We Shall Not Sleep Page 8

  “Yes, sir.” Joseph was outside on the wooden pathway before he fully realized what Cavan had said—no one could leave. He, Matthew, and Schenckendorff were imprisoned here until this crime was solved. It would probably only be a couple of days, but it was already October 17. What if it took longer?

  The air was cold, with a raw wind coming in from the east. He walked quickly, his boots pounding on the slats, but at least the planks were firm under his weight, not like the constantly rocking duckboards in the trenches, the best of them covered with chicken wire to help men avoid slipping when they were wet.

  He reached the tent and knocked on the door frame. He heard the command to enter, and pushed it open. Inside, it had been cleared of most of its medical supplies, no doubt because they were needed as much as for the convenience of the police. The man sitting behind the bare, wooden table was plain-faced with dark hair brushed straight back and a short bristly mustache. He appeared to be of average height. Only the hands holding a pencil above a clean sheet of paper were in any way remarkable. They were slender, fine-boned, with particularly long fingers. His insignia said that he was a captain.

  The other man in the tent was fairer, his nose a little crooked as if at some time it had been broken. He stood a little distance from Jacobson’s chair and stared at Joseph with undisguised curiosity.

  “Yes?” Jacobson inquired. He was very pale, his voice sharp. It was apparent that he was nervous, and Joseph guessed that he was probably a civilian policeman fairly recently drafted to the front. The stench of it would turn his stomach, and the scale of death everywhere must be something he had read of, but could never truly have imagined until now.

  “Captain Reavley, sir,” Joseph replied. “Chaplain. Dr. Cavan thought I might be able to help.”

  Jacobson’s face relaxed; even the tightness of his shoulders eased a little. “Oh. Good. Yes, Captain. I’m obliged. This is a very ugly business, and there are only Sergeant Hampton and myself to deal with it.” He indicated the other man briefly. “We need to question everyone: doctors, orderlies, nurses, and of course the patients…men…injured men.” He did not seem certain what term to use. “I’d be grateful if you could help. You might know better how to deal with it, what to say. Colonel Hook says you’re…experienced.” He was obviously at a loss to understand what that might mean.

  “Yes, of course. You’ll have to give me some of the facts, or my questions won’t be of much use,” Joseph said. He had no intention of telling Jacobson about the other crimes he had solved.

  Hampton shifted his weight from one foot to the other but did not interrupt, and Jacobson ignored his restlessness.

  “Sarah Price,” Jacobson said grimly. “Twenty-five-year-old nurse. Been here just over a year, according to my information, pleasant enough, and good at her job. Turner, the slightly wounded man on guard duty, found her at the back of the Operating tent, on the ground near where the…the waste is left for removal.” He looked embarrassed because he could not think of any words that were decent to describe what he knew were amputated limbs from injured soldiers, parts of their bodies that could not be saved. He was shivering as he tried to control his feelings. “What…” He swallowed. “What do you do with it…the waste?”

  “Bury it,” Joseph replied. “As deep as possible.”

  “Never be found,” Jacobson said with relief. “Maybe whoever killed her was hoping the same would happen to her. Could be why she was left there.”

  “Possibly,” Joseph agreed, trying to save Jacobson’s emotions. Then he realized how false that was. They could not afford to cater to squeamishness, even as a mercy. “Still, bodies come back to the surface here, sir, quite often,” he continued. “New shell holes, craters, even new graves dug. He couldn’t hope to conceal her. More likely he just left her there because that’s where it happened.”

  Out of the corner of his vision Joseph saw Hampton nod. He looked as if he had been here at the front longer than Jacobson. Possibly he was not in the regular Criminal Investigation Department, merely seconded for this crime.

  “What time was she found?” Joseph asked.

  “Just after half past six this morning. You’d better come and see the body, and where she was found.” Jacobson rose to his feet and motioned for Joseph to follow him. “Hampton will get on with investigating the physical facts.” He did not bother to glance at his assistant as he led the way out.

