24

Chris had never experienced such relief as he did the moment the door of Lufthansa Flight 261 to Frankfurt was closed, and the plane began taxiing to the end of the runway. After the unbearable tension of the past twelve hours, he felt exhausted as he eased himself back in his seat. Glancing over to where Judith sat beside him, expression weary and eyes closed, he didn’t doubt she felt the same way too.

Just over an hour before, they’d witnessed the murder of the couple mistaken for themselves. As the airport crowd had reacted in a screaming turmoil of panic and hysteria, they’d stood in a daze, scarcely able to take in the reality, numbed to silence and too stunned to move. Then, less than a minute later, sirens were sounding, police cars and an ambulance screaming into view.

The two of them had drawn their arms round each other, and returned inside the terminal building in a state of deep shock. The killing put everything in a dramatically different perspective. Knowing it should have been them out there, that two innocents had been caught up in their own, desperate drama, provoked overwhelming feelings of horror, outrage, guilt. It also, in a strange way, brought the two of them suddenly closer, like the sole survivors of some appalling disaster. Reeling from emotions on a scale they’d never experienced, at the same time they realised that now, even more than before, they couldn’t lose their grip. They had to get the hell out of this place.

Heading for the departures screen in the airport building, they found the first flight to Europe was by Lufthansa in an hour. Ground crew at the Lufthansa desk told them seats were still available. A reverse-charge call to Judith’s cousin Michelle, in London, and her credit card details, secured them two places in Economy. They scrambled through customs and immigration through to Boarding, which was already under way.

Now as Chris looked over at Judith, he reflected that they’d just been through the most harrowing experience of their lives together. There was no question now of not trusting each other, and no room for hostility. They were both in it together. As if in response to his thoughts, she reached out and took his hand in hers, drawing it into her lap as the plane thrust down the runway. Both of them looked out of the window as they took off, watching the sprawl of Bombay beneath them as the plane curved upwards in sharp ascent.

Then, as the plane reached its cruising altitude, Judith turned to Chris, her expression wan. ‘These past couple of weeks … I know I’ve been … difficult.’

He shook his head, before reaching out and tracing the line of her cheek with his finger. ‘It’s your job to be suspicious.’

‘I didn’t just mean that.’ There was a tenderness in her voice he hadn’t heard since the old days. Taking both his hands in hers, she told him, ‘I’ve basically been a total bitch.’ Her eyes were filled with sorrow. ‘The things I said, I didn’t … you know.’

He didn’t trust himself to speak. Instead he reached over and took her in his arms. She wrapped hers around his, and they held each other, a familiar embrace unleashing a flood of feeling.

‘I’m sorry,’ she managed eventually, nuzzling back into his shoulder.

‘Oh, Jude!’ He stroked her hair, the way he always used to.

He was the only one who’d ever called her Jude. Hey, Jude. Her nom d’amour. After they’d broken up, he had avoided using her name altogether, though when he had to, it was always the more formal Judith.

‘It’s a long time since you called me that,’ she whispered.

‘It’s a long time since we’ve spoken. Really, I mean. But it’s been hard for us both.’

She leaned back in her seat, wiping her eyes. ‘I wish you weren’t always so bloody reasonable,’ she sniffed, embarrassed.

He smiled. ‘I’ll try to be less reasonable in the future.’

She grinned. ‘Yeah.’ Then, confiding in him after a pause, ‘You know, I’m not so sure what to do now – about my article, I mean.’

His eyes met hers with an intimacy they hadn’t shared for years.

‘We know that Carter’s on the take. If I give him the photographs it’ll be a repeat of what happened with Cullen.’

He shook his head. ‘You know, I’m still not convinced it was Mike. North has so many phones tapped.’

‘You think there’s someone down there at the airport with an envelope full of rupees for us?’

‘Could be. It’s just so utterly out of character that Mike should be involved.’

She paused a moment before saying, ‘I guess the evidence is only circumstantial. If North was listening …’

‘Not that that helps with your Carter problem.’ He stroked her hand before suggesting, ‘What about taking it a level up?’

‘Tilyard?’

Carter’s boss and the Editor of The Herald was a remote figure with whom she’d had few dealings.

‘Carter would go ballistic. I don’t even know if he’s told Tilyard about Starwear.’

‘It’s such a huge story, he should have. And if he hasn’t, you’d be doing your career no harm by going direct,’ he mused for a moment, ‘unless you took it back to The Guardian?

Judith nodded. ‘I’d thought of that. They’d love to have it, but if I did that no one I worked for in the future would ever trust me again.’

Their conversation was interrupted by an air hostess offering drinks. They both ordered Cokes, before Judith continued, ‘What I’d really like to do is get the story out to all the media. Maximum exposure.’

The phrase triggered a memory for Chris. The last time he’d seen it had been in a Starwear traffic meeting note. ‘Something like GlobeWatch,’ he mused.

Judith frowned. She’d heard of the organisation before, but right now couldn’t place it. ‘What’s that?’

