Angels in the Gloom wwi-3 Read online

  “You know the answer to that,” the Peacemaker answered, a tight, sad smile on his face. “The revolution will happen in Russia, Mason. It is as inevitable as the phases of the moon. We must have peace. Five million men are dead in Europe already. What is one more?”

  Mason gulped air, his heart racing. He had seen countless dead men. He had waded through corpses. It should not matter, and yet it did. The thought repulsed him.

  “Have you only the stomach for dreams, not reality?” the Peacemaker challenged.

  “No.” Was it the truth? Mason had talked with Trotsky, eaten with him, even liked him. Trotsky had actually told him about his exile in Siberia and how he had escaped and come to England. “No,” he repeated. The man he remembered would be for peace. Was he still the same?

  “Find him,” the Peacemaker repeated. “We can change what is to come, Mason. We can end this storm of slaughter! My God, someone has to!”

  Mason was hardly aware of his hands and feet, as if he were detached from his body. He held history in his hands. He thought of the men in Verdun, of Judith by the side of the road in Ypres, and other men and women across the battlefields of Europe. “Yes, of course,” he said firmly. Suddenly there was no doubt. He would have killed an enemy soldier with regret, but without hesitation. If Leon Trotsky was in favor of war, then he must be prevented from returning to Russia, and Lenin must go in his place.

  The Peacemaker was talking about arrangements. Mason barely heard his voice. His mind was stunned by the enormity of what he had agreed to do, but there was no escaping it. Please God, let Trotsky be for peace.

  When Mason was gone, the Peacemaker poured himself a glass of Glenmorangie and was surprised to find his hand trembling. It was excitement, release of tension because finally he had succeeded in getting Mason back. To use him to contact Leon Trotsky was a stroke of genius. It would be the beginning of accomplishing a great goal.

  He sipped the whisky and walked back to his chair, sitting down and crossing his legs. He relaxed at last. He had control again.

  He had told Mason nothing of affairs at the Scientific Establishment in Cambridgeshire, not the murder of Theo Blaine, or the man the Peacemaker had so carefully placed in the heart of the work there. Mason did not need to know.

  He also had not revealed anything about his concerns over the safety of the German naval code. There was nothing specific that he could name—no incident, nothing said that made him think the British had broken the code. It was just a sense of satisfaction in the manner of Admiral “Blinker” Hall, a man for whom the Peacemaker had the most profound respect. Hall should have been more worried, more anxious than he was.

  The Peacemaker’s plan was already well in progress. It involved Matthew Reavley, and his attraction to Detta Hannassey. She possessed not only beauty but grace and intelligence and passion. She was unpredictable, daring, sometimes tender, a mixture of madness and sanity that was almost unique. Not surprisingly, Reavley was fascinated with her. That could be used very well indeed. At the very best, the Peacemaker would find out if British Naval Intelligence had broken the code. If they had, he would have to make sure Admiral Hall knew it was Reavley who had betrayed the fact, and that would give the Peacemaker a sharp, sweet pleasure. One day he would have to destroy Joseph Reavley, too, but that could wait. Never place pleasure before business.

  It was a pity Patrick Hannassey was becoming a nuisance. He might have to be disposed of quite soon.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  It was a fine day, and Joseph decided to walk to the village and visit a few other people he knew, particularly Tucky Nunn, who was home now, and Charlie Gee’s mother, and Plugger Arnold’s father. He took the walking stick, and Hannah watched him go down the path and out of the gates. He turned around once with a wry smile, knowing she was watching him, and then disappeared along the sunlit road, Henry trotting happily at his heels.

  Hannah went back to her work, forcing the thoughts out of her mind as to how far he was recovered, whether he would ever really be completely strong again. She scrubbed the floor fiercely and moved everything around in the larder for no adequate reason. There was mending and ironing to do, and she wrote a long letter to Judith.

  Joseph returned shortly after two, having eaten in the village. He looked tired, definitely limping quite badly, but extraordinarily pleased with himself.