  Joseph had seen more dead men than he could think to count: whole ones, white and motionless. They did not look as if they were sleeping; it was profoundly obvious that the spirit that made them unique and alive was not there anymore. And he had seen men who had died in agony and terror, blown apart, half their bodies gone, soaked in blood, mutilated beyond recognition. Some of them had been men he had known in life, friends he had cared for and with whom he had shared deep and unforgettable emotions. Some he had held in his arms as their lives bled away. Still, he had not seen a body that shocked him as this one did.

  No one had tried to make her decent, on purpose, so the sight of her would stir rage and pity, and leave whoever saw her so wrenched and violated of all decency that they would never forget or forgive what had happened. The most private parts of her womanhood were lacerated and exposed, as if whoever had done it had hated not only her but all that was female as well. It was grotesque, and Joseph stared at it as if every woman he had known and loved were torn apart on that wooden table, everything to do with the act of sex debased. She had in effect been raped with the blade of a bayonet, almost certainly still affixed to the rifle.

  No wonder Jacobson looked sick. It wasn’t just the stench of the latrines, or a hundred miles of corpses half rotted in the mud over the last four years; it was this desecration of the source of human life.

  “Cover her up,” Joseph said hoarsely. “God in heaven, she didn’t have to be left like that!”

  “Yes, she did, Chaplain,” Jacobson said at his elbow. “I need your help. I don’t want any feelings of mercy for your men, any loyalties to anyone, or pity for the living, or ideas of peace and forgiveness, to make you let this man go. You’ve seen fighting and I haven’t, but a man who would do this to a woman has to be stopped. If we say this is all right and it doesn’t matter, then I don’t want to live in the England we just spent four years of hell to defend.”

  Joseph took off his jacket and laid it over the lower half of Sarah Price’s body. He was shuddering with cold without it, but he did not even hesitate. Anything was better than leaving her like that. He wondered who Jacobson had lost: brothers, perhaps even a son. Many boy soldiers were as young as fourteen or fifteen. They hungered and died just like anyone else. Perhaps that was why the trenches shocked Jacobson so profoundly. He was thinking of someone in particular.

  “What do you want me to do?” Joseph asked.

  Jacobson sighed. “Dr. Cavan said you’d solved other murders out here. Didn’t elaborate, he just said you had a way of finding the truth. Originally I was thinking of helping to keep control of things. Everyone’s pretty upset. They’ve enough to deal with in ordinary war; they don’t need this on top of it. But any other help would be good. We need this closed as soon as possible. Get back to some kind of sanity—as much as there’s any kind of sanity out here.”

  “What are you going to look for?” Joseph asked. “There’s a bayonet on the end of every rifle on the Western Front! And blood on all of them. And on most of us in a casualty station.” He swallowed hard, as if there were something stuck in his throat. “There’s nothing to say this was personal to her. It looks like hatred of all women. A madman.” He thought as he said it that it was a shallow remark. Who could stay sane out here where all men’s life expectancy could be counted in weeks? Life had a different meaning.

  Jacobson did not reproach him for his words. Perhaps he saw the regret in Joseph’s face as soon as the words were out.

  “Opportunity, to begin with,” he replied. “See who we can weed out with that. Eliminate any man who w
as accounted for all last night. Won’t be so many, but perhaps more than in civilian life. For a start, I expect all the doctors were busy, and can prove it, and maybe some of the ambulance drivers, too? Orderlies? Understand you speak German pretty well?”

  “Yes, well enough. Do you want me to start with the German prisoners?”

  Jacobson debated with himself for a minute before replying. “Let’s narrow it down a bit first. Can hardly expect them to tell us the truth anyway, can you? They’ll try to blame us, and we’ll try to blame them. It’s natural.”

