Edition: 1st ed.,

Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: No markings
Condition remarks: Boards in good condition. Worn DJ with some tears. Light foxing on book block. Internally sound, clean and bright text.

Tycoon Charles Gresham’s planned takeover of Mike Lockyer’s company is explicable only on the level of personal malice. As an asset-stripping exercise, at which Gresham is a master, it is hardly worth the trouble; his object, as he made plain in that phone call, is to destroy not a company, but a man. How could the death of a young girl nearly thirty years ago and thousands of miles away affect the business relationship of two mature individuals who, in the interval, have barely seen mention of each other’s names? The answers emerge when Lockyer, sick with worry about the takeover threat, comes to spend what he expects to be a restful weekend with old friends in the country. During the course of a long night—at a fund-raising dance, where champagne flows to loosen inhibitions as well as memories—the two men confront each other. The truths of a quarter-century ago, when they served as wartime officers in the Royal Navy and found themselves the only survivors of a submarine disaster, are brought slowly, painfully, and shatteringly to the surface. As their friends probe deeper, they too lose the masks and disguises with which they began the evening; and when the only living person for whom Gresham now cares—his daughter Dana—becomes a vulnerable target, the last pretences to civilised behaviour are flung aside.