Nobody Salutes The Son-in-law

Chapter Five: Five In The Morning

Hadley Garland found Dawes in the garage that night, wiping down the car under a single bulb.

"From tomorrow, you drive Mrs. Elise Delancey," Hadley said. "Wherever she goes, you go. Who she sees, what she carries, how long she stays. You report to me, not to her and not to her mother." He tucked an envelope into the breast pocket of Dawes's jacket and patted it flat. "There'll be one of those every week."

Dawes looked at him for a moment. "Yes, Mr. Garland."

Hadley left whistling. Dawes finished the bonnet, folded the cloth, and drove straight to the Military Medical Centre.

A soldier walked him up to the ward without asking a single question. Hadrian was sitting beside his mother's bed with the lights turned low, and he stood when he saw who it was. Dawes came to attention as well as a one-armed man could, then took the envelope from his pocket and laid it on the bedside table.

"Garland wants me watching your wife, sir," he said. "I told him yes."

Hadrian looked at the envelope for a long time. "Then watch her," he said. "And call me the moment anything feels wrong."

Elise was at the Delancey Freight warehouse on the docks, with her phone face down on the desk beside her and eleven missed calls from her mother on it. She had been there since morning, going through the strange manifests one by one, and by ten that night she had found the pattern.

Every month for two years, a consignment of crates had left the warehouse marked FARM MACHINERY. Every month they went to the same small port near the old front line, and every month the invoice went to the same buyer. There was no company name, no address and no account number, only one word typed into the buyer's box: Quartermaster.

Nobody near the front line had bought a tractor in years. The farms up there had been burned out long ago.

She found the newest crate at the end of the third aisle, stencilled exactly like the others, and fetched a crowbar from the loading bay. The lid came up with a screech that echoed off the iron roof. Under a layer of straw, packed in neat rows and gleaming with oil, lay rifles.

Elise stared at them with the crowbar still in her hand. Then she climbed the iron stairs to the little office on the catwalk to copy the manifest, because without proof nobody would ever believe her.

She was halfway back along the catwalk with the pages in her hand when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

Two men came up out of the dark. She knew their faces vaguely from the loading crews, men Hadley had taken on last spring. The first one held out his hand. "Phone, Miss Delancey."

She gave it to him, because there was nowhere to run. The catwalk was a narrow strip of steel mesh twenty feet above the concrete floor of the loading bay, and the second man was already beside her. He took her arm almost politely and began to walk her toward the rail.

"Hadley will hear about this," she said, and her voice came out higher than she meant it to.

"He already has," the man said.

Outside, in a car parked in the shadow of a shipping container, Ned Dawes had made his call the moment their van pulled up.

The loading doors banged open below. Elise saw a figure cross the bay at a run and take the iron stairs three at a time, and then the man holding her arm was suddenly not beside her any more. She heard one heavy sound and then another, quick and flat, like sacks dropped on a floor. When she turned, both men were lying on the mesh and her husband was standing over them. Neither of them had seen what hit him.

Hadrian picked up her phone and the manifest she had dropped, and he put them both into her hands. He didn't ask if she was hurt. He looked at her face and seemed to find the answer there.

Dawes had the car waiting at the warehouse doors. Elise didn't remember getting into it. She only knew that she was in the back seat and couldn't stop shaking, her teeth knocking together, her fingers locked around the manifest so hard the paper creased. Hadrian took off his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders. He didn't tell her she was safe or that everything would be fine. He sat beside her in the dark, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the coat, and said nothing at all until her hands were steady again.

She woke at dawn on a narrow sofa she didn't recognise, still wrapped in his coat.

It took her a moment to place the room. It was the small room behind the kitchen, the one her mother had given him the week of the wedding, with a single bed, a wardrobe and a window that looked out over the yard. Her own bedroom window faced it from the other side. She had looked down at this window more often than she would ever admit.

Hadrian was standing at the glass with his back to her. The clock on the wall said five.

For two years, every morning at exactly five, she had watched him do this from across the yard. He stood perfectly upright for one minute, heels together and hands at his sides, without moving at all. She had always put it down to a soldier's odd habit, like squared bed corners and early nights.

On the table beside the sofa lay the morning paper. The photograph filled the top half of the front page, three hundred old soldiers in Victory Square with their hands raised, saluting the back of a man nobody could name. Beneath it, the article explained that the Varn Pass silence was held at five in the morning, once a year, at the hour the rear guard fell. Only the men who had been there, it said, still kept it every day.

Elise looked at the man in the photograph. Then she looked at the man at the window.

The coat over his arm in the picture was her mother's.