We Shall Not Sleep (17 page)

Joseph saw it in his eyes and understood. "All right, I'll tell you what you can do to help. Give me a more honest picture of the men you think I've judged too softly. Help me to see them as they are. Somebody killed that girl pretty obscenely. I saw her body. It was worse than you think."

Barshey was startled, then overwhelmingly disgusted.

"I'm not as otherworldly as you think," Joseph told him quietly. "I've heard some confessions that would surprise you, especially from men who knew they were dying. I just didn't think of anyone I know doing something like this. There was a hatred in it I hadn't imagined."

"Oi hope it's not someone from St. Giles." Barshey's face pinched as if he expected a blow. "Oi'll think about it, an' Oi'll ask."

"Don't think long, Barshey. It's going to be too late pretty quickly." It hurt even to say it aloud.

"Oi
know that." Barshey did not offer any words of comfort. The belief in everything working out for good had long ago been swept away. You believed in honor, courage, and friendship, but not in any certainty of justice.

Joseph found Judith helping with nursing shifts in the tent for the walking wounded. It had been a quieter night than usual. The front line having moved farther east, the injured men were being taken to a clearing station closer by. There were half a dozen patients, two standing, and four sitting in various degrees of discomfort. Others had obviously received no more than first aid—a bandage to stop the worst of the bleeding, a sling for a broken bone. More were already treated and waiting to be told where to go next, their uniform sleeves cut away, bandages clean and white. There were two nurses in attendance, an orderly, and a young surgeon.

Judith looked at Joseph's face and excused herself from the man she was helping, leaving the job for the orderly to finish. She crossed the space between them in a few strides. "What is it?" she asked anxiously. "What's happened?"

Using as few words as possible, he told her, and saw her eyes widen with horror. "I'm sorry," he finished. "We have no more time to spare. Quite apart from getting Schenckendorff to London, we've got to find out who did it to save Matthew."

"They can't believe it was him!" she said desperately, struggling to find it absurd rather than serious. "Why on earth would he? He only arrived here a day before she was killed! It doesn't make any sense. Anyway, where would he get a bayonet?"

"Judith, there are weapons all over the place, rusted ones, broken ones, ones people have dropped or lost. And what does sense have to do with any of it?" he demanded, feeling panic rush up inside him. "Why would anyone do that to her? They need to blame somebody, open the station, and get on with ending the war. They want to get the men out of here and start operating it as normal again, probably even move it forward. We're too far behind the lines now. Above all, they want to say the matter is closed and forget all about it."

"Even if it isn't the right man? That's monstrous!" She waved her hands, refusing to believe it. She ignored the curious glances of the orderly and two of the wounded.

"Look around you!" Joseph said impatiently, keeping his voice low. "How many men are dead? What's one more if they can close this and say it's ended? They don't know Matthew; he isn't one of them."

"But somebody really did it! Somebody—"

"I know." He lowered his voice with an effort, breathing in and out deeply, trying to regain control of himself. "We have to find him, British or German, and we have to do it in the next two or three days, at the most. We need to begin by getting to know everything we can about Sarah Price. We agree that she didn't deserve it, nobody could, but she may have done something to provoke it—"

Her face tightened with anger. "And what does a person do, exactly, to
provoke
being hacked to death, Joseph?" she said savagely. "Funny how you never think your brother could be just like other men!"

"That's the point, Judith," he said with barely a flicker of change in his expression. "It's probably someone that nobody thinks of as having violent or uncontrollable passions, or having been so wounded in mind that at times he no longer behaves like ordinary sane people. But somebody knows him, has worked beside him, fought beside him, shared rations, letters from home, all the things we do and the ways we get to know people."

"Was that why you said it?" she demanded, her eyes wide and angry. "To make me think of that?"

"Not altogether," he admitted reluctantly. "I do think that she might have said or done something that infuriated someone. If it is entirely random, we don't have much chance of finding him, do we?"

