Chapter Fifteen
The shop in Bow had a yellow sign over the door that read:
EVANS & SONS
Beauchamp clocked the camera on the eaves, the second camera on the lamp post opposite, and the man in a navy puffer jacket smoking outside the kebab shop next door who watched the car pull into the alley and gave Connor a single nod through the windscreen.
The back entrance let into a chaotic stockroom. Connor went through it ahead of them, lifted a hinged section of the counter, and ushered Vidal through into the shop floor.
Vidal stopped just inside and put both hands over his mouth. “Connor.”
The shop floor was deep and narrow, lit by long fluorescent strips that painted everything in a stark light.
A glass cabinet ran the entire length of one wall, packed with watches, rings and chains.
The opposite wall was given over to electricals, and a tangle of random appliances.
At the back, behind a second counter, stood a wall of small numbered drawers.
There were two customers in the shop. An elderly woman in a headscarf was at the jewellery counter being attended to by a young man with a shaved head and a tape measure round his neck, and a man in painter’s overalls was inspecting a drill at the electrical wall.
Vidal took it all in like a child arriving at the seaside.
“This is magnificent. Look at it. Look at the density of it. There is more humanity in this one room than in the whole of Bond Street. Every object here has a story. Every single one of them has been brought in by someone who needed money, and now they sit here on these shelves waiting to be taken home by someone else. It is the most fascinating thing I have ever seen.”
“It’s a pawn shop, mate.”
“It is a museum of need, Connor.”
Connor caught Beauchamp’s eye over the top of Vidal’s head. “Mick.” He raised his voice slightly. “This is a friend of mine. He’s going to have a wander. Anyone comes in, you let him serve them if he wants to.”
Mick, behind the counter, took in Vidal in his linen shirt and his expression of wonder. “Right you are, boss.”
Vidal was already off, moving along the glass cabinet. He bent over each tray in turn. He pressed his fingertips to the glass above a fob watch, and made a wounded noise over a wedding ring that had been engraved on the inside with a date in 1962.
Beauchamp positioned himself against the back wall with a clear sightline to the door and watched him.
The shop bell went off and a man in a tracksuit came in carrying a PlayStation 3 under one arm and a tangle of cables under the other. He approached the counter and began the negotiation with Mick. Vidal was at the counter before Mick had got past the opening offer.
“Mick, mi amor, may I?”
Mick glanced at Connor, who was leaning against the doorframe of the stockroom with his arms folded. Connor lifted one eyebrow and Mick stepped sideways to make room.
“Sir.” Vidal turned the full radiance of his smile onto the man in the tracksuit. “I am told that you are here to part with this magnificent piece of equipment. May I inspect it?”
The man in the tracksuit, who had walked in expecting to deal with Mick and was now being addressed by a man in linen who hadn’t bothered to introduce himself, took an involuntary step backwards in surprise. “Er. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead, mate.”
Vidal lifted the PlayStation reverently in both hands. He turned it over. He inspected the underside. He blew very gently on the vents, then he set it back down on the counter and laid one palm flat on top of it.
“Sir, this console is a piece of history. It is the third generation of the most successful home entertainment platform of the early twenty-first century. It revolutionised the way that ordinary people watched films in their own homes, on account of being one of the first machines to incorporate a Blu-ray player as standard. Did you know this?”
“I…yeah, I think so.”
“Of course you knew this. You are the kind of man who knows the worth of his possessions. I can see it in the careful way you have brought it in. The cables, look, you have wound them so neatly. Connor, Connor look at how he has wound the cables, it is the work of a craftsman. Sir, what is your name?”
“Daz.”
“Daz, my friend. I would like to offer you five thousand pounds for this console.”
The whole shop went quiet.
Mick laid his pen down on the counter very deliberately and took a step backwards as though distancing himself from this shitshow.
Connor unfolded himself from the doorframe. “Vidal.”
“Connor, this man has brought in a piece of cultural —”
“A word over here, please, sweetheart.” Connor crossed the shop floor in unhurried strides, hooked a hand round Vidal’s elbow, and walked him a polite distance away towards the guitar wall.
He kept his voice low. Beauchamp, against the back wall, could hear every word.
“Daz’s PlayStation is worth forty quid. On a generous day. Mick was going to give him thirty.”
“That is outrageous, the man has —”
“The man has brought in a knackered console because he needs to put petrol in his car this week, and Mick is going to give him a fair price for it. Daz is going to walk out of here with his money feeling like he hasn’t been had over.
If you give him five grand for it, Daz goes home, tells his mates at the pub, and by Friday I’ve got fifty blokes queuing up the alley with their old consoles.
