We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [67]
He had wanted to forget it because he had not behaved well. The flattery had turned his head, and he had not considered anyone else’s feelings. It was one of the stupidities of youth he preferred not to recall, but that was a luxury he could not afford now.
“I behaved badly,” he admitted, staring at Jacobson. “We were both young, and only flirting. It meant nothing in any lasting sense, just fun at the time. She moved on to somebody else, and so did I.
Sarah is not an uncommon name. I didn’t see her here, and I didn’t connect the woman you spoke of with the girl I had known.”
Jacobson had said nothing. Hampton’s face expressed his total disbelief.
Matthew walked four paces, turned, and walked back again.
Jacobson had interviewed him again, briefly, but there was nothing to pursue. There was a soldier nicknamed Punch, but he had denied being anywhere near where Matthew had been. He had brought in a wounded soldier, a fifteen-year-old, but he’d come from the opposite direction, naturally, from where the fighting was.
Jacobson had pressed Matthew about his exact position in the intelligence service, and what he was here for. Matthew had considered telling him, but he had nothing with him to prove it, and he had left London telling Shearing only that he had gone to collect vital information—nothing as to what it was. If Shearing had read between the lines anything of the Peacemaker, he would not substantiate that to anyone, certainly not to a policeman he did not know. The Peacemaker’s power was far too wide and deep to take sides like that.
Matthew’s rescue depended on Joseph and Judith. The only answer was to find whoever had really killed Sarah. The huge and ugly thought always at the edge of his mind was that the whole trip here was the Peacemaker’s last ploy before the defeat of Germany, and the end of at least this part of his plan.
Was Matthew in some way closer to him, more of a danger than he had supposed? Or was it no more than revenge for the trouble the Reavleys had caused him from the day John Reavley had found and taken the copy of the treaty, in 1914? If he had not found it, or not understood it, might there now be an Anglo-German Empire across the northern half of the world? Would there have been peace, at least on the surface, even if there were terror, betrayal, and suffocated lives underneath?
No, there would not have been peace. America would not have given in. It might have been crushed, with the combined weight of Europe against it, but not without fearful cost. The bloodshed would have been terrible, perhaps eventually even as all-consuming as it was now, just in a different place; the same protagonists, only on different sides. And the shame of England would have been irredeemable.
Now it was almost over. Matthew was locked up in a shed behind the front line in Belgium, and Jacobson thought he had murdered a woman. Or perhaps he knew perfectly well that he had not, but it suited the Peacemaker to have a final revenge?
If Joseph could not prove him innocent, Matthew would be tried and shot—or, more ignominiously, hanged. Or possibly the men who had cared for Sarah, had worked with her, and were sickened by the brutality of her death might come and drag him out and “accidentally” shoot him. Of course that was illegal, but what was the nicety of the law in the face of the carnage these men had seen in the last few years? Bodies of friends they had loved had been torn to pieces beside them, shattered to bloody pulp. Death was an everyday occurrence. If some of them could not bear that their brave, funny, kind friends were slaughtered while a bestial murderer was taken home to England without a scratch on him—well, that was not hard to understand.
He paced back and forth, four steps, turn, four steps. He must not panic, must not lose control. Come on, Joseph! Do something!
Judith woke alone in an old bunker and immediately felt almost suffocated by