Carlos sighed in the way he did when his children were being wilfully dense. “The Knightsbridge property is yours if you want it. It is a better address. A better class of neighbours. You would have a porter at the door and Harrods on your doorstep, and you would not be — ”
“Pare. I am in MAYFAIR, in a pied-à-terre of the ducal Fitznorman-Bicesters. The bloke in the flat below mine is the son of a Saudi billionaire, and the woman in the ground floor flat keeps a Picasso in her downstairs loo. The class of neighbour is not the issue.”
“That is not the kind of neighbour I meant, Vidal, and you know it.”
The slotted spoon stilled in Vidal’s hand.
His father was using the gentle voice he fell back on when he was about to lay down the law. He set the spoon down on its rest and turned the gas off under the broth. Then he picked the mobile up off the salt cellar and took it off speakerphone to hold it against his ear.
“Pare, what are you getting at?”
“Vidal.” His father drew in a long breath that came down the line as a dry rasp against the speaker. “Connor Evans, when we met him, came across as a very handsome and worldly man. Your mother liked him a great deal. I shook his hand and I drank his Rioja, because that is what one does when a son’s friend comes to be presented. But he is not the man for you, my boy.”
“Pare.” His voice had risen a register. “My brothers taught himEl cant dels ocells. We had many dinners with him, andnowyou tell me he is not for me?”
“That all happened before a review of his associates was given to me, Vidal.”
“A review of his — what are you talking about, Pare? A review by whom?”
“By the people whose job it is to provide such reviews, my boy. I am going to read you something. I want you to listen, and then we shall talk.”
There was the rustle of paper being shifted on the other end of the line. Vidal lowered himself onto the kitchen stool.
“Connor James Evans. Born Bow, East London, nineteen eighty-one. Director of Evans and Sons Limited, a chain of seven pawnbroking establishments and four licensed betting shops trading across East London and into Essex. Director of three further companies registered to the same address, two of which are dormant.
“Subject is the younger of two brothers. The elder, Patrick Sean Evans, born seventy-eight, has been the subject of three separate Serious Crime Directorate inquiries between two thousand and eleven and the present, none of which has resulted in charges being brought. Areas of interest have included: the alleged provision of debt-recovery services to third parties; the handling of stolen high-value goods through the family’s pawnbroking businesses; and a suspected role in the launderingof cash receipts from a number of nightclubs in the Romford and Ilford area.
“Connor Evans has not personally been the subject of an inquiry. He is, however, named in the asset registers of two of his brother’s companies, and his pawnbroking premises have, on multiple occasions, been the point of entry into the system for items subsequently traced to thefts under investigation by Essex and Metropolitan forces.
“Subject’s working assessment is that of a man who maintains plausible deniability through the strategic separation of his commercial activities from those of his brother’s, while continuing to derive material benefit from the wider family enterprise.”
Carlos paused.
“Shall I go on, my boy? There is a great deal more on Patrick. I do not think you will enjoy it.”
The broth was ticking down to a simmer behind him. He could hear the small wet popping of the marrow in the bones, and underneath it the steady mechanical hush of his own pulse against the inside of his ear.
He knew that prose.
He knew the itemised cadence of the clauses, the careful phrasing and the polite archaic register of the terminology used like ‘areas of interest have included’. He recognised the professional discipline that had built the sentence about Connor not personally being the subject of an inquiry, and then proceeded to outline his grey area associations.
He knew which man wrote like that. He had sat at Vidal’s own kitchen table in a navy jumper, drafting cohabitation protocols and briefing documents to his commanding officers.
Beauchamp.
“Pare, you do not know Connor as I do. You met him for a few evenings over Rioja, and a piece of paper has now told you what to think of him. That is not how a man assesses another man.”
“Vidal—”
“He came up the stairs the night I was hit by a car, Pare. He sat with Beauchamp at my bedside until I came round. You shouldn’t judge a man like that by the actions of his brother.”
“My boy, listen to me!”
“He has been kinder to me than anyone in this country other than Beauchamp himself, and now Beauchamp has taken his polite Sandhurst pen to him and reduced him to the most sensationalist aspects of his character. Pare, you are reading me areport. You are reading me a piece of intelligence work, drafted by a man with a grievance, and you are asking me to take it as the whole truth of a person.”
“Vidal, Beauchamp—”
“May I remind you of who we are. We are the Montcadas, and the eight hundred years of our line are not a procession of saints. Avi Lluís ran half of the contraband tobacco in the western Mediterranean for the better part of his thirties, and you have a photograph of him in your study with a cigar the size of his forearm. Our great-aunt Pilar was married off to a Sicilian whose family business was, by any honest reading, the systematic robbery of every shipping route between Palermo and Tunis, and we still toast her at Christmas. The Bishop of Lleida who confirmed me had three illegitimate children by a woman in Tarragona. Do not lecture me about the proximity of Connor Evans to commercial activity that does not bear close inspection. Half the men whose names are written into our family Bible would not have survived a Beauchamp report!”
