Declan winced: ‘I can understand all that, but deliberately to hand over all our secrets.’

‘She may not have done,’ said Patrick. ‘Taggie was out a lot cooking. Tony probably came to the house. The plans were on your desk. Your writing isn’t that indecipherable.’

‘D’you think I should go round to The Falconry and kill him?’

Patrick gave a wintry smile. ‘I wouldn’t. You know how Lady Gosling abhors violence.’

Taggie, who was kept enormously busy cooking for parties and filling up people’s deep freezes for Christmas, made heroic attempts to be cheerful, but she worried Patrick far more than Declan. Never one to grumble, she refused to discuss Rupert, but Patrick knew she was bleeding to death inside.

Outside, the weather was frantically warmer, the snow thawed in patches, leaving fantastic shapes, a sea horse there, a camel here. All down the valley the streams that tumbled into the Frogsmore were still frozen into dirty grey glaciers. Wandering numbly through the fields with the dogs, Taggie only noticed the flattened tufts of thick tawny grass sticking up through the snow, like the heads of a thousand Ruperts slain in battle.

‘Too long a sacrifice,’ quoted Patrick bitterly, thinking too of his own situation, ‘can make a stone of the heart.’

Cameron, mercifully, was still very busy editing Yeats (Declan had lost all interest in the project), and setting up the programme on stepmothers which Channel Four had commissioned. She popped over on several occasions to cheer Declan up, but managed to avoid times when Patrick was at home. Patrick didn’t know if she’d gone back to Tony, or whether Tony was looking after his mother. He and Taggie decided it would be better to do nothing until after the franchise results were announced.

Sunday, 15th December was D-Day. The form was that from nine o’clock onwards, in an atmosphere of high drama and secrecy, the existing managing directors of all the commercial television companies would roll up at the IBA in their limos at quarter of an hour intervals. Driving past the battalions of reporters, photographers and camera crews, they would be ushered once again into the building from the underground car park and be whizzed up in the lift to yet another empty office. Here, not unlike the suitors in The Merchant of Venice, they would be handed a sealed envelope from Lady Gosling and then be left alone to open it and learn if they had held onto their franchise, or whether, as in some instances, they had to merge with their rivals. Allowed a few minutes to digest this information, they would then be summoned to Lady Gosling’s office for a brief word of congratulation or commiseration. Afterwards they would leave the building by the back door or by the front, having sworn not to reveal a word of the results to the press. After all the existing contractors had been seen, the contenders, who hoped to depose them, would come in one by one after lunch and endure the same procedure.

At four-thirty Lady Gosling would call a press conference to announce the results, which would simultaneously be rushed to the Stock Exchange and the Home Secretary, who would inform the Prime Minister.

Tony Baddingham was so certain he had retained the Corinium franchise that he’d taken a suite overnight at the Hyde Park Hotel.

Expectation had been boosted by front-page forecasts in most of the Sunday papers of a definite Corinium victory. The Krug was therefore flowing at a reception for the press and for all Tony’s Corinium supporters, as he left for his twelve o’clock appointment with the IBA.

Tony was relieved the contenders weren’t being seen until the afternoon. He would need police protection if he met Declan in the lift. He preferred to gloat over Venturer’s utter humiliation at a distance.

It was a bitterly cold grey day, with an icy wind, which razor-cut the face far more effectively than any East End villain. Rather than walk the two hundred yards from the Hyde Park Hotel to the IBA, Tony made Percy drive round the park and approach 80 Brompton Road from South Kensington. Innumerable cameramen and journalists were mingling on the pavement with the Christmas shoppers as his Rolls drew up.

Never one to resist publicity, Tony decided to go in through the front door and let Percy take the Rolls round to the car park. There was a frenzy of activity and popping of flashbulbs as he got out. Tony had always kept a high profile; most of the press recognized him. Posing for thirty seconds in his Garrick tie and new £900 suit, he told the grey forest of microphones that he didn’t believe in jumping the gun, but he was confident, quietly confident, that he’d still be in business that afternoon, before scurrying through the revolving doors of the IBA.

‘Arrogant focker,’ snarled Declan who was watching ITN at Freddie’s house. ‘Don’t talk about guns in my presence, you bastard.’

‘Don’t watch it,’ said Patrick, switching off the television. ‘It’ll only upset you. You ought to change soon, and have a shave.’

‘What’s the point of looking pretty for a firing squad?’