He pulled a wry expression. ‘Starwear’s in line to win a whole lot of awards from them. I know North’s making sure all the media are there.’

As he was talking, Judith was following him intently.

‘Some kind of think-tank on global industrial relations. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’re just a set-up—’

‘But it would horrify Ellen Kennedy.’ She’d worked it out now.

Chris’s expression was puzzled. ‘Dr Kennedy from St John’s?’

She was nodding.

‘What’s she—’

‘1 phoned her three weeks ago. She’s big on the child labour issue. I checked her out as a lead. Said she was involved with GlobeWatch. In fact, she’s handing out the awards.’

In that instant, the same possibility occurred to them both. They searched each other’s eyes with excitement. ‘Imagine if she turned up at the awards ceremony with the real story.’ Chris spoke quickly. ‘When are the awards?’

‘The eleventh. What’s today?’

‘We arrive in Frankfurt on the seventh. Cutting it fine.’ His tone was urgent. ‘We’d still have to get to Oxford.’

Judith met his look of doubt with a sudden determination. ‘It’s too big an opportunity to miss. I just hope to God my photos come out, and we get to her in time.’

‘I hope she plays ball.’

‘She will.’ Judith was certain. ‘How can you argue with photographic evidence?’

The Great Room of the Grosvenor House Hotel is one of the largest and most opulent salons in London, long established as the capital’s preeminent venue for gala banquets and awards ceremonies. The evening of the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony saw the hotel’s banqueting staff swing into well-oiled routine, to ensure that each one of the four hundred invited luminaries was made to feel important. A red carpet swept across the pavement to receive men in black ties and women in elegant evening wear as they stepped from the backs of chauffeur-driven Bentleys, Jaguars and London cabs.

Once in the hotel, gathering on a balcony that overlooked the Great Room, guests were offered sparkling flutes of Moet et Chandon and tray-loads of exotic canapes by circulating staff. Glittering beneath them were fifty candlelit tables, covered with immaculately starched white tablecloths, and laid with silver and crystal and sumptuous floral centrepieces. Seven-thirty for eight p.m., the invitations had instructed, and the balcony was filling all the time, the buzz of excited conversation and laughter growing rapidly, so that by ten minutes before the hour, the pre-dinner drinks party was roaring.

Tonight’s gathering was certainly of the turbo-powered variety, with more heavyweight businessmen gathered here than at a UN economic summit. Lombard had exerted its considerable corporate influence to ensure that the Chief Executive Officers and Managing Directors of the world’s largest global businesses were assembled here in one room. Industry leaders and the money men who bankrolled them, high-profile entrepreneurs and business gurus, all the major brokerage houses and merchant banks were represented – the atmosphere positively reeked with corporate testosterone. They’d flown in from New York and Chicago, from Tokyo and Sydney, from Berlin, Paris, Moscow and Milan.

And the power wasn’t purely economic. There were senior politicians too: Tory grandees and Labour peers, three former Prime Ministers and two former US Presidents, cabinet ministers from around the world. To a room heaving with gravitas had been added a sprinkling of celebrities to add glitz to the occasion: blue-blooded English aristocrats and exiled European monarchs, golf stars and supermodels and several private Gulfstream-loads of Hollywood power-brokers.

They were all here for a night at the top. Because Lombard had persuaded them, or their advisers, that the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony was the place to be seen. It represented the very essence of the new millennium’s business values – global corporate citizenship and enlightened self-interest – values that all of those attending wished to be associated with. It presented an opportunity to bask in reflected glory, if not to capture it for themselves. For Lombard had also exercised the full might of its media influence to ensure that anyone who was anyone in the business media had been coaxed or cajoled into attendance. Here tonight were the City Editors of every national British newspaper and major press agency, as well as the Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune from America, the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung from Germany, France’s Le Soir, Italy’s II Mondo and a raft of reporters from China and south-east Asia. Television cameramen from the BBC, ITV, BSkyB, CNN, Bloombergs and CNBC had set up on a special TV platform, able to get footage right around the room. The effect had been carefully choreographed so that no one arriving could fail to be impressed by the company in which they found themselves – and, by association, impressed by themselves, for being among the elite corps of global power-brokers and tycoons whose money made the world go round.

At the centre of one of the most star-studded groups in the room stood Jacob Strauss and his wife Amy, both resplendent in their evening finery. Flash-cubes had been going off all around them from the moment they stepped from the back of their Bentley. And one thing they both knew was how to play the media – a smile here and a handshake there, saying the right word in the right ear, and standing by the right people for group photo calls. Standing back a few feet from the Strausses, apparently unnoticed but orchestrating much of what Jacob and Amy Strauss were doing, stood Elliott North. He was cool and svelte in his dinner jacket, his face freshly shaven and cologned, and moustache neatly trimmed. Behind those flashing lenses, he didn’t miss a thing. There were a number of people he needed Jay to circulate among, and he had only a limited time to work the room, in accordance with the plan already worked out by Mike Cullen.

