Christmas in the Snow (7 page)

‘Yes, Miss Fisher, for the 12th. You’re on the table with Messieurs Lafauvre, Crivelli, Henley and their wives.’

‘That’s all? No one else?’

‘No, Miss Fisher. Just the executive committee.’

Allegra allowed herself a small smile. She was on the top table with the boss? Everything was lining up just as she wanted.

‘Fine. Then I’m going to need something a little more special for that. Um, black definitely, maybe a little more skin, although nothing too showy, obviously.’

‘Long?’ Cinzia asked.

‘Quite possibly, yes. And a higher heel. Let’s go to four.’

‘OK,’ Cinzia nodded, leaving her coffee untouched on the table. ‘I’ll bring some things in next week for you to look through.’

‘Great. You’ll liaise with Kirsty to make sure I’m in the country?’

‘Of course.’

Kirsty nodded too, leaning forward to place something on Allegra’s desk. ‘Here’s the photo you wanted framed,’ she said quietly, handing over the image of Allegra, Bob,
Jo and Derek with Mr Yong and his team, now smartly set in a jet-black Linley frame.

A frown settled on Allegra’s features at the sight of it. She had had no word back from the Chinese camp since the incident with Sam in Zurich yesterday and, after a sleepless night, had
decided not to interfere, taking the view that his inappropriate behaviour couldn’t be considered a reflection on her. Strictly speaking, it hadn’t happened under her
‘watch’, and although she was still fuming about it, she had to assume no news was good news.

‘Fine. Send it over to Zurich on the overnight. I’ll follow up tomorrow. OK, thanks, both.’ And she looked back down at her screen: sixty-six new emails unread. And
counting.

The halls of the V&A echoed with the sounds of jollity long before she came to the Dome, where the drinks were being held. In the centre of the vast space was a giant
Christmas tree that had been sprayed white, blue lights illuminated the vaulted ceilings, and tall planters overflowed with rowan-berried profusions. In a far corner, a pianist was dwarfed by the
proportions of the grand salon, almost lost.

She stood and watched for a moment, her eyes taking in the power DNA of each group of guests, waiters moving between them like skaters on a pond. London was draped in black and white tonight,
women sparkling, men strictured in barathea, and she could almost smell the money in the air, over the cologne.

The feathers of the skirt shimmied slightly as Allegra walked, her footsteps light but quick over the floor, as she approached the closest group; one man, Peter Butler, was her opposite number
at Red Shore, their closest rivals, with a portfolio within £70 million of theirs.

‘Peter,’ she smiled, kissing him on each cheek without actually making physical contact. ‘Belinda,’ she smiled again to his wife, repeating the charade and making small
talk about the merits of cockerpoos over Labs in London and the floppy paddles in the new Discovery 4, before exiting with a regretful smile and moving on to the next group.

She was four groups in when she finally reached her target, Pierre Lafauvre, founder and chairman of the company and centre of her world. Every night she spent without sleep, every day she spent
sequestered from sunlight, every medical check-up that noted too-high blood pressure was done willingly in pursuit of his approval. Fifty-two but looking ten years younger, with salt-and-pepper
hair, broad shoulders and a disarmingly still manner, he had enamoured her long before they’d ever met, his business reputation almost mythical on her postgraduate course at LSE, when
he’d been the big ticket at Credit Suisse, before falling out spectacularly with his bosses over the expenses scandal – to this day he still maintained the £68,500 bottle of
Petrus had been the clincher for a deal that had netted $486m in fees – and setting up his own hedge-fund company, PLF, months later. There was nothing between them romantically, although she
knew people talked. He was her professional icon and mentor – that was all; he had never made a move on her, but she had sometimes wondered whether he suspected the motives behind
Crivelli’s resentment towards her, often positioning himself between the two of them as interference. A sort of protector.

His wife was a model, naturally: Allegra’s height, Slavic and twenty-three. Someone – Bob? – thought she’d once been an angel for Victoria’s Secret, but that was no
help to Allegra. She always found it a sufferance having to talk to her; Pasha’s English was fine, but her conversational range wasn’t and she clearly felt that Allegra’s title as
president of luxury goods meant they were bonded for life, dooming Allegra to countless evenings discussing Dior’s new handbag range and Saint Laurent’s unforgiving androgyny.