Her face crumpled with regret. "I'm sorry. I suppose we don't." She took a deep breath and looked a little away from him. "I feel guilty because I didn't even take much notice of her. I thought she was trivial and empty-headed. Father always used to say I was too quick to judge. I thought I'd learned."

She bit her lip hard. "We've got to get Matthew to London with that German officer, whatever his name is, because we've got to expose the Peacemaker. My war won't finish until we have! I'll start finding out. At least I've plenty of time, compared with usually, and I have an excuse to be here. I suppose I even have an excuse to ask questions now. At least nobody can tell me it's not my business."

"We have to succeed—" he started.

"I know!" She didn't want to hear him say it, even though she had accepted that it was true.

She began with the other medical staff, knowing she had a better chance with them than Joseph did with the soldiers. None of them had been here very long: It was the nature of a Casualty Clearing Station for the wounded to move through it as quickly as possible.

"No more time for being charitable about it," she said briskly to Erica Barton-Jones as they were in the storage tent taking delivery of some clean blankets, having sent away those too torn or saturated in blood to use anymore.

"I thought they'd arrested someone," Erica replied, heaving the gray blankets up. She was not pretty, but there was a grace and strength of character in her face that was in a way more attractive. A highly practical woman, she held whatever grief she had experienced deep inside her.

"They have," Judith replied. "My brother."

Erica was incredulous. "The chaplain? That's idiotic!"

"No, Matthew. He's an intelligence officer." She had no compunction at all about shading the truth. "He's out here on some mission or other, which of course he can't tell us, and they don't believe him. He can't prove it because it's secret. That's what intelligence is about."

"So what are you going to do?" Erica's face was tense and anxious. "You could ask questions, of course, but what makes you think anyone will tell you something they haven't told the police? Not that I'm saying you shouldn't try." There was an uncharacteristic flash of sympathy in her eyes, perhaps because she thought Judith would not succeed.

Erica's pity only made it worse, and a flare of temper burned up in Judith. "Because I know what questions to ask," she snapped. "For example, before anything happened, who was Sarah nursing? Did she flirt with any of the doctors or orderlies?" She saw Erica's distaste. "And don't screw your face up and pretend it couldn't happen. We're all frightened and tired and sick with seeing people suffer, and we can't do much to help them. We don't get close to anyone for long because people are moved around all the time, lots of them die, but we still can't help the need for touching someone, emotionally or physically. Life can be too hard, too unbearably lonely without it. Friendship is almost the only lifeline to sanity and the things that are worth surviving for."

Erica stared at her, her eyes shadowed, her lips pulled tight. She looked as if her mind was racing and she wanted to speak, but the words eluded her.

"Well, who was she nursing?" Judith repeated. "Don't tell me you don't know, because you do! You are in charge and you never miss anything. You're the most efficient nurse on the whole Ypres Salient. Did she go anywhere near the German prisoners? I haven't seen the rosters, but we both know they don't mean anything. People go where they're needed. An emergency happens and everything changes."

"It's not on the roster," Erica said reluctantly. "But I'm pretty sure she did. We had a bit of a panic about one of the Germans who lost an arm. Thought he was going to bleed to death. Another one had a mangled foot, but he's recovering quite well. We lost a couple, but we never had much of a chance of saving them anyway. They were bad when they got here."

"Who? Did she quarrel with anyone—flirt too much? Was she careless?" Judith rattled off the questions, hearing the demand in her own voice and knowing the answers would prove nothing. "Did she go back again afterward?"

"I wish I could say she did, but she stayed pretty much with our own," Erica replied. She stood stiffly; her gray dress was soiled and very crumpled, but she carried herself with such a high head and ramrod back that on her it had a kind of style. "Mary Castalet did most of the nursing for the Germans," she continued. "There are only a few here, you know. About eight. Anyone fit to move got sent on. We need the beds. Some of them are on the floor anyway, poor creatures."

Her elegant face puckered in distress. "I imagine having fought for four years out here, losing the war, terrified that your wife and children will be treated pretty much the way you treated the Belgians, and then being wounded and lying on the floor of the enemy's field hospital! I wouldn't wish that on a dog."

