We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [97]
Benbow looked acutely uncomfortable, and a tide of guilt swept up his lean face. “He was having a bit of a fling with Nurse Jessop,” he said, not looking directly at Joseph. “Didn’t see that it mattered. He wasn’t gone long.”
“How long, do you know?”
Benbow hesitated.
“You don’t know,” Joseph said for him. “Which means you are not accounted for, either. It’s time for the truth, Benbow. It would be better if you gave it to me honestly rather than my having to drag it out of others. Any lie is a form of guilt at this point, whatever you are lying to conceal: your error, or anyone else’s.”
Benbow looked wretched. “I don’t know how long he was gone,” he said in a low, hard voice. “I wasn’t there, either, not when he came back. I think it was only a few minutes we were both gone.”
“You think?” Joseph said softly. “Did you lie to cover Eames or yourself?”
“Both.” Benbow hesitated again. “I was with Sarah Price, but only at the water. I helped her carry a bucket and stopped to talk to her for a few minutes. She was looking after some of the German wounded. I was angry with her for flirting with them. She seemed to prefer them to us.” His hands were clenched, and the muscles were tight in his neck and jaw. “It was then that I realized why. She liked to tease them, flirt, bait them a bit. Fun, she called it. But the poor bastards couldn’t do anything about it. Most of them were too badly shot up, and scared stiff of what would happen to them—even more, to their women at home—and she liked that.”
“You’re not painting a picture of a very pleasant young woman,” Joseph observed.
Benbow glared at him, then gave a short bark of laughter. “It’s a true one.”
“I am assuming, Corporal, that you knew her fairly well?”
Benbow colored again. “She was around a lot.”
Joseph said no more on the subject, but neither did he promise Benbow not to report it if it should become necessary. Instead he went to speak with the German prisoners, to see if any of them could corroborate how long Eames or Benbow was absent from duty.
He asked Schenckendorff first. He looked pale still, but his foot was less inflamed and his fever appeared to have gone. Now he faced the possibility of being tried for murder and hanged, and his eyes held a black humor at the irony of it, but he had summoned all the strength he possessed to mask his fear.
He corroborated Benbow’s story, hope flaring up for an instant that somehow it would help prove his own innocence, then dying when Joseph did not say so.
“I’m closer to the truth,” Joseph said quietly. “But I’m not there yet.”
“I did not do it,” Schenckendorff replied. “I stood outside on the earth for a little while, and felt the rain. I spoke to no one. The girl who was killed was the one who came in here and laughed and joked with our men? A very pretty girl, but shallow, I think, perhaps frightened, and cruel at times. It is terrible that she was killed. I’m sorry. Stupidity does not deserve such a fearful punishment. We are all stupid at times, led blindly by our hopes or fears. Too busy looking at what we are running away from to see what we are running into.”
Joseph said nothing. Schenckendorff could have been speaking of a dozen different things, physical, emotional, or moral. In another time and place he could have liked the man, even been his friend. Now all that mattered was to clear him of blame so they could get him to London in time.
Joseph rose to leave, and as he was walking past the cots one of the prisoners spoke to him in excellent English, calling him by name. Joseph stopped. There was something familiar about the voice, but he could not place it.
“Chaplain?” the man repeated. He was lean and dark with prominent features, handsome in his own way.
“Do I know you?” Joseph asked, puzzled.
The man smiled. His head was bandaged, and there was still blood oozing over his right ear. There was also heavy padding on his right shoulder and arm. “Feldwebel Eisenmann,” he answered. “We discussed English football in no-man’s-land, 1915. I’m glad to see that you