We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [41]
She considered it for a moment. It would be more comfortable, but it would also instantly put her on a physical level with him and take away any resemblance she had to a soldier.
“Thank you, but I prefer to stand,” she replied. She was also not going to call him sir. “I sit a great deal,” she added. “I drive an ambulance.”
“Yes, I know.” He indicated a piece of paper in front of him on the table. “You’ve been here a long time.”
“Since the beginning.”
“Then you will know the other people here as well as anyone can. You will have known Sarah Price.”
“Not much. I’m a driver, not a nurse,” she pointed out.
“Don’t you bring wounded men here to be treated?” he asked.
She thought he was a plain man, but in other circumstances he would not have been unpleasant. There was intelligence in his face. “Yes,” she answered. “The orderlies help me unload them off the ambulance, then I turn around to go back for more.”
He blinked. “Don’t you tend them at all on the way?”
“I can’t drive an ambulance through the mud and shellfire and tend to wounded at the same time!” she said tartly.
“Don’t you have anyone to help you?” He looked at her with intent.
“Yes, most of the time.”
“People trained to give medical help?”
“Of course. Otherwise they wouldn’t be of any use.” She was keeping her temper with difficulty. It was unfair to resent him—none of this was his fault—but he was still an outsider probing with a civilian’s lack of understanding for the terror, the grief, and the loyalties of soldiers.
“Nurses?” he questioned. “Orderlies?”
“V.A.D.’s,” she answered.
“What happens if your ambulance breaks down?”
“I mend it!” she said with her eyebrows raised.
“Yourself?”
“Of course. There’s no one else.”
“You must be extremely competent. Where do you do the regular maintenance work?”
At last she saw his point. “Usually here. But I don’t often see many nurses. None of us has a lot of time to stand around.”
“But you see a lot of orderlies, other drivers, doctors, soldiers?”
“Of course. But I have no idea who attacked Sarah Price. If I had, I would have told you.”
“Would you, Miss Reavley?”
“Of course I would!” The anger burned through now. It was a stupid question, and offensive. “No decent person would defend a man who killed one of the nurses! Or any woman, for that matter.” She stood even more stiffly. “We work together, Mr. Jacobson. We have done so in more hideous circumstances than you could imagine. You know nothing about it. I can see that in your face, even if I didn’t know. We have a kind of loyalty to one another that peacetime couldn’t create.”
The ghost of a smile crossed his face, full of regret.
“I believe that, Miss Reavley, which is why I think that one of you could well be defending a man with whom you have shared danger and pain, perhaps who has even saved your life, because you cannot believe he would do what he has. You will have different judgments of right and wrong from mine, and debts of honor I couldn’t understand.”
With amazement like a slow-burning fire inside her, she realized what he was saying. “You think I would defend the man who did this?” she said incredulously. She could feel her temper slipping out of control. “I want him found and arrested even more than you do! The worst that can happen to you is that you fail!” Her voice was shaking now, and she was gulping for air. “I could be assaulted or murdered, or both. So could my friends! Of course I want him caught…and…and got rid of…like…sewage!”
“Even if he were, for example, your friend Wil Sloan?” Jacobson asked. “A man who would never hurt you, surely?”
“That’s disgusting. Wil would never even think of doing something like that!”
“What kind of a man would, Miss Reavley? Do you know who would and who wouldn’t?”
He had caught her, this ordinary civilian who knew nothing about the reality of war. She had walked straight into his verbal trap without seeing anything of it. She hesitated, unable to frame an answer. He was right: She was trying to protect those she cared for most, because they could not be guilty,