Chapter Ten
Vidal went up the garden steps at a clip that sent the hem of his robe snapping behind him. Beauchamp watched him go without moving to follow.
He was in no hurry at all to catch up. His temper had been sitting low and unpleasant in his chest since the call with his commanding officer at ten, and the prince’s flounce had not improved it.
He wasn’t sorry he’d raised his voice, or that he’d used the prince’s first name.
Vidal needed pulling out of the clouds and setting down on the pavement with the rest of them, and if the landing had bruised his dignity, well.
Dignity healed. Beauchamp’s career might not.
“Go easy on him.”
Beauchamp’s eyes cut sideways. Connor was still on the grass, balanced on his heels with his towel looped round his neck. They’d known each other for less than two weeks, and Connor was already telling him how to handle his principal.
Every resident in the building had been run through a background check before the Fitznorman-Bicester people had handed over the keys, and Connor Evans’s screening had run to fourteen pages.
The man had betting shops across three East London boroughs, a chain of thriving pawnbrokers, and an older brother whose name appeared in connection with a Serious Crime Directorate inquiry that had been quietly shelved in 2019.
Connor himself came up clean. He paid his taxes, declared his considerable income, and kept his books in the sort of order that suggested he knew precisely where the line was and had made a professional study of skating right on it.
What the screening couldn’t explain was why a passing acquaintance of Vidal’s was now telling Beauchamp how to handle him.
Beauchamp held his gaze, then turned and followed Vidal up the steps.
By the time he reached the top of the stairs, the click of Vidal’s bedroom lock had already carried down the corridor to meet him.
He let himself into the flat, set his keys on the console table, and stood there a moment in a residence he’d been in and out of over the last few days, and had never once heard go quiet.
He got to work.
He drew the long curtains across each of the drawing-room windows and checked the latches.
He stood in the middle of the room and considered the line of sight from the building opposite, which struck him as less than ideal, so he made a note to raise it with Young.
The kitchen window onto the mews was already shut.
He checked it anyway, tested the handle, and drew the blind down.
He found Young at the kitchen counter, kettle just coming up to the boil, and waved him off it before he could reach for a mug.
“Leave that. I want a full sweep done of the building. Every point of entry and egress needs to be checked, front and back, the mews gate, the service stairs, the lift shaft. Talk to the porter about the CCTV on the square side. I want to know what angle it’s holding and whether it’s been serviced this year. ”
“Sir.”
Young was on his feet before Beauchamp had finished, which he was glad of.
He liked Young, insofar as he permitted himself to like any of the men he worked alongside.
Young was serious without being grim, the sort who could stand at a doorway for six hours and remain sharp throughout, then still be a laugh when they nipped out to the pub afterwards.
When Young had let himself out, Beauchamp went back through the flat and started over from the beginning.
He tested every window latch along the front elevation.
He walked the length of the service corridor and satisfied himself that the back door was bolted top and bottom.
Then he examined the sightlines from the drawing room a second time, from three separate angles.
Around half past eleven he went into the kitchen and made up a plate.
He piled on strips of jamón ibérico, a slice of the sharp manchego Vidal had pronounced acceptable on Tuesday, and a few torn pieces of the good sourdough.
He added a small pile of olives from the jar on the counter, because a plate without olives would be received as a moral failure and sadly attributed to his Englishness.
He carried it down the corridor, set it on the floorboards outside the bedroom door, and knocked once.
“I’ve left some lunch out here for you, sir.”
Through the afternoon he kept an eye on the corridor between his other tasks. At one, the plate was where he’d left it. At half past three, the olives had begun to sweat and the food had still not been touched.
The buzzer for the front door went off at around four, sustained and insistent. Beauchamp crossed to the intercom.
“Hello?”
“I’d like to see my son. Open the door, please.”
Beauchamp scanned the screen beside the intercom, confirmed that the face turned up towards the camera was in fact Her Serene Highness Princess Anne of Cardona, and buzzed her in. He was at the top of the stairs by the time she came round the landing.
She arrived in a cloud of expensive scent and the soft rustle of a camel cashmere coat. A navy handbag was tucked into the crook of her elbow and a string of modestly sized pearls sat at her throat. Her hair was as dark as Vidal’s, pinned up off her neck.
“Major Beauchamp. Where is he?”
“In his bedroom, ma’am. He’s been —”
“Vidal.” She swept past him into the drawing room. “Come out, please, darling. Now.”
The bedroom door was flung open. Vidal came through the archway at close to a run, crossed the drawing room in three strides, and threw himself at her with the abandon of a much younger man.
She absorbed the impact of his weight. Her arms folded round him as Vidal pressed his face into the side of her neck.
“Mama.” His voice came out muffled against her coat. “Mama, you cannot believe, you have no idea. I have been in such a state. I cannot breathe in this flat. Papà was so angry, and the Major —”
“Yes, my darling.”
“— the Major has been walking round and round the flat testing the latches, Mama, as though someone were about to come down the chimney like the Grinch. I have been locked in that bedroom for hours, hours, with nothing but Mercè and my own dark thoughts, and she has not been good company. She’s been sulking because I would not take her into the garden a second time. ”
“Yes, my darling.”
“And I have not eaten, Mama. I cannot eat at a time like this, my stomach is in knots, my career as a serious political voice is over before it has begun.”
