“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 isoutrageous, 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 turnedto 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.”
