The air between the two front seats frosted with silence. Finally, Chris reached across the chill and took Carla’s hand.

‘Look,’ he said wearily. ‘In the First World War fighter pilots used to toast each other with champagne before they went out and tried to shoot each other out of the sky. Did you know that? And the winners used to drop wreaths on their enemies’ airfields to commemorate the men they’d just killed. That make any sense to you? And we’re talking about less than a hundred and fifty years ago.’

‘That was war.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris made his voice stay calm. ‘A war for what? Lines drawn on a map. Can you honestly say that those men were fighting for anything that made any kind of sense? Anything that makes more sense than a competitive tender or a promotion duel?’

‘They had no choice, Chris. If they laid wreaths it was because they hated what they had to do. This is different.’

He felt his anger twist and jump like a fish in a net: this time it was an effort to hold it down. It looked as if Carla was going to pull her favourite trick and they were going to arrive at the Bryants’ front door in the brittle silence of an interrupted row.

‘You think we have any more of a choice than they did? You think I like what I do for a living?’

‘I don’t think you dislike it as much as you say.’ Carla was digging in her bag for cigarettes, a bad sign on the row barometer. ‘And if you do, there are other jobs. Other companies. Chris, you could go and work for the fucking ombudsmen with what you know. They’d take you. UNECT, or one of the others. The regulatory bodies are screaming for people with real commercial experience.’

‘Oh, great. You think I want to be a fucking bureaucrat. Playing at international social democracy with a fucking placard and a zone-level salary.’

‘Ombudsmen make a lot of money, Chris.’

‘Says who?’

‘My mother used to know some of the guys from UNECT in Oslo. Their field agents pull down near two hundred grand a year.’

Chris snorted. ‘Not bad for fucking socialists.’

‘Alright, Chris.’ It was cold and even, a flip side of her anger he hated worse than the shouting. ‘Forget the fucking ombudsmen. You could get a job with any other investment firm in the city.’

‘Not any more.’ He hunched his shoulders as he said it. ‘Have you got any idea how much Shorn paid to get me out of Hammett McColl? Any idea what they’ll do to protect that investment?’

‘Break your legs, will they?’

The sneer hurt, not least because it sounded like something Mel might have said in workshop banter. Jealousy flared. He hid it and worked at calm.

‘Not mine, no. But the word will be out there, Carla. Every executive search company in London will have been warned off me. Anyone who chooses to ignore it, they’ll find strung up under Blackfriars Bridge.’

She exploded smoke across the car. ‘Come off it.’

‘No? You don’t remember Justin Gray, then?’

‘That was petrol-mafia stuff.’

‘Yeah, right. A recruitment consultant with a flat in Knightsbridge and a house in St Albans is really going to get mixed up with those clowns. Everybody believed that one.’

‘Wearing a suit doesn’t make you smart, Chris. It just makes you greedy.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it.’

‘Look. Two weeks before he died, Gray was instrumental in moving two senior cutting-edge technologies execs out of Shorn and into Calders UK. He told the police he’d been receiving death threats throughout the run-up to that deal. Conveniently enough, they failed to investigate.’

‘I think you’re talking wine-bar dramatics and a coincidence, Chris.’

‘Suit yourself. Gray’s not the only one. There was that guy they found floating in his swimming pool in Biarritz last year. Another one a couple of years before that in a car smash. Mistaken duel call-out, they said, like that happens all the time. Both chasing candidates at Shorn. Coincidence? I don’t think so, Carla. Over the last five years, there’ve been at least a dozen executive search personnel who’ve ended up dead or damaged while, coincidentally, they were trying to prise candidates away from Shorn.’

‘So why’d you go to work for them?’ she snapped.

Chris shrugged. ‘It was a lot of money. Remember?’

‘We didn’t need it.’

‘We didn’t need it, right then. These days, that means nothing. You can’t ever be backed up too much. Besides, Shorn aren’t the only ones to play rough with the reckies.’ He found he was smiling faintly. ‘They’re just better at it than most. More prepared to go to the asphalt, quicker to floor it when they do. Just a harder crew, that’s all.’

‘Yes, and that’s really it, isn’t it Chris.’ There was ice in her voice -she’d caught the smile. ‘It wasn’t the money, it was the rep. You couldn’t wait to get in the running with the hard crew, could you? Couldn’t wait to test yourself against them.’

‘All I’m saying is when you talk about choices, face the facts. Be realistic. Realistically, what choice do I have?’

‘You always have a choice, Chris. Everyone does.’

‘Yeah?’ Finally, his anger slipped its leash. ‘Have you listened to any fucking thing I’ve said, Carla? What fucking choice do I have?’

‘You could resign.’

‘Oh, good idea.’ This time there was a break in his voice that he couldn’t iron out. ‘And then we could go and live in the zones. And when your father gets threatened with eviction again, instead of paying off what he owes, we could just be poor and helpless, and maybe go and help him pick his possessions up off the street where they throw them. Maybe you’d like that better.’

Carla flicked ash off her cigarette and stared out of the side window. ‘I’d like it better than waiting to see this car on fire on the six o’clock news.’

‘That isn’t going to happen.’ He said it reflexively.

‘Isn’t it?’ Now he could hear the unshed tears in her throat. She drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Isn’t it? Why is that, Chris?’

Silence. And the sound of the Saab engine.

Mike grinned. Laughter erupted around the table.

Two hours earlier, Chris would have been willing to bet that he wouldn’t hear Carla or himself laugh for the whole weekend. But here he was, seated in soft candlelight, watching across a food-laden, black wood table top as his wife broke up in peals of genuine hilarity. Against all the odds, the evening with the Bryants had taken off like a deregulation share issue.

‘No, really.’ Suki fought her own laughter down to a smirk. ‘He actually said that. Can you believe it? Would you have gone out with a man who said that to you?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Carla was still laughing, but her answer was absolutely serious.

‘Oh,’ Suki reached across the table and took her husband’s hand. ‘I’m being horrible, aren’t I. Tell us how you met Chris, Carla.’

Carla shrugged. ‘He came in to get his car fixed.’

The laughter rekindled. Chris leaned forward.

‘No, it’s true. You know, she was standing there, in this. T-shirt.’ He made vague female body gestures with both hands. ‘With a spanner in her hand, grease on her nose. And she says, I can give you the best road holding in Europe. And that was it. I was gone. Falling.’

Carla lost a little of her mirth. ‘Yeah, what he doesn’t tell you is, he was beaten up from some fucking stupid competitive tender. He was falling. He could barely stand. Torn suit, blood on his hands. Down his face. Trying all the time to make believe he wasn’t hurt.’

‘Mmm,’ Suki grinned. ‘Gorgeous.’

Carla’s smile faded slightly. ‘No, not really.’

‘Oh come on, Carla. I bet that’s when you fell for him as well. Noble savage and all that caveman stuff. Just like that Tony Carpenter fuck, you know, the one where he fights off all those motorcycle thugs. What’s it called, Michael? I can never remember the names of these things.’