  “It’ll be difficult,” Joseph warned. “People come and go all night long in a station like this. Usually it’s mostly wounded and drivers, but right now it’s prisoners as well. It’s not guarded, except the German prisoners, and that’s only by men not wounded badly enough to go home, but not fit for the front line. Sometimes men bring in a friend or someone they found or rescued, or come to see someone too ill to be moved. Still…I’ll see what I can learn.”

  Jacobson put his hand on Joseph’s arm. “First speak to some of the nurses, Chaplain. They’ll be pretty badly upset. They know you. They’re used to seeing you around. Maybe they’ll tell you things they won’t tell me. See if you can find where people were. Find out what you can about this girl.” He gestured toward Sarah Price on the table. “And take your coat, man. You’ll freeze, and we need you. I’ll see she’s decently covered.”

  Joseph left the hut with his jacket back on again, cold from the dead body rather than warm from his own. The back was now stained with dark blood from where the cloth had touched her.

  The wind outside was knife-edged, blowing hard and flat from the east so that it stung the skin. He walked slowly along the wooden boards, passing nurses who smiled at him nervously. One or two even stepped off into the mud to avoid being too close to him. He was a chaplain and a man they knew; what must they be feeling about others?

  What lay behind the savagery that had swept over some man until he had lost everything within himself that made him decent, all gentleness, all respect for life or dignity or hope? Had war changed him, or had it merely stripped from him a veneer concealing the barbarism that had always been there, just hidden from view?

  Did he know the man, and had he failed to see it? What manner of priest does not recognize hell when it is in front of him, face-to-face? A man so blunted by the sight and sound and smell of suffering that he has shut himself off from the pain of it, a man who refuses to see, because seeing hurts? Seeing forces you to acknowledge that you must also act. The excuse of ignorance is stripped away, leaving you naked before the truth.

  He stopped outside the Pre-operation tent. He was not ready to go around it to the Treatment tents yet, even though he was so cold his muscles were tight and his teeth clenched.

  Who had done this? One man must answer for it. But was one man alone responsible, or were they all, because they had taken young men and taught them that fighting and killing are necessary for the nation to survive? And they were necessary! Surrender was not just a matter of ceasing to fight; it meant forfeiting all the freedoms that gave you the chance to make any choice about good and evil, for you and your children, and maybe even their children as well.

  Perhaps it was how you fought that made the difference. Maybe some of the soldiers who lived on and went home were just as much casualties as the dead. What had war done to the man who had torn Sarah Price open that way? Could they ever heal him and make him something like whole again? Or must they simply execute him, for the sake of society? Whose was the guilt?

  He would speak to the nurses one by one. He must get some sense of order into his mind, learn all he could about that night. Where had Sarah been working, and with whom? Could other people establish that beyond doubt? It was a busy place, men coming and going all the time, but with their attention on the injured and on their own jobs and the terrible urgency of them.

  Still, if he could discover what time she had been killed, then it would be possible to eliminate most people, and it might begin to make sense. Of course he would learn as much as he could about Sarah herself, just in case there was any personal element to her death, but it could so easily have been no more than being alone in the dark at the wrong time.

  First he walked around the Admissions tent into the wind and across the open space to where he found Judith in the lee of the supply tent, very carefully fitting new spark plugs into the engine of her ambulance.

  “Don’t ask me where I got them!” she warned. “Believe me, you would prefer not to know.”

  He’d had no intention of asking. He was a lot wiser now than he had been two years ago. Odd how your family was the last to realize that you had grown up, or had learned from your mistakes.

  “Were you here last night?” he asked her.

  She smiled at him. Her face was smeared with engine oil and more than a little mud, but she still had the same steady eyes, the high cheekbones, and the passionate and so very vulnerable mouth. What on earth was she going to do in St. Giles after the war? Marry some local worthy who would never begin to understand her? He repeated the question.

  “Driving back from the front line, most of it,” she answered. “I dropped wounded off here at about three, helped get them inside, had a cup of tea and something to eat. I cleaned the ambulance. I suppose I left again about half past four. I got lost somewhere about Polygon Wood, I think, but it could have been any other hill with tree stumps on it. I got back here about daylight.”