  “Look!” he said as soon as he was in the door. He produced out of a large paper bag a beautiful, softly curved pewter goblet with an ornate handle. The lines were simple, the sheen on it like dark gray satin.

  “Oh, Joseph! It’s gorgeous!” she said enthusiastically. “It will be perfect on the shelf in your room. You need a few things to replace those you took with you to Flanders. How old is it?” She knew without asking that it was not a reproduction, apart from the patina on it. No doubt Joseph had found it at the junk shop at the end of the High Street, where John Reavley had spent so many hours.

  “It’s not for me,” he answered happily. “It’s Shanley’s birthday in a couple of weeks. I thought it would be ideal for him. Don’t you think it would?”

  She was momentarily confused.

  He saw it in her face. “You don’t think so?” He was disappointed. “He loves things like this. It’s seventeenth century. It’s real!”

  “Of course it’s real,” she said quietly. She saw the gentleness in his eyes, and with a lurch of sorrow so violent it caught her breath, she knew what had happened. She did not wish to tell him, but she had to. “But Shanley’s birthday isn’t until next February, Joe. It’s Father’s birthday in the beginning of May.”

  He stared at her.

  She gulped. “You . . . you just got them mixed up. It’ll keep . . . if . . . if you want it to.”

  Joseph stared at the goblet, frowning. “I suppose I did,” he said quietly. “Stupid.” He stood up and went limping out into the hall and she heard his uneven step up the stairs. She had dwelt on her own loneliness without Archie. She had hardly even thought about Joseph, so busy trying to deal with everybody else’s fears and griefs he had no time for his own. He must miss his father appallingly. There had been a friendship between them nothing else could replace, but at times perhaps Shanley Corcoran came close. His warmth, his optimism and humor, his wealth of memories probably were more precious than she had any idea. It would be a good thing to give him the goblet, not to mark any occasion, just as a gift. She would say that to Joseph.

  In the afternoon as she was walking to the village hall with a bundle of knitted squares, she was passed by Penny Lucas, who was cycling along the road. The two women exchanged waves. Hannah liked Penny’s warmth and enthusiasm, but she had not seen her in several weeks. She had no children, so perhaps she was involved in war work that had kept her out of St. Giles.

  Penny pulled in to the curb ahead and dismounted with dexterity. She waited until Hannah caught up with her.

  “How are you?” Hannah asked.

  Penny gave a small sigh of resignation. She was a handsome woman with chestnut hair, blue-green eyes, and a lightly freckled skin that always looked blemishless. Now some of the color was gone from her cheeks, in spite of the exertion of bicycling.

  “Well enough, I suppose,” she answered with a little shrug. “How about you?”

  “A day at a time,” Hannah replied.

  Penny pushed the bicycle and they walked slowly side by side.

  “I haven’t seen you for ages,” Hannah went on. “Are you doing something interesting?”

  “Not really.” Penny gave a rueful smile. “Just organizing the laundry room at the hospital in Cambridge. It’s important, I suppose, but once you’ve got a system going it’s hardly groundbreaking science.”

  Her use of words jarred Hannah, reminding her forcibly of Theo Blaine and his terrible death.

  Penny must have seen it in her face. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I suppose it’s at the top of everybody’s mind. He was an extraordinary man, you know.” She b
rushed her skirt aside from being caught in the wheels of the bicycle. “No, of course you wouldn’t. He hardly had any time to know anyone. Corcoran works them all the hours they’re awake, practically. It must be necessary, for the war, I suppose, but it’s hard to take sometimes.” Her face tightened. “He forgets that those men are young, and maybe not as obsessed with science and making history as he is.” She looked sideways at Hannah. “Sorry again. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  “He was my father’s closest friend, actually,” Hannah corrected her, wondering how Penny Lucas knew so much. She could remember meeting her husband, Dacy, only a couple of times. He was a quick-tempered man with a ready smile, who collected chessmen from various cultures and liked to talk about them.

  “But your friend, too,” Penny added, watching her.

  “Certainly, and he’s my brother Joseph’s godfather.”

  “He’s the one in the army? He was wounded, wasn’t he? How is he?”

