‘I love you too.’
For the next month, the walls of Ellie’s world were rain and numbers. Numbers on paper, numbers on phones, numbers on screens as she worked and reworked the spreadsheets that Blanchard sent her. In the evenings, and in the pre-dawn darkness when she went to work, rain curtained off the windows through which she saw the world. It never seemed to stop. At night she dreamed of windows on screens and screens on windows, rivulets of numbers running down them and collecting in pools at the bottom. Sometimes she woke with tears on her face. In the 4 a.m. silence she imagined that the rain had drowned out all of London; that she, alone on the thirty-eighth floor, was the only person who had survived.
The weather put everyone on edge. Even Blanchard’s impeccable good manners stretched to breaking. He snapped at her for minor mistakes; her reports came back covered in red ink. When she stumbled out of her nightly taxi — she never walked any more — it was all she could do to take her supper out of its packaging and collapse into bed. At least she saw nothing more of the man from the towpath. She puzzled over his warning until it grew so old she dismissed it. She didn’t tell anyone, certainly not Doug. He didn’t need any more reason to distrust Monsalvat.
She began to dread their nightly phone calls. Whether it was the distance or the weather, they could never agree, grinding on each other like the wrong key in the wrong lock. Doug went to Paris on a new passport, but wouldn’t tell her what he’d found. Once, she heard a woman’s voice in the background and spent a long, furious night lying awake and wondering. When she asked Doug about it the next day, he said it had been a radio play and called her paranoid.
One Thursday in early November, Blanchard invited Ellie to lunch. Some of his good humour seemed to have returned: he told her she needed fattening up and pinched her cheek like a wicked uncle. To her surprise, when they stepped out the door his car was nowhere to be seen.
‘The restaurant is just around the corner. The exercise will do you good.’ He raised an umbrella and made a chivalrous gesture with his arm; Ellie took it and clung close, struggling to dodge puddles and keep pace with his long strides. Some children from a local school had put out a stuffed straw man on the pavement and were collecting for their bonfire. Ellie couldn’t imagine how they’d find anything dry enough to burn.
He took her to the Coq d’Argent, an exclusive restaurant on the top floor opposite the Bank of England, all walnut panelling and red leather chairs. Ellie ordered smoked ham with roasted figs; Blanchard asked for Marennes d’Oléron and something called Imperial Al Baeri. Ellie sneaked another look at the menu while he studied the wine list. Marennes were oysters; Imperial Al Baeri was caviar. Price: £118 for fifty grams.
She closed the menu and looked away to hide her shock. Beyond the windows the building tapered like the tip of a spear, supporting a roof garden which was as sodden as the rest of London. And sitting at a table by the windows overlooking it, a briefcase by his knee, a face she’d have been happy never to see again.
She almost grabbed Blanchard’s arm. ‘That man over there. I know him.’
‘It’s the City. Most of the men in this room, I have done deals with them.’ He sat back and let the waiter pour two glasses of champagne.
‘Pol Roger. Churchill’s favourite.’
‘His name’s Lechowski,’ Ellie bore on. ‘He was in Luxembourg doing due diligence on Talhouett.’
Blanchard looked amused. ‘Did he ask you to go to bed with him?’
That brought Ellie up short. She blushed crimson; she began to stammer a couple of different answers, but none would come out right. She took a long draught of the champagne to buy herself some time. Blanchard never took his eyes off her.
‘Lechowski has a reputation. In the world of investment banking, he’s known as “the letch”. You know, he once offered Christine Lafarge to give her his client’s complete defence strategy if she would sleep with him.’
The waiter had come back and was setting out the food. Ellie sat in awkward silence until the business of plates and napkins and cutlery was concluded. Blanchard paid him no attention.
‘What did she do?’
Blanchard squeezed lemon over his oyster, then picked up the shell and tipped it into his mouth. He licked his lips with a smile so carnal it made Ellie blush all over again.
‘Who knows? But next morning, Christine had the document and we completed the takeover.’
Across the room, Lechowski stood. His jaws mashed reflexively on a piece of gum. For a horrible moment, Ellie worried he’d seen her. But he was looking elsewhere, towards an older man with brusquely chopped white hair and a sharply etched face striding towards him. They shook hands; Lechowski gestured the older man to sit.
‘Who’s that?’
Blanchard suddenly seemed much more interested in Lechowski’s table. ‘His name is Lazarescu. He is a judge in Romania. He is in London for a conference.’
His dark eyes fixed Ellie, laying down a challenge. Choosing her words carefully, she said, ‘I thought we abandoned the Talhouett deal.’
Blanchard smiled, pleased. ‘The management of Groupe Saint-Lazare considered your presentation very carefully. Ultimately, they felt that Talhouett holdings is too important strategically to abandon the acquisition.’
He spread caviar on a piece of toast and popped it in his mouth. Ellie tried to count the little black globules and wondered how much each one cost.
‘This puts us in an awkward position. We know that the company is worth less than it appears, but our rivals do not. If we bid the correct value, we will lose.’
By the window, the briefcase had somehow migrated from Lechowski’s side of the table to the judge’s.
‘So you’re telling Lechowski?’
Blanchard swallowed another oyster, chased down with a mouthful of champagne. ‘Did they teach you the efficient market hypothesis on your course? In an ideal market the price of an asset will reflect all available information about its future prospects. All we are doing is correcting an inefficiency in the market.’
‘I thought market inefficiencies were where profits were made.’
Blanchard acknowledged the point. ‘It was a superb piece of work you did, Ellie. I know you do not want to see it thrown away to our enemies. But — c’est la guerre. Sometimes we must sacrifice a pawn to capture the king.’
Ellie wondered which she was.
‘Do you have plans for this evening?’
His question caught her off balance.
‘I have tickets to the opera and my client cancelled. Wagner — Tristan und Isolde. Do you know it?’
Ellie shook her head. Opera, like caviar, wasn’t on the menu much in Newport.
‘It is sublime. Perhaps the most shattering work of art ever created. The tenor who sang the first performance died two weeks afterwards. The composer was so afraid of its power he banned all further performances in his lifetime.’
‘It sounds dangerous.’
She only said it for lack of anything more intelligent to say. Blanchard took her seriously. ‘The music takes you across the threshold to another place — a place governed by obsession. That is to say, without boundaries. Sometimes it is difficult to return.’ He waved to get the waiter’s attention. ‘Of course, if you have other plans …’
She caught his glance, daring her, and held it. She was still angry about Lechowski. She didn’t even think she liked opera. But the thought of another evening alone in her tower, combing her e-mails while she waited for the inevitable squabble with Doug, filled her with a sudden, palpable dread.
She drained her champagne. ‘What time does it start?’
Two men sat in a café at the rästhof on the autobahn, watching the trucks labour up the high pass. They called each other Harry and George, though they didn’t attach a lot of weight to those names. George was tall and lean and stooped, with a white beard and white hair that grew in woolly curls. Harry was shorter and wider, with tousled, sandy hair and a friendly face that always seemed to be apologising for something. At the moment he was studying the inside page of a three-day-old Italian newspaper. A handwritten translation had been taped next to one of the articles. It didn’t make it any easier to read.