Chapter 62 The fourth floor

Chapter 62 The fourth floor
Bruno was on his feet before the second knock.
I stayed on the couch and watched him cross to the door and stop beside it without opening it.
"Who is there?" he said.
A beat of silence before he finally responded. 
"It is Daniel," he said. "I need to come in."
Bruno opened the door.
Daniel stood in the corridor with his coat still on and his hair wet from outside and the particular look of a man who had been sitting on something for several hours and had finally decided he could not sit on it any longer.
He looked at Bruno and then at me and then at the letter on the cushion beside me.
"You met with Matteo," he said.
"Yes," Bruno said.
"He called me after," Daniel said. "To tell me what he told you." He stepped inside and Bruno closed the door. "He wanted me to know before the trial."
"Sit down," Bruno said.
Daniel sat in the chair across from me and put his hands on his knees and looked at the floor for a moment.
"I knew," he said.
Bruno went very still beside the door.
"Not everything," Daniel said quickly. "Not Cassano. Not what Richard did with the information Father gave Matteo." He looked up. "But I knew Father was frightened. In the weeks before he died he was different. He stopped sleeping and he was checking the locks at night and he had conversations in rooms he closed before he started." Daniel pressed his hands together. "I was twenty-two and I told myself it was work stress. I told myself that for eight years."
"But it was not work stress," Bruno said.
"No," Daniel said.
Bruno came and sat on the arm of the couch beside me and I felt him close and did not move away and he did not move away either.
"Why are you telling us this tonight?" Bruno said.
"Because Matteo's full statement goes to Cole tomorrow morning," Daniel said. "Everything. Including the conversation he had with Father six months before he died. Including the fact that Father told Matteo he was worried about someone close to him finding out what he was building." Daniel looked at Bruno. "He told Matteo he was worried about me."
The room went quiet.
"He thought you might tell someone," I said.
Daniel looked at me.
"He did not know if he could trust me," Daniel said. "His own son. He looked at me and he was not sure." He stopped. "He was right not to be sure. Not because I would have told Richard deliberately. But because Richard already had me. Not the way he had Matteo or Harlan. Something older than that."
"What did he have?" Bruno said.
Daniel reached into his coat pocket and put something on the table between us.
A photograph.
Old, printed on paper, the edges slightly worn.
Daniel was in it, maybe nineteen, standing outside a building I did not recognise with a man whose face was turned away from the camera.
"That is Richard," Daniel said. "We met when I was nineteen. Before you ever knew him. Before Father introduced him to Phoebe." He looked at Bruno. "Richard found me first. He spent two years building a relationship with me before he came anywhere near this family."
Bruno picked up the photograph.
"He chose us," Bruno said. "Before Monaco. Before any of the business. He chose this family specifically and worked his way in from the youngest outward."
"Yes," Daniel said.
"Why us?" I said.
Daniel looked at me.
"Father's evidence against Cassano," Daniel said. "Richard knew about it years before Father went to Matteo. He had been watching Father build it and waiting for the right moment to take it." He paused. "He needed to be inside the family when he moved. Someone who could reassure Father that Richard was trustworthy."
"You," Bruno said.
"I told Father Richard was a good man," Daniel said. "I believed it. I had spent two years believing it because Richard had spent two years making sure I believed it." He looked at his hands. "Father trusted Richard partly because I vouched for him."
The lamp threw its warm light across the room and outside the city was quiet and the letter was on the cushion and the photograph was on the table and none of it was new damage, it was old damage finally showing its full shape.
Bruno set the photograph down.
He looked at Daniel across the table and Daniel looked back at him and between them was everything that eight years of silence had built up and was now slowly, painfully, being cleared away.
"You were nineteen," Bruno said.
"Yes," Daniel said.
"Richard targeted a nineteen year old boy and spent two years grooming him into a position he could use," Bruno said. "That is not something you carry alone."
Daniel looked at his brother.
His mouth moved slightly but he did not speak for a moment.
"I vouched for him," Daniel said.
"You were manipulated by someone who had been doing it for twenty years," Bruno said. "There is a difference."
Daniel looked at the table.
I reached across and put the photograph face down so he did not have to look at it.
He glanced at me.
"Thank you," he said quietly.
"Cole needs to know this," Bruno said. "The timeline. How early Richard chose this family. How deliberately he built his way in." He looked at Daniel. "It changes the shape of the prosecution case significantly."
"I know," Daniel said. "That is why I came tonight. I am going to Cole in the morning." He paused. "I wanted you to hear it from me first."
Bruno nodded once.
The three of us sat in the quiet room for a moment.
Then Daniel stood and picked up his coat.
At the door he stopped and looked at Bruno.
"The letter," Daniel said. "From Father. Was it—" He stopped.
"He wrote about both of us," Bruno said.
Daniel was quiet for a moment.
"Equally?" he said.
"Equally," Bruno said.
Daniel pressed his lips together and nodded and went out and the door closed and the corridor was quiet.
Bruno came back to the couch and sat beside me and picked up the letter and held it without opening it.
I put my head on his shoulder.
His arm came around me.
We sat like that for a long time and the lamp burned and the city was quiet and the plant from my mother's garden sat on the kitchen windowsill and everything was still and close and exactly right.
His phone lit up on the table.
A message, not a call.
Bruno read it and his arm tightened around me slightly.
"What does it say?" I said.
He turned the phone and faced me.
Trial brought forward. Three weeks from today, Richard's legal team requested it. Judge Adler approved it this afternoon. Be in my office tomorrow at eight.
I looked at the screen.
Three weeks.
Half the time we thought we had.
Bruno put the phone face down on the table.
"Three weeks," I said.
"Yes," he said.
I sat up and looked at him.
"Then we do not waste a single day," I said.
"No," he said. "We do not." There's another motive behind this so be fast.