We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [26]
He woke with a jolt to find Tiddly Wop Andrews bending over him. There was a thread of daylight coming down the steps. He could see that Tiddly Wop’s handsome face was gaunt with weariness, and now also creased with new anxiety. “Chaplain!” Tiddly Wop said urgently. “Wake up! The colonel wants you roight away.”
Joseph struggled to the surface of comprehension, his head pounding. “Why? What is it now?” His first fear was that Schenckendorff had died. Then he realized that Hook had no idea how much that would matter. He struggled to sit up. Every bone and muscle in his body hurt. “What’s happened, Tiddly?”
Before the war Tiddly Wop’s hair had been long, and when he was worried he brushed at his brow as if it still were. He did it now, unaware of the movement. “Oi don’t know, Chaplain, but it’s bad. Looks loike hell, he does. Something at the clearing station, that’s all Oi know. You’d better go now. That’s whoi Oi didn’t even get you a mug of tea. No toime.”
Joseph was suddenly ice-cold. “Have you seen Miss Reavley?” he demanded, his mouth dry. That was always his first thought.
“Yes, an’ she’s foine, sir. But you’d better go,” Tiddly Wop urged.
Warmth flooded back into Joseph as if the blood had started pumping again. That was absurd. Judith had been here for four years, and usually he managed not to think about what she faced, or he would cease to function at all. It was the only way anyone could survive. Most men had family here, or at the very least lifelong friends. They all came from the same few villages. It was what bound them together, made the sharing and the loyalty complete, and the loss devastating.
He struggled to his feet and followed Tiddly Wop out into the pale, misty daylight. The rain had stopped; a watery sun was gleaming on the mud. Here and there it shone on a flat surface of a crater, making it look like polished steel.
It was a fifteen-minute hard walk to the colonel’s command bunker. Joseph went down the concrete steps and parted the sacking over the entrance. He asked for permission to enter. When it was given he went in and stood to attention. This was farther forward than the Casualty Clearing Station. It was an old German bunker, and deeper than the British equivalent. The floor was dry, the walls lined with pretty decent wood.
“Sit down,” Hook ordered, gesturing to an ammunition box turned on end. They must have taken the chairs when they retreated. Tiddly Wop was right: Hook looked dreadful. “I’m afraid there’s been a death at the clearing station,” he said grimly. “I’ve no choice but to call in the military police, but I want you to be there. You know how to keep your head and deal with these things.”
Joseph was confused. There were deaths every day, in the trenches, in no-man’s-land, in the ambulances, in the first-aid posts, in the clearing stations, in the fields, and on the sides of the roads, violent, desperate deaths all the time. A hospital was the best place to die, not the worst.
“One of the nurses,” Hook added. “Sarah Price.”
“I’m sorry,” Joseph said automatically. “I’ll write to her family. What happened?”
“For God’s sake, Reavley!” Hook snapped, his voice near the edge of control. “I wouldn’t have woken you up to tell you if it were an accident! The poor girl was hacked to death with a damn bayonet!”
For the second time since waking up, Joseph was stunned into complete immobility. He struggled to grasp what Hook had said, and yet the words were clear enough. A nurse had been brutally murdered. Of course the military police had been sent for; there was no other possible action. “Yes, sir,” he said slowly.
“Be there, please,” Hook asked. “The