We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [65]
“Maybe,” the other correspondent said drily, shifting his position to ease his cramped legs. The guns were too close for carelessness. Snipers could shoot a long way. “Nevertheless it’s true,” he went on. “Been a lot more convenient if it’d been one of the Germans, but apparently it wasn’t. Just as well, or we could have had a bloodbath in reprisals. Anyway, who is this Reavley? Why is it impossible? That’s a word I wouldn’t expect to hear you use so casually.”
“I know him.” Mason’s mind was racing. Judith would be desperate. He could barely imagine what she must be feeling. He should go back to the Casualty Clearing Station immediately and do something to help. The police must be idiots. Surely a word with whoever was in charge would unravel the mess they had made?
“And nobody you know could commit a crime?” the other correspondent said with mockery in his voice. “Come on, Mason! Whoever it is, somebody knows him! It’s not like you to be stupidly sentimental.”
Mason slithered down the hill until he was well below the ridge, then stood up. “I know him well, you damn fool!” he snapped. “I know his whole family. I have for years. He’s based in London, for a start. He wouldn’t even know the damn woman. You can have this.” He waved his arm to encompass the entire region of the battle line. “I have to find out what’s behind the…the foul-up at the clearing station.”
“You can’t…,” the other man began, but he was addressing Mason’s back, and he gave up.
Mason started to walk—there was no other means of transport this far forward—and the sheer physical effort of it gave him some release from the fury of frustration inside him. Why was Matthew Reavley up here at the front line anyway? What had brought him to France or Belgium so close to the armistice? Why was he not in London doing all he could to influence events the way he would want them to go?
He passed a gun crew hauling a cannon up the incline until it was clear of the stream. He had no time to think of helping them.
He remembered vividly his last encounter in Marchmont Street, and how the Peacemaker had been at his wit’s end to prevent a settlement on Germany punitive enough to create a vacuum in the economy of Europe that might end swallowing half the world. Could it be something to do with that? Or was he being fanciful to imagine that anything that any handful of men could do would seriously affect the tide of history? Was there not going to be chaos whatever they did?
They were firing behind him, the noise almost deafening. One blessing peace would bring would be silence. He trod on a patch of shifting ground and nearly lost his balance. There were shell craters all around, and a low mist rising off the wet earth. Some of it stank of old gas, and the clinging odor of decay was everywhere. He thought of the clean wind in the grass off the high fens, the scent of bracken, the silence that stretched to eternity, the blue hills beyond the hills, and the bright sky.
How ironically senseless that this policeman, whoever he was, should arrest Matthew Reavley of all men for a barbaric murder. Matthew had been the Peacemaker’s most implacable enemy, even more than Joseph. But this was one thing the Peacemaker could not have accomplished, another absurd twist of fate. This final injustice to the Reavleys was sheer, blind chance.
And yet they had never given up. He could imagine their efforts now. They would be doing everything possible, at any cost, to prove that Matthew was innocent. They would be outraged, burning with the stupidity and fear of it, but not self-pitying, certainly not defeated.
He was passed by an ambulance taking wounded back to the nearest casualty clearing station, but it was not the one where Judith was. The tide of events had left that behind. It would