Angels in the Gloom by Anne Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

memory of his parents’ broken bodies after the car crash. The police had called it an accident and nothing public had ever suggested otherwise.
    To talk about numbers of losses was one thing; to see the blood and the pain in real people was quite different. He understood very well why soldiers ran away rather than take cold steel in their hands and plunge it into another human being. The fact that that other man was German was irrelevant. He was flesh and bone, capable of exactly the same emotions as themselves. Perhaps for some the nightmares would never entirely go. He did not want to be the kind of man for whom they would. He was intensely grateful that his job had never required him to meet his enemy face to face and exercise the violence of death. He did not delude himself that he was somehow absolved from the results of any victory he might win, and of course he was not; he was merely spared from the sight and the memory of it.
    Detta was looking at him curiously. He caught in her eyes an unguarded moment of compassion.
    “He’s a chaplain,” he said quickly, to explain that Joseph was not a soldier. Although since he was Protestant, not Catholic, perhaps in her eyes that would be even worse. He found himself smiling at the lunacy of it; it was that or rage, or tears. “A shell ripped his leg open and smashed his arm pretty badly, but the doctor says he’ll not lose it.”
    She winced. “I suppose he’s in considerable pain,” she said gently.
    “Yes.” He needed to go on; the next thing had to be said, but he hated it. “The casualties are heavy at the moment. He was out over no-man’s-land carrying back a pretty badly wounded soldier, someone from our own village—not that that makes any difference, I suppose. We’re desperately short of ammunition. We’re having to ration it, so many bullets per man. They’re being shot at, and they can’t shoot back. We’re buying stuff from America, but it’s being sabotaged at sea, and when it gets here it’s no bloody use!” There was more anger in his voice than he had meant there to be, and his hand on the table next to his glass was clenched tight. He must think clearly. He was here to do a job, not to indulge his fury.
    “Sabotaged?” She affected surprise, her dark eyes wide. “The Americans would never do that, surely?”
    “At sea,” he corrected her.
    “At sea? How?” She did not disguise her interest.
    That made it easier. Now they were playing the game again, threading the lies in with the truth, testing each other, tying the knots of emotion tighter and tighter.
    “Smoke bombs,” he answered. “Pack them in the hold, along with the shells, and set them to go off when the ship’s at sea. It looks like fire. Then, of course, the captain has no choice but to flood the holds, and the shells are damaged. Not all of them, and there’s no way to tell which. From the outside they look perfectly all right. We’re so desperate for munitions, we can’t afford to turn them down.”
    “How do you know they’re smoke bombs?” she asked. “Do you find them?”
    “We know they’re being put there,” he answered. “We have men in several of the American East Coast ports.” He was not sure whether to go on. Was that enough? Might she realize what he was doing if he added any more?
    “Then why don’t you stop it?” she said curiously, her faintly uneven brows giving her a quizzical look. “You can’t be squeamish! Or are you afraid of upsetting the Americans?”
    He gave her a sidelong, incredulous look. “Of course we aren’t squeamish! What about? Taking out one or two saboteurs? Showing them up to the Americans? We can do it without causing a diplomatic incident. It’s just too soon to act. We know who they are. If we take them out now, they’ll only be replaced by others that we don’t know. Far better to wait, and trace the whole organization, then we can get rid of all of them.”
    “How can you do that?” She turned her