‘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.’
Andrew’s personal affairs. Philippa stared numbly at him. She was still in shock. She had gone beyond her own personal anger and bitterness now, totally overwhelmed by her awareness of how many lives Andrew’s egomania had destroyed.
All those people soon to lose their jobs; and in a town where all too probably they would not be able to find new ones.
‘How could he have done it, Neville?’ she asked shakily. ‘How could he have taken such a risk?’
‘He was that kind of man, Philippa,’ Neville told her. ‘He thrived on the excitement of taking that kind of gamble. He enjoyed taking risks.’
‘With other people’s lives … other people’s welfare?’ Philippa asked him bitterly. At the back of her mind was the thought that Andrew had not merely been a gambler addicted to the dangerous thrill of taking a risk, he had also been a coward, happy to gamble recklessly with the futures and livelihoods of others, but totally unable to face up to the consequences of losing that gamble when it affected him personally.
‘You wanted to talk to me about Andrew’s personal affairs,’ she said wearily instead. ‘The house was in Andrew’s name but I suppose it will only be a formality having it transferred into mine as his widow … like the bank accounts.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘To be honest I haven’t given much thought to that side of things and I should have done. It was a bit awkward at the garage this morning when I went to get petrol. They’ve stopped Andrew’s account and I had to use the last of my cash. I’ll need to draw some more from the joint account.’
Neville cleared his throat and looked down at his desk. ‘I’m afraid it’s not quite as simple as that, Philippa.’
As she looked into his face and saw his expression Philippa felt her stomach drop with all the speed and sickening effect of a high-speed lift. She knew even before he spoke that there was something seriously wrong, but her throat had gone so dry she couldn’t even begin to ask what it was.
‘Let’s take the house first, shall we?’ Neville was saying. ‘When Andrew approached the bank for an additional loan we could only grant it against some sort of security. The company’s assets were already tied up to secure the existing loans he had and so the only security Andrew had to offer was the equity in the house, and of course his insurance policies. If the house had