Read To Love a Traitor for Free Online

patronising men who were far braver than he. “But you mean the men who went on that last patrol with Hugh, don’t you?”
    “I do indeed. Tell me what you heard from your young lady friend, and I’ll tell you if it fits what I’ve found out.”
    “Well, according to Mabel, some of the reports were contradictory, but there was talk of one man—a Lieutenant Matthew Connaught—who had had a stroke of luck not being caught up in it all. He’d been supposed to be going with them—no one seemed to know why—but the night before, he got a bullet in the leg. It was put down to enemy fire, but, well, I find that a little hard to believe.” Roger shrugged. “Granted I was never in the trenches, but it seems to me the angle’s all wrong. Perhaps if he’d poked his head above the parapet and a sniper had taken an ear off, but a leg?”
    “You think it sounds fishy, don’t you?” Sir Arthur’s good eye had the disconcerting quality of seeming to see right through Roger, while giving away in return no more than did his glass one. “Sort of thing a man might do to himself if he fancied sitting that one out, hm? After all, it was only a minor injury. Didn’t put him out of active service for long—just long enough to avoid the patrol. And of course, after that one ended in disaster, daytime patrols were rather discouraged. No point simply throwing men away. Not until one has to.”
    That was as close as Sir Arthur ever came to criticising the way the war had been run in the field.
    “Yes—you see, sir?” Roger asked eagerly. “It’s just the sort of thing a man might do if he knew the fellows who went on that patrol were going to be gunned down.”
    Sir Arthur huffed. “I don’t like it, though. Not as proof he was a traitor. Man might just have got himself into a blue funk about the whole thing. Then again, I suppose, if the injury was self-inflicted, why not go the whole hog and give himself a Blighty one?”
    Roger nodded, pleased to find Sir Arthur seemed to share his views on the matter. “Because if he was passing information to the enemy, he’d want to stay out there at the Front.”
    “Or, of course, it may be that it was simply an accident, and he was covering for one of the men—wounding a superior officer, even by accident, is a damned serious matter.”
    Oh. Perhaps Sir Arthur wasn’t as convinced as Roger had thought. Roger’s face must have fallen at the thought, because Sir Arthur looked at him and gave a dry, wheezy chuckle.
    “Don’t mind me. I’m just playing Devil’s advocate. No, as it happens, I did think Matthew Connaught’s interestingly timed wound warranted further investigation. So I had a look at the war diaries of your brother’s battalion for the period in question.” He huffed. “Well, to be perfectly honest I had Miss Pendleton take a look at them, but she’s got a damn good eye, and she came up with something all right. If it is something.” Sir Arthur paused, and scowled. “Damned if I know if I should tell you this or not, might just be putting the wind up you for nothing, but, well… For what it’s worth, there was one—and only one—entry that might just possibly have been suggestive. Have a read of this.”
    He handed Roger a single sheet of paper, upon which a single paragraph had been neatly typed:
    25th February 1917. Lt. Connaught has made friends with a dog that wandered into Summer Trench yesterday and keeps returning. No censure to be applied as it appears to be beneficial to the men’s morale to have a mascot .
    Roger read it through once more, not quite following. “That’s it? I’m sorry, sir. I don’t… Oh.” Realisation came with blinding force, and he cursed himself for an idiot. Of course . “You mean to say Fritz was using dogs to carry messages across the lines?”
    He’d heard, of course, that dogs had been used behind the lines in some cases. But across no-man’s-land, under machine gun fire and shelling? Could an animal really