of behavior, and found it difficult even to guess. Surely it had to be ten minutes or a quarter of an hour at least? Joseph had seen the body but had refused to discuss it, which was ridiculous in a way. Judith was an ambulance driver; there was no kind of death or mutilation she had not seen. Except, of course, deliberate sexual violation of a woman.
She went over it in her mind. Between four and five o’clock most people were so thoroughly accounted for that they need not be considered. Tiddly Wop Andrews had been walking wounded, with a bad slash in his side, but once it was cleaned, stitched, and bound up—well before three o’clock—he had been in the Resuscitation tent. Cully Teversham had sworn to it. He had been in to see his brother, Whoopy, who had been struck by shrapnel in his leg and side. Allie Robinson had accounted for Cavan for all but a few minutes here and there—certainly not long enough to have found Sarah, raped her, and killed her. Not that Judith had ever imagined that Cavan could be guilty.
The guards Culshaw and Turner had accounted for each other, but that meant almost nothing. Snowy Nunn had been in because he had brought Stan Tidyman, who had lost his leg. Snowy had accounted for Barshey Gee, injured in his left shoulder and with the skin torn open on the side of his head, also walking wounded.
Except that was the heart of the problem. Barshey Gee had not been in the tent where Snowy said he was, not all the time, because Judith herself had seen him at quarter past four outside near the entrance to one of the old connecting trenches. He was a long way from where Sarah had been killed, but it meant Snowy was lying to protect him.
And she knew this because she had been there herself, not where she said she’d been when she’d lied to protect Wil Sloan.
How many other people were lying to protect someone they knew, trusted, and were convinced, beyond even the remotest question, was innocent? And one of them was wrong!
She sat motionless and cold, exhausted by the hopeless tangle of it. Matthew and Joseph had even talked of the possibility of Matthew racing back to London and trying to persuade Shearing to intervene, claim some sort of intelligence coup that would override even the needs of justice. But how could they persuade Shearing that Schenckendorff was legitimate, that Dermot Sandwell was the Peacemaker, and that he was on the brink of sabotaging the armistice agreement? They were not even sure themselves.
There was a sound of light footsteps outside, and the sacking moved. “May I come in?” It was Lizzie’s voice, tight and weary.
Judith looked up. “Of course.” Then instantly she regretted it. She liked Lizzie—everything about her was individual, strong and candid, quite often unexpectedly funny—but just now she had no patience for anyone else. Her mind was eaten up with endless, fruitless anxiety.
“What is it?” she asked as Lizzie came down the steps and let the sacking fall closed behind her. Judith stood up. In the light of the one lamp Lizzie was white-faced, almost haggard. She sat down on the cot as if not certain her legs would support her much longer.
“They’re saying that the German will be taken away in a day or so,” she said hoarsely. “What will they do with him?”
“Try him, and t
hen hang him,” Judith replied. The words hurt to say; there was a despair in them that she had not fully acknowledged before.
“Hanged?” Lizzie whispered. She tried to swallow and could not. Her mouth was too dry. “But…”
“They believe he is guilty of a terrible crime,” Judith said harshly. “Someone raped Sarah with a bayonet and hacked her to death. Nobody’s saying that, because they’re trying to keep it quiet—stop the panic, or the revenge. But it’s true. Then they left her lying like a whore, legs wide, in among the refuse. Don’t you think whoever did that deserves to hang?”
“If you hang someone, and then discover you were wrong…” Lizzie’s voice faded away and she sat down suddenly, her eyes wide and hollow, as if she were looking inward at something unbearable.
Was it possible Joseph had broken his secrecy and told her about Schenckendorff and the Peacemaker? Judith sat on the other bunk and leaned forward. “Lizzie…”
It was as if Lizzie could not hear her.
“Lizzie,” she repeated urgently, “did Joseph tell you that—” She stopped. At the mention of Joseph’s name Lizzie had winced. The movement was almost too small to see, but it was as if the misery inside her had increased. Why would she feel such desperate pain if they exposed the Peacemaker, or if they failed? Did Lizzie know more of the truth than they did? Judith refused to believe that. Lizzie was exactly what she seemed to be. She must not allow the Peacemaker and the suspicions he awoke to poison everything.
Lizzie sat frozen, her knuckles white. Very gently Judith put her hand over Lizzie’s without closing it. “I think you’d better tell me. Is Schenckendorff guilty?”
Lizzie shook her head so slightly it was barely a movement at all.
“Are you sure?” Judith asked.
“Yes.” It was forced, as if her throat was raw.
“Who is?”
“I don’t know.” Lizzie met Judith’s eyes at last. “I really don’t. I have no idea. It just isn’t Schenckendorff.”
