Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [43]
“I’m glad that bastard’s dead,” Cully said, dropping the spent match in the mud and regarding his tunic skeptically. Apparently it satisfied him, because he put it back on again. “Is that wicked?” he asked anxiously.
Joseph smiled. “I hope not!”
Cully relaxed. “He was pretty damn unlucky! He must’ve run bang into the only Jerry around there, ’cos we were to the east of where ’e was and Harper’s lot were to the west. Don’t know how any Jerry got through.”
Joseph was puzzled, but he thought little more of it until later in the evening when he was helping Punch Fuller light a candle to heat tea. He overheard a conversation that made it clear there had been a patrol between the German line and where he had found Prentice.
“What time?” he asked.
“Well, I dunno, Chaplain,” Punch said, his eyes wide. “Line held, that’s all I know. We lost Bailey, and Williams got hit in the shoulder, but no one got past us. I’d stake my life on that!”
It was Prentice’s life Joseph was thinking about. “But there must have been one German got through,” he argued. There had to be. Maybe that is why Prentice was drowned rather than shot? It began to make sense. A German had been caught, probably out on a reconnaissance of the British lines, and he was alone so he couldn’t afford to make any noise at all, or he’d attract the attention of the patrol.
“Why’s that, Chaplain?” Punch asked.
“I found one of our men dead,” Joseph answered. “About twenty yards out directly in front of Paradise Alley.” He named the length of trench as it was known locally.
“Then you must have found the Jerry, too,” Punch said with certainty. “No one got back past us.”
“He must have waited till you went, and then gone.”
“We didn’t come back till dawn,” Punch assured him. “That’s how we lost Bailey. Too damn slow. If a Jerry’d got up out of the mud and gone back, he’d ’ave passed right through us. Believe me, that didn’t ’appen. We’d all ’ave seen him, us, our sentries, and theirs.” He turned to Stan Meadows beyond him. “Isn’t that right?”
Stan nodded vigorously.
“I must be mistaken,” Joseph told him, and bent his attention to the candle in the tin, and the mug of tea. He was not mistaken, but he did not want anyone else to start thinking what was now racing through his mind. It was ugly, bringing back hard, painful memories of Sebastian’s death, the surprise and suspicion, the broken trust and the knowledge he had not wanted. Death was grief enough; murder was a destruction of so many other things as well. It stripped away the protection of small, necessary privacies, and exposed weaknesses that at other times could have been guessed at, and then left to be forgotten.
Was this murder again? In the general carnage of war, had someone taken the opportunity to kill Prentice, in the belief his death would be taken for granted as just another casualty?
Who? That was something he did not even want to think about.
What would happen now if he told Colonel Fyfe what he had found? Everyone would know. The trust between men would be destroyed, the friendships that made life bearable; the bad jokes, the teasing, the willingness to listen, even to silly things, anxieties that were foolish, dreams that would never happen, simply in the act of sharing. The certainty that one man would risk his life for another was what bound them into a fighting force.
Suspicion of murder, and the questions that went with it, would poison that, and the cost here would be even greater than it had been in Cambridge. If he told Fyfe, an investigation would begin, justice might be found, or it might not, but at what price? Wil Sloan? Even Barshey Gee? Or one of the sappers who had been Corliss’s friends? And if it were not found, if they never knew, then what shadow would be over them all, perhaps endlessly?
But surely among all the things he could not help, could not even ease, this was one small