Deborah watched her. There was no mistaking the other woman’s shocked distress. Deborah actually felt sorry for her, her plight reaching out to her in a way she hadn’t expected. Would she have felt a similar empathy had Philippa been a man? She didn’t know, but then a man would not have been in such a situation, would he?
In the office and at home reading the bank’s file on the company and its owner, it had been easy to criticise and condemn, to be distanced from the effect that Andrew Ryecart’s financial ineptitude and arrogance had had on other people’s lives, but here, facing one of, if not the prime victim of Andrew’s overweening pride, Deborah suddenly realised exactly what Mark had meant when he had said that it was a side of their work he simply had no stomach for.
But it was her job to find the stomach for it, as Ryan would no doubt point out mockingly to her when she tried to express her present feelings to him.
Silently she listened as Neville Wilson explained the position to Philippa.
‘Andrew fell into the same trap as many other people during the eighties,’ he told her. ‘He bought the company when interest rates were low and then borrowed heavily to re-equip it, bringing in new plants and taking on extra men, secure in the knowledge that there was an increasing market for his goods. Over-trading is the term we bankers use for it,’ Neville told her drily. ‘But, unfortunately, men like Andrew very rarely listen to our words of caution. Additionally, matters were made worse in Andrew’s case by the fact that not only did interest rates rise steeply, but he had also gambled on winning an extremely large new contract and had expanded, borrowing extra money to spend on the plant and new buildings on the assumption that he would get this contract. At that time the value of his assets merited such a loan but, of course, now…’
‘I suspect that your husband’s accountants, like the bank, would have cautioned him to think very carefully about what he was doing,’ Deborah intervened. ‘We always counsel companies not to put too many of their eggs in the one basket, so to speak. Several small contracts are always much wiser and safer than one large one. Several small ones to provide the bread and butter and one large one for the jam are, of course, even better. Even if your husband had obtained this large contract he could still have been facing severe problems. What a lot of these large companies do is use their contracts as bait, and once they have their fish well and truly hooked and dependent on their contracts to stay in the business they use that power to force down the price of the goods or services they’re buying. It’s standard market practice but often, in the euphoria of obtaining a good new contract, even the most sensible of businessmen can forget that fact.
‘In your husband’s case, unfortunately, he was already over-committed financially before he expanded to take on this contract. Once he realised he wasn’t going to get it, the only way the business could have survived would have been via a very large injection of cash. He couldn’t borrow any more money. He had already borrowed up to the
full extent of his assets and as it is the bank will be very lucky to recoup all of its money.’
‘So there’s no way the company could be kept going?’ Philippa asked her.
Deborah shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry, there isn’t. If there were, the bank, or more likely your husband’s accountants, would have recommended appointing receivers; they would have taken over the running of the company and tried to keep it working as a going concern until they could find a buyer…’
‘And there’s no way that still could be done?’ Philippa asked her eagerly. Perhaps if she talked to Robert, stressed to him how many people would be put out of work if the company closed down, played a little upon his pomposity… his public image and the acclaim he would receive locally if he ‘saved’ Kilcoyne’s… ‘If there were someone who could invest…’
Deborah shook her head again. Why was it that she felt so much pity and compassion for this woman? She was the antithesis of everything she was herself, pitifully defenceless and unaware, the kind of woman who probably never worried about anything other than what to serve at her next dinner party, whose knowledge of world affairs was probably limited to the name of Hillary Clinton’s dress designer and who was probably more familiar with the current cost of a Chanel suit than with the current state of the share index.
The kind of woman who almost exactly mirrored the type personified by her own mother.
Deborah frowned abruptly. Where had that thought come from?
‘Not unless this someone could come up with two million pounds,’ she told Philippa briskly.
Philippa could feel the colour leaving her skin, her blood felt as though it was being sucked back through her veins by some giant vacuum pump, leaving her physically shaking… physically nauseous.
‘Two million pounds! B-but that’s impossible…’ she started to stammer. ‘Andrew would never borrow so much money… He couldn’t!’
Deborah said nothing, pausing for a few seconds before removing a sheaf of papers from the file in front of her and saying quietly, ‘It’s our job as liquidators appointed by the bank, who are the main creditors—that is to say your late husband’s biggest debts are with them—to recoup as much of this money as we can, and this process is normally done by liquidating the company’s assets… hence the term liquidation.
‘What I have here is a list of those assets over which the bank has a charge; that is to say that when your husband borrowed this money from the bank he secured it by signing over to the bank those assets.’
Philippa tried to listen but she was still in shock, still stunned by the extent of Andrew’s debt. Two million pounds… how could he have borrowed so much money?
Deborah looked up at Neville Wilson. It was his job to explain to Philippa Ryecart the extent of her husband’s debts and the consequences of them.
Silently she started to replace her papers in the file.
‘And the people who work for the company?’ she heard Philippa asking her urgently as she stood up. ‘What will happen to them?’
‘They’ll be served with redundancy notices,’ Deborah told her. ‘There’ll be a formal meeting this afternoon informing them officially of what’s happened and…’
‘Redundancy!’ Philippa shivered as she looked across at Neville.
‘There isn’t any alternative, I’m afraid,’ he told her. ‘It’s standard procedure in such cases. Every extra day the company is in operation merely adds to its debt. I just wish I’d been able to persuade Andrew to listen to me when I tried to warn him about the risks he was running, but——’
He broke off as Deborah interrupted him to say quietly, ‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow morning as arranged.’ She turned to Philippa. ‘I’m sorry all this has to come as such a shock to you,’ she told her.
As she left the office she was thanking her lucky stars that she was not the sort of woman who could ever fall into the kind of trap that Philippa had been caught in. To be so dependent on a man and so unaware of his financial affairs.
It crossed her mind that Ryan was very much the same kind of man as Andrew Ryecart had been.
In Neville’s office Philippa stood up, preparing to leave, but Neville waved her back into her seat, saying, ‘Not yet, Philippa—we still have one or two things to discuss… about Andrew’s personal affairs.’