Pepper shook her head. “No. Financial ones—apart from the obvious potential hassle with the police and the Press, a sports star who’s hooked on drugs doesn’t stay the best in the world for very long, and when he loses that status he loses his earning power, and without that he’s no use to me.”
She stepped past him while Jeff was still pondering on her words and looked round for Carl Viner.
He was fairly easy to find. He liked women and they liked him. Half a dozen or more of them were crowded round him now, tanned long-legged beauties, all blonde, but the moment he saw Pepper walking towards him they lost his attention. He had a well-deserved playboy image and for that reason some of the other agencies were wary of him, but he was shrewd enough to know what would happen if he played too hard, and it was Pepper’s private conviction that he was a definite contender for next year’s Wimbledon title.
Unlike all the other men present, who were wearing formal lounge or dinner suits, he was dressed in tennis whites. His shorts were brief enough to be potentially indecent. His hair was blond and sun-streaked, and fell over his forehead in unruly curls. He was twenty-one and had been playing tennis since he was twelve. He looked like a mischievous six-foot child, all appealing blue eyes and smooth muscles. But in reality he had a mind like a steel trap.
“Pepper!”
He rolled her name round his mouth, caressing it as though he was caressing her skin. As a lover he would be the type of man who liked to kiss and suck. Pepper knew even before his eyes moved in that direction that his tastes ran to women whose breasts were high and full.
One of the blondes clinging to his side pouted, teetering between sulky acceptance of Pepper’s presence and aggressive resentment. Pepper ignored her and looked down at his feet. He was tall and muscular and took a size eleven tennis shoe. The grin he gave her when she lifted her eyes to his face contained pure lust.
“If you want to see if the adage is true, I’m more than happy to oblige.”
The gaggle of blondes erupted into sycophantic giggles. Pepper eyed him coolly.
“You already have,” she told him drily, “but as it happens I was just checking to make sure you’re wearing the sponsor’s shoes.”
Carl Viner’s face reddened like a spoilt child’s. She leaned forward and patted him on the cheek, digging her nails gently into his smooth flesh. “Real women always prefer the subtle to the obvious. Until you’ve learned that you’d better stick to playing with your pretty dolls.”
The sponsors were a relatively new company in the sports footwear field and they had wanted a racy, sophisticated image for their product. Pepper had read about them in the financial press, and it had been she who had approached them. Their financial director had thought that that gave him an edge over her, but she had soon disabused him of that. She already had several tennis shoe manufacturers clamouring with offers of sponsorship. She had never had any intention of allowing her client to accept an offer from anyone but the company she had chosen—they had the soundest financial backing; and they had also designed a shoe whose efficiency and style would soon outstrip the others, but they had allowed Pepper’s self-confidence and coolness to undermine their own faith in themselves, and Alan Hart, their Financial Director, had been forced to back down and accept her terms.
He was here tonight.
There had been a time when he had thought he could get Pepper into bed, and his ego still smarted from her rejection of him.
For a woman who wasn’t very tall, she moved extremely well. Someone had once described the way she walked as a sensual combination of leopardess’s feline, muscled prowl and a snake’s hypnotic sway. It wasn’t a walk she deliberately cultivated; it was the result of generations of proudly independent women.
Alan Hart watched her as she moved gracefully from group to group, and he also watched the effect she had on people around her. Men were dazzled by her, and she used her sexuality like a surgeon with a sharp knife.
“I wonder what she’s like in bed.”
He turned his head and said without smiling to the man standing beside him,
“She’s a tease.”
The other man laughed.
“Are you speaking from personal experience?”
He ignored the question, his eyes following Pepper’s indolent walk.
How had she done it? How had she built up her multi-million-pound empire from less than nothing? For a man to have achieved so much by the time he was thirty would be awe-inspiring enough. For a woman…and one who by her own admission had barely received the most basic sort of formal education, never mind gone to university…
Alan freely acknowledged his own sense of almost savage resentment. Women like Pepper Minesse challenged men too much. His own wife was quite content with her role as his mental and financial inferior. He had given her two children and all the material benefits any woman could possibly want. He was regularly unfaithful to her and thought no more about it than he did about changing his shirt. If he gave it any thought at all he assumed that even if his wife was aware of his infidelities she would never leave him. She would lose too much; she couldn’t support herself, and he had been careful to make sure that she never had more than pin-money to spend. He didn’t know it, but for the last three years his wife had been having an affair with one of his closest friends. He didn’t know it, but Pepper did.
She left after she had got what she had come for—a tentative offer of sponsorship for one of her other clients; a boy from the back streets of Liverpool who was one day going to win a gold medal for his speed on the running track.
The preliminary skirmishes were over; now the hard bargaining would begin. It was a game in which Pepper was a skilled player.
In a London sorting office, electronic machinery relentlessly checked and despatched the unending sacks of mail, and four letters slid into their appropriate slots.
It had begun. On the chessboard of life the pieces were being moved into position.
2
The first member of the quartet received his letter at nine-fifteen exactly on Saturday.
Although Howell’s bank did not open for business on Saturdays, it was Richard Howell’s practice as its chairman and managing director, to spend a couple of hours there checking through the mail and attending to any small matters of business that might have been overlooked during the week.
It was only a half hour’s drive from the Chelsea mews flat he shared with his second wife to the small private car park that belonged to the bank. A uniformed commissionaire was there to let him in. Harry Rogers had been with the bank since the end of the Second World War, in which he had lost his right arm. He was due for retirement at the end of the year—something he wasn’t looking forward to, despite the generous pension he knew he would receive. He liked working at Howell’s. For one thing, it gave him something to boast about when he joined his pals at the Dog and Duck on Friday nights. There were very few people who didn’t recognise the Howell name; the merchant bank was famous for its meteoric expansion and profitability under the chairmanship of Richard Howell. It was regularly quoted in the financial press as an example to others of its kind; and those financial correspondents who in the early days had dubbed him as “reckless” and “lucky” now described him as “a man with diabolically keen financial insight; an innovator and a challenger.” Howell’s had been behind several of the more dazzling takeovers in the City in recent years, and the clients who came to them tended to stay.
At just turned thirty, Richard Howell still had the same relentless energy and drive he had when he first entered the bank, but now it was tempered by caution and a discreet amount of guile.
He was a man whose photograph regularly appeared both in the financial pages, and more latterly in those gossip columns that focused on media personalities, but very few people looking at those