We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [73]
He leaned forward a little, the candlelight gold on his cheek. “But all the time we’re thinking of what we did to her.”
Matthew turned toward him. “What do you know that we don’t, Joe? There’s a lot of talk about rape or mutilation, but if anyone knows, they aren’t saying.”
Judith winced. She had been refusing to think further. No one had imagined that the motive was anything other than sexual, but that was not the same as giving words to the act.
Joseph’s eyes moved from one to the other of them gravely. “It’s the violation of the inner person that is unbearable,” he answered. “The complete loss of control of your own body and its passions and needs, the core of the way in which it belongs to you. In a woman it is if she is violated by someone else; in a man it is if his own body betrays him by degrading every decency he ought to hold and turning him into a creature outside the acceptance of his fellows. We’re all afraid of it. We don’t know how to stop it from touching the core of identity, of life. We run away from truth; we build lies that we can live with.”
Judith stared at him. He was trying to say something bigger than she had even considered, a more painful idea. There was something in it that touched her own knowledge of passion and change, the freedom she had won here in slaughter, and was not sure how to deal with once her carefully outlined job was over. Without an ambulance…a uniform…who was she then?
“We need the truth,” Joseph finished, his voice half an apology. “Whoever it hurts. It was somebody here. To find that we may also find a whole lot of other things we would very much rather not have known. Do you believe Schenckendorff’s guilty?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said.
“No.” Judith had no hesitation. “I think somehow or other it’s the Peacemaker.”
Judith was not called out that night. She slept on a cot in one of the outer rooms of the hospital until four in the morning, when the first casualties came in. They were now some considerable distance from the fighting as it moved eastward toward the borders of Germany itself, and there were other casualty clearing stations far closer. This was just the excess that others could not treat.
She worked helping the orderlies, carrying stretchers, assisting those able to walk a little way the few steps from the ambulance to the waiting area, or from there into a theater.
By six o’clock the worst was over. She drank a hot mug of tea and ate a heel of bread, then she went to help the nurses. She had not their skill, but she could at least fetch and carry for them and do the simpler jobs. She was prepared to sit, with a calm face and a quiet voice, with those who were beyond all practical aid. She knew Joseph did it often enough. It was a small service, but no young man should face the final darkness alone, unnoticed, and with no one to say they cared.
By eight o’clock she was sharing rations with Lizzie and trying to think of what questions she could ask to strip bare the lies that were painting Schenckendorff as a murderer. She refused to accept that there were no loose ends anywhere, no one who knew something that would eventually unravel it all.
Moira Jessop joined them, sitting on an upturned empty box with her mug in both hands. “In a month’s time we could all be home,” she said cheerfully. “Eating proper food. Having a bath and sleeping in sheets. I’d love to be clean.” She pulled an expression of complete disgust.
Lizzie gave a slight, bleak smile.
“What’s the matter with you?” Moira asked cheerfully. “At least now we know it was a bloody Jerry who killed poor Sarah, and not one of us. We don’t need to look sideways at each other anymore. Or walk around in fear, for that matter. And don’t pretend half of us weren’t!”
Lizzie swallowed hard, but with the dryness of the bread that was not surprising. “Half of us were afraid it would turn out to be someone we knew well,