Nobody Salutes The Son-in-law

Chapter Three: What The Camera Kept

Detective Cobb liked to conduct his interviews at night, when people were tired enough to say things they would regret in the morning.

He sat across the metal table from Hadrian with a paper cup of coffee he didn't offer to share, and he started gently. A man under pressure, his mother in hospital, his wife's family looking down on him every day. Anyone would snap. Hadley Garland had said the wrong thing at the wrong moment, and Hadrian had lost his temper. Sign a statement, plead guilty, and the magistrate would be kind.

Hadrian looked at him and said nothing.

By two in the morning, Cobb had stopped being gentle. He talked about prison, about how long the Delanceys could keep a man in court, about how nobody would miss a discharged corporal with a temper. He slammed his palm on the table hard enough to tip over his cup. Hadrian watched the coffee run to the edge and drip onto the floor, and he kept his hands folded and his mouth shut. He had learned patience in places where impatient men died.

At four, Cobb gave up and sent him to a cell. "You'll talk," he said from the door. "Everybody does."

Just before six, the duty sergeant came down the corridor with a plain brown envelope, the seal taped and signed across. "Courier left this for you," he said. "Wouldn't give a name."

Inside was a single card in handwriting Hadrian knew. Seven hours on the table. She woke at three and asked for you. Out of danger. A.O.

The general hadn't phoned, and he understood why. Calls into a police station could be recorded, and anyone listening might wonder why the deputy commander of the Northern Army cared about a corporal's mother. Hadrian read the card twice, tore it into small pieces, and flushed them away. Then he lay down on the bench, closed his eyes, and slept for the first time in two days.

Elise spent that night at Lowmoor General.

She had gone there at midnight for the original cancellation form, and the night clerk told her it couldn't be released without the administrator's authorisation. So she sat in the empty waiting area under the humming lights and refused to leave. Around three, an older man in a grey security uniform stopped in front of her and asked if she was Mrs. Reid.

Nobody had ever called her that before.

"Dr. Pennington had yesterday's footage wiped," he said quietly. "Corridor and car park both. I made a copy first. I didn't like what I saw."

His booth was a cramped room behind reception, warm from a bank of monitors and smelling of instant soup. He pulled a chair out for her and pressed play.

The corridor came up in grainy black and white. Elise watched two orderlies park a trolley beside the lifts and walk away. She watched visitors step around the old woman lying on it, and she watched her husband sit down beside her and take her hand. He stayed like that for over an hour, leaning close, talking. In two years of marriage, Elise had never seen his face soften like that. She had never given it a reason to.

"There's more," the guard said, and switched to the car park.

The timestamp read late afternoon. Hadley Garland got out of his car, looked around twice, took hold of his own collar with both hands and tore it open. Then he bent down and struck his cheek against the edge of the car door, once and then again, before checking the result in his wing mirror.

Elise made the guard play it three times. Then she asked for a copy, and he already had one waiting on a memory stick.

By eight the next morning, that copy was on the desk of Cobb's commanding officer. The superintendent watched it in silence, then picked up his phone. Twenty minutes later, the assault charge was dropped.

Hadrian walked out of the station into a grey, damp morning and found Elise waiting by her car. She had not slept either, and it showed.

"I'm sorry about my mother," she said.

It was the most she had said to him in a month. He knew what it cost her, and he didn't ask for more.

"Thank you for coming," he said, and she nodded once and unlocked the car.

They drove home without another word. Lucinda was waiting in the morning room with the newspapers spread across the table and a cup of tea at her elbow, as though the police had never been in her hallway.

"Don't imagine this changes anything," she said, without looking up. "Hadley made an error of judgement. You are still exactly what you were yesterday."

She turned the front page toward him. Under a photograph of a tall granite stone, the headline read PATRIOTS OF THE PASS.

"On Sunday, this family will sit in the front row at the unveiling of the Varn Pass Memorial," Lucinda said. "Delancey Freight carried that stone down from the mountain free of charge, and the whole country knows it. The minister will thank us personally."

Hadrian looked at the photograph. The names were too small to read in newsprint, but he didn't need to read them. He knew all thirty-one, and the order they had fallen in, and which of them had been laughing when the first shell came over the ridge.

"You'll carry my coat," Lucinda told him, "and you'll stand at the back."

"Yes, Lucinda," he said.

Elise wouldn't be there. She told her mother she had work, which was true, though not in the way Lucinda assumed.

If Hadley could put her name on one document without her knowing, he could put it on others. So every night that week, after the office emptied, Elise sat alone at her desk and went through Delancey Freight's shipping records line by line. Most of it was exactly what it should be, timber and grain and machine parts moving along routes she could have drawn from memory.

By Saturday night, she had found a stack of manifests she didn't recognise.