We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [112]
But Cavan could not account for his time. Allie Robinson had lied to protect him, and he had allowed her to until Judith had caught him in it. He had said he had been in the Evacuation tent, but he hadn’t.
Joseph was sick with misery, as if the evidence were closing in around him like an enemy in the dark. Any hour now it might strike the blow that could not be defended against, the proof that could not be denied. There was no point in asking Cavan himself, and he could keep Allie Robinson until last when she could no longer lie.
He began with Erica Barton-Jones. He found her with Stan Tidyman. The soldier was still gray-faced, his eyes hollow, but he was wrapped up with a pillow and a blanket rolled tight to support him. He managed a faint smile.
Joseph asked after him briefly, then took Erica to one side, over in the corner of the tent beside a table piled with old blankets, bandages, and other stores. They could hear the rain drumming on the canvas.
“The night Sarah was killed,” he said without preamble. “Tell me what you can remember of where everyone was, just what you are certain of. From about midnight onward.”
“It was a bad night,” she said grimly. “I can’t tell you times, only where I was.”
“How many surgeons on duty?”
“Two—Captain Cavan and Captain Ellsworth—and there were anesthetists and orderlies, of course.”
He did not tell her that he knew this already, or that all but Cavan were accounted for. “Tell me what you recall,” he said.
She repeated what she had said from the beginning, every case, what was done and an estimate of the time. He stopped her, questioned, made her repeat and be as precise as possible, everything checked against what others had said.
“What is it you expect, Chaplain?” she demanded exasperatedly. “Going over and over it isn’t going to help. I don’t know who killed Sarah, or what snapped in somebody’s head, or why it was her and not somebody else. Except that she was the one who flirted, but she certainly wasn’t the only one who fell in love or had normal human feelings.” Her face pinched, and she turned half away from him. “If you are looking for some unique sin in her that’s going to make you feel there’s any kind of justice in this, then you aren’t going to find it. And quite frankly I think you are morally dishonest to try. There isn’t any justice, and nobody with any…any courage…is going to believe there is.”
He was startled. He had not even considered such a thing. “If life were always just, then there would be no courage necessary,” he pointed out. “If being good automatically made you safe, then it wouldn’t even be good, it would just be sensible: buying safety, buying your way out of pain or failure, confusion, everything that hurts. Is that what you thought—that I was looking for sense in it?”
She stared at him, her face pale and tired in the half-light. “Aren’t you? Aren’t you longing to explain God so we won’t stop believing in Him?”
“No. I gave that up years ago, even before the war, let alone since.” He thought first for an instant how he had felt after Eleanor’s death, the anger and confusion, the long retreat from emotion into the religion of the brain. That was over now, a kind of little death from which he had been awoken. “No,” he said again. “I’m still looking for whoever killed Sarah because they have to be stopped. I’m not sure it’s even anything to do with justice for her, or for them. It’s a very practical matter of them being prevented from doing it again.”
She blinked. “Sometimes I think you are so pointless, so divorced from the realities of life, well-meaning but essentially futile.” She gave a sigh. “Then you come out with something that makes me feel that perhaps you are the only one who really is dealing with the truth, bigger than the little bits of reality we manage.”
“Sometimes,” he said with a slight smile.
She smiled back at him. “I still don’t know who did it.”
“Do you know if Cavan was in the Evacuation tent when he said he was?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Allie Robinson said he was, but she was lying, to cover for him,” he told her.