Princess Anne let him run his mouth. She held him through it, her hand moving in a slow even circle between his shoulder blades, and she let him spew his grievances against the shoulder of her cashmere coat without interrupting once.
When he finally paused for breath, she eased him back by the shoulders and looked at him.
“Vidal. You’ve done something very stupid.”
His mouth opened to protest.
“No. Listen to me, please. You filmed yourself delivering a political rant. You posted a video of yourself online that gave forty million strangers a look at your home and its surroundings, and you did it because you wanted the view count.”
“Mama, we need people to understand what’s been done to us!”
She lifted one hand and set the pad of her thumb against his cheekbone, holding his face in place the way one held the face of a distractible child.
“You’ve exposed yourself. And you’ve made a good man” — her eyes cut sideways to Beauchamp and back without her head moving — “spend his morning being shouted at by people that he’ll need to continue working for long after he’s left this post with you. ”
Vidal’s lower lip trembled.
“But.” Her thumb stroked once along his cheekbone, then came away.
“You’ll be largely fine. That upstart President Ferrer doesn’t see you, Vidal.
He doesn’t see any of us. We’re an inconvenience, a line item in his weekly briefing.
We’re not a threat. If we were a threat, you wouldn’t have been able to leave Cardona alive, and your father wouldn’t be in Geneva.
Do you understand the distinction I’m drawing? ”
“Forty million views is something, Mama. Forty million. I’ve put Cardona on the front of the Guardian, and you are telling me that none of it —”
“Vidal.” She gave his cheek a pat that tended more towards firm than tender.
“You’ve made yourself into a spectacle, my love.
That’s what your viewers cared about. Not Cardona.
Cardona is nothing to most people, exactly as it is everything to us.
They watched your video because a beautiful man was shouting about a caterpillar moustache in a foreign language, and now they’ll watch something else.
Don’t confuse their fleeting attention with their interest.”
Vidal said nothing. His eyes had gone very bright, and he wasn’t blinking. Beauchamp, who’d been standing by the console table with his hands folded behind his back through the whole of it, dropped his gaze to the carpet.
Princess Anne turned.
“Major Beauchamp.”
“Ma’am.”
“I don’t blame you for any of this. I want that clear before we go any further. I know my son, and I can tell you that there’s no briefing pack in the world that would’ve prepared you for the experience of being left alone in a room with him and a camera. You did what you were asked to do.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“You’re welcome. Now. Here’s what I’d like from you.
” She folded her hands over the clasp of her handbag.
“I’d like you to stay in this flat with my son.
I’d like you to sleep in the second bedroom, within speaking distance of him at all hours, and I’d like you to maintain that arrangement until I’m personally satisfied that the fuss has died down. ”
Beauchamp drew a breath to answer. She held up one finger without looking at him.
“Before you tell me it’s a security posture you can manage perfectly well from your own flat. I’m sure you can. That isn’t what I’m asking for.”
She turned her gaze back to her son, who’d stiffened against the arm of the sofa.
“What I’m asking for, Major, is an adult in the building, not a bodyguard.
I’d like my son to have to walk past another grown man and have to explain himself to someone in person before he picks up his mobile and gives the European press another day’s entertainment.
” She paused. “My son does many things impulsively, Major. He does rather fewer of them in front of an audience he’s fond of. ”
Vidal’s mouth opened. “Mama, this is humiliating!”
“Yes, darling. I know.”
“You are installing a chaperone!”
“I’m installing a witness to your actions, Vidal.
An accountability partner. You can’t help yourself around a camera, my darling.
You never could. And now you have forty million strangers clapping for you.
That’s a drug I am not prepared to let you take unsupervised.
” She turned her head without heat. “Major. Are you willing?”
Nobody in this entire operation seemed to understand that he had a job description, informal as it was, and that the job description didn’t include moving into his principal’s flat at the request of a woman he’d met ninety seconds ago.
“Ma’am. With respect. There are perfectly adequate security arrangements that don’t require me to be resident in the flat. I can have a man on the door around the clock. I can have Young upstairs.”
“No.”
The word landed flat on the parquet between them. Princess Anne had not raised her voice. Her tone, which had been warm and maternal three sentences ago, had simply gone steely.
“Major, I was just being polite. I was offering you the dignity of a conversation, because you’ve had a very trying morning and because I am fond of good manners. I wasn’t truly offering you a choice.” She inclined her head a careful fraction. “There isn’t one.”
Beauchamp’s hands, which had been folded behind his back in the posture he defaulted to when a principal was behaving unreasonably, did not move. He had been trained, at considerable expense to the taxpayer, to keep still while his life was rearranged around him.
“Ma’am.”
“The King’s Private Secretary spoke to your commanding officer at half past two this afternoon. I’m told the conversation was brief. I’m told your CO was relieved it had occurred to someone.”
Beauchamp’s eyes, very much against his professional training, went to Vidal across the drawing room.
Vidal’s eyes had already gone to him. Both their mouths opened at the same instant.
“No —”
“No, absolutely not —”
Princess Anne threw her head back and laughed.
It resembled Vidal’s laughter when he was enjoying a joke at someone’s expense, and it filled the drawing room.
She laughed until she had to press two fingers to the corner of one eye.
When she brought them away she was still laughing, and her warmth had come back into the room.
“Oh, my darlings. Oh, the two of you.” She shook her head. “I am going to enjoy this very much indeed.”