PART 1 — THE DOORWAY
My jacket was still pressed when I came off Fort Callow and drove the fifty-one minutes to Redvale General.
The sun was going down across the ribbons on my chest and the plate above the pocket. ROARKE.
That night I was not a colonel. I have said that sentence to myself about four hundred times since and I am no longer certain it is true, and I will come back to that.
A nurse put a hand up in the corridor. “Ma’am, you can’t go through.”
“Junie Roarke. Where is she.”
She looked at my face and then at the uniform and stood aside, and I have thought about that too.
Junie was on her side under a thin blanket in an observation bay. One eye closed over. Her lip split. Marks round both forearms that were the shape of hands.
The white dress she had put on that morning was torn at the shoulder.
“Mum.”
I got hold of her and she shook the way she used to shake in a thunderstorm at six years old, when I used to tell her nothing was going to get to her.
And somebody behind me laughed.
“She’s always been dramatic.”
Fletcher Wynn-Dale was in that doorway with his mother Cordelia and his brother Alaric. Good coats. Good watches. Not one of the three of them looking at the bed.
Cordelia smiled at me.
“Colonel Roarke. Your daughter had an episode and fell. Nobody touched her.”
Junie’s hand closed on my sleeve.
“They locked me in the guest house,” she said. “They took my phone. They said if I left him they’d finish me.”
Fletcher rolled his eyes. “She exaggerates. She’s very sensitive.”
And Alaric said, “Some women marry into families they can’t manage.”
I have been shouted at by better men than Alaric Wynn-Dale. Twenty-six years teaches you that the angrier you are the quieter you go.
Cordelia came a step closer.
“Let’s not make this unpleasant. We have friends in the courts, in the papers and in the statehouse.” And then, leaning in: “Your rank does not impress us.”
Alaric said, “Take her home and be grateful.”
I looked at the three of them and said nothing at all.
And every one of them smiled wider, because they read it as fear.
Three things had happened in that room that none of them had noticed.
The first is that there is a camera above that doorway, and it had been running the whole time Cordelia Wynn-Dale was explaining to a witness that my daughter fell.
The second is that Junie had already told the emergency doctor something entirely different at twenty past four, an hour before any of them arrived, and it was in the notes with a time against it.
And the third is what my daughter had whispered into my ear while I was holding her, which not one of those three people knew she remembered.
I took my phone out of my pocket.
Cordelia’s smile went. “Who are you calling?”
I met her eyes and pressed the number.
See more on the next page
