careful to make sure that she never had more than pin-money to spend. He didn’t know it, but for the last three years his wife had been having an affair with one of his closest friends. He didn’t know it, but Pepper did.
She left after she had got what she had come for—a tentative offer of sponsorship for one of her other clients; a boy from the back streets of Liverpool who was one day going to win a gold medal for his speed on the running track.
The preliminary skirmishes were over; now the hard bargaining would begin. It was a game in which Pepper was a skilled player.
In a London sorting office, electronic machinery relentlessly checked and despatched the unending sacks of mail, and four letters slid into their appropriate slots.
It had begun. On the chessboard of life the pieces were being moved into position.
2
The first member of the quartet received his letter at nine-fifteen exactly on Saturday.
Although Howell’s bank did not open for business on Saturdays, it was Richard Howell’s practice as its chairman and managing director, to spend a couple of hours there checking through the mail and attending to any small matters of business that might have been overlooked during the week.
It was only a half hour’s drive from the Chelsea mews flat he shared with his second wife to the small private car park that belonged to the bank. A uniformed commissionaire was there to let him in. Harry Rogers had been with the bank since the end of the Second World War, in which he had lost his right arm. He was due for retirement at the end of the year—something he wasn’t looking forward to, despite the generous pension he knew he would receive. He liked working at Howell’s. For one thing, it gave him something to boast about when he joined his pals at the Dog and Duck on Friday nights. There were very few people who didn’t recognise the Howell name; the merchant bank was famous for its meteoric expansion and profitability under the chairmanship of Richard Howell. It was regularly quoted in the financial press as an example to others of its kind; and those financial correspondents who in the early days had dubbed him as “reckless” and “lucky” now described him as “a man with diabolically keen financial insight; an innovator and a challenger.” Howell’s had been behind several of the more dazzling takeovers in the City in recent years, and the clients who came to them tended to stay.
At just turned thirty, Richard Howell still had the same relentless energy and drive he had when he first entered the bank, but now it was tempered by caution and a discreet amount of guile.
He was a man whose photograph regularly appeared both in the financial pages, and more latterly in those gossip columns that focused on media personalities, but very few people looking at those photographs would have recognised him in the street. No photograph could convey that restless, highly strung energy that became so evident when one met him face to face. He was not a particularly tall man; just a little over five foot ten, with a smooth cap of straight dark hair and the olive-tinged skin that was his Jewish heritage.
Several generations ago the Howells had anglicised their name and given up their Jewish faith; judiciously they had married into the lower and even sometimes upper echelons of the British aristocracy, but every now and again a Howell was born who looked remarkably like the Jacob Howell who had first founded their empire.
Richard Howell had the sculptured, pared-down face of an ascetic. His eyes were a very intense shade of blue, and they burned like the incessant fires of ambition that burned inside him. He knew quite well where it came from; this desire to build and go on building. His father and his grandfather had both been ambitious men in their different ways. It was unfortunate that in his father’s case that ambition had not led on to success but to death! But that was behind him now.
His first wife had accused him of being a workaholic, and he had denied it. Workaholics were driven purely by the pedestrian need to work; Richard wanted more; he was and always had been driven by a particular purpose, and yet now that that purpose had been achieved he couldn’t stop.
Inside his traditional striped shirt and Savile Row suit was a man who was basically a gambler. But unlike those men who must win and lose fortunes across the baize-covered tables of the world’s casinos, he had had the good fortune to be granted an entrée into the most exclusive of all the world’s gambling circles—the world of high finance.
Richard picked up the letter and studied the heading thoughtfully. Minesse Management. He knew of them, of course; there was talk in the City that it wouldn’t be long before they went public, but privately he doubted it. Pepper Minesse would never give up her empire to others, no matter how many millions going public might earn her.
Richard had seen her once, briefly, at a cocktail party he had attended with his second wife. There had been something elusively familiar about her, but though he searched his memory all night, he hadn’t been able to recognise what. It had annoyed him, because he prided himself on having a good memory for faces, and hers was so strikingly beautiful that he couldn’t imagine how, having seen it before, he could possibly have forgotten where. In fact, he could have sworn that he hadn’t, and yet…and yet that elusive, faint tug on his memory told him that somewhere he had. Linda, his second wife, worked for one of the independent television companies. Like him, she was career-orientated. Pepper Minesse had been at the party with one of her clients.
Richard Howell wasn’t a man who had a bias against successful women, and Pepper Minesse had intrigued him. She had built up her business from nothing and no one seemed to know anything about where she had come from or what she had been doing before she signed on her first client, other than that she had once worked for the American entrepreneur Victor Orlando. She was a woman who was skilled at appearing to be completely open and yet at the same time remaining conversely secretive about her past and her private life.
Richard tapped the envelope thoughtfully on his desk. It wasn’t all that unusual for him to receive correspondence from people he did not know; it happened all the time. Howell’s bank was known to be extremely discreet about dealing with its clients’ affairs.
He opened the letter and read it, then got out his diary. There was nothing booked in for Monday afternoon. He made a pencil note in it. The letter intrigued him. Pepper Minesse: he was looking forward to meeting her. It could be very…interesting.
He went through the rest of his mail and then his phone rang. He picked it up and heard the voice of his wife. They had arranged to spend the weekend with friends and she was just telephoning to remind him.
“I’ll be home in half an hour.” That would just give them time to make love before they set out. The adrenalin bounced round his veins, released by the intrigue and anticipation of Pepper’s letter. It was always like this—the merest hint of a new deal, a new game, always gave him a sexual boost.
Linda was the perfect wife for him; when he wanted sex she was both receptive and inventive; when he didn’t, she didn’t pester him. As far as he was concerned they had an ideal relationship. His first wife…He frowned, not wanting to think about Jessica. Linda had accused him once of wanting to pretend that his first marriage had never happened. She put it down to his Jewish blood and his inherited need to preserve old-fashioned values, and he hadn’t argued with her. How could he? His marriage to Jessica was something he couldn’t discuss with anyone, even now. He felt the beginnings of anger build up inside him, draining his physical desire, and checked them automatically. Jessica was in the past, and she was better left there.
Alex Barnett received his letter when the postman dropped it off halfway through Saturday morning. His wife Julia picked it up from the hall carpet and carried it through to the
