We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [79]
She nodded, aching with too much memory and sorrow to speak. She put out her hand and touched his face, then self-consciously snatched it away again.
He smiled slowly, and the hope in his eyes dazzled her.
The following day Judith drove more men south and west to larger hospitals. She was only just pulling in at the Casualty Clearing Station when Joseph came splashing across the mud toward her, his face drawn with anxiety.
She scrambled out. “What is it?”
“They’re sending Schenckendorff out the day after tomorrow,” he said desperately. “In roughly thirty-six hours. They’ll try him immediately and he’ll be hanged.” He did not add all the other things that were racing through both their minds. Was he guilty or innocent? Was the Peacemaker really who he said he was? Was he telling the truth, and had the Peacemaker deliberately engineered this way of exacting revenge? Or was he lying, to make them all try to expose the wrong man, perhaps destroying him, and freeing the real Peacemaker? Or was it all coincidental, the ultimate farce of the whole affair?
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Judith sat on the cot in her bunker and tried to think. Nothing made any sense that was absolute and unarguable. Every possibility they had thought of depended upon so many accounts that might be lies or mistakes, it dissolved the moment they tried to prove it.
Now it seemed Sarah must have been killed later than they had thought, if Benbow really had seen her after four o’clock. Yet from the state of the body, the blood, and her coldness when she was found at half past six, she had already been dead at least two hours. So she must have been killed between four and half past.
Were any of the guards telling less than the exact truth, intentionally or not? Any of them could have been alone for a while, if his partner had been called away by some alarm or emergency; and if both had, then it was at least possible that any of the wounded Germans who were able to walk, other than just Schenckendorff, could have come out of the hut and killed Sarah. If she had jeered at them about what would happen to their women, that could have been reason enough.
She shivered. Inside, the bunker was sheltered from the wind, but it was small, enclosed in the earth like a tomb, and the clay always seemed to carry the damp with it. It smelled stale and cold.
How long did it take a man to rape a woman and then slash at her with a bayonet? Judith had no experience with anything like this kind of behavior, and found it difficult even to guess. Surely it had to be ten minutes or a quarter of an hour at least? Joseph had seen the body but had refused to discuss it, which was ridiculous in a way. Judith was an ambulance driver; there was no kind of death or mutilation she had not seen. Except, of course, deliberate sexual violation of a woman.
She went over it in her mind. Between four and five o’clock most people were so thoroughly accounted for that they need not be considered. Tiddly Wop Andrews had been walking wounded, with a bad slash in his side, but once it was cleaned, stitched, and bound up—well before three o’clock—he had been in the Resuscitation tent. Cully Teversham had sworn to it. He had been in to see his brother, Whoopy, who had been struck by shrapnel in his leg and side. Allie Robinson had accounted for Cavan for all but a few minutes here and there—certainly not long enough to have found Sarah, raped her, and killed her. Not that Judith had ever imagined that Cavan could be guilty.
The guards Culshaw and Turner had accounted for each other, but that meant almost nothing. Snowy Nunn had been in because he had brought Stan Tidyman, who had lost his leg. Snowy had accounted for Barshey Gee, injured in his left shoulder and with the skin torn open on the side of his head, also walking wounded.
Except that was the heart of the problem. Barshey Gee had not been in the tent where Snowy said he was, not all the time, because Judith herself had seen him at quarter past four outside near the entrance to one of the old connecting trenches. He was