Established in the late eighties, the company had boomed through the nineties with everyone else, merging and acquiring, ducking and diving, and gaining a reputation for savage asset-stripping that was the envy of its more ethical and kindhearted competitors. Now it was often described in the financial press as a model of tough, efficient management, well suited to today’s hard times. Young executives who survived a few years at Lawtons could survive anywhere.

Max’s cell phone rang as he was coming down Ludgate Hill. It was just before six-thirty.

“Taking the morning off, are we?” It was the voice of Amis, nasal and aggressive. He didn’t wait for Max to answer. “We need to talk. See if you can get in here by lunchtime. Tracy will tell you the restaurant.”

So much for my good day, Max thought. Although, if he were honest with himself, no day that included Amis could be entirely good. Mutual dislike had been in the air the instant the two men met, when Amis had swaggered in, fresh from spending three years in New York, to run the London office. From the start, their relationship had been tainted, as is so often the case in England, by the simple difference in the way they spoke English. Their accents.

Max was the product of a minor public school, and had grown up in the leafy, middle-class comfort of the Surrey hills. Amis was born and raised in the grim outer reaches of south London, neither leafy nor comfortable. In fact, they had grown up less than twenty miles apart, but it might as well have been twenty thousand. Max liked to think that there was not a trace of snobbery in him. Amis liked to think that he didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. They were both wrong. But each had a grudging respect for the other’s ability, and so, with difficulty, they tolerated one another.