Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [139]
“Maybe, but this one’s different. Sorry, Chaplain, but we’ve got to search you.”
“Of course.” Joseph submitted obediently, then finally he was conducted along a narrow corridor. His footsteps, instead of echoing as he had expected, were eaten by the silence, as if he had not really passed that way at all.
Corcoran was in an ordinary room, indistinguishable as a cell except for the fact that the window was above head height, and the glass was so thick that nothing was visible through it. The single door was made of steel with no features at all on the inside, no hinge, no handle.
Corcoran himself was sitting on a bunk bed with a bare mattress.
He looked up as the door closed and Joseph was left alone with him. He was an old man, his face withered, his skin without life. His eyes seemed smaller, more deeply sunken into his head.
Joseph felt a wrenching pity inside him like a cramp in the stomach, and even a kind of revulsion. It would have been unimaginable a week ago. This was Shanley Corcoran! A man he had loved all his life, whose face and voice and whose laughter were woven into the best of all his memories. And he had killed Theo Blaine, not in anger or passion, not in defense of anything good, but because Blaine was going to achieve the glory of saving Britain, leaving Corcoran to be no more than a footnote on the pages of history.
That glory in other men’s minds had mattered to him more than the project itself, more than Blaine’s life, and God forgive him, more than the lives of the sailors who would have used the device, whatever it was. Had he thought of them?
Joseph stopped just inside the door, standing because there was nothing on which to sit. He had to say something, keep up the pretense.
“What is it you know, Shanley?” he asked. He could not bring himself to say “how are you?” That would be absurd now, and dishonest. His state was painfully obvious, and Joseph could do nothing to help, even if he wished to, and he was not sure that he did, or what it was he felt now, except misery.
Corcoran gave a bitter little laugh. “Is that all you care about, Joseph? After all these years, the sum of it is ‘what do you know?’ ”
Joseph felt a stab of pity and disgust that almost made him sick. It was like a physical twisting of the stomach. “That’s why you sent for me,” he replied. “And incidentally, why they let me in.”
“And the only reason you came?” There was accusation in Corcoran’s face.
It was even worse than Joseph had feared. The room was not hot, but it was airless, and he could feel the sweat running down his body. He could not ask him when the corruption had started, or if it had always been there. He played the farce. “Is there another spy in the Establishment, Shanley?” he asked.
Corcoran looked up at him. “You know, I have not the faintest idea. There might be. It could even be one of the technicians or guards, for all I could say.” Now there was anger in him, as if he had been let down. “But I knew you wouldn’t come unless you thought there was some glory in it for you, some prize to take back to Admiral Hall.” His mouth twisted in a sour grimace. “You’re nothing like your father, Joseph. He knew the value of friendship, through fair weather or foul. He would never turn his back on a lifetime of loyalty, all the human passion and treasure of the past. But for all your pretense of religion, your self-righteousness going out to the trenches where you can pose the hero, you’re shallow as a puddle in the street.”
It was ridiculous that it should hurt! It was grossly unfair, distorted by fear and, please God, by guilt as well, but still it left Joseph gasping with the pain of it. “Don’t use my father’s name in this,” he said between his teeth. “Most of the time I miss him with a constant emptiness. I keep thinking of things I want to ask him, things to tell him, or just to share. But I’m glad he doesn’t have to see you now. He would have found it unbearable because you’ve betrayed not only the future, but the past as well. Nothing looks the same as it used