His fingers settled on Vidal’s good forearm in a slow stroke from elbow to wrist. Then he stepped away from the bed and started unpacking the holdall on the far side of the room.
Beauchamp set the candle on the bedside table. That fucking poncey French thing in its glass jar with the fig label, which Vidal had banged on about for half an hour the first time he’d lit one in front of Connor. Connor had taken the piss for a fortnight after, and then quietly bought one for his own flat, because the truth was the bloody thing did smell nice.
The man laid out the rest of Vidal’s things. A pair of pyjamas in pale blue silk, a toothbrush, a small leather wash bag with his initials stamped out in gold, a paperback Connor had thrown into the bag after finding it on Vidal’s bedside table.
Connor came round to Vidal’s bedside and looked down at Vidal knocked out cold. They had him with his right arm bound up in a sling against his chest. There was a gauze pad taped at histemple where his head had met the tarmac, and a graze on the bridge of his nose that someone had cleaned up.
Connor bent down and laid a kiss on the crown of his dark head, smoothing his hair back off his forehead with the flat of his palm. He smelled of antiseptic and the faint chemical sweetness of whatever they’d put through the cannula. Vidal didn’t stir at the feel of his touch. Connor straightened up and turned to find Beauchamp standing at the foot of the bed. The man looked wrecked.
“Right.” Connor jerked his chin at the chair on his side of the bed. “Park yourself before you fall down. You look like you could use a shot of what they’ve given him.”
Beauchamp didn’t move.
“He’s a little troublemaker, this one.” Connor laid the back of his fingers against Vidal’s good cheek. “Wandering about Mayfair in his pyjamas at one in the morning like a Victorian ghost. Beauchamp, you and me are going to have words with him when he wakes up, do you hear me? I’ll get him the fifty quid olive oil instead of that liquid gold shit he dips everything in.”
Connor combed his fingers slowly through the dark hair fanned across the pillow. It really was the silkiest stuff he’d ever touched on a man. “Tell you what, Beauchamp. Why don’t we give him a buzzcut while he’s out? He’s so bloody vain about this hair. Imagine his face in the morning when he finds it gone.”
Beauchamp’s mouth worked. For a second Connor thought he had him, but the first thing Beauchamp had said since they’d walked through the door to Vidal’s room was “This is my fault.”
Connor let out a breath through his nose. “Right. So you told him to lace up his boots, did you, and pop out for a refreshing midnight stroll along Park Lane? Pointed him at the traffic and gave him a friendly shove?”
Beauchamp’s eyes remained fixed on the wall, his expression impassive.
“Come on, Beauchamp. Vidal’s hardly the most biddable little fucker on the planet. The bloke once argued with me for two solid hours because I had Marmite on my toast. He took it as a personal affront, mate. Like I’d spread it onhim. You couldn’t have made him stay in the flat with handcuffs and a length of chain. So whatever you’re telling yourself standing there, you can pack it in.”
“I’m not effective for him as security detail anymore, Connor,” Beauchamp stated flatly. “I haven’t been for a while now. I let the walls down. Things got too personal between us. That’s why he reacted the way he did when I started arranging the handover. He didn’t trust me to be doing it for the right reasons, because the reasons had stopped being right some time ago.” Beauchamp’s hands had gone white against the metal where he gripped the footrail of the bed tightly. “I’ve lost his trust. The best thing I can do for him now is take myself out of the running. I’ll ring Captain Wallis tonight. Get David down from Hereford. The team can be installed by Wednesday.”
“Hang on, mate. That’s a massive overreaction. He needs you here, Beauchamp. He’s just been hit by a car. He doesn’t need you handing him over to a stranger.”
“I’m a danger to him if I stay. He doesn’t listen to me anymore. He didn’t tonight. He won’t tomorrow. The whole point of having me around is that he listens to me and likes me enough to tolerate my constant presence. Now that it’s clear he won’t, I’m a liability. I’m a man taking a salary for a job I can no longer do.”
“He doesn’t listen toanyone, Beauchamp. That’s not on you. That’s just his default setting! He’s wired to ignore instructions.”
“He listens to you.” Beauchamp’s mouth had pulled into the saddest half-smile Connor had ever seen on a man’s face. “He cares about what you say, and he trusts you. He goes to you when he can’t bear to be in his own head, and you bring him back fromit. I’ve seen it. He came down to your flat this morning and he came back upstairs straightened out. You’re the man he needs.”
Beauchamp dragged a hand down his face from forehead to jaw, and held it there over his mouth. When he lowered it, he straightened against the foot rail and his shoulders went back into the line Connor had watched him hold for hours at a time.
“There are things you’ll need to know. About managing him.”
“Beauchamp, mate —”
“He forgets to eat when he’s upset. Properly forgets. He’ll go thirty hours without a meal and not register it, and then he’ll fall apart over a tin of sardines because his blood sugar’s on the floor. You have to put food in front of him. Not ask him what he wants. Put it down where he can reach it, and don’t make a thing of it, or he’ll refuse it on principle.
“He cries in the garden. He thinks no one can see him from the upstairs, but the kitchen window has a clear sight line down to the wrought-iron chair on the left of the flagstones. He goes down there in his robe with a glass of wine he doesn’t drink, and he just cries. Don’t go down there to ask him what’s wrong. You just have to let him get it out. All you have to do is light that candle of his so that when he comes back up to the flat, it’s properly filled the drawing room with its smell.”
Connor sat down slowly on the chair on his side of the bed. Vidal’s breathing carried on between them.
“The thermostat in the flat isalwaysset to twenty-four. You’ll think that’s mad, because it is mad by English standards, and the heating bill last month was four hundred and eighty pounds, but you don’t drop it. You don’t open windows. He gets cold the way some people get hungry. It changes his mood before he’s noticed.”
“All right.”
“He won’t ask for help. Not once. He’ll work his way around it with a piece of theatre, and if you don’t try to hear beyondthe drama, you’ll miss it. The big productions are usually him being fine. The small ones, where he goes very quiet and starts being elaborately polite, are when he needs you. Watch for the politeness. If he’s not trying to get a rise out of me, that’s when I pay attention.”
Beauchamp’s voice had gone hoarse and he still wasn’t slowing down.
“The dog’s the barometer. Mercè eats when he eats. If she stops eating, he’s stopped eating, and you have to fix both of them. He’ll be embarrassed about the broken arm. About the fact that he was wandering about Mayfair in his pyjamas. Don’t make him explain why he went out. He won’t have a good reason, and he’ll feel it’s beneath him to admit there wasn’t one.”
“Beauchamp.” Connor reached across the bed and gripped Beauchamp by the arm. “You’re not going anywhere tonight. You don’t have to give me this handover.”
