Chapter Thirty
The bones had been in the pot for four hours, and Vidal was using a slotted spoon to skim a fine grey scum off the surface of the broth. He had his mobile propped against the salt cellar, blaring out on speakerphone, when his father said the word Knightsbridge again for the third time.
“Pare. I am skimming the broth.”
“You can skim and listen to me at the same time, Vidal. You have always been very gifted at doing two things at once. It is one of your better qualities.”
“It is my best quality, and I am wasting it on a conversation I have already had with you twice this week.”
Carlos’s voice came down the line, muffled by distance. “The Knightsbridge tenant has gone, my boy. The flat is empty. It is a perfectly good flat, three bedrooms, a porter on the door, and the porter is very good with dogs. Mercè will adore him. He has a Schnauzer.”
“Mercè does not adore Schnauzers, Pare. She finds them too old looking, with their whiskers.”
Vidal laid the spoon across the rim of the pot and turned the heat down a notch.
The kitchen smelled of celery and the sweetness of marrow.
He was making this broth for Connor on the grounds that Connor had been sniffling into a tissue for the better part of three days now and refusing, with great working-class stoicism, to admit that he had a cold.
“Pare, I am not moving out of Barnaby’s flat.”
“Perhaps he would like it back, my boy. Perhaps you are encroaching on his kindness…”
“I’m paying him market rate rent, Pare. And Barnaby does not give a fuck about this flat. He has Lex now, and he is occupied with the very important business of being made happy in his own bedroom for the first time in his adult life.”
Carlos sighed in the way he did when his children were being wilfully dense. “The Knightsbridge property is yours if you want it. It is a better address. A better class of neighbours. You would have a porter at the door and Harrods on your doorstep, and you would not be — ”
“Pare. I am in MAYFAIR, in a pied-à-terre of the ducal Fitznorman-Bicesters. The bloke in the flat below mine is the son of a Saudi billionaire, and the woman in the ground floor flat keeps a Picasso in her downstairs loo. The class of neighbour is not the issue.”
“That is not the kind of neighbour I meant, Vidal, and you know it.”
The slotted spoon stilled in Vidal’s hand.
His father was using the gentle voice he fell back on when he was about to lay down the law. He set the spoon down on its rest and turned the gas off under the broth. Then he picked the mobile up off the salt cellar and took it off speakerphone to hold it against his ear.
“Pare, what are you getting at?”
“Vidal.” His father drew in a long breath that came down the line as a dry rasp against the speaker.
“Connor Evans, when we met him, came across as a very handsome and worldly man. Your mother liked him a great deal. I shook his hand and I drank his Rioja, because that is what one does when a son’s friend comes to be presented. But he is not the man for you, my boy.”
“Pare.” His voice had risen a register. “My brothers taught him El cant dels ocells. We had many dinners with him, and now you tell me he is not for me?”
“That all happened before a review of his associates was given to me, Vidal.”
“A review of his — what are you talking about, Pare? A review by whom?”
“By the people whose job it is to provide such reviews, my boy. I am going to read you something. I want you to listen, and then we shall talk.”
There was the rustle of paper being shifted on the other end of the line. Vidal lowered himself onto the kitchen stool.
“Connor James Evans. Born Bow, East London, nineteen eighty-one.
Director of Evans and Sons Limited, a chain of seven pawnbroking establishments and four licensed betting shops trading across East London and into Essex.
Director of three further companies registered to the same address, two of which are dormant.
“Subject is the younger of two brothers. The elder, Patrick Sean Evans, born seventy-eight, has been the subject of three separate Serious Crime Directorate inquiries between two thousand and eleven and the present, none of which has resulted in charges being brought. Areas of interest have included: the alleged provision of debt-recovery services to third parties; the handling of stolen high-value goods through the family’s pawnbroking businesses; and a suspected role in the laundering of cash receipts from a number of nightclubs in the Romford and Ilford area.
“Connor Evans has not personally been the subject of an inquiry. He is, however, named in the asset registers of two of his brother’s companies, and his pawnbroking premises have, on multiple occasions, been the point of entry into the system for items subsequently traced to thefts under investigation by Essex and Metropolitan forces.
