Chapter Twenty-Two
The car was parked on the kerb opposite the Evans house, a neat double-fronted terrace at the better end of a Bow street that had clearly been on the up for the last decade.
There were window boxes, and a brass knocker in the shape of a pineapple.
Vidal had gone in carrying a bouquet of peonies the size of a toddler, with Connor’s hand at the small of his back.
Beauchamp had been left in the car.
He had not, strictly, been ordered to stay there. Vidal had simply not looked at him as he stepped out onto the pavement, the way he hadn’t looked at him for most of the past week. Beauchamp had taken the cue and remained where he was.
Vidal had spent the past five days speaking to him only when operationally necessary, and even then in the clipped register of a man addressing the back of a taxi driver’s head.
The shortlist of private security firms that Beauchamp devoted days to compiling had been received with a nod and tucked into the kitchen drawer that held the takeaway menus.
It hadn’t been looked at since. Each calendar invitation he’d sent for vetting interviews had come back accepted within the hour, with no accompanying remark.
It was the most operatic punishment Beauchamp had ever been subjected to.
He had not realised, until the running commentary stopped, how thoroughly Vidal’s voice had come to shape his days.
How much he missed the pet names tossed across the kitchen at him, or the unsolicited opinions on everything from the weather to the manchego he’d picked up at the markets.
Beauchamp shifted in his seat and ran a slow scan along the road.
Two cars down on the opposite side, there was a Ford Focus with a baby seat in the back.
A pair of teenagers were smoking on a low wall outside the corner shop, neither of them paying him any attention.
The driver beside him was nursing a takeaway coffee and listening to the football scores on 5 Live with the volume turned down low.
“All right back there, Major?”
“Fine, thanks, Hassan.”
The Mercedes turned into the street about ninety seconds later.
Beauchamp clocked it at the top of the road before it had finished the manoeuvre.
A G-Wagon with blacked-out windows. Its matte paintwork swallowed light rather than reflected it.
It came down the street and pulled up directly behind Connor’s Range Rover.
The driver’s door opened, and Patrick Evans stepped out onto the pavement.
The intelligence file had described him as six-three, fifteen stone, with no distinguishing marks.
Patrick was bigger than Connor in every direction, taller by a clear couple of inches, with shoulders broad enough to fill the doorway of his car.
His dark hair was slicked back the same way that Connor wore his, and they shared the same waistcoat-and-rolled-shirtsleeves uniform.
He stood beside his car, doing up the lower button of his jacket, and Beauchamp watched him take in the street.
He did this like a man who had grown up assuming that someone, somewhere, was likely to be watching him back.
His gaze settled on the dark saloon opposite the house, found Beauchamp through the windscreen, and stayed there.
He drew himself up to his full height and gave Beauchamp a slow, affable smile, before raising his hand in a wave.
Beauchamp released the door handle and lifted one hand off his knee in acknowledgement.
“Christ,” Hassan said softly. “That’ll be the brother, then.”
“That’ll be the brother.”
Hassan lowered the volume on the football another notch and took a long drink from his coffee.
“Can I ask you something, Major?”
“Go on.”
“Your man in there. He’s alright, isn’t he?”
Beauchamp shifted his attention off the Mercedes for a half-second. Hassan was looking at the Evans house, not at him, his hands loose on the wheel.
“He’s fine.”
“Yeah, no, I know he’s fine fine. I mean…he’s a sweetheart, isn’t he? He came down yesterday morning to bring me a coffee from that fancy place on Mount Street. Wanted to know the name of my little girl. Asked if she’d like a jumper like Mercè’s.”
“That sounds about right.”
“That’s what I mean.” Hassan tipped his head sideways. “Bloke like that, though. All the linen, the crucifix, the Cambridge this and my grandmother that. You’d expect him to be slumming it round here of a Sunday afternoon? Sitting down to a trifle in Bow?”
Beauchamp watched Patrick pull a pack of cigarettes from his inside pocket and light one on the pavement without hurry.
“He likes them,” he said. “They’re a novelty. They’re different from what he’s used to.” Only belatedly did he see how reductive he’d been about Connor, who wasn’t a novelty at all. Connor was a decent man who had taken Vidal to his mother’s house for a Sunday roast.
“Yeah. I can see that.” Hassan paused. “Still. A posh boy like that, running round with the Evans brothers. Bit of a leap, isn’t it?”
“It’s his to make.”
“Fair.”
Patrick took a slow drag and angled his head towards the upstairs window of the house, where a child’s face had appeared briefly behind the net curtain before vanishing again.
“Connor’s decent,” Beauchamp said. “He’s straightforward. Pays his bills, runs his shops, looks after his mum. I’ve seen the file on him and there’s nothing in it that keeps me up at night.”
“And the brother?”
Beauchamp let the question sit. “There have been murmurs about Patrick for about fifteen years. Serious Crime had a look at him in 2011, and again in 2019. Nothing’s ever stuck.
Everything he owns is clean on paper, his accountants are better than anything the Revenue can throw at them, and he’s never been convicted of so much as a parking ticket. ”
“But?”
“But Patrick Evans drives a hundred-and-fifty-grand car, and the cash business sits two doors up from a betting shop. I don’t lose sleep over Connor. Patrick, I keep an eye on any time he’s near the principal.”
Hassan whistled under his breath. “Does your man know?”
