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.
? ? ?
Beauchampwatched 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.
