Chapter One
The Turkish flower seller had a cousin in Istanbul who made the best künefe in the city, and Vidal was in the middle of telling him his honest opinion on the sample he’d been given, when Mercè shivered against his ribs.
“One moment, my friend,” Vidal said, switching from the cheerful pidgin he had been constructing out of three languages and a great deal of goodwill, and unbuttoning the top of his linen jacket so that he could tuck his dog more thoroughly inside it.
Mercè was wearing a small jumper Vidal had acquired from a shop two streets back, from a woman who sold vintage children’s clothing and who had not been able to refuse him when he held Mercè up and made a face.
But the jumper was inadequate to the climate, because the English climate was incompatible with anything that lived.
Really lived. “There. Better. Now, künefe. You were saying.”
“My cousin Hakan,” said the flower seller, who was called Mehmet and who had been opening his stall when Vidal had drifted into his orbit forty minutes ago. “In Beyo?lu. He uses the proper kaymak, the buffalo cream, you know, not that supermarket milk nonsense.”
Mehmet, who had begun the conversation suspicious of the unshaven foreigner, but progressed through bemusement to delight in the space of half an hour, beamed.
“You should go,” he said. “To Istanbul. You would love it.”
“I am going,” Vidal said, with absolute conviction.
What did it matter that the loss of his country and his current statelessness were putting a small damper on his usual movements?
“The moment my circumstances permit. Now. These — ” He gestured at the buckets of peonies, which were a colour he had not seen in some weeks, and had stopped him in the street as cleanly as a hand on the shoulder.
“These are extraordinary. I will take a great many.”
“How many?”
“All of the pink. Wrap them however you like, my friend, I trust you completely.”
Mehmet wrapped the peonies. Vidal produced a quantity of British banknotes from the inner pocket of his jacket.
Beauchamp had pressed them on him last night, like Vidal was a child going to the funfair.
He held the bundle out and let Mehmet take what he needed, because Mehmet was an honest man; you could see it in the way he handled the flowers.
He carried them away under his right arm, with Mercè against his ribs on the left, and he turned the corner without noticing that he had turned it, because he was thinking about his mother’s terrace.
He had decided, some time before dawn, that the only safe way to think about anything from Before was to keep walking while he did it.
Stillness was the danger. There was too much of it in the Mayfair flat, where the balcony overlooked nothing he recognised.
He’d left it some hours ago by the simple expedient of putting on his shoes and opening the door.
He did not propose to return to it until he had walked the city into a shape he could understand.
He had no idea where he was now. He had passed, he thought, a park on his right, then a square with a statue of someone on a horse.
England had a surprising number of them.
Now he was on a different road again, and there was a woman walking three small terriers towards him.
The terriers had seen Mercè, and Mercè had seen the terriers, so there was no question of passing without a conversation.
“Madam, good morning. Your dogs are exquisite. What are their names?”
The woman, who was perhaps seventy and wearing a coat that Vidal recognised as Loro Piana from a hundred yards away, stopped and considered him over the top of her sunglasses. Her terriers had already settled the question by sniffing his shoes with great enthusiasm.
“This is Hector,” she said. “And this is Achilles. And this is Patroclus.”
“Madam.” Vidal placed his free hand over his heart again. “You are a classicist.”
“My husband was.”
“Was?”
“For forty-one years. He died in March.”
“Ah.” Vidal didn’t flinch from this the way the English would have flinched. He simply nodded, slowly, and said, “I am very sorry. The first spring is the worst, I think. Everything insists on being beautiful, even if one is not yet ready for it.”
The woman looked at him for a moment over her sunglasses, and then she lowered them slightly. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”
They talked for a while about her husband, who had taught Greek at a school Vidal had not heard of, about her sons who lived abroad, and about the terriers, who had been her husband’s idea and were now her entire morning.
Vidal listened with the complete and unwavering attention that was the only gift he had ever consistently been able to give other people.
When the woman finally said that she must let him go, she said it as though she were apologising.
Vidal kissed the back of her hand and told her that he would think about her terriers and her charming conversation all day, and she walked away towards the park looking, he thought, fractionally less alone than she had before they talked.
He kept walking.
From a small bakery he bought a pastry of indeterminate provenance that the woman behind the counter described as a sausage roll but which she also described as blessed, with great seriousness.
He sat and arranged the peonies on the bench beside him.
Then he extracted the pastry from its paper bag and held it out so that Mercè could sniff it suspiciously and then turn her head away.
This was not a good sign. He took a bite, and this sausage roll did not taste blessed in any sense he recognised, but it was hot, and it had buttery pastry on the outside.
Even he had to accept that there are mornings on which one settles for what one is given.
Then he heard the running.
Running, in central London, was unusual enough that he looked up, prepared to be irritated by some smug jogger in shorts and sweated-through active wear.
What he saw instead was Major H. R. Beauchamp, coming around the corner of the square at a pace that no man who wore that particular close cut of suit had any business sustaining, with another man behind him in similar dishevelment.
Both of them were coatless, having clearly come from somewhere in a great hurry.
The English were that way: they hurried, and had no time for an aimless wander.
