The comic’s plastic smile was drowned in the sounds of whoops and cheering as the screen split from five beautiful faces, four of them pretending to be pleased, to the one who really was. She lifted one arched eyebrow, placed her manicured fingers to her throat, as if to ask, me?

The camera loved it. It lingered for a second on the creamy skin. And, of course, the deliciously avant-garde necklace that surrounded it.

There was a fresh explosion of cheering. Hugh now permitted himself just the faintest of smiles. Hands were slapping his back, his shoulders. Ah, he thought with satisfaction, you just wait.

Jill swept regally up to the stage in her dress, a twenties-style flapper thing, made of millions of tiny sequins. A heavy fabric that clung to her skin, black and sleek like an otter. Sexy but very simple. The perfect backdrop for jewellery. And what jewellery! Hugh had chosen these pieces himself. Gems for a rebel. Great chunks of citrine, one of the cheapest, most plentiful semiprecious stones in the world, strung on wires of yellow eighteen-karat gold; but along those wires, glittering like tiny suns, were bezel-set canary diamonds.

It was perfect. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Mixing the cheap and the incredibly costly, the delicate and the spiky. Matching wire earrings dangled from her perfect lobes, silhouetted against her jet black Louise Brooks bob.

Hugh Montfort had won the designers’ lottery. A fresh young star had just received her first Oscar, wearing a design by Mayberry, his firm. A firm Hugh Montfort, the youngest CEO in its history, had led out of the fusty, half-forgotten backwaters of St. James’s to international prominence as the number one house for the freshest, funkiest pieces money could buy. He had followed his hunches and worked—slaved, even—to get Mayberry gems round the necks and fingers of every hot young thing that ever graced the cover of a hip magazine. Indeed, such had been his success that Jill Calvert’s people had called him.

He briefly imagined the faces of his rivals in New York, Paris, London. Cursing. Montfort had pulled it off yet again. Yes, he thought—perfect. A brief surge of pleasure at a job well done washed over him. He lived for these moments, when his successes enabled him to forget.

“Perfect!” Pete Stockton, the chairman of the Mayberry board, exploded next to him.

Hugh nodded towards the screen. “Watch.”

He had another surprise up his sleeve—one he had suggested to a startled, and instantly grateful, Miss Calvert, who could see at once what it would do for her. How it would take her from just another worthy actress into instant superstardom. Fame was the currency, Hugh thought. For her—for him, as well. An Oscar was nice, but it didn’t necessarily make you huge by itself. Who remembered Marisa Tomei? Or Roberto Benigni?