Because tonight was all about Jacob Strauss. Under the auspices of GlobeWatch and the ethics of the new millennium, the reality was that this was Jacob Strauss’s coming-out party; his first major public occasion as CEO of Starwear. It was a bit like a debutante’s ball – and everything was in place so that a more spectacular endorsement of his corporate vision, leadership and values would be impossible to imagine.

As North guided Jay and his wife first in this direction, and then that, he took special satisfaction from his role, feeling like the gambler who’d already bought off the croupier. Little did any of these guests realise that it was Jacob Strauss who would be setting off for the stage four times during the course of the evening to collect a GlobeWatch award. Jacob Strauss would make the trip the final time for the greatest prize of all – GlobeWatch’s Company of the Year. It was Jacob Strauss who would come out of it all as the golden boy of corporate America who had conquered the world.

All of which suited North fine. The higher Jay flew, North reckoned, the further he had to fall – and the less inclined he’d be to take the trip. He had already decided this would be his last official engagement as Jacob Strauss’s PR adviser. For, despite tonight’s impeccably organised ambiance of bonhomie, Strauss’s demands were becoming more reckless than ever. And, along with his increasing demands, it was becoming harder and harder to cover up for him. Treiger and Laing had been put out of action, thank Christ, but there would be others. You couldn’t hide the truth for ever. When Jacob Strauss was basking in the glow of tomorrow’s headlines, he’d decided, he was going to ask for his share of the success. Ten million dollars.

That island in Greece was beckoning. He could see it in his mind’s eye.

One of the elegantly clad guests at the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony didn’t head for the Great Room entrance along with the other guests, but made his way, as instructed, to the main hotel entrance. Presenting himself at Reception, he was directed to a suite on the seventh floor. He knocked on the door, which was opened by Mike Cullen himself.

It had required all of Cullen’s considerable persuasive skills to get Ed Snyder along tonight at all. Outraged by the sordid revelations of the tabloid press, and the damaging accusations of the broadsheets, he’d been fighting a rear guard action all week. It had been frustrating and exhausting – going well beyond the usual stresses of his business schedule, intruding deep into his personal life too. His wife had stuck by him, thank God. She’d realised the sleaze was being orchestrated deliberately to blacken his reputation at the very time he needed all the corporate credibility he could muster. She was damned if she was going to let Jacob Strauss wreck her marriage. And, predictably, the moment the Textiles Bill amendment had been passed, the stories disappeared, the telephone stopped ringing, the photographers decamped from outside their house.

At the end of the most bruising week of his career, it required all the confidence Ed Snyder could muster to walk into a room filled with his business peers and act as though he was taking it all in his stride. Yet this was precisely what Cullen had persuaded him to do. Though there was, of course, a very great incentive.

‘Drink?’ offered Cullen.

He glanced at his watch before shaking his head. ‘Ten to,’ he replied. Then he fixed Cullen with a look of enquiry, to which the other immediately responded.

‘I’m ready to trade,’ Cullen said.

‘When?’

‘Now.’

‘In the next ten minutes?’

‘We can shake on it in the next ten minutes. Carry out the transaction first thing tomorrow.’

Snyder was taken aback by the unexpected suddenness of it. But no less interested.

‘How much?’ he asked.

‘One twenty.’

He regarded Cullen closely. He’d been following Starwear’s share price as intensively as Cullen himself. That evening’s price had closed up, putting Cullen’s holding, he’d worked out earlier that evening, at just over £120.5 million pounds. ‘Sounds reasonable,’ he responded.

‘I’m a reasonable man.’

Shaking his head with disbelief, he walked across to the window that looked down on Park Lane, to where guests were still arriving for the ceremony. ‘After everything that’s happened this week …’ he mused.

It would be the most incredible turnaround. To his thirty-nine per cent holding would be added the twelve per cent, which no one knew Cullen owned – all that was required to give him full control of Starwear. Having been dragged through the dirt by the national press, he’d soon be king of the castle, CEO of the world’s largest sportswear manufacturer, owner of the world’s second biggest brand. The first thing he’d do would be to fire Jacob Strauss, for whom he had a well-developed contempt. He’d clear out Strauss’s cronies; he’d merge in the Active Red operation and have in his control a business empire three times the size of its closest competitor. All with the entrenched commercial advantage that Starwear had won by its amendment in the House of Commons that week. He couldn’t suppress a smile.

Catching the expression from across the room, Cullen grinned. ‘I did tell you to keep focused on the big picture.’

He nodded. ‘You did.’ Then, glancing directly at Cullen, ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting me to keep on Lombard as Starwear’s PR advisers?’

Cullen raised the palms of his hands equivocally. ‘It’s a no-strings deal. If you decide to keep us on, of course, we’d be delighted. Though I would propose a certain restructuring.’

Snyder agreed.

‘Just remember,’ Cullen reminded him, ‘whatever success Starwear enjoys tonight will be yours, by virtue of ownership, tomorrow.’

Snyder shrugged his shoulders dismissively. ‘You don’t need to sell me on it. I’ve been working for this moment my whole lifetime.’

‘You and me both, Ed. So, we have a deal?’

