Nobody Salutes The Son-in-law

Chapter Two: The Marshal's Leave

Families were not allowed to wait outside the theatre doors at the Military Medical Centre, but nobody told Hadrian Reid to move.

He sat on a plastic chair in the empty corridor with his elbows on his knees, and for the first time in two years he let himself remember the bridge.

Four years ago, at the Varn Pass, a rear guard of thirty-two men had held a stone bridge in the snow while the Northern Army turned the enemy's flank. Only one of them lived, an eighteen-year-old private named Jonas Merrick, and he lived because Hadrian went back up the mountain for him himself. He carried the boy down on his back for two days, through drifts that reached his waist, talking the whole way so Jonas wouldn't fall asleep and never wake.

The army made him the youngest Marshal in its history. Then it buried his name. The militias still fighting in the mountains had put a price on the Marshal's family, so his face was classified, his records were sealed, and the man who had saved the Northern Army officially did not exist.

Two years ago, his mother fell ill. Hadrian took leave to be near her and became someone else, a discharged corporal with a quiet manner and no particular prospects. Every cent of his real pay went to the families of the men who had died on that bridge. He had never felt it was his to keep.

The same month, he pulled Godfrey Delancey out of a burning car on the motorway. The old man had been trapped behind a buckled door while other drivers filmed from the hard shoulder, and Hadrian broke the window with his elbow and dragged him clear before the fuel tank caught. Godfrey was proud and old-fashioned, and he made up his mind from his hospital bed. Any man who runs into fire, he announced, is the husband I want for my daughter.

Elise agreed for her father's sake. Hadrian asked for only one thing in return, that his mother be cared for. Weeks after the wedding, Godfrey had a stroke that took his speech, and Lucinda had run the house ever since. She ran the son-in-law too, or believed she did.

Hadrian rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock above the theatre doors. Elise would be landing soon.

She landed at seven and went straight from the airport to her office. The emails had flooded in the moment she switched her phone on, and one of them was the cancellation of Edith Reid's care. It carried her signature. She hadn't signed it.

She stood at her desk with the printed form and studied her own name, written in a hand that was close to hers but not quite right. The loop of the E was too careful. Someone had practised.

Hadley was waiting for her in the outer office. His collar was torn open and a purple bruise was rising along his cheekbone, and he got to his feet the moment she walked in, as if he had rehearsed that too.

"I didn't want you to hear it from anyone else," he said. "Your husband came here this afternoon. He was out of his mind. I tried to explain your mother's decision, and he..." He touched the bruise and winced.

Elise looked at the bruise for a long moment. Then she looked at the signature. "Then explain why you cancelled his mother's medicine in my name."

Hadley opened his mouth, and nothing useful came out of it.

"I'll have the original from the hospital by morning," she said. "Go home, Hadley."

He didn't go home. By the time Elise's car pulled up outside the Delancey house, every downstairs light was on.

Lucinda met her in the hallway in cream silk and pearls, perfectly composed. "Hadley has been loyal to this family for six years," she said. "Your husband is a houseguest who still forgets to use the side door. I know which of them I believe."

"He forged my signature, Mother."

"Hadley acts on my instructions. If you have a problem with a signature, take it up with me." Lucinda smoothed a crease from her sleeve. "The assault is another matter. That belongs to the police."

A heavyset man in a rumpled raincoat stepped out of the drawing room as if he'd been listening for his cue. "Detective Cobb," he said, showing Elise a badge without quite letting her read it. "We're just waiting on Mr. Reid."

Halfway up the staircase sat Tarquin, her younger brother, with his phone already held up and a grin on his face. "The lads are going to love this," he said.

Hadrian came home at half past ten. He had left his mother asleep in a guarded room, and he walked through the front door with his jacket over his arm and the smell of hospital soap still on his hands. He saw Cobb, the handcuffs, Lucinda's small satisfied smile and the phone pointed at him from the stairs, and he understood all of it before anyone spoke.

"Hadrian Reid," Cobb said, "you're under arrest for the assault of Hadley Garland."

Elise stepped between them. "He was at the hospital with his mother all day. I can have that confirmed in ten minutes."

"Then he can tell us all about it at the station." Cobb didn't take his eyes off Hadrian. "Hands where I can see them."

Hadrian could have ended it with a single call. By morning, Cobb would be directing traffic in a town nobody had heard of. But he had already made one call today, and there were men in the mountains who would pay a great deal to learn the Marshal had a mother. He would not risk making another.

He set his jacket down on the hall table and held out his wrists.

"Hadrian, don't," Elise said.

"It's all right," he told her, gently, the way he'd spoken to his mother in the corridor that afternoon.

Elise didn't move. She stood with her back to the detective and her hand pressed flat against her husband's chest, and for a moment nobody in the hallway said a word. Tarquin leaned forward on the stairs to get a better angle.

Then Cobb reached past her, snapped the cuffs shut, and took him anyway.