We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [8]
“Yes. And if I think of anything, I still will,” Matthew answered.
Shearing tidied the handwritten notes in front of him and locked them in his desk. It was an unnecessary measure since the room would be locked also, but it was his habit to be careful, even though the notes would not be decipherable to anyone else were they found. “Bring me more as soon as you have it.”
“Yes, sir.” Matthew stood up. “Good night, sir.”
“Good night, Reavley.”
Matthew returned to his office, locked away his own papers, and collected his mackintosh. Outside in the dark street, he turned left along the pavement and began to walk briskly. Getting home to his flat would take him about half an hour, by which time in the fine, cold drizzle he would be pretty wet. Still, it was better than looking for any kind of transport. Buses were crowded and irregular. Taxis were rare. Everyone was competing for the little petrol there was, and he could easily walk the distance. In fact, after sitting most of the day at a desk sifting information, he was glad of the strange sense of freedom the dark streets brought to him. They were crowded with other people also hurrying, their heads down, their collars high. The occasional gleam of car headlights shone on the wet surfaces: smooth tarmac or rough cobbles, the sharp edge of a curb.
He would have known the way blindfolded. He passed the tobacconist on the corner. The man’s son had been killed at Gallipoli, and a younger son had lost an arm at Verdun. His daughter’s husband had been blinded at Messines. The greengrocer’s son was in the Royal Flying Corps. He was still fine, but his mother had been killed in a zeppelin raid here at home. And so it went. Everyone had lost someone, even if it was a lifelong friend rather than a relative.
He crossed the street, facing into the wind. The rain was heavier. The Peacemaker that Shearing had referred to was the code name Matthew and Joseph had given to the man who had conceived a wild plan to prevent the war entirely, back in the summer of 1914.
Matthew could remember walking across the sunlit cricket pitch that afternoon in Cambridge as if it were yesterday, and yet in a way it seemed like another lifetime. He could still see the cloudless sky and the white gleam of flannels and shirts. The women wore long, pale muslin dresses. Wide hats shaded their faces, and their long hair was elaborately dressed. It had been a golden afternoon that seemed as if it would go on forever.
And Matthew had shattered it, at least for his own family. He had come to tell Joseph that their parents, John and Alys Reavley, had been killed in a car crash on the Hauxton Road. That evening as they sat in the silent, strangely empty family home, the village constable had come to express his sympathy, mentioning quite casually the news that in Sarajevo the archduke and duchess of Austria had been assassinated by some Serbian madman.
John and Alys Reavley’s deaths had proved to be murder also. John Reavley had found one of the two drafts of a proposed treaty between Kaiser Wilhelm and King Edward. It would allow Germany to invade England, France, and Belgium and absorb them into an expanding German Empire, and then in time take the rest of Europe as well. The kaiser’s price was German help to regain the former British colony of the United States, and of course to keep the rest of the British Empire of India, Burma, Africa, Australasia, and various islands around the earth. It would in effect