The sun was still blazing as she left the college and stepped onto the street, but she felt empty. To cover herself, Sophie started walking up the hill.There was a taxi rank at the station. She fished out her mobile, dialled Tom’s number.

A recorded message told her his mailbox was full. Then it cut her off.

She dialled again, this time Celine, in Paris.

“Celine—my son appears to have changed his mobile without telling me. Do what you can to hunt him down, will you?”

“Yes, of course, Madame,” Celine said briskly. “I will find him.”

Sophie hung up, feeling the dismay curling in the pit of her stomach. She doubted it. Tom was gone. And she had no idea where to find him.

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

“It’s great to meet you.”

Edgar Lowell shook Hugh’s hand with a firm grip. He nodded politely.

“And my partners, Karl Epstein and Willoughby Strachan.”

“How do you do,” Montfort replied.

He was standing in the conference room of Lowell Epstein, one of America’s newest investment banks. Despite this fact, and the secondary fact that they operated out of Boston, instead of the centre of the world, New York, the room radiated confidence. It had cost a lot of money to bring antique oak panelling to the walls of these offices, located on the sixty-second floor of a brand-new skyscraper; the carpet was overlaid with an Aubusson rug; there was a Turner hanging in the corridor outside; the secretaries all wore Donna Karan; everywhere he turned there was the quiet, reassuring hush of money, and lots of it.

“Where’s the head of your M&A department?” Montfort asked, once they had waved him to a seat. Mergers and acquisitions, the lifeblood of big Wall Street deals. House Massot would be both.

“That’s Jake Feingold.”

“Great guy.”

“He’ll be along in just a moment.”

“We wanted to take a few minutes to get to know you ourselves,” Lowell concluded.

Montfort smiled thinly; he had not come here for chitchat.

“It’s amazing to meet the Boy Wonder,” Karl Epstein said. “That’s what they call you, yes?”

“The press can say foolish things,” Montfort agreed calmly.

He hated that epithet. But it was better than the first, the Axe Man. The business press gossip columns had christened him that when he’d first arrived at Mayberry and had immediately laid off over 30 percent of the workforce. The company was insanely overmanned then, and he had not regretted it. No more had he regretted closing ten money-sucking stores.

In time, of course, with greater success, they had expanded. He had created three times as many jobs as he had cut. That was natural market economics.

It had not stopped him being hated.