A Love Like Blood Read Online Free Page A

as the private drove us slowly back into town.
     
    I don’t remember anything else about my time in Paris, nothing in detail. I suppose it was around then that the men began to whisper about me, nudging each other and winking when they thought I wasn’t looking. The private had obviously been talking.
    But I didn’t care about that. I had few friends amongst the men; I’d never found it easy to be one of them, as some of the other officers did. I’d always been set apart, and this gossip made little difference to me.
    We left the city in the early evening and returned to station. Amid the noise and activity of the unit, it was easier to hide my silence. A torpor and introspection settled in me, and that night I lay half awake, replaying the scene I’d witnessed, again, and again, and again.
    Of course, I hadn’t even dreamed yet of the full horror of the situation. That this moment would cling to the rest of my life, weighing it down, crippling it, pulling it in a direction I would never have wished it to go.
    No, then all I could think about was the woman on the ground, the man squatting over her.
    In my mind she became more beautiful every time I replayed the scene, though thinking back now I’d seen her in less than half-light, for a few seconds, in a moment of great shock. Maybe she had been very beautiful, maybe very ugly, I don’t know, but there had been an elegant curve to her jaw, finely shaped eyebrows, waves of thick dark hair, and I’d seen her as attractive.
    I berated myself. Would it be any less terrible if she’d been hideous? Of course not.
    And the man. Him.
    I’d seen his face most clearly in profile, and then, as he turned slowly to look at me, in full. His nose strong but not big, his dark brows, his eyes, mocking me.
    I could not understand everything about the way he had looked at me; that would come later. For the whole of that first wretched night, I was consumed by other, more immediate questions.
    Who was he? Who was she? Was she someone he knew, or some poor girl he had lured into the hole in the manner the private thought I had been trying to?
    Had he killed her? That seemed likely, but maybe not. Maybe he’d just found her, and . . .
    What?
    Cut her body and drunk her blood?
    I questioned again if that’s what I had really seen. It was ludicrous; it was, as I’ve said, something I should not have seen, something wrong. Not just violence, not just murder, but something even more depraved than those acts.
    My mind turned over and began to sink beneath these awful thoughts, but still sleep did not come till the very early hours, as daylight returned. And yet, even in sleep, and as I forced myself awake again, and as we struck camp that morning, and even as we began to roll further east chasing our men chasing the German forces, one question rose to dominate all my other thoughts.
    It was the question that drove me to where I am today, that ate away at my sense of self for year after year, and it was this.
    I said that the young woman’s body was lifeless, but even on the way back to the city in the jeep, I had begun to realise that that was an assumption I’d made. It was dark. It only lasted a few seconds. I saw a terrible and shocking thing.
    I’d assumed she was dead.
    But what if she wasn’t, what if she’d still been alive when I’d found her? What then?

Chapter 4
     
    In March 1951 , I went back to Paris.
    After the war, I’d returned to London briefly, but then took a specialism, telling myself that it would offer a better career, though in truth it was more something that happened than something I chose.
    The chance to move back to Cambridge was all I thought about, and when a position arose in the small Department of Haematology, I took it.
    I had further studies to do, and I did them diligently. I worked hard, but I also enjoyed being back in the place I felt was home, with some old friends around me; people like Hunter, an English professor who was a lifelong family