‘We have a deal.’

The two men shook hands.

Ellen Kennedy was wearing the same black dress she wore for all her ‘evening do’s’, as she called them. It had cost her a small fortune at Laura Ashley’s ten years before, but it was very flattering – black lent her petite frame a certain elegance, she’d always thought. She particularly liked wearing the dress with her grey hair up, as she was wearing it tonight, and complemented by the twin strand of pearls she’d inherited from her mother. Arriving at the Grosvenor House by cab, she carried under her right arm a plastic folder containing her three-page speech.

Claude had assured her she needn’t worry about bringing a copy of the speech. All of the speakers’ addresses, including the one she’d sent him, had been prepared for an auto cue machine, so that speakers needed only to focus on their delivery. Ordinarily, Ellen would have been only too happy to take advantage of the technology. But tonight it was out of the question; the speech she was about to give was very different from the one she’d faxed over to Claude three days ago. It couldn’t be more different. In fact, what she planned to say was the very opposite of her original intentions.

What had changed it all had been her visitors last Friday night. A knock on the door at ten-thirty at night was unusual to begin with, but still more unexpected was the discovery, on opening the door, of Judith Laing and her young man, Christopher. As she showed them in, she’d recalled her telephone conversation with Judith a few weeks ago, when she’d said she was investigating a child-labour story. Was the visit in connection with that, she wondered, or was it purely social? After sitting down, Judith had confirmed that Ellen was to be the keynote speaker at the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony in two days’ time. Then she and Christopher told their story.

Ellen had, of course, been shaken to the core by their revelations. But there was no time for disbelief. Quite apart from her remembering Judith as a student with a particularly acute intelligence, the two had brought evidence – including photographs of Starwear’s slave factory in Jaipur. Christopher had told her about the modus operandi of Mike Cullen and Elliott North – the deaths, in suspicious circumstances, of William van Aardt, Merlin de Vere, Kate Taylor; the dirty-tricks campaign against Starwear competitors; and how he suspected GlobeWatch was merely a front set up by Starwear to give itself prizes.

Recovering from her shock, Ellen Kennedy didn’t know what made her more furious – the horrific abuse to which Starwear was subjecting children in India, or the fact that she’d almost been deceived into giving the company her full endorsement. Almost – but not quite. She had been tempted to phone Claude Bonning, then and there, and have it out with him. But Judith and Christopher had persuaded her otherwise. They had proposed a very different tack indeed, and one which, she conceded, would have far more impact.

The three of them had talked into the early hours before Judith and Christopher left – they were staying at a friend’s cottage in the Cotswolds. Next morning, Ellen had started making a few discreet enquiries, using the list of GlobeWatch sponsors Claude Bonning had originally sent her. One advantage of having been a lecturer for the past forty years was that generations of students had passed through her hands. Some, like Judith, had stayed in touch, and had gone on to scale the dizziest of corporate pinnacles. By now, Ellen knew a fair number of senior executives at various companies, including some on the GlobeWatch sponsor list. She managed to track down a few at their homes during the weekend. She was sorry to trouble them, she explained, but she hoped they could answer a quick query, or give her the name of someone who could; was it the case that their company had made a substantial donation to a non-profit-making group called GlobeWatch?

A couple had known the answer straight away. Others phoned her back. In three out of five cases, there had been no record of any donation, although amounts below £250, one of her former students explained, were not individually listed. In the remaining two cases, a donation had been confirmed. In each case, the company had made a donation of £100 on the recommendation of their PR advisers, Lombard.

It was all the proof she’d needed. But she still wanted confirmation from Claude himself. Making her way now into the hotel, she found him resplendent in his penguin suit, greeting more movers and shakers than she had ever seen in one place.

‘Claude, I need a quiet word,’ she had told him, unsmiling.

‘What – now?’ He’d appeared startled.

‘Yes.’

She seemed very serious, he couldn’t help noticing, which was strange. She didn’t seem the type to suffer from nerves.

‘Well, I …’ He glanced about the crowded room rather helplessly, before remembering the security room just off the lobby. Swiftly leading her to it, he showed her inside, before closing the door behind them.

‘In the past few days,’ she began immediately, ‘I’ve been on the telephone to five of my former students now working for companies who supposedly sponsor GlobeWatch.’

Her emphasis had him suddenly, and visibly, crumpling.

‘It turns out that none of the companies has paid more than £250. In fact, it’s more like £100 each. And unless I’m very much mistaken, GlobeWatch has only one corporate sponsor. The same company that’s in line to win four prizes tonight, including the Company of the Year Award. Is that the case?’

Claude was, by now, white-faced, his jaw trembling. There was no need for him to answer.

Stepping closer to him, she looked despairingly into his eyes. ‘Claude – why?’

Raising his hands to cover his face, he shrank before her, until he finally managed to gasp, ‘I was blackmailed.’

‘Elliott North?’ She was brisk.

He glanced up at her, astonished.

‘Huh!’ she snorted. ‘As I thought.’ Then she was making her way across the room.