The shop runs on margins, love. Margins and trust. You can’t buy a man’s PlayStation for a hundred and fifty times what it’s worth, even if your heart is in the right place. ”
Vidal was quiet. Beauchamp watched him absorb Connor’s words. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped half an octave. “I have made a fool of myself.”
“You haven’t. You’ve been generous in a place where generosity has a different shape.
It’s a learning curve, sweetheart, that’s all.
” Connor turned him gently by the shoulders and walked him back to Daz.
“Mick. Sort Daz out for forty-five quid. Daz, mate, sorry about that. My friend here is from out of town.”
“Way out of town, it looks like,” Daz muttered, and accepted his forty-five pounds. Vidal watched the transaction in silence. When Daz had left the shop with his cash, Vidal turned to Connor and laid one hand against the lapel of Connor’s waistcoat.
“You are a good man, Connor Evans. I have been telling everyone this and now I know it for certain.”
“Don’t tell anyone. It’s bad for business.”
Connor caught Vidal’s hand in his and brought it up to his mouth, pressed a brief kiss to the knuckles, and let it go. Then he tipped his head towards the jewellery counter.
“Come on. Let me make it up to you. I’ll let you play with the chains.”
What followed was, by Beauchamp’s later estimation, the longest twenty minutes of his professional life.
Connor lifted the hinged section of the counter and ushered Vidal behind it.
He slid open a drawer and produced a coiled gold chain of a thickness and weight that Beauchamp had associated only with photographs of nineteen-eighties American rappers, and proceeded to lower it over Vidal’s head like a bishop investing a new cardinal.
He produced a second one, lighter but longer, and added it on top of the first. A third went on after that.
By the end of the operation Vidal was wearing about four kilos of gold and the crucifix at his throat had been entirely buried.
Then Connor opened a second drawer and produced the rings.
They were enormous. Each one was a flat-faced sovereign mounted on a band wide enough to cover three knuckles. Connor slid one onto each of Vidal’s fingers in turn, one for each finger of each hand. By the time he had finished, Vidal couldn’t bend his fingers.
“Connor.”
“Hold up. One more thing.”
Connor reached into the drawer a final time and produced a knuckleduster. It was solid brass, polished to a high shine, and it had the word LOVE engraved across the top of it. He slid it onto the four fingers of Vidal’s right hand.
Vidal looked at himself in the mirror mounted at the end of the counter, and then he began to laugh.
He laughed until he had to brace himself against the glass with both elbows and until Mick, who had been pretending not to listen, was openly grinning at the counter beside him. “Beauchamp, you must take a photograph. I need a record of this transformation. I need to send it to —”
“Sir. No.”
“Beauchamp, I am not going to —”
“Sir, with respect, I am not photographing you in a brass knuckleduster for the purposes of you posting this image on any platform that’s going to be viewed by more than one person.”
Vidal pressed the back of his hand against his mouth and visibly pulled himself together.
“Beauchamp. My darling Major. I swear to you, on my grandmother’s grave beneath the cathedral altar, that the photograph will not leave my mobile.
It is for me, for the day, twenty years from now, when I look back upon this morning and I need proof that it really happened. Will you do this for me, please?”
Beauchamp took the mobile out of Vidal’s outstretched hand.
He framed the shot. Vidal had thrown one heavy gold-laden arm around Connor’s shoulders and arranged his face into the kind of glowering scowl Beauchamp had seen on the covers of the rap albums his lance corporals used to play in the back of the Land Rover.
Connor, beside him, matched his energy, holding up two fingers in a peace sign.
Beauchamp took many photographs. Even the one where Vidal got his arms around Connor from behind and was attempting to strangle him with the longest of the gold chains. He handed the mobile back for Vidal’s review.
Vidal scrolled through the photographs with his entire face lit up, holding the mobile at arm’s length on account of being unable to bend the fingers of either hand.
He passed it back to Connor so that Connor could look as well, and the two of them stood behind the counter with their heads bent together over the screen.
Beauchamp stood against the back wall, with his hands folded behind his back and his eyes on the front door, and he thought, very clearly and very distinctly: Fuck.
His stomach clenched.
What do I do here?
The job was to keep Vidal alive. Not to monitor the people he fucked. This was, by any reasonable security assessment, a significant complication.
“Right.” Connor closed the drawer and began divesting Vidal of his accessories one ring at a time. “Sandra’s expecting us at quarter past. Major, you ready?”
“Always.”
Connor’s eyes met his for a beat over the top of Vidal’s head. “Right. Let’s go feed the prince.”