We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [77]
“Wil?” As she turned to look at him, she veered wildly close to the edge of the road, sending the ambulance bucking and slewing across the craters. She pulled up sharply. “Sorry.”
“I didn’t do it, Judith!” he said haltingly. “I just know that everybody’s scared, not only the women.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Do you know if anyone is lying to protect someone else?” she asked him. “Maybe someone they owe a really big debt, like having pulled them off the wire or carried them back from no-man’s-land? That would be something you’d pay for the rest of your life, wouldn’t it!”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s why pretty well everyone’s happy to think it’s one of the Jerries.”
“But what if it isn’t?” she insisted. “We can’t hang somebody who didn’t do it because it’s convenient. Surely to God we are better than that?”
“It isn’t that easy,” he replied. “Haven’t you ever owed anybody something? Something so big you can hardly breathe for the weight of it. You have to pay debts like that. You have no choice.”
“You know something, Wil!”
“I hear wounded men talk,” he admitted. “You don’t, because you’re up here driving, but I spend a lot of time with some of them.”
“What do you know? I’m not moving until you tell me.”
“I can walk back from here better than you can.”
“Wil!” she protested desperately.
“I know how some of the men feel,” he answered. “That’s all. I told you I don’t know who did it. I don’t. Hell, Judith, if I did I’d have said when they had your brother!”
“Yes. Yes, I know.” She eased the engine into gear again and straightened the wheels on the rutted road. They still had more than a mile and a half to go.
When Judith pulled the ambulance in and parked it, Wil went to help the orderlies with the new wounded, and she began the usual maintenance of the vehicle. She was in the back tidying and cleaning the stretchers and sweeping the floor when she heard footsteps outside in the mud, and a moment later a shadow blocked the light at the door.
She looked up and saw a familiar silhouette that made her heart jolt and her stomach tighten far more than she wished. She wanted to be in control of her emotions, but as Wil had said, her body let her down. She was hot and cold at once, and her hands were clammy.
“Can I help you?” Mason asked.
“Not really, thank you. I’m just about finished,” she said a trifle more coolly than she had intended. Although perhaps it was for the best. She did not want to hope, or imagine, that she could see in him a tenderness or a belief that was not there. “What’s the news from the front? Where are we now?”
“About two miles from Tournai, the last I heard,” he replied. “The fighting’s still pretty heavy.”
“Yes, I know. We’re still getting quite a few of the casualties.”
“I heard you found the man who murdered the nurse. It was one of the Germans.”
She kept on looking at the ambulance stretchers even though there was nothing more to do to them. “They’ve arrested him, but they haven’t collected all the evidence to charge him yet. He’s under guard more to protect him, I think.”
Mason was silent for a moment or two. She stepped out of the ambulance, taking his hand because he offered it, and it would have been pointed had she refused it. She found herself absurdly self-conscious. His physical nearness intruded on her concentration, and she was angry with herself for allowing it.
“But he did it?” he said at last as she closed the doors. They turned toward the tent where there was most likely to be hot tea. The night had closed in, and the wind was harder and colder from the east.
“I don’t know.” She knew the admission would leave questions he would be bound to ask, and answers that would betray more of her emotion than she wanted to share, but she refused to lie to him.
They were inside before he replied. “You don’t think he did, do you?” That was a challenge. “Why? Because you’re afraid it’s what everybody wants?”
“No. I…” What could she say that made any sense, yet did not betray who Schenckendorff was? That she could not do, whatever lies it cost. She