  The baker’s cart passed them, pulled by an old black horse, looking shiny in the sun, harness bright.

  “Recovering, but it takes time,” Hannah replied.

  “You’ll miss him when he goes back.” Penny turned away, as if to guard some emotion she knew her eyes betrayed. It sounded from her voice like pain, a sudden loneliness too strong to govern.

  Hannah wondered how well Penny had known Theo Blaine. Or was it someone else she was thinking of that hurt so deeply? Had she lost brothers or cousins in the war? “Do you have family in France?” Hannah asked aloud.

  “No.” The word was oddly flat. “We’re all girls. My father’s so ashamed of it. No sons to send to the front.” She gave a little shiver, a gesture oddly vulnerable. “He doesn’t even think much of a son-in-law who works in a scientific place. It could be a factory, for all he perceives, except that it isn’t really work—pushing a pen around. Actually Dacy works far longer hours than anyone else I know. Except Theo; he’s probably one of the most brilliant men alive today.” She took a breath and almost gagged on it. “At least . . . yesterday. Isn’t that awful!”

  “Yes, it is,” Hannah agreed, taken aback by the depth of emotion in the other woman’s voice. It seemed odd to stand together on the footpath in the sun, knowing each other so slightly and speaking of the deepest passions of life and loss as if they were friends. But that had probably happened to women all over the country. Just as the trenches made brothers of men, so the ripping apart of the old certainties, the aching loneliness of change and bereavement, made sisters of women who might never have known each other in peacetime. “You think you can’t bear it, except that there isn’t any way out,” she added.

  Penny straightened her shoulders and started to walk again. Plugger Arnold’s father passed them, leading a shire horse, and Hannah smiled at him.

  “That loathsome policeman keeps coming around prying into our lives,” Penny said angrily. “I don’t suppose he’s going through my laundry basket, but I feel I can’t even take a bath for fear that he’ll knock on the door to see how much hot water I’m using.”

  “His must be a very difficult job.” Hannah matched her step to Penny’s. “If there really is a German spy in St. Giles, it could be pretty well anyone, couldn’t it?”

  Penny nodded in agreement. “Although I can think of dozens it wouldn’t be—the old village families, especially those with sons or brothers at the front. When you think of it, that doesn’t leave many.”

  “He’ll have to look in other villages, the nearby ones, anyway,” Hannah reasoned.

  “You wouldn’t get a car down that back lane,” Penny pointed out. “You’d scratch it to pieces and leave tire tracks all over the place. Our busy inspector would have seen them. Maybe that’s why he’s questioning everyone close enough to walk . . . or I suppose bicycle.” She gave a rueful little smile. “It’s incredibly grubby!” Then suddenly she was angry again. “I hate it! It’s not his fault, but I hate him, too—with his devious remarks and probing little eyes, as if he’s all the time imagining . . . I don’t know what. Think what it would be like married to such a man who spends his days pawing through the sins and tragedies of other people’s lives.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “I’m sorry. You haven’t even met him. How could you know?”

  Thoughts raced through Hannah’s mind, memories of foolish things she had said and done that she would prefer no one knew. But she had thought of other things, too, about Ben Morven, the way he laughed, the easy way he walked, the look of his throat in a clean cotton shirt. He had good hands, brown and slender. . . .

  But then she focused again on what Penny Lucas was saying. Was that why Penny felt so very strongly about Inspector Perth? Did she know the narrowness of the back way to Theo Blaine’s house because she had been there? “Do you know Mrs. Blaine?” Hannah said aloud.

  Penny was caught by surprise. Her face had a closed look. “Well, a bit, of course. Theo worked with my husband.”

  What an odd way of putting it! She did not speak of Theo as Lizzie Blaine’s husband, as if she wanted to avoid the thought.

  “Why?” Penny demanded, her blue-green eyes narrowed.

  “I was thinking how dreadful she must feel,” Hannah lied. “It’s an awful way to lose someone. I hope she has good friends, I mean other than just people like the vicar, or . . . or that sort of thing.”

