RISE OF THE FORSAKEN SON-IN-LAW

Chapter 6

The restaurant was called Braise, and it occupied a narrow Georgian building near Berkeley Square -- warm-lit, low-ceilinged, improbably intimate for a kitchen that produced food of that calibre. Oliver arrived two minutes early. He was shown to a corner table by a young man who moved with the focused efficiency of someone trained by someone exacting, and he sat and read the menu and waited.

Stella Laurent arrived two minutes late, which he suspected was intentional.

She was taller than he had expected, which was an unfair expectation to have had, and she moved through the restaurant with the specific ease of someone who owns the room not by assertion but by familiarity. Dark hair pulled back. A chef's double-breasted jacket traded for a well-cut linen shirt. She glanced at the menu as she sat down, as though checking it had been presented correctly.

"I did not change anything," he said.

She looked at him. "I know. I was checking that Henri seated you at the right table. He sometimes gives this corner to the walk-in guests. I disagree with that decision." She set her bag on the empty chair. "You are Oliver Marlowe."

"I am."

"I have read the file your butler sent over. The hotels need significant help."

"They do."

"Your father's previous food and beverage director had conservative taste and no genuine culinary curiosity. Three of the properties are serving food that would embarrass a mid-range airport hotel." She said this without cruelty, but also without cushioning. "I assume you want to change that."

"I want to change everything that needs changing."

She studied him for a moment. "Why?"

"Because it is my company now."

"That is a very thin reason to do something well," she said. "People who do things because they own them generally do them badly. People who do things because the thing deserves doing tend to do them better."

He looked at her. "All right. Because the previous management wasted what was actually a very good foundation, and I find waste offensive."

"That is more interesting." She signalled to the young man. "We will have the tasting menu, the first wine flight, and still water. Bring the cheese course before the dessert." She looked back at Oliver. "You will want to think about the savoury elements while you eat. People with your kind of focus always work backwards."

"You do not know what kind of focus I have."

"You read the menu and then set it down at exactly the angle I fold my menus to. You noticed. You have not looked at your phone once. You arrived before me even though you do not know this room, which means you dislike the disadvantage of being second. Shall I continue?"

Oliver was quiet for a moment. "No," he said. "I think we should talk about the hotel programme."

She smiled, and it changed her face into something warmer and briefly unguarded. "Good. I have ideas."

They talked for two and a half hours. She had done her research -- not just the financial reports but the individual properties, their locations, their competitive sets, the specific culinary traditions of their regions. Her proposal was ambitious and coherent and not cheap. Oliver pushed back on three points and she pushed back on all three of his pushbacks and was right about two of them, and he said so.

"You admit when you are wrong," she observed.

"I find it saves time."

"Most men in your position do not bother."

"I am aware of what most men in my position do," he said. He meant it to be neutral. It came out slightly tired.

She heard the tiredness and did not ask about it, for which he was inexplicably grateful.

When the bill came, she waved it away. "My table, my bill. Send me the contract terms this week."

"Edmund will."

"Yes, I imagine Edmund will." She stood and offered her hand. Her handshake was firm and brief. "Mr. Marlowe."

"Miss Laurent."

He watched her walk through the restaurant toward the kitchen, stopping twice to check something at a service station, and then she was gone, and the room was noticeably less interesting.

* * *

The Clarissa matter presented itself, as he had known it eventually would, through the design contract.

Hadley called in the afternoon to inform him that a company called Voss-Lumiere Studio had submitted a bid for the hotel redesign programme. Rachel Voss -- Clarissa's cousin -- was listed as creative director.

Oliver was quiet for a moment. "Who reviewed the submission?"

"It scored in the top quartile on presentation quality. The work itself is--"

"Send me the full file."

He read it that evening. The work was thin -- competent presentation packaging competent-enough ideas. It had no business being in the top quartile of a serious competition, which told him something about how the scoring had been conducted.

"Invite them to present," he told Hadley the next morning. "Personally."

"Of course. Shall I schedule it for next week?"

"Next week is fine. And Hadley -- score them properly this time."

Hadley paused. "Yes, sir."

Oliver put the phone down and sat back in his chair and let himself feel, very briefly, the specific pleasure of a trap set with patience.