At Some Disputed Barricade by Anne Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

compared with peacetime. Petrol was scarce and expensive, and the army had first call on good horses. There was something heartbreakingly drab about the quiet women waiting in queues or patiently walking along the pavements. The omnibuses had women conductors. One passed Matthew as he waited on the curb to cross. The driver was a woman also, her hair drawn back off her face and tied behind her neck. The girls who worked in munitions factories had actually cut theirs short. It was too easy to get it caught in the machinery and literally have one’s scalp torn off.
    No one seemed to wear red or pink anymore, as if it were somehow indecent in the face of so much loss.
    Matthew crossed the street and reached the other side, stepping up onto the pavement past a group of white-faced women, silent, each lost in her own world. There were such groups in every town and village all over Europe, waiting for the casualty lists. In some places where a whole brigade had been wiped out, every house in street after street would have the blinds half drawn and stunned, white-faced women would sit in the August heat and wonder how they were going to face tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that.
    Too much had been paid to allow this ever to happen again, anywhere, for any reason. To appease now would be to make this terrible sacrifice meaningless. That thought was not bearable.
    He walked past them to the top end, caught an omnibus to Hampstead Heath, and climbed the steps to the upper deck. He sat alone, his mind turned inward.
    He barely glanced at the streets he passed through. They were gray and dusty, the city trees in full leaf between the occasional stretch of fire-scarred rubble where a zeppelin had bombed.
    Was it possible that Hannassey had left some legacy behind him? Matthew had never imagined that the Peacemaker worked alone, but he had believed that the Peacemaker was not only the brain of the conspiracy, but the heart and the will of it also. Was he wrong? Was there still someone with the skill to concoct a plan like this and carry it through? Had the Peacemaker designed it and left the instructions before his death?
    He dismounted at Hampstead Heath and walked to the police station. With his credentials, it was not difficult to find a senior officer willing to tell him about the alleged incident, the young man involved, and his debts.
    “Miserable business,” Inspector Stevens said unhappily, sitting behind a desk piled with paperwork. He stirred a tin mug of tea to dissolve the sugar in it.
    Matthew had declined the offer of tea.
    “Could it have been a misunderstanding on Wheatcroft’s part?” he asked. “Unwise, perhaps, and young Pollock jumped the gun a bit?”
    “Of course it could,” Stevens answered. “Pollock withdrew the complaint anyway. Said he was put up to it when he was drunk and only half knew what he was saying.” His bland face registered a weariness and unutterable contempt. “Young waster should be in the army, like everyone else!” He could not disguise the bitterness and the grief in his face. For a moment it was embarrassingly naked. Matthew did not need to ask where his own son was, or if he was still all right. The answer was stifling, like the hot air in the closed room.
    “Why isn’t he in the army?” he asked, because he needed to know more about the boy.
    Stevens shot him a look of disdain. “If someone propositioned him, it’d be the first time he bloody complained about it!” he said hoarsely.
    “Obvious he was willing?” Matthew asked.
    Stevens raised his eyebrows. “You mean should Wheatcroft have known what he was and kept clear? Not necessarily. He wasn’t refused by the army for that. Flat feet! That’s what it says on the forms. But that isn’t the point. Wheatcroft said the whole incident never happened, and Pollock changed his story. Said Corracher put him up to it.”
    “Could that be true?”
    “God knows!” Stevens replied. “I doubt it. Wheatcroft denied