Chapter Thirty-Four
Benton opened the door to James’s private apartments and got as far as “Good after—” before Vidal swept past him without breaking stride, his face set in the expression Barnaby privately categorised as Mediterranean Fury: Contained But Imminent.
“I had no part in this,” Vidal announced to the room at large, which was currently empty save for James’s corgis and a red box on the coffee table. He turned to Barnaby, one finger raised. “Let me be absolutely clear. I had no part in this.”
Barnaby came through the door behind him, hoisting two Five Guys bags by their handles.
The paper was warm and translucent with grease, the spots spreading outward in slow, dark blooms that would have horrified him six months ago, and now struck him as evidence of a meal worth eating.
Just on special occasions, though. He set them on James’s coffee table and wiped his greasy palms off on a tissue.
“You didn’t have to come,” Barnaby said.
“You are carrying fast food into a royal palace where my great-great-great-great-grandmother Victoria was born. Of course I had to come. Someone needs to witness this desecration.”
James appeared from the corridor in joggers and bare feet, his reading glasses pushed up into his hair. He perked up at the sight of the bags. “Is that Five Guys?”
“It is Five Guys,” Barnaby confirmed, already pulling out foil-wrapped burgers and distributing them across the table. “I got a bacon cheeseburger with extra pickles for you. Cajun fries, large, to share. And a vanilla milkshake.”
James sat down and unwrapped his burger, clearly delighted by this break from palace food. “What are we celebrating?”
“The collapse of British civility,” Vidal sniped, even as he picked up a chip and scarfed it down.
Barnaby settled into the armchair opposite, tucked one leg beneath him, and grabbed three Cajun fries from the shared carton before anyone else could establish territorial claims. His face was bright in a way that Vidal’s thunderous expression made all the more conspicuous.
“I have big news,” he said.
Vidal’s jaw tightened. “So do I. Barnaby has officially abandoned all hope of human connection and requires an emergency cock intervention before his arsehole fossilises.”
James tipped his head back and laughed, even as he crammed a handful of fries into his mouth. “Noted. Now, Bash, before you respond to Vidal’s not entirely unfounded statement, what’s your news?”
“Brookridge received a donation,” Barnaby said. He picked up another chip and bit into it, letting the Cajun spice settle on his tongue before continuing. “Four million, three hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds. Given anonymously!”
The room went still. James’s burger hovered an inch from his mouth. “I’m sorry. Did you say four million?”
“Four million, three hundred and twenty-five thousand!” Barnaby could hear the grin in his own voice and didn’t bother suppressing it.
“Greg told me in the break room yesterday. He thought there’d been a clerical error when he saw it come in, and so he spent twenty minutes on the phone with the bank confirming the transfer was real before he even told me about it. ”
James set his burger down. He wiped his hands on a napkin with careful movements. Vidal had gone quiet.
“We can replace the prefab,” Barnaby went on, because the plans had been building behind his skull for hours and the pressure of containing them had become physically uncomfortable.
He wanted his plans for the future out in the world.
“We can set up a proper indoor school, with heating, that’s fully accessible!
I’ve got my layouts sketched. And obviously, they’re not very good, but I can sort that out… ”
He was talking too fast. He knew this because James had gone soft around the eyes, the look that usually preceded a big hug.
“I can finally do up Brookridge the way I’ve always wanted to,” Barnaby continued, his voice dropping. “I’ve been seeing it in my head all these years, and now I can make it all real! I can get more people involved…”
He looked up and caught the glance that passed between James and Vidal.
It lasted just half a second. James’s hazel eyes moved to Vidal’s dark ones across the coffee table. Vidal’s expression shifted: his theatrical pout dissolved, his eyes went bright and liquid, and his chin developed the faintest tremor.
“What?” Barnaby asked him. His hand went to swipe at his mouth, in case he had a smear of sauce there that Vidal was judging him for.
“Nothing.” Vidal’s voice was thick. He waved a hand and turned his face toward the window, blinking rapidly. “It is my allergies. Your English pollen is aggressive.”
“It’s March.”
“Yes, but climate change has thrown the state of the world off. Don’t interrogate me, Bash. I have diplomatic immunity in all things.”
James picked up his burger again. He took a measured bite then said casually, “So the donation was entirely anonymous?”
“The donor requested no contact.”
“Through which mechanism? A charitable foundation? A solicitor’s trust? Direct bank transfer?”
Barnaby frowned. “Yes, direct transfer, Greg said. Why?”
