Shoulder the Sky (4 page)

And yet they had instructed Sebastian Allard to kill John Reavley the very next day. Therefore they had to have known that he had it, and that he would be driving down that particular stretch of road that morning.

The Peacemaker could only be someone who knew John Reavley personally, and also knew that his second son worked in London in the Intelligence Services, and would be the obvious person to whom to take the document.

Who had contacted Sebastian Allard with information and instructions in the few hours of the afternoon or evening after Reisenburg had given John Reavley the document, and before he had set out the next day for London?

Sebastian was dead, as was his brother, Elwyn. Their father, Gerald, was drowned deeper than ever in the brandy bottle, and their mother, Mary, was broken by the fury and shame of the scandal. She had changed her name and left Cambridgeshire, with its unbearable past, behind her. She had not adopted any family name, either on her parents' side, or Gerald's, but something totally unconnected. It had taken Matthew this long to find her where she worked as a voluntary aide in a military hospital outside Brighton.

It was early afternoon when he parked in the gravel space outside the entrance and climbed out, grateful to stretch his legs after the two-hour drive. He went up the steps, enquired in the hallway if he could speak with Mrs. Allan, and was directed to one of the wards.

On the way there he passed a young man, looking no more than twenty, sitting in a wheelchair. The way the rug fell over his lap made it apparent he had only one leg.

Matthew did not want to look at it. He was twisted with pity, guilty for being able to stride out easily himself, and he was in a hurry. He was acutely aware that Joseph would have felt the same, and would have stopped. It often surprised him how much he missed Joseph now. Since he lived in London and Joseph had lived in Cambridge, he had not expected to.

"Good afternoon," he said with a smile. "Am I heading the right way for Ward Three?"

"Yes, sir," the man assured him with a sudden light in his face. He looked at Matthew's uniform but saw no regimental insignia on it. "Straight ahead."

"Thanks," Matthew acknowledged, and went the rest of the way and through the door. He saw Mary as soon as he was inside. She was wearing a grey skirt and blouse with a white apron over it, rather than the fashionable unrelieved black silk of mourning that he had last seen her in, but she was still gaunt-faced, her body almost fleshless, shoulders high and thin, backbone like a ramrod. She took no notice of him, concentrating on her task of rolling bandages. She was probably used to people coming and going in the ward.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Allan," he said quietly, using her new name in order not to embarrass her. "Can you spare me a few minutes of your time?"

She stopped, her hands motionless, the bandage in the air. Very slowly she turned, but he knew that she had already recognized his voice. Her angular features were pinched with fear and her dark eyes shadowed. She stared at him without speaking.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Allan," he repeated her new name to let her know he had no intention of ripping away the mask she had so carefully constructed. There was such tragedy between them, wounds to which healing could not be imagined. Both his parents were dead at her son's hands, both her sons were guilty of murder and suicide, the scandal had destroyed everything she cared about and it was his brother who had exposed it. She had no dreams left and the emptiness was there as she looked at him.

"I assume you have some reason, Captain Reavley," she replied without expression in her voice.

"Maybe we could walk outside?" he suggested, glancing towards the door, which opened on to a terrace and then the lawn, where he could see at least half a dozen young men in chairs of one sort or another.

"If it is necessary," she answered. She did not betray any interest in what he wanted, nor did she ask how any of his family were, although she must have known Joseph and Judith were both in Flanders, because it had been general knowledge in the area before she had left it.

He led the way, their footsteps hard on the wooden floor of the ward. He was aware of at least two men lying silently in beds watching them as they went.

Outside the air was mild and still, sheltered by the high walls covered with roses and honeysuckle, not yet in full leaf. The sky above was milky blue.

"What is it you wish?" she asked, stopping well short of any of the other occupants of the garden.

He had given a great deal of thought to what he would say to her, but nothing had ever been free from the pain of the past. There was no clean or kind way of phrasing it. Perhaps simple was the best.

He had decided to tell her as much of the truth as he dared. She was owed that much; she had lost more than any of them, and he saw no added danger in it.

"Sebastian did not act alone," he began. "Someone taught him ideas and beliefs, then told him what to do. He obeyed, thinking it would avert war. That person, apart from individual guilt for death in your family and mine, is also still free to commit treason and sabotage of England, and to help Germany in any way they can. Their motives don't matter, they must still be prevented. I cannot ask official help in this because I don't know whom I can trust."

The faintest, most bitter humour touched her face for an instant, then vanished, her black eyebrows rising so slightly it could have been only a trick of the light. "And you imagine you can trust me?"

"I've told you little you don't already know," he replied. "Added to which, I'm at a dead end. I cannot believe that you have any kinder feelings towards this man than I do."

The emotion was nowhere in her face except her eyes, which suddenly sprang to smouldering life. "I would kill him if I could," she replied. "I would like to do it with my own hands, and watch him go. I would like to see the knowledge in him, and the pain. I would make sure that he went slowly, and that he knew who I was."

The implacable hate in her frightened him, but he did not doubt her words. He found his mouth dry. Could he ever hate like that? He had lost his parents, and the grief might never completely leave him, but their deaths had been swift and honourable. Both her sons, the passion and the hope of her life, had been turned into murderers, and died by suicide. And yet neither of them had been evil he knew that as clearly as he saw the sunlight on the grass. They had been deceived and destroyed by others, and, in the end, crucified by shame.

"Unfortunately I haven't yet found him," Matthew said to her with a gentleness that amazed him that he could feel for her. She looked like some mythical fury rather than an ordinary twentieth-century woman standing on the lawn of a Brighton hospital. But then surely myth survived because it was a distillation of human truth? "You can help me," he added.