Behind her, he called out, plaintively, ‘You’ll still be … making your speech?’

At the door she turned. ‘Oh, yes, Claude,’ she told him, ‘you can be sure of it.’

The motorbike courier pulling into The Herald’s Wapping offices winced as he swung off the bike and made his painful way across to Security. He’d been on the bike for the past three hours, racing up the M4 from the Cotswolds, ignoring the developing cramp in his legs. Speed was of the essence, the young lady had said. And he had promised her he’d get the envelope delivered before seven. Looking at his watch now, he noted with satisfaction that it was just ten to. He raised the visor of his helmet, looking at the woman inside Security.

‘Delivery for—’ he squinted at the envelope, ‘Carol Anderson.’ Within a minute, Carol had come down to collect the envelope. PA to the Editor of The Herald, she rarely received envelopes addressed to her personally. Tearing it open on her way back to the office, she read Judith’s handwritten note, glanced over the accompanying piece – and gasped. She began running towards the Editor’s office.

Judith and Chris walked hand-in-hand down the cobbled pavement from the pub where they’d just eaten dinner. Bernie’s Cotswold bolt-hole was conveniently located just a few hundred yards away from one of the most congenial hostelries in the shire – one with which the two of them had grown rapidly acquainted in the past two days.

Following their visit to Ellen Kennedy in Oxford, they’d arrived around three o’clock on the Saturday morning. Neither of them having slept properly for over forty-eight hours, they’d collapsed in Bernie’s double bed and slept solidly ’til mid-afternoon. They had phoned Ellen again, and she had told them of her investigations confirming GlobeWatch’s true status as a mere front for Starwear – and about the speech she’d planned for the following night. Then the two of them had set off for a pub dinner.

It had been an evening of red wine and candlelight, reminiscences about their times together at Oxford, and an outpouring of their lives since then. There had been such intimacy, such emotion. It was as though the barriers holding them apart for so long had, after all the events of the past few days, been tossed aside, unleashing an intensity of feeling neither of them had felt since they were last together. On their way home, on that crisp, November night, they had paused outside a chapel where Christmas carols were being practiced; they were both transported back to the first time they’d been together, after carols at St John’s. Drawing Judith close to him, Chris put his arms around her and kissed her. Raising her face to his, Judith responded to his passion, their bodies melting together.

What happened when they returned to the cottage was as inevitable as it was utterly ecstatic. High on good feeling, the moment they stepped inside the door they hadn’t been able to wait to tear off each other’s clothes. Leaving a trail of coats and jeans and underwear all the way from the front door to the sitting room, they’d knelt down in their nakedness before the glowing embers of the fire, lost to each other as they kissed. Then, drawing back, with his forefinger Chris traced the smoothness of her cheek, pale beneath her dark, tousled hair, down her neck, all the way to where her pert, beige-tipped breasts were taut beneath his touch.

‘I just want you so much.’ His voice was husky.

She responded to his expression of unashamed lust, lying back on the carpet and drawing him on top of her, between her parted legs.

There’d been none of the hesitancy or self-consciousness of first-time sex, but all of its breathless edge. Unable to resist his urgency, his driving demand for satiation, Judith had been crazy with passion. Their rising cries became noisy and unrestrained, as their rhythm grew faster and faster. She had urged him hoarsely on, through territory so well known and so loved – and yet so utterly exhilarating.

And afterwards, when they had both been to the edge and over it, they lay together in front of the fire, flooded with bliss. As she basked in the afterglow, a silent tear trickled down Judith’s cheek. Wrapped up in him, she hadn’t felt so safe, so sure of herself, for years. For Chris, holding her folded into his body, it had been like coming home.

Tonight, as they opened the front door of the cottage, after another day of country walks and fire-lit passion, they were both stirred by an anticipation of a different kind. Chris walked across the sitting room and switched on the TV. Glancing at his watch he saw it was half-past eight – Claude Bonning was doing an exclusive, pre-ceremony interview live on the balcony of the Great Room, while behind him GlobeWatch’s high-profile guests were dining.

Turning to Judith, he slipped his arm around her waist. ‘So,’ he murmured, ‘we’re on countdown.’

Making chit-chat with captains of industry was not generally something that came easily to Ellen Kennedy, and that night was no exception. She found herself at a table of corporate warriors with a combined net worth greater than that of the continent of Africa, and whose sole obsession, it seemed, was the latest activity of international stock markets. Usually, she would have seen this as a networking opportunity, a chance to broaden her professional horizons and, who knows, maybe stimulate interest in the research work she did. But not tonight. To begin with, she was feeling daunted by the task she faced. And besides, after tonight, she realised, she would have no shortage of opportunity to explain to people what she did outside the lecture theatre.