The door bell rang. Declan started. Why did he pray each time it might be Maud?

‘I’ll answer it,’ said Freddie.

Freddie’s heart was heavy. He knew there was no hope of Venturer getting the franchise, but he’d tried to keep everyone’s spirits up for the last two weeks and tried even harder to be a good husband to Valerie. In return Valerie hadn’t even bothered to come up to London today, she so detested failure. But as Freddie peered through the spyhole, he felt his heart expand in joy and gratitude, for there, her face as red and purple with cold as a mandrill’s bottom, stood Lizzie. Never was a door opened so fast. As he drew her into the house out of the sight of any lurking press, she fell into his arms.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he mumbled incoherently.

‘I know I shouldn’t,’ said Lizzie, ‘but James is being so smug, and I couldn’t sit around drinking Tony’s champagne. I thought it would poison me.’

At Tony’s house in Rutland Gate, totally oblivious of the franchise affair, with only thought for one another, Caitlin O’Hara and Archie Baddingham met up on the first day of the school holidays.

‘Are you sure it’s safe,’ asked Caitlin as they went into Monica’s bedroom, ‘and your father won’t descend down the chimney like Father Christmas?’

‘No, they’ll be whooping it up all day at the Hyde Park,’ said Archie. ‘And poor Mum will spend her time fending off kisses from ghastly drunken hangers-on like James Vereker. I’m sorry your father hasn’t got it.’

‘It’s a shame,’ said Caitlin. ‘He worked jolly hard. So did Tag.’

‘I’ll support you,’ said Archie, putting a bottle of Sancerre and two glasses on his mother’s bedside table. ‘Look, are you sure you want to go through with this, and wouldn’t rather wait until after we’re married?’

Caitlin, who, despite her habitual air of unconcern, was trembling like an earthquake, shook her head. ‘Most people sleep together first these days, just to find out whether they’re sexually compatible. Anyway, I reached the age of consent last week. It’s awfully tidy in here.’ She looked round in amazement. ‘You ought to see my parents’ bedroom. D’you think we ought to put a red towel underneath us? It’d be so awful if I bled all over your mother’s sheets.’

‘What time is it?’ whispered Archie.

‘One forty-five,’ said Caitlin, looking at the flickering red figures of the digital clock. ‘Why?’

‘I want to remember what time the most important thing in my life took place,’ said Archie, as he unbuttoned her black cardigan.

He looks terrible, thought Taggie, as she brushed Declan’s dark-blue suit and straightened his tie. The new Harvie and Hudson green-and-blue-striped shirt Cameron had bought him last week in honour of the occasion was already too big. In the last fortnight the thick black hair had become almost entirely silver, and despair and grief had dug even deeper trenches on his forehead and on either side of his mouth.

The clock struck two.

‘Car’s here, Declan,’ called Freddie from the hall.

‘Good luck,’ said Taggie, hugging him. ‘It’ll be over in half an hour.’

One by one the members of Venturer shook Declan’s hand and wished him well. Billy gave him the faded four-leaf clover he’d worn in his boot when he’d won the show-jumping silver in Colombia. Henry Hampshire gave him a piece of white heather, foisted on him by a gypsy outside Harrods that morning. Rupert had sent a telex from LA. Professor Graystock and the Bishop of Cotchester were no doubt at this moment enjoying their second helpings of roast beef in Gloucestershire. Everyone waved to Declan as he set off.

‘Majestic though in ruin,’ said Patrick ruefully.

‘Not yet,’ boomed Dame Enid. ‘Don’t be so defeatist, boy.’

The media went berserk as Declan’s car drew up. It had been a long, cold, somewhat boring day. Not admitted inside the IBA for reasons of security, they had spent their time belting the hundred yards between the front of the building and the back, desperate to get a story. Managing Directors of television companies are enormously powerful but not always very well-known men. One camera crew had had the embarrassment of asking their own Chief Executive what television company he worked for. Another crew wasted a lot of film on their own press officer.

But everyone knew Declan. Many of the crews had worked with him, and loved him, and wished he could have won. The Christmas shoppers, battered by the cold and each other, knew him too, and cheered and mobbed him. It took him several minutes to fight his way across Brompton Road and, as he went in through the revolving doors, a fat woman gave him a piece of holly for good luck. Coming the other way was Johnny Abrahams, his old boss at the BBC who’d put in a bid to oust Granada.