We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [57]
“They can’t believe it was him!” she said desperately, struggling to find it absurd rather than serious. “Why on earth would he? He only arrived here a day before she was killed! It doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, where would he get a bayonet?”
“Judith, there are weapons all over the place, rusted ones, broken ones, ones people have dropped or lost. And what does sense have to do with any of it?” he demanded, feeling panic rush up inside him. “Why would anyone do that to her? They need to blame somebody, open the station, and get on with ending the war. They want to get the men out of here and start operating it as normal again, probably even move it forward. We’re too far behind the lines now. Above all, they want to say the matter is closed and forget all about it.”
“Even if it isn’t the right man? That’s monstrous!” She waved her hands, refusing to believe it. She ignored the curious glances of the orderly and two of the wounded.
“Look around you!” Joseph said impatiently, keeping his voice low. “How many men are dead? What’s one more if they can close this and say it’s ended? They don’t know Matthew; he isn’t one of them.”
“But somebody really did it! Somebody—”
“I know.” He lowered his voice with an effort, breathing in and out deeply, trying to regain control of himself. “We have to find him, British or German, and we have to do it in the next two or three days, at the most. We need to begin by getting to know everything we can about Sarah Price. We agree that she didn’t deserve it, nobody could, but she may have done something to provoke it—”
Her face tightened with anger. “And what does a person do, exactly, to provoke being hacked to death, Joseph?” she said savagely. “Funny how you never think your brother could be just like other men!”
“That’s the point, Judith,” he said with barely a flicker of change in his expression. “It’s probably someone that nobody thinks of as having violent or uncontrollable passions, or having been so wounded in mind that at times he no longer behaves like ordinary sane people. But somebody knows him, has worked beside him, fought beside him, shared rations, letters from home, all the things we do and the ways we get to know people.”
“Was that why you said it?” she demanded, her eyes wide and angry. “To make me think of that?”
“Not altogether,” he admitted reluctantly. “I do think that she might have said or done something that infuriated someone. If it is entirely random, we don’t have much chance of finding him, do we?”
Her face crumpled with regret. “I’m sorry. I suppose we don’t.” She took a deep breath and looked a little away from him. “I feel guilty because I didn’t even take much notice of her. I thought she was trivial and empty-headed. Father always used to say I was too quick to judge. I thought I’d learned.”
She bit her lip hard. “We’ve got to get Matthew to London with that German officer, whatever his name is, because we’ve got to expose the Peacemaker. My war won’t finish until we have! I’ll start finding out. At least I’ve plenty of time, compared with usually, and I have an excuse to be here. I suppose I even have an excuse to ask questions now. At least nobody can tell me it’s not my business.”
“We have to succeed—” he started.
“I know!” She didn’t want to hear him say it, even though she had accepted that it was true.
She began with the other medical staff, knowing she had a better chance with them than Joseph did with the soldiers. None of them had been here very long: It was the nature of a Casualty Clearing Station for the wounded to move through it as quickly as possible.
“No more time for being charitable about it,” she said briskly to Erica Barton-Jones as they were in the storage tent taking delivery of some clean blankets, having sent away those too torn or saturated in blood to use anymore.
“I thought they’d arrested someone,” Erica