His voice was soft, very polite. He was a rather elegant man.
“Joseph Reavley. I am a chaplain in the army. I live in Selborne St. Giles, in Cambridgeshire.”
“And why are you not with your regiment now, Captain Reavley?”
“I was injured, but I am due to return as soon as you permit me,” Joseph replied.
“When your duty here is completed, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Just so. How long ago were you wounded, and when did you go from hospital to St. Giles?”
Joseph gave the answers, and detail by detail the prosecutor drew from him his involvement with solving the murder of Theo Blaine, his acquaintance with Blaine’s widow, his conversations with Hallam Kerr and with Inspector Perth. It was a meticulous, almost dry, account, but then there was no jury to impress, no emotion to manipulate. The three judges would deal only with facts.
Throughout it all it was a battle between Joseph and Corcoran, who sat staring as if Joseph were the betrayer and he the victim, a man in an impossible situation who had been beaten by circumstance, and in the end turned on by the one person he trusted like a son. Such was the agony in his face that Joseph became more and more certain that he had actually convinced himself it was so.
Worse was to come. The defense lawyer, a lean man with fair, receding hair, stood up and walked toward Joseph, stopping a couple of yards in front of him.
“Would you like to sit down, Captain Reavley?” he asked courteously. “I know you received serious wounds which must be barely healed. We do not wish to cause you unnecessary pain.”
Joseph straightened his shoulders and stood even more crisply to attention. “No, thank you, sir. I am perfectly recovered.”
“I understand you have been awarded the Military Cross for your heroic efforts in bringing back dead and injured soldiers from the mud of no-man’s-land in Flanders?”
Joseph felt himself color. “Yes, sir.”
“Is that part of an army chaplain’s duty?” The defense seemed surprised.
“Not technically, sir, but I believe it is morally.”
“So you are willing to define your moral duty outside the army’s terms of reference?” He smiled very slightly, his voice still soft. “The army tells you one thing, but you have added to it others far more dangerous, risking your own life and very nearly losing it, because of the way you perceive your own duty?”
Joseph could see the pitfall ahead; he had dug it himself and there was no honest way to avoid it. “Yes, sir. But I am far from the only chaplain to do that.”
“Ah, I see. Soldiers must obey orders, but chaplains have a higher master, a different morality, and can do as they themselves think fit?”
Joseph could feel the heat in his face and knew it must be plain to others. “Most soldiers will risk their lives to save their friends, sir,” he replied stiffly. God, he sounded self-righteous. He loathed it. “If you had someone you were responsible for,” he went on, “some young man of nineteen or twenty who had gone out to fight for his country, was lying injured, bleeding in the mud of no-man’s-land, and you had it in your power to go and look for him, perhaps bring him back alive, wouldn’t you?”
There was a faint rustle of movement in the room, a kind of sigh.
“What I would do is immaterial, Captain Reavley,” the defense replied, shifting his weight and then taking a step or two to face Joseph from a different angle. “We are establishing what you will do. It is quite clear from what you have said that you make your own rules, answering to what you believe is a higher authority than human law.”
The prosecutor rose to his feet.
“Yes, yes,” the central judge agreed. He turned to the defense. “Mr. Paxton, you are drawing too high a conclusion. We take your point that Captain Reavley is a man who follows his belief in morality without being ordered to. Please proceed.”
“Thank you, my lord.” Paxton turned to Joseph again. “I shall not ask you to repeat your testimony regarding the death of Mr. Blaine, or your growing acquaintance with Mrs. Blaine after her widowhood. It all seems to be perfectly clear. But I will ask you to repeat what she said about her husband’s ability. And then, if you would be so good, tell us what you did to ascertain for yourself that it was indeed true. What is Mrs. Blaine’s knowledge of the situation at the Establishment, other than what her husband told her? And it is regrettably beyond doubt that he was more than willing to deceive her in matters surely more important to her than his professional skill, relative to that of Mr. Corcoran.”
Joseph had no choice. Reluctantly he admitted that he had accepted Lizzie’s word, without corroboration.
“You seem somewhat gullible, Captain Reavley,” Paxton observed. “Well meaning, but easily led where your affections, or your own perceptions of your duty, are concerned.”
“Is that a question, my lord?” the prosecutor demanded, his voice edgy, his face pale.
“Perhaps it should be,” Paxton rejoined immediately. He looked at Joseph. “You seem to wish to be all things to all men, Chaplain. No doubt a noble and Christian desire, but you may well end in betraying one in order to be loyal to another. And I fear in this instance it is your lifelong friend, Shanley Corcoran, who is going to suffer for your very mixed emotions, and what you feel to be a higher duty than that which you have been given. My advice to you would be to do what you have been commanded to, and do it well. Leave the rest to others, before you meddle where you do not understand, and end in doing irretrievable harm, not only to individual men, but to your country.”
Joseph stood rigid. Was it true as he had feared? He tried to be all things to all men, and was in truth nothing inside, empty? He looked at Corcoran. There was sweat on his face, but his eyes were gleaming. He had seen hope, and he would allow Joseph to be destroyed if he had to, to save himself. In that ugly, final moment Joseph was certain of it: Corcoran would survive at all costs.
Joseph turned away, sick at heart. He faced Paxton. “That is very good advice,” he said distinctly. “And it is what I did. Mr. Corcoran had said to me that he had killed Theo Blaine because Blaine was incapable of finishing the project they were working on, but to protect his own scientific reputation he was going to sell it to the Germans.”
Paxton’s eyebrows shot up. “Even though it did not work?”
“I didn’t believe it either,” Joseph replied, and saw Paxton’s face flame. “I went to Admiral Hall of naval intelligence and told him all I knew. He would be able to check on Theo Blaine’s abilities, and those of all the other men working at the Establishment.”
Paxton shifted his position again. “And if Blaine could not complete the work, Captain Reavley, but intended to betray what there was of it to our enemies, what would you have done in Mr. Corcoran’s place? You, who exceed your own orders and go over the top into no-man’s-land to bring back the dead? Is this not actually what you received your Military Cross for? Was not the journalist Eldon Prentice actually dead? It was a corpse you risked your life to bring back, was it not?”
“Victoria Crosses are given for a specific act of extraordinary valor,” Joseph corrected him. “Military Crosses are for a number of lesser acts. Lots of men go out to bring back the injured. You can’t always tell if they’re dead or not until you reach your own trenches. It’s wet and cold and dark out there, and you’re being shot at. Sometimes men die before you get them back.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Very moving,” Paxton said. “But irrelevant. There are many kinds of courage, moral as well as physical. I repeat, if you knew for a certainty that the most brilliant scientist in your Establishment was also a traitor, but you could not prove it to others, what would you do, Captain Reavley?”
Joseph closed his eyes. This was the moment. Corcoran was sitting rigid, staring at him. He could feel his eyes as if they burned a scalding heat onto his skin. “I would do what I have done,” Joseph replied. “I would take the evidence to naval intelligence and let them deduce from it what they would. I could be mistaken.”
“And was Mr. Corcoran mistaken, in your opinion? Did he act in error?”
Joseph’s mouth was dry, his heart pounding. “No. I do not believe so. He described a scientist whose ambition and hunger for glory was so consuming that he would betray everything and everyone else, rather than yield the ultimate achievement to another. He would sooner have Britain lose than win with someone else’s invention. But it was not Theo Blaine he was describing, it was himself.”
