Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [64]
“I’ve got to help,” Ben said urgently, cutting through the clamor in her mind. “I’ll get the next train. I can carry some of these. You go on.”
“Maybe I can help, too,” she said spontaneously.
He considered her offer for a moment. “Come on then.”
They worked without consciousness of time. Their train to St. Giles came and went. Ben helped carry stretchers and load them into the waiting ambulances. Hannah lent her strength and balance to the walking wounded, the gray-faced men who were exhausted with sleeplessness and pain.
It was more than an hour before the soldiers were all tended to. As the medical orderlies thanked them, Hannah realized that she was rumpled and marked with dust and occasional smears of blood. Her shoes were scuffed where she had been accidentally trodden on.
Ben was far more creased and his shirt was torn and soiled. He pushed his hair back and smiled at her. There was no need for words between them; both of them realized they were experiencing a kind of silent victory.
“You have blood on your face,” she told him. “Have you a handkerchief?”
He shook his head. “It’s just off my hand. I caught it on a rough piece on one of the stretchers.” He looked down at his left hand, just below the base of his index finger, exactly where Inspector Perth had caught himself on Blaine’s garden fork. Only Ben’s was fresh, and still bleeding, a small tear, caused by gripping something sharp.
Hannah suddenly felt ice inside her.
“Don’t tell me blood makes you faint!” he said incredulously. “You’ve just been helping people with real wounds!”
She controlled herself with an effort, trying to smooth the horror out of her eyes. “No, of course not! I was just thinking . . . I don’t know what. I suppose remembering Joseph coming back. He was such a mess. I dread his having to go again. It could be worse next time.”
“Don’t think of next time.” He tried to smile at her, anxiety in his face, and gentleness. “Maybe there won’t be one. The war’s got to finish one day. It could be soon. Come on, or we’ll miss this train, too.”
The following afternoon Perth came again to see Joseph. Followed by Henry, they went out into the garden and through the gate into the orchard, partly to avoid any chance of being overheard by one of the children when they came home from school.
Perth looked tired and harassed. Joseph remembered that expression from St. John’s two years ago, and all the misery of suspicion then. Except that in St. John’s he had known that whoever had committed the crime was either one of his own students or a lecturer who was at least a colleague, more probably a friend. This time there was no such certainty. He was ashamed of how precious that relief was.
“Not much progress,” Perth said lugubriously. “But it does seem, from information given, that it’s possible Mr. Blaine was having an affair with the wife of one of his colleagues.” He gave Joseph a startlingly penetrating glance, then turned away again to watch a thrush land on the grass near one of the apple trees. “Need some rain to bring the worms up,” he added.
“And the bicycle?” Joseph asked.
Perth shook his head. “Can’t find anyone willing to say they saw it. Least not at a time that’s any use to us. We know when he must have got home, because of when he left the Establishment, and that’s certain.” He chewed his lip. “Not that Mrs. Blaine says any different. He ate his dinner. They had a quarrel about something and nothing, she says. Afterward, Blaine went outside and she stayed in and had a long bath. Nobody to prove that right or wrong. But then there likely wouldn’t be. Was after dark, so not many people out, and no one anywhere to see a lone cyclist along the lane. Which no doubt he was counting on.”
“If it was after dark, they’d have a light,” Joseph pointed out. “Only a fool would cycle along a wooded track in the dark. That’s asking to trip over a tree root or even a pothole.