The thought arrived like a coordinate dropped on a map. James would understand. James was the only one in this country who could possibly understand, because James had been raised inside the same scaffolding of titles and protocols. Vidal wiped his nose against the back of his wrist and walked faster.
He turned south at Hyde Park Corner. The grass at the edge of the path was wet against his ankles. He had been crying, he realised, for some time now. His tears had tracked down his cheeks and onto the collar of his pyjamas.
I am not His Serene Highness Prince Vidal of Cardona any longer.
He tried the sentence in his head and found that it would not stay still long enough to be examined. It slid sideways every time he reached for it. He tried it again.I am not.He could get as far as the negation, and then the rest of it dissolved in his mind.
The Albert Memorial was a long way off through the trees, gold and ridiculous in the middle distance. He fixed on it as a marker and kept walking.
Somewhere ahead of him, the path crossed a road. He stepped down off the kerb with an unthinking adjustment of his weight that didn’t require his eyes to be open or his brain to be present. His bare foot found the tarmac.
He didn’t see the headlights. There was only a sound like the world drawing in a sharp breath, a horn that came from somewhere outside his line of sight, and then the impact arrived against his hip. The ground was no longer where it had been just a moment ago.
He was airborne for what felt like a very long time. Long enough to think,Beauchamp.
The tarmac came up to meet him. He landed on his right side. Something in his arm gave, with a wet sound he heard from inside his own body, and the pain, when it arrived, was total and all-consuming.
He was looking up at the sky. He could not immediately work out how he had got to this position, with the ground hard against his back. There were leaves overhead, the black filigree of plane trees against a sky that wasn’t quite black. Somewhere very far away a woman was shouting, and a car door had opened and closed.
Mercè.
He had left her on the cushion, warm in the dent of the sofa with the lamp on, and now he was on his back in a road near Hyde Park and Mercè was alone in the flat.
A face appeared above him. A young face, female, her mouth open, saying something he couldn’t make out. He tried to lift his head to answer her and found that his head would not lift. He tried to move his right arm and discovered that his right arm was not, in any meaningful sense, available to him.
“Pare,” he said, or thought he said. The word came out very small.
The face above him was speaking into a mobile. He could hear the rhythm of the words but not the meaning of them. The sky behind her had begun to soften at the edges, the leaves running together into one dark wash, and he thought, with the last bit of clarity he had, that he ought to tell her about Mercè. Someone needed to know about Mercè.
He opened his mouth to say it.
The dark came up underneath him like water and closed over his head.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Connorcame up out of sleep all at once when his flat’s buzzer went off, the way he always had since he was old enough to understand what late phone calls meant in his family. He sat on the edge of the bed, scrubbing one hand down his face, and the buzzer went again in two short presses. He reached for the joggers he’d left over the back of the chair and pulled them on as he walked.
The intercom screen showed two coppers on the front step. A woman in a high-vis stab vest and a younger lad behind her. His heart, which had been ticking along nicely, kicked up a gear.
Patrick.
He pressed the buzzer to let them through the front door and then he was out of the flat in his bare feet. He took the stairs two at a time. By the time he hit the ground floor landing the female officer had pushed the inner door open and was standing in the hall with her radio crackling against her shoulder.
“Mr Evans?”
“Yeah.”
“Sir, before I say anything else, I want you to know that everyone’s all right.” She had her hands up in front of her chest, palms out, the universal copper’s gesture forslow down. “I want that clear before we go any further.”
Connor came down the last three steps and stopped in front of her. He was breathing harder than the stairs warranted. “Right. Right. Go on.”
“I’m PC Alder. This is PC Hartley. Are you a friend of a Mr Vidal Montcada?”
He hadn’t been expecting that name out of a copper. “Yeah. Yes, he lives upstairs. Top floor. What’s happened?”
“Mr Montcada was involved in a road traffic collision this evening on Park Lane. He’s been taken to the Royal London Hospital. He’s in a stable condition, sir, I want to stress that, but he’s sustained a fracture to the right arm that’s going to need surgical attention, and he’ll be admitted for several days while they sort him out.”
Connor slumped against the wall beside him and took a breath in through his nose.