Judith refused to let her mind picture it.

"How well are they guarded, really?" she asked.

Erica thought for a moment. "Not closely," she said, meeting Judith's eyes levelly. "Most of them came here voluntarily. They're wounded and they need treatment. Why would they escape and where would they go, assuming they were fit enough to go anywhere?"

Judith forced herself to ask the next question. "What about our men going in and hurting them? If that happened, couldn't they as easily get out?"

Erica's face hardened as her anger rose in reaction to the whole tragic, ridiculous turn of events. "Don't be stupid! You know the answer to that already—we can't spare extra men to guard Germans from our own soldiers."

"Then possibly a German prisoner, one not wounded too badly to walk, could have gotten out and gone looking for someone vulnerable, like one of the nurses?" Judith pointed out. "Maybe one who was childish enough to taunt them, or try flirting?"

"I suppose so. But the other prisoners would have seen it. They're in there like sardines in a tin."

Judith thought about it for several moments. Ideas raced through her mind. It would be easier for all of them if it had been one of the Germans. It was going to be bitterly painful to have to acknowledge that a British soldier could have done such a thing. Worse, it had to be someone they knew, because there wasn't anyone they didn't know, or had not fought beside, shared rations with, jokes, loneliness. They all wanted it to be a German.

But that might also be more difficult to prove. And might they want it enough to be tempted into making it look that way, whether they were sure of it or not? Nothing was clear enough. That was a sickening thought, but once it was in her mind she could not get rid of it.

"Describe Sarah to me," she said instead, picking up the blankets again and resuming folding them. They were rough to the touch and smelled stale. "What was she really like? I only saw her a few times when we were helping the wounded inside, and she came over to give a hand, or when she gave us tea or food."

Erica hesitated.

"Come on!" Judith said urgently, her patience slipping. "How was she in a crisis? What did she talk about if you had a really sick man and you had to sit up all night with him? What did she think was funny? What did she cry over? Was she saving money for anything? Did she write to anyone? Who did she like, or not? Who didn't like her?"

"What on earth can that have to do with who killed her?" Erica was making a clearly visible effort to keep her own patience. "Judith, for God's sake! Nobody's saying it, but everybody's thinking it! Some man went crazy and raped her!" She shuddered violently. "It wasn't just a quarrel where somebody slapped her too hard. You're talking as if it were all reasonable. It isn't!" Now her voice was growing uncontrollably louder. "Reasonable people fight sometimes. If they're men they might even hurt each other badly. But this wasn't human. There was blood everywhere. It was like a wild animal!"

"Foxes do that to chickens sometimes," Judith replied. "But animals don't kill for hate, and they don't indulge in years of organized slaughter of their own kind, leaving nothing but mud and ruins. This was very definitely human."

Erica put down the blankets she was holding. The lamplight flickered in the draft through the tent flap. It danced on her face, accentuating the lines of strain. "I'm only answering your questions because they've arrested your brother," she said, her voice shaking a little. "Sarah was all right in a crisis, pretty stupid the rest of the time. I never sat up all night with her. I took care to avoid it. According to Allie and Moira, she talked about men. And as to what she thought was funny, it was pretty juvenile: flirting, teasing, making people look silly. There was a cruel streak in her. I think it was partly because she wasn't respected very much, and she knew it." Erica turned away and her shoulders under the gray dress were stiff, as if she disliked herself for what she had said.

"Underneath the laughing and the flirting, she was pretty desperate," she went on quietly. "She didn't have a lot to go home to. She wasn't a bad nurse, but she didn't do it because she loved it. It was a job. What did she cry over? Nothing. I never saw her cry." Her face tightened, and she kept avoiding Judith's eyes. "Now that I think it over a bit harder, I think possibly she didn't dare to, in case she couldn't stop. Who did she like? Men, any men who would flirt with her. Who didn't like her? I didn't. She thought I was a stuck-up bitch, and said so, several times. Ask anyone, she wasn't discreet about it. Or about much else, either."