Free Broken Music by Marjorie Eccles

heavy shelling to start again from the other side; when he was wading thigh-deep through the disgusting black hell of thick mud, parts of other men’s corpses and the huge bloated rats that fed on them; during brief, temporary lulls in the fighting when he was lying, half awake, almost too exhausted, mentally and physically, to grab a few hours’ sleep; and latterly, between operations in the hospital when they were doing what they could with his mutilated face. It was the unutterable waste of lives – sons and brothers, husbands and fathers, boys barely out of the schoolroom – which invariably led him back to that other untimely death. That lovely young girl, before the war, found dead in the far-off, by then almost unimaginable beauty of a sweet English summer morning. Though she hadn’t been lovely anymore when he’d first seen her. By that time, twelve hours in the water had robbed her red-gold hair of its lustrous shine, her skin of its pale radiance, her body of life. He had, however, seen the photographs her distraught family had produced. In life she had been beautiful, a remote, pre-Raphaelite maiden, in death a Millais Ophelia .
    It was indeed partly because it wasn’t in him to leave anything unfinished that he had decided to come back here, but also because he felt that she, the victim, did at least have the right to have her pointless death explained, a basic human right denied the men who had died, equally pointlessly, for nothing, during the insane war that had for so long held the world in its fist. He had never been satisfied about Marianne Wentworth’s death.
    Reardon was a loner, with problems of his own to sort out. As yet, he hadn’t much idea what his future was to be. The only child of elderly parents, he now had no relatives or dependents, his father, the owner of a small printing works, having died while he was at the front, leaving him a tidy little sum which would last him until he made his mind up what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He was still not much above thirty, and if he did not in the end rejoin the police, he thought he might travel: to India maybe, China, take the golden road to Samarkand, explore unknown continents. A passionate self-improver, he wanted to study other peoples, other religions, see if he might begin to make sense of what the world had come to, and why. He had first suspected the non-existence of God when, as a young boy, he had seen his mother die agonisingly of cancer, a suspicion reinforced later in his police career, when he’d seen how men were brought to dishonesty, brutality and violence through poverty and ignorance. Had there been a God, He would surely never have allowed that. Nothing in the futile and inhuman slaughter of the last years had made him revise his opinions, but maybe, somewhere, there might be some sort of an answer.
    He knew that there was no question of the police reopening what it had suited them to write off as an open-and-shut case. Even supposing – and there was in his mind no certainty about this, yet – supposing he did take his old job back, he would not be allowed to resume enquiries. He was sailing close to the wind even now, in taking this on himself. And in any case, he admitted in the privacy of his own thoughts, finding answers might prove an impossible task. But he was damned if he wasn’t going to try.
    â€˜If you are not back in the police, do they know what you are doing?’ Nella Wentworth asked suddenly, very sharp, seeming to have followed his thoughts with an accuracy which for a moment disconcerted him.
    â€˜No,’ he answered honestly. ‘It’s a matter of personal satisfaction, wiping the slate clean. For you and your family, as well as for me.’ And perhaps a feeling that he had been spared, when so many others had not, to have the chance to right a wrong, he added to himself. It was on the cards that he might have come anyway, in the