The deal was signed.

Next day the Planning Committee voted to reject the chain's offer for the playing field, preferring, as it said, to put the needs of the local community first.

On the same day the bulldozers moved on to a piece of derelict land only half a mile away and, financed by the big chain's own money augmented by a large loan from a city bank whose CEO had long nursed a grudge against his opposite number on the chain's board, the first of Monty Wright's supermarkets was erected in record time.

Five years later even the City's most dedicated doubters had to accept that the Wright-Price chain was here to stay. By that time another dozen shops had gone up in the southeast and marketing whiz-kids were keen to climb aboard the bandwagon. The fact that an early appointee to the Board of Directors was a local businessman called Ratcliffe King who had happened to be Chairman of the Planning Committee that rejected the application to purchase the playing field was noted but not commented on. At least not by anyone with any sense. Ratcliffe King wasn't known as King Rat in Lu- ton political circles without reason. No longer a councillor, he retained the title and still wielded much of the political power in his role as head of ProtoVision, the planning and development consultancy he had founded on retirement from public life. Officially his role on the Wright-Price board was and remained nonexecutive, but in the view of many, he'd played a central strategic role in the campaign that twenty years on had led to Monty Wright being knighted for services to industry as head of a company no longer coveted by the market leaders as possible prey but feared by them as potential predator.

"What about Sir Monty?" asked Joe, turning back to Merv. "And keep your voice down, I think he heard you talking about him."