‘Pasha, how lovely to see you. Your dress is beautiful,’ Allegra smiled to her, taking in the backless baby-pink number interspersed with crystals and – to Allegra’s
dismay – marabou feathers.

‘Thank you. Elie Saab Couture,’ Pasha replied, twisting her narrow hips slightly to make the crystals glitter and the feathers flutter. ‘I like yours too. The same,
huh?’

Allegra kept smiling, her body rigidly still. She would not flutter. Their dresses were nothing like the same.
They
were nothing like the same. Allegra wasn’t in this room on
account of the slant of her eyes or the curve of her breasts. She was in here because she deserved to be, because she was every bit as talented and ruthless and disciplined as the men surrounding
them in Savile Row conformity. They could all merge as one in their identikit dinner suits, only a slip of coloured lining or change of buttons marking them out, while she stood alone in her black
dress, but she was more like them than she was like Pasha – whether they were both bedecked in feathers or not.

‘Pierre.’ Allegra smiled, visibly relaxing as she met his eyes and almost bursting to tell him about her triumphant first meeting with Yong. Nothing in her world seemed real till he
knew about it.

‘Allegra,’ he nodded, holding his champagne glass by the stem. ‘I hear things didn’t go according to plan in Zurich.’

She stalled, the smile frozen on her face. ‘Excuse me?’ Oh God. Sam Kemp. He’d ruined it for her after all. No news was bad news. No news was failure.

She shifted position, stopping the panic from taking hold. ‘As far as I’m aware, everything’s on track. Yong liked our proposal for the investments, he accepted the gifts with
gratitude and thanks, we couriered over the meeting photograph this afternoon, and I’m planning on following up with a phone call requesting the second meeting tomorrow. As far as I’m
concerned, it should all be wrapped up and in the bag by this time next week.’

She knew it was foolish to speak so confidently. There were 101 things that could go wrong between now and then. The Chinese were notoriously difficult to pin down to an agreement, and
she’d be a fool to think Red Shore and all their other competitors weren’t furiously chasing after him too. But she couldn’t help herself. This was her big break.

‘I have always admired your balls, Allegra,’ Pierre said, ‘but I don’t see how even you can get around this. And I want that account, because then Leo Besakovitch can
take his fucking money and go fuck himself.’

Allegra let a beat pass. Besakovitch’s money – a $28-billion family trust built on water-sanitation products sold throughout the Third World – had been the start-up fund for
Pierre’s company, and for nearly a decade they had made each other significantly richer. But the men’s once-close relationship had foundered and Besakovitch was pulling his investment a
few days before Christmas. Allegra wasn’t sure if it was the emotional or financial rupture that had sent Pierre into such paroxysms of rage, but to his mind, success was the best revenge and
he had been driving them all even harder since Besakovitch’s pull-out announcement three months ago. And it was working – their average returns had increased from 11 per cent to 14 per
cent – but Pierre wanted more than just good results on the money they had. He wanted a new big investor, a show pony to restore his pride and put PLF back on top again, and they both knew
Yong was the man to do it.

Besakovitch who? Sam Kemp’s loss would be her gain, unfortunate but true. It was her contact – a Chinese friend from LSE – who’d tipped her off that Yong was looking to
grow his capital outside the Chinese economy for the first time; she was the one who’d spent weeks delicately brokering the meeting, finally managing to secure it in the no-man’s-land
of Zurich, studying their accounts twenty-four seven and formulating an investment strategy that would promise Yong the returns that would procure his investment and, crucially, bump PLF’s
returns up from the basic 2 per cent management fee to the 20 per cent of profits payouts.

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t see what the problem is.’

Pierre’s eyes flitted down her quickly – resting fractionally on the feathers – as though the words he was about to say were as surprising to him as to her. ‘You are a
woman, Allegra.’

‘Yes.’

‘In the interpreter’s report, it clearly states that Yong doesn’t feel comfortable negotiating with a woman.’

Allegra’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. She didn’t know where to begin. She couldn’t believe the words had even been articulated. It had been bad enough seeing it on the
report, knowing Yong had said it, but for her own boss to put it out there as a ‘problem’ – it was a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen, and he knew it.

She closed her mouth again and narrowed her eyes, knowing he wasn’t that stupid. Pierre wouldn’t bring up this problem without having first configured a solution.

