“Connor.”
“Yeah?”
“I have nothing to wear to a Sunday roast in Bow.”
“You’ve got about forty linen shirts, sweetheart. Pick one.”
“They will think I am apreening peacock.”
“Youarethat, Vidal, love. They’ll think you’re my friend. Which you also are. Mum’s been asking after you since she saw the photos from the shop.” He paused. “She thinks you’ve got a kind face.”
Vidal closed his eyes. His hand came out from under the throw and found Connor’s on his stomach, and his fingers curled round Connor’s thumb.
“Tell your mother I accept. Tell her I shall bring flowers and eat everything she puts in front of me. I will be on my very best behaviour.”
“I’ll tell her no such thing. I’m too afraid of that woman to lie to her and she can make her judgement on your behaviour herself.”
“Connor.”
“Mm.”
“If she does not like me I shall be inconsolable for weeks, and you will have to service me on that dining table every morning until I recover.”
“Tempting. I might have to tell her you hate her trifle.”
Vidal’s eyes flew open. “Connor Evans, you would not dare — ”
Connor dropped his full weight onto him, pinning Vidal to the sofa as he laughed and thrashed under the cashmere throw.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Thecar 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 sentfor 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.
