Ballard’s office overlooked the old market square in Richmond, a well-to-do market town in North Yorkshire. The room was furnished by Ballard himself, not his employer, and the result was welcoming and warm. Ballard had been offered promotions, but he refused anything which took him away from Yorkshire. His clients loved him and his bosses left him alone. He welcomed George with coffee and biscuits.
‘Well, well, George. It’s a while since I’ve seen you. Very sorry to hear about your father’s death. Very sorry indeed. You must be very cut up, I suppose. How’s poor Helen taking it?’
Ballard munched on the biscuits as he spoke. He was a fat man with greying hair and moustache. He had the no-nonsense mouth of the tough banker and the twinkly eyes of a kind and humorous man. Crumbs from his biscuits lodged inside his moustache.
George shrugged. According to Josie, their mother was in a very bad way indeed, having teetered on the brink of following their father into the night. As it was now … but Ballard didn’t need to know the real, gloomy story. A brightly-coloured fairy tale would do for him.
‘Mum’s taken it OK to be honest,’ said George. ‘As you know, there wasn’t much love lost between Mum and Dad by the end. She’s just pleased that the money’s coming into the family proper after being under lock and key for so long.’
The will was secret, but Ballard knew as well as anyone how much Bernard Gradley was worth. If George could con him into believing he was about to inherit millions, then getting him to show a bit of grace with Gissings shouldn’t be so tough.
‘Yes. A few million must dull the edge of pain I suppose. Especially if you couldn’t stand the old bastard – and I speak as a friend of the old bastard, as you know. Still you haven’t come here to talk about that, I guess. Proud proprietor of old Tom Gissing’s shop, eh? Wouldn’t quite guess it. Not from the look of you. Still, stranger things have happened. How can I help?’
‘Well I owe you half a million quid, give or take.’
‘That’s right. But it’s give not take. Five hundred and forty-eight thousand, seven hundred and eighty-two pounds. Due close of business on Friday.’
‘That’s fine, but I wonder if we could sort out an extension. Two or three months perhaps?’
‘An extension? With all that cash from your dad?’
There was a twinkle in Ballard’s eye, but his mouth was unforgiving, and it was the mouth talking.
‘Nothing has yet been released by the estate’s executors,’ said George truthfully. ‘There are death duties, valuation of the business, all the rest of it. Until I get my slice of the pie, I’m as poor as a church mouse. What I want is to defer the loan until I can recapitalise the business, write off the debt, give it a healthy balance sheet once again.’
‘You have a letter from the executors? I might be able to grant a deferral if you had a letter.’
George stuttered for a moment. He could get a letter. It just wouldn’t say what he needed it to say.
‘Er – I guess so. What I don’t know is whether I can get it in time. There’s a whole bunch of executors and the legal palaver seems to take for ever.’
Ballard checked some figures on his desk.
‘The interest payment due on Friday is around six grand. If you get that to us plus another thirty grand as an advance on the next series of interest payments, then I’ll give you a temporary extension. Let’s say three months, shall we?’
George nodded without being able to speak. In his mind’s eye, he’d expected Ballard to nod the whole thing through without a hint of difficulty. As it was, Ballard had hardly helped at all.
Emerging blinking into the market square, George chased a traffic warden from his illegally parked car, pulled out his mobile phone and started to dial. He had five days to find thirty-six grand. If he couldn’t, he would be the shortest lived proprietor The Gissings Modern Furniture Company (Limited) would ever know.
8
Not dead, thank God, but very, very ill.
An ambulance had come quickly. A kind paramedic had been swift to reassure a distraught Josephine that her mother’s pulse was steady, her breathing weak but constant. The journey to hospital was an unremembered rush of sirens and flashing lights. Once there, Helen Gradley was thrust fast and unemotionally on to the processing line of the modern NHS. Her case was serious and, queue-jumping the groaning hordes in casualty, she was placed immediately into intensive care. Through that night and the days that followed, diagnosis and prognosis became clearer.
Helen Gradley had had a stroke, a stoppage of blood to the brain. The consequences were hard to predict, even for a specialist. Some people lost speech, lost coordination, lost memory, then recovered the lot within weeks and months. Others might lose less, but lose it for good. With Helen, whose stroke had been severe, only time would tell.
And Josephine? That first night at the hospital she had sat up all night with her mother. Doctors had come and gone, giving conflicting advice, rushing off at the command of a pager, too busy to do their job. Josie, in her party dress still, held her mother’s hand, whispering encouragement. She remembered the mood she’d been in, climbing the hill towards home: her anger, her passionate demands for her old life back. That was all gone now. Helen Gradley, for so long the shield between her children and their father, the victim of an unfair divorce and a cruel will, lay in bed, helpless as a baby, looking to her daughter for help.
Josephine was just seventeen. She had never expected to earn a living, let alone care for a disabled parent, but she knew her duty. ‘It’s OK, Mum. I’m here,’ she said.
9
It’s a common problem amongst bankers. You work hard all day. You come home tired as a dog in a heatwave. Then when at last you collapse into bed, you can’t even sleep. Worse still, you do sleep and your dreams are full of the rubbish you’ve spent your day with. Numbers walk past in an endless stupid procession. You’re no longer you. You’re just a cursor flashing in a crowded spreadsheet, roving up and down, sorting out numbers, the last traffic cop left alive in Gridlock City.
It was three o’clock in the morning and Zack threw off the covers. He groaned. Outside there was a distant whistle of traffic from Camden High Street and the sound of a milk float clinking. Zack tried to let the sounds drift in and over the clickety-click of marching numbers.
He put the light on, splashed water on his face, then decided to have a shower. Maybe that would wash the rubbish away. He stood under the jet of water and scrubbed himself with the Boots aromatherapy shower gel which Josephine had given him for his birthday. It was a rather pointed present, bought for less than a tenner – Josie’s way of reminding him that she was struggling to cope. Damn her. She’d quit complaining when Zack saved their father’s fortune single-handedly. When she had a few million quid in her pocket – money which Zack would have put there – she could buy him a decent present. The purple gel (‘Refreshing and Relaxing’) dripped off Zack’s bony figure under the spray. Numbers still chattered, but not as much.
He threw on a dressing gown stolen from the New York Plaza in happier days, and padded into the kitchen. Nothing in the fridge except a yoghurt past its sell-by date. He opened it and sniffed it. It smelled OK. What’s the difference between a yoghurt pot and Australia? The yoghurt’s got a living culture. Ha, ha. Zack ate the yoghurt and stared at the lid. The sell-by date. More numbers. He’d be dreaming about the bar code next. If he scrabbled around in the dustbin he could probably find a till receipt to read.
He went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Sarah Havercoombe seemed completely indifferent