The mood in the Great Room, which had started out as one of high spirits, moved up a key as guests began dinner. Wine flowed freely, as first the hors d’oeuvres were consumed, then the entrées, a detectable buzz of anticipation developing as waiters swooped and fluttered about the tables and the minutes ticked closer to the main event. In front of each guest was an Order of Ceremonies card, bearing the GlobeWatch logo, and outlining how, after coffee had been served following the main course, the awards ceremony would begin. Up at the front of the room, on stage behind a podium, a massive, wall-to-wall screen flanked by faux Doric columns and towering flower arrangements, bore the GlobeWatch logo projected in blue and green. All very theatrical, Ellen Kennedy couldn’t help observing. Around the room, as the noise level steadily increased, there was one table in particular that seemed to be enjoying itself. Seeing her looking over, the businessman to her left followed her gaze.

‘Jacob Strauss,’ he noted, ‘and that Lombard guy, what’s his name? Mike Cullen.’

‘You know them?’ she asked.

‘Know of them.’

‘Hmm.’

It wouldn’t be long, she mused, before very few people couldn’t make the same claim.

Finally, coffee had been served, the lights dimmed, and after a hush of anticipation had descended, came a blast of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ from massive speakers in all four corners of the room, together with a spectacular display of projected computer graphics on the front screen. Then, across to the podium strode Claude Bonning. His opening address was upbeat and assured. Despite a few nervous glances in the direction of Ellen’s table, he explained bravely what GlobeWatch was, and why it had been created, before welcoming the first celebrity speaker of the evening to present the first award. He was, pronounced Claude, the world’s leading motivational guru, a man who closely advised the US President, who had helped BMW achieve fifteen percent performance increases, and who had coached British swimming champion Chris Parry, who went on to win five gold medals at the Olympics.

‘Your majesties, my lords, ladies and gentlemen,’ Claude drove up the excitement, ‘will you please welcome to the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony this evening, Dr Anthony Black.’

There was more music and a tumult of applause. This whole thing, thought Ellen, had all the razzmatazz of an Oscars ceremony. On her Order of Ceremonies card she’d noted that a production company had been brought in to ensure the evening’s flawless progress. In fact, before sitting down for dinner, she’d been approached by a young man bristling with mobile phones, to be asked about her preference for the height of the podium, and did she have any other needs. She’d surprised him by handing over a series of photographic slides she wished to use. He hadn’t expected them, he said, but would ensure they were all set up ready for use.

Now, as she took in the music, the lighting, the dramatic setting, she realised it had all been designed to create maximum excitement. The first speaker, Dr Anthony Black, had no doubt been selected for the same reason. A highly effective speaker, he broke the ice with some well-directed humour, before seizing control of the audience with a few of his key motivational concepts. In a few spellbinding minutes he succeeded in communicating a vision of corporate success limited only by the imagination, of global interconnection bringing the human race closer together, and of a future of transformation and enlightenment. By the end of it his audience were, metaphorically, if not literally, on the edges of their chairs. When he announced the winner of the first category – Human Potential Development – the result was greeted with triumphal applause.

And so the evening went on. Speech after speech. Prize after prize. All building up to the grand finale. Jacob Strauss’s first appearance on stage to collect the prize for Best Developing Nations Employer was greeted with an applause so great it had the chandeliers clinking. On his second and third appearances, his reception seemed even more thunderous still. But Dr Ellen Kennedy was not one of those clapping. Ignoring the curious glances of her fellow diners, she sat watching the proceedings with an expression that was deliberately blank. All would very soon be revealed, she decided. Her time would come.

And come it did. The triumphal music leading up to the ultimate prize of the evening was even more extravagant than all that had preceded it. Claude Bonning once again took to the stage, pronouncing Dr Kennedy to be ‘One of the foremost thinkers of our time. A celebrated academic. A global leader in the field of corporate citizenship. Acclaimed internationally for her work in developing countries. Author of three important books …’

When she stepped up to the stage, a diminutive figure amid the massive floral bouquets and Doric columns and GlobeWatch logo, the applause was deafening.

Opening out her folder on the podium, she carefully donned her reading glasses and glanced about the cavernous room. After forty years of addressing large, and not always well-disciplined gatherings, she had an extremely well-developed instinct for ensuring the undivided attention of all present. And right now she used the power of the pause: a period of silence, longer than most speakers would feel comfortable with, standing with calm assurance for long enough so that when she spoke her first words, every single person there was desperate to hear what she had to say.

When, finally, she did begin, she started in a most unexpected fashion.

‘Yesterday I spoke to a young lad called Vishnu,’ she told her audience. ‘He was surprisingly cheerful for a boy living in circumstances which, I suspect, are a lot less fortunate than the average twelve-year-old in Britain. Vishnu has no idea where his parents are, or even if they are alive – he last saw them when he was seven. He lives with his aunt and uncle, and shares a cramped room with three cousins in a semi-detached house in London. The family can’t afford bus fares, so he has to walk three miles to school every day. He has no spending money except for the £5 a week he makes on his paper round. So there’s no question of video games, or designer trainers, or trips to the movies – all of which are considered, these days, to be a normal part of growing up.

‘But Vishnu considers himself to be extremely fortunate. In fact, he thinks his life is one of luxury. All the more surprising, when you consider what terrible injuries he has suffered.’