“Subject’s working assessment is that of a man who maintains plausible deniability through the strategic separation of his commercial activities from those of his brother’s, while continuing to derive material benefit from the wider family enterprise.”
Carlos paused.
“Shall I go on, my boy? There is a great deal more on Patrick. I do not think you will enjoy it.”
The broth was ticking down to a simmer behind him. He could hear the small wet popping of the marrow in the bones, and underneath it the steady mechanical hush of his own pulse against the inside of his ear.
He knew that prose.
He knew the itemised cadence of the clauses, the careful phrasing and the polite archaic register of the terminology used like ‘areas of interest have included’.
He recognised the professional discipline that had built the sentence about Connor not personally being the subject of an inquiry, and then proceeded to outline his grey area associations.
He knew which man wrote like that. He had sat at Vidal’s own kitchen table in a navy jumper, drafting cohabitation protocols and briefing documents to his commanding officers.
Beauchamp.
“Pare, you do not know Connor as I do. You met him for a few evenings over Rioja, and a piece of paper has now told you what to think of him. That is not how a man assesses another man.”
“Vidal—”
“He came up the stairs the night I was hit by a car, Pare. He sat with Beauchamp at my bedside until I came round. You shouldn’t judge a man like that by the actions of his brother.”
“My boy, listen to me!”
“He has been kinder to me than anyone in this country other than Beauchamp himself, and now Beauchamp has taken his polite Sandhurst pen to him and reduced him to the most sensationalist aspects of his character. Pare, you are reading me a report. You are reading me a piece of intelligence work, drafted by a man with a grievance, and you are asking me to take it as the whole truth of a person.”
“Vidal, Beauchamp—”
“May I remind you of who we are. We are the Montcadas, and the eight hundred years of our line are not a procession of saints. Avi Lluís ran half of the contraband tobacco in the western Mediterranean for the better part of his thirties, and you have a photograph of him in your study with a cigar the size of his forearm. Our great-aunt Pilar was married off to a Sicilian whose family business was, by any honest reading, the systematic robbery of every shipping route between Palermo and Tunis, and we still toast her at Christmas. The Bishop of Lleida who confirmed me had three illegitimate children by a woman in Tarragona. Do not lecture me about the proximity of Connor Evans to commercial activity that does not bear close inspection. Half the men whose names are written into our family Bible would not have survived a Beauchamp report!”
“That’s an uneven comparison, my son! The men who built our line did so in a different century, when these things could be carried by a great house and absorbed into its history.
We are no longer a great house, my boy. You are Mr Vidal Montcada now, and Mr Vidal Montcada cannot afford to be photographed in the company of a man whose brother has been the subject of three Serious Crime Directorate inquiries. ”
“He is named in the asset registers of two of his brother’s companies, Vidal.
He is not a passive bystander. The report is very clear on that point.
I’m not asking you to abandon him as a friend completely.
Accept the Knightsbridge flat’s keys when I have them couriered to you on Tuesday, and place a little distance between you and a man who, however charming you find him, is going to cost you a great deal more than he gives you in the long run. ”
“He has never asked me for a single thing, Pare.”
“For now, Vidal.”
The kitchen had gone quiet around him. He could hear only his father’s voice telling him, in the gentlest possible terms, to put aside the one man in this country who had laid claim to him without conditions.
“I am not going to do that. Pare. But I love you very much, and I am going to ring you back when I am calmer so that I don’t say anything that I will regret.” He ended the call.
The mobile sailed across the kitchen in a high arc that struck the wall above a cupboard and bounced onto the parquet, where it skittered to a halt against the leg of a chair.
The screen had gone black and shattered completely.
Mercè, who had been asleep under the table, came up onto all four legs and barked once, sharply.
“It is all right, amor. It is all right.”
He was breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth in the slow measured pattern Beauchamp had once shown him after a bad call from Geneva, which he was furious to be using now.
He left the broth on the hob. He left Mercè under the table with her ears flattened, and the mobile in pieces against the chair leg. He went down the corridor in his stockinged feet and out of the flat, taking the stairs two at a time, hand on the banister to steady himself on the turns.