"How?" she asked, looking at the wheelchair-bound soldiers, not at him.

"Who contacted Sebastian the afternoon before the crash in which my parents died? In any way telephone, letter, personally, anything at all."

"How excruciatingly delicate of you, Captain Reavley." There was a hint of mockery in her voice. "You mean the day before Sebastian killed your mother and father!"

"Yes. The morning would have been too early; anything from lunch time onwards."

She considered for a moment or two before answering. "He had two or three letters in the early afternoon delivery. One telephone call, I remember. No one visited, but he did go out, and was troubled when he returned. I have no idea whom he could have met then."

"Did the letters come through the post?"

"Of course they came through the post! What were you imagining? Letters by pigeon? Or a liveried footman dropping something off in a carriage?"

"A message by hand," he replied. "It is simple enough to put something through a letter box, but it wouldn't have a franked stamp on it."

She let out her breath in a sigh. "Do you really think this is going to help you find him? Or that it will bring any kind of justice if you do? You won't be able to prove anything. You will look ridiculous, and whoever you accuse will walk away. You'll be fortunate if he doesn't ruin you for slander."

"You underestimate me, Mrs. Allan. I didn't have anything so straightforward in mind."

She stared at him. It was not hope in her eyes, making them so alive, but it was a flicker of something better than the dead anger before. "There was a telephone call, from Aidan Thyer, and then half an hour after that, Sebastian went out."

Aidan Thyer. He was Master of St. John's College in Cambridge, a position of extraordinary, almost unique, influence. Many young men's dreams and ambitions had been moulded by whoever had been Master of their college in their first formative years as adults, away from home, beginning to taste the wild new freedoms of intellectual adventure. Matthew could remember his own Master, the brilliance of his mind, the dreams he had started, worlds he had opened for his students. Who better to teach Sebastian to be an idealist who would kill for peace?

If it were Thyer, it would hit Joseph profoundly. But pain had nothing to do with truth.

"Nothing between?" he asked Mary Allan. "No one to the door, even at the back? No deliveries, no tradesmen?"

"No," she answered.

Was she being careful, or trying to avoid an answer that would hurt so deeply? But the contact had to be someone John Reavley had known, and presumably trusted. It had to be someone close enough and with the intellectual and moral power to have influenced Sebastian to kill two people he had known for years,

the parents of the man who had tutored and helped him even before he went up to university and even more afterwards.

"Did he say anything about where he was going?"

"No. Do you think it was to see Aidan Thyer?" Her voice was crowded with disbelief. After Sebastian's death she had stayed in Thyer's house! He had witnessed her grief, and appeared to do all he could to help.

"I don't know," Matthew replied truthfully. "There are lots of possible explanations. But it is at least somewhere to begin. Someone told Sebastian what to do, and where my father would be."

"Why could it not have been at any time?" she asked, frowning slightly. "Why only in the afternoon of the day before? Why did he do it? Your brother was Sebastian's closest friend."

"I know. It had nothing to do with Joseph. It was political." That was as close to the truth as he would come.

"That's absurd!" she retorted. "Your father used to be a Member of Parliament, I know, but he didn't stand for any convictions Sebastian was against. He didn't stand for anything out of the ordinary. There were scores of men like him, maybe even hundreds." It was possibly not intended to be rude, but her tone was dismissive and she made no effort to hide it.

Matthew pictured his father's mild, ascetic face with its incisive intelligence, and the honesty that was so clear it was sometimes almost childlike. Yes, there were many men who believed as he had, but he himself had been unique! No one could fill the emptiness his death had created. Suddenly it was almost impossible for Matthew not to snap back at Mary's callous remark. It required all his self-control to answer civilly.

"And had any of those hundreds been the ones to learn the information he had, and had the courage to act on it," he said carefully, 'then they would have been the ones killed." He deliberately avoided using the word 'murdered'.

Her face pulled tight and she turned away. "What information?"

"Political. I can't tell you more than that."

"Then go and talk to Aidan Thyer," she told him. "There's nothing I can do to help you." And without waiting for him to say anything more, or to wish him goodbye, she turned and walked back towards the door inside, a stiff-backed figure, every other passion consumed in grief, oddly dignified, and yet completely without grace.

Matthew remained outside, and went back to the car along the grass and around the footpath.

Chapter Two

"I don't know," Sam said wearily, pushing his hair back and unintentionally smearing mud over his brow. "It's such a bloody mess it's impossible to tell for sure. Looks like one of the props came loose and some of the wall collapsed. But what made it happen could be any of a dozen things. How much of his hand has he lost?"

They were in Sam's dugout, off the support trench. It was three steps down from the trench itself, a deep hole in the ground, duckboards on the floor, a sacking curtain over the door. Inside, it was typical of many officers' quarters: a narrow cot, a wooden chair and two tables, both made out of boxes. There were several books on a makeshift shelf beside the bed, a little poetry, some Greek legend, a couple of novels. There was a gramophone on one of the boxes, and inside the box about twenty records, mostly classical piano music Liszt and Chopin, a little Beethoven and some opera. Joseph knew them all by heart. There was also a photograph of Sam's brother, younger, his face pinched with ill health.

"Two middle fingers, I think," Joseph replied. "If it doesn't get infected he might keep the rest."

Sam had brewed tea in his dixie can, which was carefully propped over a lighted candle. He had a packet of chocolate biscuits, which had come out of a parcel from home. He poured the tea, half for Joseph, and divided the biscuits.