As her first slide appeared, there was a massive, collective gasp from the audience, which had no idea where this speech was heading, but was utterly engrossed nonetheless. The slide showed the back of a naked child, horrific weals scorched across his back, buttocks and thighs, as though he’d been branded with a steel bar.

‘These burns were no accident,’ Ellen continued calmly, ‘they were deliberate burns inflicted by the man who owned Vishnu, so that he couldn’t sit down.’

Expressions of shock had turned into a rumble of outrage.

‘Vishnu’s crime was to complain, after working for fifteen hours, that he could no longer thread a needle because his hands were shaking. He wanted a rest. His owner decided to teach him a lesson he would never forget.

‘But Vishnu is quite right to consider himself one of the lucky ones,’ she continued. ‘He has relatives in Britain who came to the rescue. For the sum of just one hundred pounds, very much less than the cost of each of our meals here tonight, he was saved from another four years of slavery. The same can’t be said of the children he left behind.’

Her second slide had been taken from the roof of the building across from the Starwear shed in Jaipur. Blown up across the whole of the screen, it showed dozens of child slaves bent over benches, a scene of unimaginable horror. Children were clearly shackled to their benches,with scarred backs and bruised faces, it was an image of the most Dickensian squalor. This time, there was more than simply a gasp from the audience. Voices were raised in indignation, above a rising tide of disapproval.

‘We can’t know how many children work as slaves in Vishnu’s old factory,’ Ellen continued, ‘how many are tortured, raped or simply worked to death. But I would guess about two hundred at any one time.’

She paused for the flurry of indignation to subside, regaining the audience’s full attention before she announced, ‘This photograph was taken last week in Jaipur, India. The factory costs less than four hundred bowls of rice a day to operate, and as such is one of the most productive garment manufacturers in the world. Its location, indeed its very existence, has been one of the most ruthlessly guarded secrets of recent times. But I can reveal tonight that this factory, and others like it, is knowingly and all too willingly operated … by Starwear.’

At that moment, the Great Room erupted in emotion, undignified bellows of denunciation sounding above a chorus of outrage. Across the room from where Ellen Kennedy stood beneath the image of unimaginable misery, cameramen on the television platform had broken away from her address to follow proceedings below. There was shocked bewilderment on the faces of famous politicians; tears on the cheeks of a supermodel; alarm as businessmen called out in incredulous voices.

The table of Jacob and Amy Strauss was the very epicentre of a volcanic explosion. Completely abandoning the pretence of charming civility he’d adopted all evening, Strauss had leapt to his feet and, face purple with fury, was screaming at North, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

North’s expression was one of wild panic. The vein in his forehead had swollen to dark crimson.

‘I had no idea!’

Opposite North, Cullen experienced a rare moment of complete bewilderment. Then his survival instinct kicked in. ‘Jacob, sit down!’ he shouted above the cacophony. ‘There are TV cameras everywhere. Don’t draw attention to yourself!’

But Jacob Strauss had lost it. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ He picked up a wine bottle and smashed it on to the table.

North looked over at Cullen. ‘Should I get Bonning?’

Cullen had already glanced across the room to where Bonning had been standing – but he’d disappeared.

‘Too late,’ he correctly surmised.

All about them, diners who only minutes before had been congratulating Jacob Strauss on his third ascent to the stage were now staring at him in shock and confusion. There were bellows from tycoons, City Editors and merchant bankers:

‘Explain yourself, Strauss!’

‘That’s how he’s getting those figures!’

‘Unbelievable!’

Ellen Kennedy waited a while for the waves of outrage to peak, before she held up her hands. For all the exploding passion in the room, her gesture commanded rapid respect. It was as though her scandalised audience could hardly wait for further explanation.

‘I fully realise the seriousness of the accusation I am making,’ Ellen said, ‘but Starwear is guilty of very serious crimes. While carrying out the systematic abuse of children in India, the company has been completely misleading its shareholders about the true source of its profits.’

Her next slide showed Starwear’s last annual report, with a red circle around the figure for India.

‘This figure is attributed to Starwear’s Quantum Change factory, which is also in Jaipur. A very impressive figure, I’m sure you’ll all agree. But even at maximum output, the Quantum Change factory was never designed to produce even half of the output shown.’

She now showed the relevant page from the Forbes report, a substantially lower figure also ringed in red.

This time, the reaction in the room was of even greater ire. If anyone had been in doubt before about her accusations, they were evidently convinced now. All heads were turning in the direction of the Starwear table, where an undignified slanging match had ensued between Strauss and North. Amy Strauss, who had arrived resplendent in Versace, was making a hasty exit from the room in floods of tears, Helen Cullen following closely after to provide moral support. Starwear’s guests at the table were standing, throwing down their napkins in disgust and making their way towards the stairs. All this time, Mike Cullen sat, absolutely silent, shaking his head with an expression of stern disapproval.

When Ellen Kennedy raised her hands again, her audience seemed less inclined to calm down. Furious taunts and bitter recriminations rebounded across the room. ‘Quiet, please.’ She had to raise her voice. ‘Please let me continue.’

