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That island in Greece was beckoning. He could see it in his mind’s eye.
One of the elegantly clad guests at the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony didn’t head for the Great Room entrance along with the other guests, but made his way, as instructed, to the main hotel entrance. Presenting himself at Reception, he was directed to a suite on the seventh floor. He knocked on the door, which was opened by Mike Cullen himself.
It had required all of Cullen’s considerable persuasive skills to get Ed Snyder along tonight at all. Outraged by the sordid revelations of the tabloid press, and the damaging accusations of the broadsheets, he’d been fighting a rear guard action all week. It had been frustrating and exhausting – going well beyond the usual stresses of his business schedule, intruding deep into his personal life too. His wife had stuck by him, thank God. She’d realised the sleaze was being orchestrated deliberately to blacken his reputation at the very time he needed all the corporate credibility he could muster. She was damned if she was going to let Jacob Strauss wreck her marriage. And, predictably, the moment the Textiles Bill amendment had been passed, the stories disappeared, the telephone stopped ringing, the photographers decamped from outside their house.
At the end of the most bruising week of his career, it required all the confidence Ed Snyder could muster to walk into a room filled with his business peers and act as though he was taking it all in his stride. Yet this was precisely what Cullen had persuaded him to do. Though there was, of course, a very great incentive.
‘Drink?’ offered Cullen.
He glanced at his watch before shaking his head. ‘Ten to,’ he replied. Then he fixed Cullen with a look of enquiry, to which the other immediately responded.
‘I’m ready to trade,’ Cullen said.
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘In the next ten minutes?’
‘We can shake on it in the next ten minutes. Carry out the transaction first thing tomorrow.’
Snyder was taken aback by the unexpected suddenness of it. But no less interested.
‘How much?’ he asked.
‘One twenty.’
He regarded Cullen closely. He’d been following Starwear’s share price as intensively as Cullen himself. That evening’s price had closed up, putting Cullen’s holding, he’d worked out earlier that evening, at just over £120.5 million pounds. ‘Sounds reasonable,’ he responded.
‘I’m a reasonable man.’
Shaking his head with disbelief, he walked across to the window that looked down on Park Lane, to where guests were still arriving for the ceremony. ‘After everything that’s happened this week …’ he mused.
It would be the most incredible turnaround. To his thirty-nine per cent holding would be added the twelve per cent, which no one knew Cullen owned – all that was required to give him full control of Starwear. Having been dragged through the dirt by the national press, he’d soon be king of the castle, CEO of the world’s largest sportswear manufacturer, owner of the world’s second biggest brand. The first thing he’d do would be to fire Jacob Strauss, for whom he had a well-developed contempt. He’d clear out Strauss’s cronies; he’d merge in the Active Red operation and have in his control a business empire three times the size of its closest competitor. All with the entrenched commercial advantage that Starwear had won by its amendment in the House of Commons that week. He couldn’t suppress a smile.
Catching the expression from across the room, Cullen grinned. ‘I did tell you to keep focused on the big picture.’
He nodded. ‘You did.’ Then, glancing directly at Cullen, ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting me to keep on Lombard as Starwear’s PR advisers?’
Cullen raised the palms of his hands equivocally. ‘It’s a no-strin
gs deal. If you decide to keep us on, of course, we’d be delighted. Though I would propose a certain restructuring.’
Snyder agreed.
‘Just remember,’ Cullen reminded him, ‘whatever success Starwear enjoys tonight will be yours, by virtue of ownership, tomorrow.’
Snyder shrugged his shoulders dismissively. ‘You don’t need to sell me on it. I’ve been working for this moment my whole lifetime.’
‘You and me both, Ed. So, we have a deal?’
‘We have a deal.’
The two men shook hands.
Ellen Kennedy was wearing the same black dress she wore for all her ‘evening do’s’, as she called them. It had cost her a small fortune at Laura Ashley’s ten years before, but it was very flattering – black lent her petite frame a certain elegance, she’d always thought. She particularly liked wearing the dress with her grey hair up, as she was wearing it tonight, and complemented by the twin strand of pearls she’d inherited from her mother. Arriving at the Grosvenor House by cab, she carried under her right arm a plastic folder containing her three-page speech.
Claude had assured her she needn’t worry about bringing a copy of the speech. All of the speakers’ addresses, including the one she’d sent him, had been prepared for an auto cue machine, so that speakers needed only to focus on their delivery. Ordinarily, Ellen would have been only too happy to take advantage of the technology. But tonight it was out of the question; the speech she was about to give was very different from the one she’d faxed over to Claude three days ago. It couldn’t be more different. In fact, what she planned to say was the very opposite of her original intentions.