“Major!” Vidal waved his half-eaten sausage roll at him in delighted greeting.
“And you have brought a friend. This is excellent. I have been worried, you know, that you did not have any. As you did not demonstrate the appropriate comforting behaviours last night when I met you, I assumed you had no previous practice. Sit, sit, both of you, there is room. Well, there is room if I move the peonies, and I am happy to move the peonies.”
He was halfway through gathering the peonies into his lap to make space on the bench when he registered, properly, that Beauchamp had not moved. The other man was murmuring into a small black radio. Vidal caught the words recovered, visual confirmed and stand down.
Beauchamp had brought his breathing back under control.
His hands were now folded behind his back at parade rest, his eyes fixed on Vidal in a way that Vidal had not been looked at in some time.
He searched for the word for this look in three languages and found it in his fourth, Latin.
Sollicitudo, care under duress. The man had been afraid. For him.
“Ah,” Vidal said. Quite quietly. “I have done something.”
The man with the radio finished his transmission and clipped the device back onto his belt. He took a small step backwards, putting himself a professional distance away from the bench. He didn’t look at Vidal, he kept his gaze on a point in the middle distance and declined to witness any of it.
“Major,” Vidal’s own voice came down several registers without his permission. “How long have you been looking for me?”
“An hour and forty minutes, sir. Conceic?o called the residence at half past seven. She’d let herself in to clean and found the flat empty. She was concerned, so she rang the contact number I’d left on the kitchen noticeboard.”
“I did not know,” Vidal said, “that I was not allowed to go for a walk.”
“You’re not not allowed, sir.”
“Then —”
“You’re required, sir, to inform someone before you leave the residence.
So that someone can go with you.” Beauchamp spoke to the paving stones with great evenness.
“There are people in Cardona who’d prefer that you weren’t in London.
There are also people in this city who occasionally take an interest in unaccompanied foreign nationals of significant personal wealth, and although I’m confident in your ability to charm any one of them individually, even you would have difficulty talking your way out of being moped-mugged. ”
“Moped-mugged…” Vidal repeated thoughtfully. “What is this thing, Beauchamp?”
“Two men on a moped, sir. They come up the pavement. One drives. The other takes the watch off your wrist before you understand what’s happening. The Marylebone end of Mayfair has had nine incidents just this month.”
Vidal looked down at his own wrist, where a ￡25,000 watch was sitting that he had been wearing in public all morning without knowing about these moped-muggings.
“Show me,” he said.
“Sir?”
“This moped-mugging. I cannot imagine it. I require a visual.” He gestured vaguely at the air between them. “A film. There must be a film. Everything is a film now.”
Beauchamp reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and produced his mobile.
“Come and sit on the bench, Beauchamp,” Vidal said, more gently. “I cannot watch a film from four feet away. I do not have the eyes of a bat.”
“Bats are largely blind, sir.”
Vidal tilted his head to receive this information with the appropriate level of dignity.
“They navigate by echolocation,” Beauchamp added, in the same tone in which he had announced the figure for moped incidents in Marylebone. “Their visual acuity is generally poor.”
“Beauchamp.”
“Sir.”
“You are telling me I have got the metaphor the wrong way round.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That is…” Vidal pressed a hand to his chest. “That is humiliating, Beauchamp. I have been saying that for years! I said it to the French ambassador in 2022. He did not correct me. He must have thought I was an idiot!”
“I’m sure he didn’t, sir.”
Beauchamp got up and crossed the four feet to the bench, leaving an appropriate distance between them. Vidal slid along the wood until their shoulders were almost touching, and craned his neck to see the screen.
A grainy piece of CCTV footage played on screen, taken from somewhere above a shop.
A man in a coat was walking along the pavement at an unhurried pace.
Then a moped came up behind him on the pavement itself, with two riders on it, the second one already half-dismounted.
What happened next was over before Vidal could catch it.
“Oh,” he said. “The poor man! And his poor coat. Did you see how they…yes, yes, of course you saw, you have shown me the film. Play it again.”
Beauchamp played it again.
“There, you see, the second one is not even properly on the moped when they take it. He is hanging off the back like a… Beauchamp, this is choreography! This is a ballet. A grotesque ballet of social disorder. Where is this?”
“Sloane Street, sir. Two months ago.”
“Sloane Street.” Vidal sat back from the phone, frowning.
“I have been to Sloane Street. I have been to Sloane Street with your King, Beauchamp. We went to look at a shop that sold something James was very excited about. I cannot remember what, because it was several years ago, and James gets very excited about a great many things.” He levelled a finger at the side of the Major’s face, the side currently studying the screen with great concentration. “Show me more. I must learn!”
“Sir, I don’t think —”
“Beauchamp. Another. I am being educated. You cannot stop in the middle of an education.”
The morning, Vidal thought distantly, somewhere underneath the part of him now studying the technique by which a Hatton Garden jeweller had laid out a man with a single well-placed umbrella, had become something he had not expected when he put on his shoes at five and walked out to outrun his racing thoughts.
He had not, in any of his calculations, considered that he might be quietly outflanked by a man in a most ordinary grey suit.