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 tappedthe 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.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Wallishad been gone for nearly six hours, and Vidal still couldn’t shake the residue of him.
He was sitting at the end of the sofa with a glass of Albariño he’d poured at some point, and Mercè lying warm across his thighs in the position she’d held since he’d come back from showing the man out. The lamp on the side table was the only source of light in the room. Beauchamp had gone to bed somewhere after eleven, and the flat had settled into the hush it took on at this hour.
David. Wallis insisted on being called by his first name. The man had arrived in the drawing room at four o’clock that afternoon in a navy suit, and he had spent the next ninety minutes calling VidalYour Highnessand laughing at all of his jokes. He’d agreed with everything Vidal said.
The man was perfectlyfine. He was Lympstone-trained and ex-Royal Marines. Beauchamp had supplied a dossier on him an inch thick, every page of it indicating professional competence.Vidal had no reasonable objection to this David. He simply did not want him.
He wanted theMajorin the kitchen, scowling at the coffee machine that he had never quite figured out. He wanted to hear Beauchamp’s dry, insubordinatesirrather than David’s clumsy attempts at sticking to royal protocol.
Beauchamp’ssirscame in at least four distinct variations, by Vidal’s count. There was thesirthat meantI hear you and I am choosing not to act on it. Thesirthat meantyou are being ridiculous and I will not dignify this with a response. There was thesirthat meantI am going to do exactly what you have asked me not to do, and you will thank me later.
Mercè shifted against his thighs, and he ran his thumb along the baldness of her flank.
Vidal’s mobile, face-down on the cushion beside him, lit up. He saw the glow before he heard the buzzing, and he was reaching for it, his heart stuttering in his chest at the unexpected late-night call. It was his father.
He sat up. Mercè protested, was ignored, and resettled herself with a wounded sigh. “Pare.”
“Vidal.” Carlos’s voice came down the line in the tone Vidal had heard only a few times in his adult life. This was the tone he reserved for delivering the news of the deaths of family members, and the night the referendum result had come in. “Are you well?”
“Yes, father.”
“Are you alone?”
“Mercè is here.”
Carlos let out a dry exhalation. “Then I am sorry, my boy, because I have to tell you this now and I cannot soften it for you over the telephone. You must hold Mercè tight.”
Vidal set the wine glass down on the side table with care, grounding himself with this act of domesticity. “Tell me.”
“Ferrer’s people came to Geneva this afternoon. They had a proposal, which I have spent the last seven hours considering with the lawyers, and which I have agreed to within the last hour.”
“And what was this agreement, father?”
“The monarchy is to be formally abolished. There will be a constitutional declaration in the Corts on Tuesday morning. The titles will go with it, of course. We are no longer Their Serene Highnesses, Vidal. None of us. The line ends with this signature.”
Vidal took in a sharp intake of breath, opened his mouth to interject, and found that he had no words to say.
