Betrayal (6 page)

I was on the M5, somewhere past Taunton, when a blaring horn brought me to my senses with a jolt of adrenalin. A car was looming up in front of me. In the instant that I realised it was stationary I also knew that I couldn’t possibly stop in time. I jerked the wheel to the left and braked hard and felt the car kick round as the rear wheels lost their grip. I must have twisted the wheel the other way because the car performed a snake-like manoeuvre and skidded again as it shot across the middle lane, narrowly missing the front of a large coach. The inside lane came at me in slow motion, any approaching traffic hidden by the bulk of the coach, but the lane must have been empty because the next moment the car was shuddering sideways across the hard shoulder and hitting the kerb with an almighty bang that almost lifted me off my seat.

The car rocked to a standstill, the engine stalled. All I could hear was the radio newscaster droning on. I sat motionless with my hands clutched to the wheel, the sweat cold against my ribs, until someone opened the door and asked me if I was all right.

I heard myself say I was okay. I must have sounded convincing because, after the man told me several times to stop driving like a bloody maniac, he slammed the door and walked back to the coach, which was parked some way ahead on the hard shoulder.

It was a long time before I could think about setting off again. I kept reliving the near-miss and the seconds preceding it, when the newscaster had spoken Sylvie’s name. His cool detached voice kept running through my mind, like a tape being played over and over again, yet only two words really registered, and both felt like something driven against my heart.
Stabbed and bound
.

I got shakily out of the car and heaved the sparse contents of my stomach onto the grass verge. When I felt a bit better I walked round the car to look for signs of damage, but the wheels seemed all right, the tyres still had air. Not knowing what else I should check, I got back into the driver’s seat and, after a last five minutes with my head back and my eyes closed, I started the engine.

I drove gingerly, half expecting knocking sounds or wobbles from the steering, but after a time I forgot to worry about the car and slowly accelerated to mid-lane speed, my mind miles away again, in a dark and distant place.

I arrived at Hartford half an hour late. Driving in through the gates, I tried to picture the factory through the eyes of potential investors. With its twenties architecture, drab brickwork and mean windows, the place had the air of old glories long faded, while its clusters of ventilation pipes and aluminium chimneys suggested spasmodic and piece-meal modernisation. Only the recently completed warehouse, a spare metal structure in cobalt blue, emitted anything approaching an up-to-date image.
Lacklustre sales . . . Low investment . . .
The newspaper’s comments were ill-founded but they still pricked at me.

George Banes came out to meet me. The production director was a burly man, his large belly testing the fastenings on his shirt, with a thick head of hair that had been silvery grey for as long as I had known him, which was almost twenty years.

‘Thought the traffic might delay you,’ he commented, as we shook hands and made for the entrance, ‘so I told the staff we’d meet at ten minutes to noon.’

‘You explained that it was just an update?’

‘I did. I said you wanted to keep them abreast of developments but that there was nothing definite at the moment.’

Even now, in my state of preoccupation, I couldn’t walk through the doors of the factory without feeling a proprietorial thrill. I was too much my father’s son, too deeply instilled with his old-style paternalistic pride not to feel an attachment to the place that was decidedly emotional.

George took me into the office that had been my father’s and would have been mine if Howard hadn’t pressed for what he liked to call an integrated management structure, and insisted we put the management and sales of all three divisions under one roof at Slough.

The room was virtually unchanged since my father’s retirement ten years ago. His wide oak desk stood in the same spot by the window, the ancient wooden in- and out-trays squatting on a worn leather surface that still bore the pattern of a hundred ink marks. When I was a small boy this room had seemed cavernous, and my father, behind the mass of his desk, an oddly distant figure. It was only when he finished his business and took me down to the factory floor and chatted in his easy soft-voiced manner that I had felt I knew him again.

George brought coffee and we sat down at the conference table.

‘So it’s all signed up with Zircon?’ he demanded eagerly .

‘It’s signed.’

‘No quibbles with the business plan?’

George and I had worked so hard on the business plan that we knew every word and financial projection by heart. ‘No quibbles with the business plan,’ I reassured him, and saw his eyes spark with satisfaction. ‘But I tell you, George, whatever happened to them on the playing fields of Eton, it turned their hearts to stone.’ I was thinking of the additional leverage the venture capitalists had demanded, and the personal guarantees covering the fifty per cent of my personal worth that was not already committed to the buyout. ‘They’ve made financial pain into an art form.’ I managed an ironic laugh.

‘But they’re behind us now, that’s the important thing.’

‘They still have their doubts about me, I think. Or rather the idea of me.’

‘What?
Why?
’

‘According to the City, family firms are breeding grounds for inefficiency and nepotism. And a family buyout – well!’ I rolled my eyes. ