Nobody Salutes The Son-in-law

Chapter Eight: The Lake House

Tarquin came to his sister's office at nine the next morning, and for once he wasn't holding his phone.

He was unshaven and still wearing yesterday's shirt, and when he saw Hadrian sitting by the window, he stopped in the doorway. "Can we talk alone?"

"No," Elise said. "Sit down."

He sat. For a moment he stared at the edge of her desk, and then his face crumpled like a child's.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Elise, I'm so sorry. Hadley put papers in front of me two years ago and told me it was farm machinery. By the time I understood what I was signing, he had me. He said he'd swear I'd known from the start." He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. "I saw what you showed the board yesterday. I know you've found the crates."

Elise said nothing. She let him go on.

"The shipping codes are in the family safe at the lake house. Hadley made me keep a copy there, in case he ever needed to hold it over me." Tarquin leaned forward, his voice cracking. "Drive out with me tonight. We'll open the safe together and take everything to the army. I'll tell them it was all him. Please, Elise. Let me put this right."

Elise looked past him to her husband.

Hadrian had sat by that window every day since the warehouse. He had heard every word, and he had heard what Dawes overheard in the garage. He gave her a small nod.

"All right," Elise said. "Tonight."

The lake house stood an hour north of Lowmoor, at the end of a long gravel track through the pines. The family hadn't used it since Godfrey's stroke. Tarquin drove, and for the first twenty minutes he talked without stopping, about their father, about summers on the jetty, about how sorry he was. Then the talking ran out, and he drove the rest of the way in silence, checking his mirror every few seconds.

Elise sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched the trees go by. She knew exactly what was waiting at the end of the track. Hadrian had told her that afternoon, quietly, in the small room behind the kitchen. He would be there first, and she was not to get out of the car until she heard his voice. She had agreed. She had not told him how badly she wanted to be wrong about her brother.

"You're quiet," Tarquin said.

"I'm tired."

The house was dark when they arrived. The headlights swept across the front windows and the long lawn that ran down to the water, and then Tarquin switched off the engine and the night closed in around them. He got out and walked to the front door with the keys rattling in his hand.

Elise stayed where she was.

Tarquin unlocked the door and pushed it wide. Then he stepped aside and turned back toward the car. "Elise? Come on, I can't find the light."

She didn't move. Through the open doorway, the hall was black and silent.

Tarquin looked into it, then back at the car. His smile slipped. "Hello?" he called softly into the dark, and nobody answered him.

"They're out here, Tarquin," said Hadrian's voice from the lawn.

The porch light came on.

Four men lay face down on the wet grass in a neat row, their wrists bound behind them with plastic ties. They had been waiting inside the house for Elise, but Hadrian and Dawes had come out an hour ahead of them, and the four men were on the lawn before Tarquin's car had finished parking. Dawes knelt on the back of the largest one, pinning him with his single arm, and he looked up at Tarquin with a wide grin.

"Evening, Mr. Tarquin," he said.

Elise opened the car door and got out.

Tarquin ran. He went past the porch and down the lawn toward the jetty, his shoes skidding on the grass. The jetty ran fifty yards out over the black water, and there was nothing at the end of it, but he ran anyway, his footsteps drumming on the boards. Hadrian walked after him. He didn't hurry. He caught his brother-in-law at the very end of the jetty, with nowhere left to go but the lake, and took him by the collar and sat him down on the planks.

Tarquin didn't hold out long.

He told them everything, with his knees drawn up and his voice shaking. Hadley had come to him two years ago with a little money and a lot of promises, and all Tarquin had to do in return was sign. Every month there was a sheet, and every month he signed it, and every month the envelope arrived. He told himself it really was farm machinery right up until he couldn't.

"Then the photograph came out," he said. "The soldiers and the coat. Hadley knew it was you the moment he saw it. He told the Quartermaster, and the Quartermaster told him to bring the Marshal's wife across the border. As long as they had her, you'd never testify." He looked up at his sister, standing a few feet behind her husband on the boards. "He said if I didn't bring you, they'd come for me instead. I was scared, Elise. You don't know what he's like."

"So you sold me," Elise said.

Tarquin opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

He had been more afraid of the Quartermaster than of losing her. They both knew it, and there was nothing left to say about it. Elise listened to the rest without a single tear. When he had finished, she held out her hand, and Hadrian gave her his phone. She called General Okonkwo herself.

The army arrived within the hour, a convoy of trucks grinding up the gravel track with its headlights blazing through the pines. While soldiers loaded the four men into the back of a truck, Elise walked into the house, turned on the lights in her father's old study and knelt in front of the safe.

She still knew the combination. It was her own birthday.

Inside, behind the deeds and her mother's jewellery boxes, sat a plain grey folder. The shipping codes were all there, two years of them, every crate and every rifle. Tarquin's lie had been built around the one tr

ue thing he told her.

They had been in the safe the whole time.