  “Are you sure of the times?”

  She frowned. “I think so. Why? Was that when she was…killed?” She said it with difficulty, and he could hear the pain in her voice.

  “I don’t know yet,” he answered. “How many wounded did you have?”

  “Six, same as usual.”

  “Badly wounded?”

  “Yes. Does all this matter?”

  “I don’t know yet. It was probably one of the German prisoners, but we have to be sure.” Joseph sighed. “Was Wil Sloan with you?”

  “Wil?” She was startled. “Yes, of course he was. You can’t suspect him, for heaven’s sake!”

  “I need to place everyone, Judith, or I can’t begin to make sense of it. Someone did a terrible thing to her.”

  She turned away. “I know! It must have been one of the German prisoners. I daresay they hate us all. Or at least some of them do. They look just like us, don’t they, especially when they’re hurt and covered with mud and blood. I hate this!”

  He touched her arm gently. “It’ll be over soon. Or this part of it will. But we’ve got to find out who did that to Sarah Price. Apart from justice, and stopping him from doing it again, Matthew and I need to get Schenckendorff back to London. They’re not going to hold up the armistice negotiations because of this mess here.”

  “Can’t you explain it to Colonel Hook and get away anyhow?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. We don’t know who the Peacemaker is, or what allies he might have here. He may know Schenckendorff has crossed over. It won’t take a genius to guess that it could be here. He’ll know Matthew’s left London, and probably where he’s come to.”

  Her eyes widened, fear sudden and gripping. “Joseph, be careful!”

  “I am. Tell me about Sarah Price, honestly. We haven’t time for blurring the edges with kindness.”

  She pursed her lips. “I didn’t know her well; I don’t think anybody really did. She was a bit flighty, enjoyed a laugh and a joke, even if it was pretty silly. Didn’t seem to take anything very seriously, and that annoyed some people. She seemed awfully shallow.” She looked away for a moment, toward the edge of the light from the lamps, then back at him, and spoke with painful honesty. “I think she stopped allowing herself to feel when her brothers were killed. She wasn’t going to let herself feel that kind of loss again. She made light of pretty well everything, and she drank rather more than was good for her. She flirted and led a few people on, but most of us knew it was just the way she was. We all
deal with loss and fear in different ways. That was hers.”

  One of the orderlies crossed over at the edge of their vision, and she waited until he was beyond earshot before continuing. “She didn’t gossip and she didn’t tell tales. And she was generous with things. I think she had stopped valuing anything, so it was easier for her to give it away. Almost as if she knew she might not make it home.” Her lips tightened. “I’m not sure she had any home now. I remember her saying once that there was only her grandmother left. I don’t know what happened to the others. Her mother died in the winter of 1916, and she lost both her brothers at the Somme.”

  She took in a shaky breath and let it out with a shiver. “Hell, Joseph, I think I might drink and flirt and behave like a fool if that were me. Catch the creature who did this to her!”

  “I’ll try. But we have to get Schenckendorff back to London.”

  “I know. At least we’ve got Matthew here to help.”

  He stayed with her a few minutes longer, then spoke to some of the nurses. They all said more or less the same as Judith had, although they were less frank with him than she had been, and some were less kind.

  He walked into the last tent at the end of the row without hope of learning anything new, or even remotely helpful. There was just one nurse there, standing with her back to him, cleaning surgical instruments on a wooden table. Her dark hair was tied up and back, but the natural curl in it made it impossible to keep tidy. Her neck was slender, and there was grace in the line of her shoulders. It reminded him of something gentle and happy that he could not immediately place.

  She must have heard his boots on the floorboards, because she turned. Her blue eyes opened wide and the scalpel slid out of her fingers onto the floor with a clatter.

  Joseph also stopped abruptly, his heart pounding. It was Lizzie Blaine. It was absurd. He was shaking and his hands were stiff and clammy, even in the cold.