PART ONE
It had not been a casual invitation, he never did anything casually. It had been an insistent, almost peremptory call from a man more used to command than to cajolement. He expected her for breakfast and it would not have crossed his mind that she might refuse. Particularly today, when they were changing Prime Ministers, one out and another in and long live the will of the people. It would be a day of great reckoning and few could doubt that by evening he would have still more trophies to adorn his many mansions. She wondered if she were intended to be one of them.
Benjamin Landless opened the door himself, which struck her as strange. It was an apartment for making impressions, overdesigned and impersonal, the sort of apartment where you'd expect if not a doorman then at least a secretary or a PA to be on hand, to fix the coffee, to flatter the guests while ensuring they didn't run off with any of the Impressionist paintings enriching the walls. There was a Pissarro, a Monet and at least two Wilson Steers, all displayed ostentatiously at the whim of some interior designer rather than hung for the discerning pleasure of a true collector. Landless was no work of art himself. He had a broad, plum-red face which was fleshy and beginning to sag like a candle held too near the flame. His bulk was huge and his hands rough, like a labourer's, with a reputation to match. His Telegraph newspaper empire had been built by breaking strikes as well as careers; it had been as much he as anyone who had broken the career of the man who was, even now, waiting to drive to the Palace to relinquish the power and prestige of the office of Prime Minister.
'Miss Quine. Sally. I'm so glad you could come. I've wanted to meet you for a long time.' She knew that to be a lie. Had he wanted to meet her before he would most certainly have arranged it. Something had happened to make him want to meet her now, and alone. He escorted her into the main room around which the penthouse apartment was built. Its external walls were fashioned entirely of toughened glass, which offered a magnificent panorama of the parliament buildings across the Thames, and half a rain forest seemed to have been sacrificed to cover the floor in intricate wooden patterns. Not bad for a boy from the back streets of Bethnal Green, he occasionally admitted, but the description was redundant. They had all been back streets where he was born.
With so much light the apartment seemed to hover in the air, suspended halfway between street and sky, gazing down upon the politicians and law-makers on the other side of the river and thereby diminishing them to the scale and significance of punctuation marks in one of his editorials, an effect she felt sure was intentional. It was Olympus, an eyrie which seemed to cut them off from reality, and Sally off from any means of escape. But that was why she had come, the challenge of meeting a man of power face-to-face, the opportunity to test herself, to prove she was as good or better than any of them, perhaps to beat them at their own game and to get her own back. It might end in disaster, of course, in a crass attempt at physical flattery and seduction or even coercion, but it was a risk she had to take if she were to stand any chance of getting what she wanted. Risk was all part of the exhilaration.
He ushered her towards an oversized leather sofa in front of which stood a coffee table laden with trays of piping-hot breakfast food. There was no sign of the hidden helper who must only recently have prepared the dishes and laid out the crisp linen napkins. She declined any of the food but he was not offended. He took off his jacket and fussed about his own plate while she took a cup of black coffee and waited.
He ate his breakfast in single-minded fashion; etiquette and table manners were not his strong points. He offered little small talk, his attention focused on the eggs rather than on her, and for a while she wondered if he might have decided he'd made a mistake in inviting her. He was already making her feel vulnerable. Eggs finished, he wiped his mouth and pushed his plate away.
'Sally Quine. Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Aged thirty-two, and a girl who's already made quite a reputation for herself as an opinion pollster. In Boston, too, which is no easy city for a woman amongst all those thick-headed Micks.' She knew all about that; she'd married one. Landless had done his homework; he wanted to make that clear, and to know what she felt about her past being pawed over by him. His eyes searched for her reaction from beneath huge eyebrows tangled like rope. 'It's a lovely city, Boston, know it well. Tell me, why did you leave everything you'd built there and come to England to start all over again? From nothing?'
He paused, but got no reply. 'It was the divorce, wasn't it? And the death of the baby?'
He saw her jaw stiffen and wondered whether it was the start of a storm of outrage or a move for the door. But he knew there would be no tears. She wasn't the type, you could see that from her eyes. She was not unnaturally slim and pinched as the current fashion demanded, her beauty was more classical, the hips perhaps a half-inch too wide but all the curves well defined. She was immaculately presented. The skin of her face was smooth, darker and with more lustre than any English rose, the features carefully drawn as though by a sculptor's knife. The lips were full and expressive, the chin flat and the cheekbones high, her long hair thick and of such a deep shade of black that he thought she might be Italian or Jewish. It was a face full of strength and passion, capable of defying the world or captivating it as she chose. Yet her most exceptional feature was her nose, straight and a fraction long with a flattened end which twitched as she talked and nostrils which dilated with emphasis and emotion. It was the most provocative and sensuous nose he had ever seen; he couldn't help but imagine it on a pillow. Yet the eyes disturbed him, didn't belong on this face. They were shaped like almonds, uplifted, full of autumnal russets and greens, translucent like a cat's, yet, while the nose was prominent and almost public in its emotion, the eyes hid behind oversized spectacles. They didn't sparkle like a woman's should, like they probably once had, he thought. They had an edge of mistrust, as if holding something back, and when she concentrated her mouth turned down puckishly but defiantly at the corners. She was a woman who would not easily lose control, nor readily give of herself.
She looked out of the window, ignoring him. Christmas was but a couple of weeks away, yet there was no seasonal cheer in the air. It was a typical December scene for London, wet and dreary as if the day had not properly woken. Low clouds scudded across the sky, seemingly only feet above their heads. It was a day when Waterloo Bridge would be tap-tap-tapping to the sound of umbrella points as pedestrians hid inside their raincoats and tried to make it across to the other side before the next squall hit. Street traders would be cursing as they struggled to keep their Christmas stock from getting soaked while trying to entice customers out of the warm coffee shops and pubs. Another couple of pounds would be added to the fare of every mini-cab and to hell with the punter who argued. The festive spirit lay discarded in the running gutters, and somehow it didn't seem a propitious day for changing Prime Ministers.