He paused, picked up his coffee, and took a slow swallow before he set it back down.
“Or you say no, and he sulks for the rest of the day, and tomorrow morning he tries to climb out of a first-floor window to buy a candle. I know which approach I’d be picking, if I were you.”
Beauchamp had learned, in his years of service, that there were two methods for containment. There was the kind you imposed, and there was the kind you negotiated. The first worked on subordinates and the second worked on everyoneelse. Vidal was not his subordinate, so if Beauchamp said no, Vidal would go anyway.
If he said yes, he could put Vidal in the back of a car with a man whose interest in keeping him alive was, by every available measure, sincere.
“Back entrance off the alley. Your men on both doors. We’re back in this flat by half past two.”
“Two, if Sandra’s quick with the bacon.”
Vidal’s hand came down flat against Connor’s chest with a slap.
“Connor.No, no, no. You absurd man. You do not open with your final position, this is the most basic principle of negotiation, my grandmother would weep.Four.We are back in this flat by four, and not a minute sooner.”
Connor exhaled a laugh into his coffee. “Four it is, then. If the Major’ll wear it.”
Beauchamp considered the table. Vidal’s hand was still resting flat against Connor’s chest, the two of them turned slightly towards each other in a way that left him on the outside of a small private circuit. Mercè, having abandoned his shin, had relocated to the warm patch of floor beneath Vidal’s chair.
“Three.”
“Three.” Vidal clapped his hands together once and turned in his seat. His palm came to rest against the side of Beauchamp’s face, his thumb stroking once along the cheekbone before he took it away. “Mygoodman.”
Chapter Fifteen
Theshop in Bow had a yellow sign over the door that read:
EVANS & SONS
PAWN, GOLD, ELECTRICAL EST. 1987
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, anda 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 ismagnificent. Look at it. Look at thedensityof 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 mostfascinatingthing I have ever seen.”
“It’s a pawn shop, mate.”
“It is amuseum 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.