“My man knows exactly what Connor is, and exactly what Patrick is, and he’s decided that today he’s going to eat a Sunday roast with them regardless. That’s his prerogative.”
“You sound like you don’t love it.”
“I don’t have to love it. I just go where he goes.”
Hassan made an amused noise and went back to his coffee. The football ticked over quietly on the radio between them. On the pavement, Patrick finished his cigarette, ground it out beneath his heel, and went up the steps of his mother’s house. The front door closed behind him.
? ? ?
Beauchamp watched the street for the better part of an hour. The teenagers outside the corner shop finished their cigarettes and wandered off, replaced by a different pair of teenagers getting off with each other against the shopfront.
At twenty past three, the Evans front door opened.
Patrick came down the steps in his shirtsleeves, jacket gone, with a disposable bowl balanced on top of another disposable bowl and a pair of plastic spoons stuck into the top one like flags.
He crossed the road at an unhurried diagonal and came up to the driver’s side of the car, bending to rap one knuckle against Hassan’s window.
Hassan lowered it.
“Alright, lads.” Patrick’s grin was broad and easy. “Mum sent me out. Said she couldn’t sit down to pudding knowing there were two blokes freezing in a car on her street without any. There’s a bowl each. Trifle. Don’t ask what’s in it, just eat it.”
Beauchamp took the bowl that Patrick passed through the open window, balanced the spoon against the rim, and surrendered to the fact that he was about to break standard operating procedure.
The trifle had everything in it. Custard, jelly, sponge, cream, glacé cherries, what looked like crushed meringue and a quantity of sherry that announced itself by smell before his spoon had cleared the lip of the bowl.
He took a first mouthful and was hit square between the eyes by a sweetness that made the back of his teeth ache.
“Cheers, Patrick. Tell your mum thanks.”
“I’ll tell her.” Patrick didn’t seem in any hurry to go back into the house. “She’s pretty taken with your fella, you know. I’m fairly sure she loves him more than my brother does at this point, and Connor’s been her favourite for forty-odd years.”
“He has that effect on people.”
“Yeah.” Patrick studied the upstairs window. “Look, no offence to him, alright. I’ve got nothing against the gay thing. Connor’s been Connor since we were little, and Mum sorted that out about thirty years ago. Half my mates’ kids are queer these days. Not the issue.”
“Right.”
“Just…Your bloke. He’s a lot, isn’t he.”
Beauchamp set his spoon against the side of the bowl and looked up. “He’s exactly who he is.”
“No, I know. I’m not having a go.” Patrick lifted both hands in a placating gesture.
“I’m just saying. He came in, he kissed my mum on both cheeks as he dumped a stack of flowers on her, and he never stopped talking.
I clocked you in the car and I thought, Christ, those blokes are earning their money today. ”
“He keeps us on our toes.”
Patrick was watching him. Beauchamp registered the appraisal without lifting his eyes off the trifle and took another spoonful.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Major. I know you’re paid to look after him. But you’ve gone a bit stiff on me there.”
“I haven’t.”
“You have. Relax, mate. I’m not slagging him off. He’s good fun. The whole house has lifted six inches off the floor since he walked in. My mum’s already started knitting him a beanie, and she only knits beanies for people she’s decided to keep.”
“That’s good of her.”
“Is he like that all the time, though? Genuinely. Off the clock, in his pyjamas. Same bloke?”
Beauchamp considered the trifle.
“He is, yes.”
“Christ. Must be exhausting.”
“It can be.”
“He’s got a thing for olives, hasn’t he?
He was telling Mum about the olive oil. Wouldn’t shut up about it.
Kept telling her she had to throw out the bottle she had in the cupboard, and that he’d be sending her round the proper stuff, and she wasn’t to use the stuff from Tesco for the dressing because it would, and I quote, ruin her good tomatoes. ”
“Fonte di Foiano.”
“What’s that, then?”
“It’s the olive oil. From a single estate in Tuscany. He had a bottle of it in his luggage the night he flew in. I have to make runs to a specialist store for it about every other week. I think His Serene Highness bathes in it.”
Patrick gave a surprised laugh. “Good for Connor then, must keep his skin nice and soft.” Patrick shook his head and pushed himself off the doorframe. “My brother’s a goner, isn’t he.”
Beauchamp didn’t answer. He took another spoonful of trifle and tasted sherry.
“Right. I’ll leave you to it. Bowls back on the wall when you’re done, the cat’ll see to anything you don’t finish.” Patrick tapped the roof of the car twice with the flat of his hand and crossed back over the road, jacket still off, hands in his pockets.
The front door of the Evans house opened and shut behind him.
Beauchamp ate the trifle. Beside him, Hassan was working through his own bowl in respectful silence, the football still ticking over low between them.
It was forty minutes before the door opened again.
Vidal came down the steps tucked under Connor’s arm, his head tipped against Connor’s shoulder, the camel overcoat draped over the pair of them. Connor had his keys in his free hand and was saying something into Vidal’s hair that made Vidal laugh, the sound carrying clear across the road.
At the kerb, Vidal lifted his head and looked across at the dark saloon. He raised a hand, unhurried, and waved at Hassan through the windscreen. Then he pointed with one extended finger at the Range Rover behind him, gave an apologetic shrug, and let Connor steer him round to the passenger side.
The Range Rover’s lights flashed as Connor unlocked it. Vidal climbed in without a backward glance.
“Home, Major?”
“Home, Hassan.”