Read Death at Dartmoor for Free Online Page A

and the prisoner thought he heard some sympathy in it. And why not? he reflected bitterly. The man could go home tonight to loving children and a trusting wife, while he—
    He swallowed. “ Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” And the thought came to him again, the frightful, gut-chilling thought that was never far from his mind, that Elizabeth was dead, and the baby within her, and that his bitter look was as much the cause of her death as the bloody poker that had smashed her skull. He might as well be punished for the one as for the other. Each was an equally hideous betrayal.
    The other prisoners traded quips as they marched—the ban on conversation was unofficially lifted outside the walls—but 351, as usual, kept his silence, remote and alone. Within the half hour, they arrived at the bog fields, where they joined the men already at work digging up stones, loading them onto wooden barrows and horse-drawn sledges, and stacking them as boundary walls under the wary eyes of the sentries. The authorities called it “reclaiming the moor,” but what they expected to do with it when it was reclaimed was more than anyone could see. Bracken and heather and rank grass were the only plants that flourished in the peat soil, and no matter how many rocks were removed, that many yet remained.
    His lips pressed tight together, the prisoner took up a long steel crowbar and began to pry up on a stubborn block of granite. The work actually came as a kind of relief, the effort loosening his muscles and making him sweat, its rhythms moving him into something of a meditative state. The other men worked together in noisy gangs, swearing and snarling at one another, but 351 preferred to labor alone, digging the stones and hauling them to the section of wall that he had taken as his responsibility. The task seemed to him something like that of a sculptor: envisioning the section of wall he wanted to build, selecting the proper stones, and wedging them into place against the force of gravity and the pressures of the other stones, in exactly the spot required to fill out and manifest his imaginary wall. Accustomed as he had been to working chiefly with his mind in what he now thought of as his “other” life, the life he had lived before he came to Dartmoor, there was something satisfying about the physicality of all this prying and lifting and fitting, under the open sky where the wind blew off the high tors hard enough to push a man right off his feet. The prisoner could feel his body growing stronger and more able, and after the first week of work in the bog fields, he began to imagine everything around him as empty spaces to be filled, while his mind searched for exactly the right shapes to fill them.
    One of the other prisoners came up to him, his black brows pulled together in an envious scowl. “Wish I wuz a Scotsman,” he growled. “I don’t much fancy Bibles, but I bloody well wud’ve liked t’ lay me eyes on that mission‘ry ’oo wuz passin’ ’em out. ’Aven’t seen a woman in two bloody years.” He grinned toothlessly. “Lay eyes, did I say? Lay me ’ands, is wot I mean.”
    The prisoner didn’t answer. But the remark brought back the scene in the chapel, the young woman in the somber black dress and bonnet of the Salvation Army, her blue eyes passionate, her tremulous voice half breaking as she said “God bless you” and whispered the number of his verse, handing him the Bible in which he was meant to look it up. Her cheeks had been red-stained, her eyes brimming with tears, and he could smell her scent.
    He arched his back and gave a mighty push down on the bar, and the stone began to lift. But at that moment a flowery perfume struck his nostrils with such a poignant force that he had to stop and sniff the air, half persuaded that the young woman in the Army bonnet had followed him here, to this very field. And then he