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blond, reassuringly. “Honestly, you lot go ahead and have a good time on me, all right? I’ll catch up with you later.”
    After more persuading in a similar vein they finally waddled off, like three penguins skidding back out onto the polar ice. Only then did the blond breathe a sigh of relief and introduce himself.
    “Thanks,” he said, pumping Lucas’s hand like the arm of a slot machine. “I’m Ben. Really, thanks so much. I swear to God, if I had to spend one more hour with those guys I’d have flung meself off the north face of the Eiger.”
    “They did seem a little tightly wound,” conceded Lucas with a chuckle. “I’m Lucas.”
    “An honor and a joy to meet you, Lucas.” Ben grinned. “Let me buy you a drink.”
    Ben Slater, it turned out, ran a hedge fund in London and was in Switzerland wooing possible institutional investors. The three stooges were all senior management from UBS, men almost exactly as powerful as they were dull.
    “I know I ought to be over there with them, dunking my bread in the cheese and talking bond yield curves,” said Ben with a sigh. “But I really can’t face it. That fondue cheese is fucking disgusting anyway.”
    Lucas laughed. “I agree. Here’s to ditching them.”
    In the end, they got along so well that they both decided to stay on for a few more days and this time actually enjoy the skiing. The staff at the Regina knew Ben well and were happy to move him into a larger two-bedroom suite so that he could share with Lucas. Better yet, he insisted on footing the bill for them both—“Honestly, mate, my fund is paying. It’s a corporate expense; you don’t owe me a penny”—and had been so persuasive that even the notoriously proud Lucas felt comfortable accepting.
    Neither Ben nor Lucas was naturally a big talker. But over the course of numerous long slope-side lunches and evenings propping up the bar, they came to share pieces of their respective life stories and discovered themselves to be somewhat kindred spirits. Ben had grown up in a happy family, unlike Lucas. But he had also been very poor and had to work against the odds to shake off his background and achieve the professional success that he had. And there was something so impossibly good-hearted about him, so jovial and warm and open, one couldn’t fail to be drawn to him. Having always hated Englishmen, and especially cockneys since his string of bad experiences at the Britannia, Lucas was shocked to discover that the country could also occasionally turn out some genuinely charming people. Ben was the archetypal diamond in the rough, and from day one Lucas adored him.
    For his part, Ben didn’t think he’d ever met someone with as much energy and ambition and lust for life as Lucas. After the mind-numbing tedium of his business trip, being in Lucas’s company was like being jolted back to life with a cattle prod—only funnier. They laughed all the time, about Petra and Ben’s hopeless love life and the fat Swiss matrons in their bright-pink jumpsuits, wiggling their hippo-like rear ends down the bunnyslopes. By the time Lucas finally returned to Lausanne and Ben boarded his private jet back to London, both of them nursing hangovers worthy of a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records, a lasting friendship had been forged. For a loner like Lucas, this was a seismic event in his life and, though they didn’t see much of each other for the next few years, he never lost the feeling that in Ben he had gained a new brother.

    Those carefree days in Murren with Ben felt like light-years ago now. Jumping onto the bus for Ibiza Town, Lucas sank gratefully into a vacant seat and began to get his breath back. He flattered himself that he was still fit, but there was no doubt that the adrenaline involved in putting distance between himself and a potentially murderous, cuckolded husband took a lot more out of him than an hour on the treadmill.
    Still, Carla was definitely worth it. She always had