Then, as the noise subsided, ‘I regret that Starwear’s deceits do not end there,’ she said loudly above the continuing row. ‘In fact, we are all unwitting participants in the company’s attempts to present a false image to the outside world.’

That had the effect of alarming her audience to a chastened silence.

‘When I accepted a position on the Executive Council of GlobeWatch, I was reassured by the breadth of corporate support for the objectives of the organisation. I am sure you will share my sense of outrage to discover, as I did a few days ago, that in fact GlobeWatch has only one major donor – the company which, by coincidence, has been awarded three of tonight’s prizes, and which I was due to present with a fourth. Your majesties, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid that GlobeWatch is nothing more than a phoney front group set up by Starwear to give itself prizes, thereby distracting our attention from the horrors it is perpetuating in the developing world right at this moment.’

There was no stopping the storm of protest unleashed now. Dignitaries behaved in the most undignified fashion as they stormed out of the Great Room, hurrying for the staircases amid howls of acrimony directed at the Starwear table – all captured by television crews and newspaper reporters who could scarcely believe the scene unfolding around them. There were demands for Claude Bonning, who was suddenly nowhere to be found. Even the production company lost control of their slick, audio-visual management – the image of child slaves appeared once again on the screen and was jammed there, whipping up still further agitation, until someone found the switch for the chandeliers, and turned them up to maximum brightness, so that the Great Room was suddenly bright as day.

Ellen Kennedy stepped down from the podium and made her way directly to a concealed exit with as much dignity as she could muster. She had just made, she knew, the address of her life. Amid the chaos of hasty evacuation, the few Starwear directors remaining had slunk off into the crowds, leaving only Jacob Strauss and Elliott North to face the scorn and wrath of those same people who, only minutes before, had been applauding Starwear with vigour. Strauss was now incandescent with rage, the ‘golden boy’ of American business transmuted into a seething cauldron of violent resentment.

‘You’re fired, you dumb fuck!!’ he screamed at North, before shoving his way through the crowd of appalled cabinet ministers, film stars and City Editors. ‘I had no idea,’ he bayed to anyone who would listen, ‘I had no idea it was going on.’

‘It’s your company, Strauss,’ someone called out.

‘I had no idea,’ he repeated, lamely.

His only instinct was to get out – but he wasn’t heading for the main staircase, that was for sure. Instead he made off in exactly the opposite direction, away from the departing crowd, back across the Great Room, and down a corridor until he spotted an Emergency Exit sign. He threw all his weight against the door, shoving it open – bursting into the hotel kitchen. A number of staff turned to look in astonishment at their black-tied visitor, before a waiter quickly approached him. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he asked, giving no hint that the guest’s entrance had been somewhat outré.

‘Just get me out of this fucking place!’ Strauss screamed.

Mike Cullen, meanwhile, had made his way directly towards the television platform with as much smooth aplomb as he could muster. Cameramen were still taking live footage of the many famous faces, producers were on their mobile phones talking excitedly to their stations, and the platform had become a natural centre of gravity for every City Editor and press agency reporter in the room.

‘Gentlemen, I’m Mike Cullen,’ he introduced himself in a loud voice, trying to garner as much attention as possible. ‘My company, Lombard, advises Starwear on public relations issues.’

He was braced for the inevitable jeers and taunts. But at least he had them all paying attention to him now.

‘I want you all to know that I am as devastated by the revelations we’ve just had as you. I realise you will have a lot of questions. So I propose holding a full media conference, right here, in fifteen minutes’ time. I will have a statement for you by then, and I will be glad to answer all the questions you no doubt have.’

Summoning a one-man media conference with such haste was unprecedented, and he’d certainly caught them by surprise. But then this evening had been the business news event of the decade. As he stepped away from the TV platform, Cullen found Ed Snyder looming in front of him, his expression turned in a sardonic smile.

‘You know, Mike,’ he said to him, ‘if it’s all the same to you, I don’t think I will buy those Starwear shares tomorrow.’

Cullen scowled.

‘But I’m sure you won’t have any problem selling them – if the price is right.’

Cullen resisted the temptation to lash out at the smug little prick as he walked away. If the price was right! In the past twenty minutes he’d seen his £120 million shareholding destroyed. Right at this minute, fund managers in America who’d watched the proceedings on Bloombergs or CNN, would be offloading their Starwear stock for whatever they could get. The price would be collapsing by the second. Investors would be bailing out like rats from a sinking ship. It was all over for Starwear. By the time the London market opened tomorrow morning, his Starwear shares would be reduced to less than the level he’d bought them for. Overnight, the ubiquitous Starwear brand, once valued at £1 billion, was dead.

Adrenalin charging through his system, Cullen realised, though, how much he still had to play for. It was Starwear’s reputation, not Lombard’s, that had been destroyed tonight. But guilt through association would quickly follow – he’d seen it a hundred times before. He needed to cover his tracks; he knew exactly what he had to do. In the next fifteen minutes he’d marshal his thoughts, sell his shares, speak to his lawyer. Polish his spin.