‘Well, what do you suggest we do about it, Pierre?’

Pierre looked over her shoulder, jerking his chin up slightly. ‘We give Mr Yong what he wants, of course.’

Allegra tilted her head fractionally, glimpsing where he was going to take this, daring him to do it. He and she both knew what the legal position would be on this if he said it. The law would
very clearly be on her side.

Someone moved from behind her. ‘I believe you and Mr Kemp met in Zurich this week. Trouble with your car, wasn’t it?’

But Allegra had stopped listening. She was looking straight into the blue eyes that had last locked with hers on a pillow. What? What was he doing here? She’d never expected to see him
again, much less here, standing with her boss.

He smiled and a rush of memories flooded back to her.

She wrenched her gaze away, certain their brief intimacy could be read openly by anyone who happened to look; she couldn’t deal with him right now, not when all this . . .

The penny dropped.

She looked back at Pierre in dismay. ‘You’re not saying what I think you’re saying.’ She smiled and forced herself to take a sip of her champagne to hide the spike of
anger that was making her hand begin to shake.

Pierre regarded her coolly. ‘You probably know Sam was the lead on Leo’s pot, but with the fat bastard leaving, Sam’s relocating to the London office with immediate effect. By
a stroke of luck, he and Yong’s son, Zhou, were contemporaries at Harvard Business School. Room-mates, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ Sam nodded, his eyes on Allegra all the while. ‘I happened to run into him on our way out of the building the other day.’

‘Did you?’ Allegra replied, pleading ignorance and ignoring the flicker of heat in his eyes. She looked back at Pierre. ‘So your suggestion is that Sam takes on the Yong
account and I just . . . fade into the background?’ A threatening note sounded in her voice.

‘
Au contraire
, Allegra.’ He smiled, tackling her barb head on. ‘I am proposing that you and Sam work jointly on this account. You are the business lead, devising
investment strategy and managing the team; Sam will take the lead on the client-management side of things.’

‘How cosy,’ Allegra said to Sam. ‘Taking your former room-mate out for lunches on the company? You can catch up on old times.’

Sam’s expression changed.

Allegra didn’t care. She stared at Pierre long and hard, the betrayal arousing in her emotions that never –
never
– assailed her. Quickly, she drained her glass and
handed it to a passing waiter. ‘Well, on that note, I have to skip off.’

‘You have somewhere to be?’ Pasha asked, the volatile undercurrents of the conversation passing her by completely.

Allegra flashed a dazzling, extra-wide smile that radiated a hostility even her toothy gap couldn’t assuage. ‘Yes, actually. A boxing lesson. It’s time for me to beat the shit
out of something.’

And with that, she turned on her heel and strode off, furious to know her feathers were flouncing.

‘I do love her dress,’ she heard Pasha sigh, as the men watched her leave in silence.

She was at the top of the steps outside when Sam caught up with her.

‘Allegra, wait!’ he called, grabbing her by the elbow and spinning her round with ease. ‘Look, I didn’t plan it like this.’

‘No?’

Her fury was palpable and he raked a hand through his hair, taken aback. ‘No. I mean, I admit I wanted to see you again. Making the move to London seemed . . . attractive after the other
night.’

Allegra wrenched her elbow from his grip, laughing. ‘You moved to London because of me?’ The scorn in her voice was scorching.

‘Not
just
because of you. London’s a lot closer to New York than Zurich . . .’ His voice trailed away. It was a flimsy excuse and they both knew it.

She stared at him, classically handsome in black tie, other women staring at him as they passed by on the steps. Why,
why
did it have to be him?

‘You think something’s going to happen between us, Sam?’ she asked, her voice low and shaky. ‘Because let me put you straight right now. I was never supposed to see you
again. That was the deal. The other night was just . . .’ She shrugged, not sure she could pull this off. ‘Sport. Exercise. A nightcap. A nice way to relax before the pitch.’

But she saw the muscle twitch in his jaw and knew she’d landed a strike.

‘What? You weren’t honestly expecting a different outcome? Did you really think I wouldn’t mind you coming in and stealing from me everything that I’ve spent months
working on?
I
cultivated the contact, nailed that meeting down, made the numbers work. But because you’re a man, because you’re his friend, you get to come in here and take all
that away from me, and I’m supposed to be
flattered
that you followed me here?’