Page 144 of Kiss Heaven Goodbye

Possibly around the time he started screwing my ex-girlfriend, Miles thought bitterly. But then again, the evidence in front of him suggested the old man’s brains had been going soft long before that affair began.

The problem was that Ash Corp. hadn’t moved with the times. In the sixties and seventies, Robert Ashford had built an empire by taking a series of calculated risks coupled with some audacious yet well-timed takeovers. He quickly gained a reputation as someone who could sniff out trends and capitalise on them. In the early eighties he had seen the need for out-of-town supermarkets; the experts had derided it as foolhardy, but he had been right.

So what went wrong? wondered Miles, reaching over for a decanter of Scotch and pouring himself a generous measure. Clearly his father had been resting on his laurels for the best part of a decade. Yes, Ash Corp. had a number of other profitable divisions, but they were stodgy, meat and potatoes operations; nothing creative, nothing exciting. Miles turned to the section dealing with the hotel division. Ash Corp. owned a number of hotel chains and resorts in all the best locations – the Bahamas, Hawaii, the French Alps – but they were old-fashioned a

nd fusty, appealing to an ageing clientele, while the young money was going to the new rash of funky boutique hotels. People wanted stylish, they wanted modern, they wanted to feel that they were part of a select elite. They didn’t want a snooty manager in pin-stripe trousers looking down his nose at them because they didn’t have a title. The Ash Corp. hotels – and indeed the rest of the company – desperately needed to be stripped right back and rebuilt from the ground up. And that was why Miles felt that London was the perfect place to begin restructuring. Since he had opened the first Globe Club ten years ago, London had transformed from a moderately important if bustling city into the most exciting city in the world. You could feel the energy in the boardrooms, the nightclubs, even the arrivals lounge at Heathrow. Cool Britannia was over, but it had left behind a vapour trail of talent and wealth. Rag-trade billionaires, restaurateurs, a melting pot of Italians, South Africans, Swiss, Indians and Americans. It was the most exciting time to be in London in decades, and Miles was right at the centre of it all, in charge of one of the biggest international corporations in the capital.

He tossed the file on to the desk and walked towards the marble staircase. He and Chrissy had moved into the five-storey white stucco townhouse just off Portobello Road in May. It had an outside hot tub, basement gym and six bedrooms; to be honest, it felt too large for them except when they entertained. He climbed up to the master bedroom on the third floor, looking at his watch. He and Chrissy were due to catch the Eurostar to Paris that night for a meeting with a hotelier interested in running the Globe concierge service as a franchise.

‘Chris?’ he called. ‘You up here?’

The bedroom had deep cream carpets and a huge oval bed covered in olive-green silk, but the room was dominated by a Marlene Dumas painting of a naked woman on all fours. He walked past it and through to the en suite bathroom, a white-tiled wet room with twin showers and a huge white marble bath. Chrissy was lying in it, swathed in bubbles, her face almost obscured by the rising steam.

‘Hi, lover,’ she smiled, lifting a hand and blowing a cloud of froth towards Miles.

‘We need to talk,’ he said, sitting on the edge of the bath and trailing a hand in the water.

‘Too right we do,’ said Chrissy. ‘We have a problem with Martin.’

Miles smiled to himself. While he got to grips with the spidery Ash Corp. structure, he had handed the running of the Globe business over to Chrissy and she was ruthlessly pruning the dead wood from the London club.

‘What’s he done?’

‘It’s what he’s not done,’ said Chrissy before rattling off a long list of complaints.

‘So fire him.’

‘I already did. I poached the deputy manager from the Lanesborough – young, ambitious, efficient, plus he’s taking a pay cut to come across to the Globe. It’s a win-win.’

Miles nodded grudgingly. Lately his relationship with Chrissy had been going downhill fast. Everything she did seemed to annoy him – the way she said ‘sat’ instead of ‘sitting’, her fixation with soap operas – in fact, some days he could barely stand to be in the same room as her. But when it came to the business, she was indispensable. She was tough, clever and one of the few people Miles could trust to give it to him straight.

‘I’ve been going through the Ash Corp. structure,’ said Miles.‘Can you believe my dad bought a dry-cleaning chain?’

‘Well, I do need someone to do my cashmere,’ she smiled.

Chrissy had come a long way since her skin-tight minidresses and stilettos when they were first married. She now had accounts at most of the shops between Sloane Square and Knightsbridge and an entire bedroom off the main suite as a giant walk-in wardrobe.

‘The whole thing needs slashing back,’ said Miles. ‘It’s like the old man wasn’t living in the modern world.’

‘Well let’s start with what you can fix: off-load the best stuff, shut down the rest. Then you need to look at the worst areas and fire everyone not pulling their weight.’

‘You can’t fire everyone,’ he said, rolling his eyes.

‘Well where are the weak spots?’ asked Chrissy, reaching out a suds-covered arm for a sponge.

‘The hotels division is a mess.’ Miles sighed.

Chrissy snorted. ‘The problem is no one wants to go there,’ she said. ‘Remember Cannon Bay?’

‘How could I forget?’

Cannon Bay was a five-star hotel resort on the French side of St Martin in the Caribbean. They had gone to St Martin to inspect a golf course complex when they were planning to extend the Globe Country Club franchise earlier that year. As Cannon Bay was the most exclusive resort on the island and an Ash Corp. hotel, they had booked a suite from curiosity. It had been awful. The staff were unfriendly, the food was bland and the paint was peeling. When Chrissy politely complained to the manager, he told her she was ‘lucky to stay here’. Chrissy had replied, in her sweetest, poshest voice, that he was lucky to keep his teeth. He was the first Ash Corp. employee they had fired.

‘Our spies are telling us that it’s the same in all the hotels. Old-fashioned, stuck-up and wasteful.’

‘Made in the image of their owner, darling,’ said Chrissy.

He frowned. Chrissy had good reason to hate his father, that was true, but he felt uncomfortable when she criticised Robert.