‘Sure. See you later.’

Chris watched him out of sight with apparent casualness. Beneath was the same caution he’d applied to the no-name challenger that morning. Bryant seemed friendly enough, but almost everyone did under the right circumstances. Even Carla’s father could seem like a reasonable man in the right conversational light. And anyone who washed blood off their hands the way Mike Bryant did was not someone Chris wanted at his back.

The security guard handed back his pass and pointed to the twin doors straight ahead.

‘Conference room,’ she said. ‘They’re waiting for you.’

The last time Chris had been face to face with a senior partner was to hand in his resignation at Hammett McColl. Vincent McColl had a high windowed room, panelled in dark wood and lined along one wall with books that looked a hundred years old. There were portraits of illustrious partners from the firm’s eighty-year history on the other walls, and on the desk a framed photo of his father shaking hands with Margaret Thatcher. The floor was waxed wood, overlaid with a two-hundred-year-old Turkish carpet. McColl himself had silvery hair, buttoned his slim frame into suits a generation out of date and refused to have a videophone in his office. The whole place was a shrine to hallowed tradition, an odd thing in itself for a man whose primary responsibility was a division called Emerging Markets.

Jack Notley, Shorn Associates’ ranking senior in Conflict Investment, could not have been less like McColl if he’d been on secondment from an inverted parallel universe. He was a stocky, powerful-looking man with close and not especially well-cropped black hair that was just beginning to show a seasoning of grey. His hands were ruddy and blunt fingered, his suit was a Susana Ingram original that had probably cost as much as the Saab’s whole original chassis, and the body it clothed looked fit for a boxing ring.