“No reason.” James reached for a chip. “It’s just that direct transfers of that size typically come from individuals rather than institutional donors.
Foundations prefer grant agreements with reporting obligations.
A direct transfer suggests someone who already trusts the organisation’s governance and doesn’t need oversight built in. ”
“Or someone who wants to stay anonymous and chose the simplest route.”
“Also possible.” James’s tone remained perfectly conversational.
“Four million, three hundred and twenty-five thousand is an interesting figure, though. It’s not round enough to be arbitrary.
If you wanted to make a splashy gesture, you’d give five.
It’s a number that’s been calculated against something specific.
A budget, perhaps. A set of known costs. ”
Barnaby lowered his chip. The Cajun seasoning was suddenly very present on his tongue.
“It sounds like this is from someone who knew what Brookridge needed,” James continued, examining a fry with scholarly interest, “and had an idea about what it would cost. Down to the figure that you’ve been holding in your head for years.
That suggests familiarity with the centre’s operations. Intimate familiarity.”
“James.”
“Mm?”
“Are you really interrogating me about this anonymous donation?”
“I’m asking you questions. There’s a distinction, although I grant you it’s a fine one when the person asking happens to be your head of state.
” James ate the chip. “Whoever made this gift knew enough about Brookridge to calculate the precise amount required for the improvements you’ve just described, and two years of operational costs.
That’s a figure that you’ve only ever told me, and Vidal, because you think your father will consider your goals too unrealistic. ”
The silence that followed was occupied by Vidal sniffing loudly into a napkin and James regarding Barnaby over the top of his vanilla milkshake with a neutral expression.
“Furthermore,” James said, and Barnaby’s stomach sank, because James deploying furthermore meant the cross-examination was entering its second phase.
The push. “Anonymous charitable giving of this magnitude has specific tax implications. If the donor is a UK-resident, they’d claim Gift Aid, which would leave a paper trail.
If they’re non-domiciled but UK-earning, the structure gets more complex.
And if they happen to be, say, a professional athlete with substantial fight purses held in a management company — hypothetically only — the tax-efficient route would be a direct transfer from the company rather than a personal account, which would show up as a corporate gift rather than an individual one.
” He paused. “Did Greg mention whether the transfer came from a personal account or a corporate entity?”
Barnaby stared at him. “I didn’t ask.”
“You might want to.”
Vidal had given up all pretence of composure.
He was clutching the napkin against his mouth with both hands, his eyes streaming, his shoulders shaking with the effort of containing what was clearly a full emotional detonation.
When Barnaby looked at him, Vidal shook his head violently and made a strangled noise.
“This is not about Lex,” Barnaby said.
James said nothing. He sipped his milkshake and let his silence do all the work for him.
“It’s not,” Barnaby repeated uncertainly. “Anyone could have…there are hundreds of donors who could have done it! The centre has a public profile, James. We’ve been featured on BBC South East. People give anonymously all the time.”
“People give five hundred pounds anonymously. People do not give four million, three hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds anonymously unless they have a specific reason to ensure the recipient cannot refuse, cannot return the money, and cannot pick a fight about it.” James set the milkshake down.
“Which rather narrows the field to someone who knows you well enough to anticipate that your first instinct, upon learning who’d given it, would be to hand it back on principle. ”
The room was very quiet. Vidal had buried his face in the sofa cushion, his shoulders heaving.
Barnaby looked at the Five Guys bag on the table. The grease spots had spread further, dark and definitive against the brown paper. His hands were in his lap, his fingers laced together, gripping hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
“I ended things with him,” he said. “He has no reason to do this for me.”
James leaned forward. His elbows settled on his knees, and his reading glasses slid from his hair onto the bridge of his nose, which undermined the gravity of his posture in a way that Barnaby would have found funny under any other circumstances.
“Bash.” His voice was gentle. “This is what love looks like when you won’t let it reach you any other way. ”
“You need to take this, Bash. Own it,” Vidal said, lifting his face from the cushion. “Don’t let this be a goodbye.”
Take the win, Barns. Lex’s voice, rough and warm, sounded in Barnaby’s head as clearly as though Lex were sitting right next to him. You take what the world offers while you still can.
Barnaby looked down at his hands and forced them to loosen finger by finger, until his palms fell open in his lap. “I need to think…” James and Vidal said nothing, which was how Barnaby knew that they understood exactly how much the ground had just shifted under him.