Hugh didn't answer until a few more strides across the muddy compound had passed beneath his feet. Then he said, also quietly, as if the two men were sharing some secret, "No. I don't think so, either. Not after he put that fist in my face. Now that made sense, I guess, if anything around here can be said to make sense. But that's not the problem, is it?"
Tommy shook his head as he answered.
"The problem is that right now everything seemingly points to him. Even his denials are more suggestive of his being the killer than not. It wasn't hard for you to turn him inside out, either. Makes me wonder what sort of a witness on his own behalf Lieutenant Scott can be."
Tommy was struck by a thought: When the truth seems to support a lie, wouldn't the reverse be accurate as well? He did not say this out loud.
"We still haven't considered the blood on his shoes and jacket. Now, Tommy, how the hell did that get there?"
Tommy walked a few more paces, himself, considering this. Then he answered swiftly, "Well, Hugh, Scott told us that he sneaks out to use the toilet at night. No one sneaks anywhere wearing a pair of clomping flight boots on old creaking wooden flooring, do they? Wake up the world that way.
And no one wears their flight jacket to bed, even if it is cold.
I'll bet he hung his from a nail on the wall, just the same as everyone else in that room. Same as you and same as I. How hard would it have been to borrow these items?"
Hugh grunted. Then he said, "I'll jolly well wager my next chocolate bar that this is precisely what Phillip was driving at earlier. A frame-up."
"Fine, but why?"
Hugh shrugged.
"That one eludes me. Tommy. I haven't the slightest idea."
The two men continued' walking quickly, until Hugh asked, "I say.
Tommy, we seem to be in a hurry, but where are we heading?"
"To the funeral, Hugh. And then I want you to go find someone and interview him."
"Who would that be?"
"The doctor who examined Trader Vic's body."
"I didn't know a doctor had examined the body."
Tommy nodded his head.
"Someone has. In addition to Hauptmann Visser. We just need to find that person. And in this camp there are only two or three logical candidates.
They're all over in Hut 111, where the medical services are located.
That's where you're heading. I'll do the escort job for Lieutenant
Scott. Not going to make him walk across the camp alone…"
"I'll join you for that. It's not likely to be pleasant."
"No," Tommy replied with more bravado than he thought necessary.
"I'll do it alone. I want your participation to be concealed, at least until we get our first hearing. And even more critically, let's make certain that no one knows how Phillip is guiding our hands. If there is some sort of frame-up and conspiracy and whatever, it's better that whoever it is doesn't know that one of the Old Bailey's best is aligned against him."
Hugh nodded.
"Tommy," he said, grinning slightly, "there is some slyness to you, as well." He laughed sharply, but not with a great deal of amusement.
"Which is probably a right good ling," he muttered, as they walked faster, "given what we're up against.
Whatever the bloody hell that is."
The hulking Canadian took another few strides forward, and then asked, "Of course. Tommy, one question does leap fairly swiftly to mind: What the hell sort of conspiracy could we be talking about?" Hugh came to an abrupt stop. He looked up, across the exercise yard, past the deadline, past the towers, the machine-gun crews, the wire, and the long cleared space beyond.
"Here? I wonder, whatever could we be talking about?"
Tommy followed his friend's eyes, staring out past the wire. He wondered for an instant whether the air would taste sweeter on the day he was freed. That was what poets always wrote, he thought: The sweet taste of freedom. He fought off the urge to think of home. Images of Manchester and his mother and father sitting down to a summertime dinner, or Lydia standing beside an old bicycle on the dusty sidewalk outside his house on an early fall afternoon, when only the smallest insistence of winter is in the early evening breezes.
She had blond hair that dropped in burnished sheets to her shoulders and he found himself reaching up, almost as if he could touch it. These pictures rushed at him, and for a single instant the harsh, grimy world of the camp started to fade from his eyes. But then, just as swiftly as they came, they fled.
He looked back at Hugh, who seemed to be waiting for an answer to his question, and so he replied, with only the smallest hesitation and doubt in his voice:
"I don't know. Not yet. I don't know."
Kriegies did not die, they merely suffered.
Inadequate diet, the obsessive-compulsive manner in which they threw themselves into sports, or the makeshift theater or whatever activity with which they decided to while away time, the oddity of their anxieties about whether they would ever return home coupled with the ill-adjustment to the routines of prison life, the seemingly constant cold and damp and dirt, poor hygiene, susceptibility to disease, boredom contradicted by hope, which was in turn contradicted by the ubiquitous wire-all these things made for a curious tenuousness and fragility to life. Like Phillip Pryce's lingering cough, they were constantly being intimidated by death, but rarely did it come knocking with its harsh demands and fearsome requirements.
In his two years in confinement, Tommy had only seen a dozen deaths, and half of these were men who went wire crazy and tried to blitz out in the middle of the night, dying in the fences with homemade metal cutters in their hands, chopped apart by a sudden burst from a Hundfuhrer's machine pistol or a tower machine-gun crew. And over the years, there were a few men who had arrived at Stalag Luft Thirteen after suffering terrible injuries falling from the air and then inadequate care in German hospitals. The day and night constancy of the Allied bombing raids had limited the precious medicines and antibiotics available to the Germans, and many of their better surgeons had already died -in forward hospitals treating men on the Russian front. But Luftwaffe policy toward the occasional Allied airmen seemingly at risk from wounds or disease was to arrange repatriation through the Swiss Red Cross. This was usually accomplished before the unlucky flier succumbed. The Luftwaffe preferred terminally sick or injured kriegies to die in the care of the Swiss; then they appeared less culpable.
He could not recall an instance where a kriegie was buried with military honors. Usually deaths were handled quietly, or with some sort of informal moment, like the jazz band's honoring one of their own. He thought it surprising that Von Reiter would permit a military funeral; the Germans wanted kriegies to think like kriegies, not like soldiers. It is far easier to guard a man who thinks of himself as a prisoner than it is to guard a man who thinks of himself as a warrior.