Chapter Five
Vidal flung open the door of Mayfair it was feeding it.
What might stop it more quickly, he was beginning to think, was joining in, and throwing Vidal off-balance. So he covered Vidal’s hand with his own.
He let his palm settle over the back of Vidal’s fingers where they curled against his sleeve. Then, with extreme care, he lifted Vidal’s hand from his forearm and gave it one final pat.
“His Serene Highness is too kind, Madam.” Beauchamp folded his hands behind his back. “The cross is mostly his to bear.”
Penelope’s mouth had formed a soft O, her eyes glistening.
Vidal was looking down at his own hand, where Beauchamp had left it. The brightness in his expression was still there, but it had gone a bit wobbly at the edges, and Beauchamp felt the private pleasure of a man who had won this little skirmish.
“Mr Montcada?” A young woman in mint scrubs had appeared at the inner door with a tablet. “We’re ready for Mercè.”
“Vidal, please, we have been through this at the desk. Penelope —” he was already on his feet, both hands clasped around hers, “you have saved my morning. I will not forget your advice on the butcher. Ottoline, my love, adéu.”
He swept towards the inner door and was halfway through it before he turned and looked back over his shoulder, eyebrows raised, and Beauchamp followed with the carrier.
Beauchamp set the carrier down on the examination table, unzipped the mesh panel, and reached inside.
Mercè was hunched at the back, her bald flank quivering against the fleece liner.
Beauchamp slid one hand beneath her ribs and the other under her hindquarters and lifted her out.
She fitted entirely into the span of his palms. The shivering didn’t stop when he brought her against his chest, so he allowed himself, in the absence of any witnesses who mattered, to run the pad of his thumb very gently along the bony ridge between her ears.
“There,” he said under his breath. “Steady on.”
The trembling subsided into something more manageable, and the vet, a brisk woman in her forties whose name badge read DR AINSWORTH, came in with the import paperwork already open on her tablet and got to work.
The examination was thorough and unhurried, and Mercè bore it with resigned dignity. At the end of it, Dr Ainsworth listened to her chest, made a noise of professional approval, and pronounced her in decent order.
“She’ll need her titres redone in six weeks, but the chip reads clean and her vaccination history checks out. You can tell the Home Office she’s not bringing rabies into Mayfair.”
“Doctor, you are an angel of the Lord.” Vidal had risen from his chair and now took both of her hands in his.
“An angel. I shall have a candle lit for you at the Brompton Oratory by Sunday at the latest. That will have to do —” he cut a look at Beauchamp across the room, slow and pointed, “— as I have yet to acquire my Diptyque candles. Now tell me, and I ask this as a man whose dog is his only remaining dependant, what do you make of her coat? Be honest with me, doctor. I can take it.”
Dr Ainsworth told him what she made of her coat.
This led, by a route Beauchamp could not entirely follow, to a discussion of Mediterranean climates versus British ones, then to the doctor’s own holiday in Menorca the previous summer, then to a particular cove that Vidal insisted she must visit on her next trip and which he proceeded to describe in some detail, complete with the name of a man who ran a beach bar there and would, on the strength of Vidal’s name alone, pour her something cold and complicated on the house.
Beauchamp stood to one side with Mercè cupped against his chest and watched the second hand of the wall clock complete two full revolutions.
Mercè had stopped shivering altogether by the end of the first. By the end of the second, she had tucked her face into the gap between his lapel and his shirt and gone to sleep.
At length, Vidal kissed Dr Ainsworth on both cheeks, accepted a printed copy of the certificate, and swept out into the corridor towards reception still talking over his shoulder about the beach bar.
Beauchamp followed, with the dog.
The receptionist turned the card terminal towards Vidal with an apologetic smile. “That’ll be eight hundred and sixty-eight pounds, please, Mr Montcada.”
“Vidal, please.” Vidal produced a black Amex from inside his coat and laid it on the counter.
The receptionist tapped the card against the terminal. Then she frowned, tapped again, and waited the requisite seconds while the screen thought about it.
“I’m so sorry, sir, it’s been declined. Could we try inserting it?”
“By all means.”
She inserted it into the machine. There was a loud beep, and his smile began to fix at the corners.
“One more time?”
“Of course, of course. These machines, you know — there is a place in Rome where I have had this exact problem twice, and both times it was something to do with the satellites they transmit to.”
Beauchamp watched Vidal’s face from his post by the door. The brightness was still in place, but the line between his brows had appeared on the third attempt, and had not gone away.
“I do not understand,” Vidal said. He plucked the card back from the counter and produced a second from the same inner pocket, this one navy with a gold edge. “Try this one, please. The other has been giving me trouble in restaurants. I suspect a fraud alert. The bank in Geneva is very protective.”
The navy card went onto the terminal. The terminal considered it, and then declined it with the same indifferent beep.
Vidal scowled.