  Penny looked at the road ahead. “We all lose people, especially these days. I don’t really know if she had friends or not. She’s rather a cold, self-contained sort of person. We each cope in our own way.”

  “Of course. And I expect the policeman will bother her most of all.”

  Penny stopped abruptly, swinging around, her eyes wide and angry. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Hannah assumed an expression of innocence close to apology. “I suppose because she must have known him best.”

  Penny looked beaten. The courage and spirit inside her were suddenly deflated.

  “I’m so sorry,” Hannah said quickly, pity overtaking sense. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose someone you know and have been friends with in such a way.” She had grown so accustomed to the lie that her parents’ deaths had been an accident, that she almost believed it herself. And regardless of that, she knew from the time Joseph had told her that it must never be spoken of. “If . . . if you want to talk to anyone who understands a bit, my brother would listen,” she offered to Penny. “A couple of years ago one of his very best friends was murdered. That’s how he knows Inspector Perth. It was pretty awful.”

  “Really?” It was surprise in Penny’s face, but not much more than polite interest. “Perhaps. Just now I need to get home. I have a mountain of things to do, and I’m due back at the hospital in the morning. Thanks for . . .” She did not know how to finish the sentence, and she mounted her bicycle and with a quick smile, pedaled away with considerable speed, leaving the words unsaid.

  Hannah stood on the curbside and watched her go, her blouse billowing in the wind and the sun bright on her hair, until she disappeared around the curve in the road. She seemed to feel the loss of Theo Blaine very deeply indeed, and yet she obviously did not like his wife, or know her very well.

  Was it possible she had had a love affair with Blaine, and her husband had discovered it? Was that what Perth was sensing, searching to prove, and was that why Penny felt so threatened and intruded upon?

  If she had met Theo Blaine secretly, where would it be? And when? Certainly not where he had been killed, but what about the woods beyond? Hardly in the winter, but in the spring or summer? Only in the evening. Too much chance of children playing in daylight.

  But outside of romantic novels, did people really make love in the woods? It would be uncomfortable, almost certainly damp and a bit muddy, and with a hideous chance of being stumbled on by someone out walking their dog, or an enthusiastic botanist or collector of butterflies. What a ghastly embarrassment! She felt her own face color as she visualized the scene and, in spite of h
erself, she began to giggle.

  So much for illicit passion in the woods!

  She walked slowly, thinking. For a romantic liaison you would have to go to a well-populated place where you could remain anonymous—and that meant Cambridge. Penny was there anyway, at her duties in the hospital. What about Theo Blaine? He would have had a car to drive to and from the Establishment. He could very easily have gone to Cambridge. The Establishment would have assumed he had gone home; Lizzie Blaine would have assumed he was working late.

  Perhaps Dacy Lucas had even borrowed Penny’s bicycle to go along the back lane through the trees to confront Blaine, and they had quarreled. What if Blaine had refused to give up his affair, and Lucas had attacked him in fury? Or perhaps Lucas had threatened to tell Lizzie Blaine, and Blaine had attacked him, and Lucas had defended himself rather too well? Then, seeing what he had done, he had been horrified and run away. Who would believe he had not meant it?

  Probably Inspector Perth knew all this. But what if he did not? He might still be convinced that it was a German spy. That thought was so horrible she felt suddenly as if her own home had been violated, someone dirty and violent had broken in and soiled everything. It would take months, years before it could be made clean again.

  Perhaps she should tell Perth at least where to look! She had grown up with the code of honor that you did not tell tales on people, and if you were caught in something you owned up to it. Above all, you never ever let someone else take the punishment for what you had done. That was the ultimate cowardice.

  But this was different. How much would everyone suffer if Perth stayed in the village and continued to awaken suspicions, even resurrect old feuds? There was more than enough grief already, and no doubt more to come. The first whispers of suspicion had started.

  Without realizing it, Hannah had changed direction and was walking briskly toward the railway station.

  Perth was not in when she arrived at the police station in Cambridge, and she had to wait over half an hour before he came. He looked hot and tired, as if his feet hurt, which quite possibly they did. His shoes were worn down at the sides and he limped a little.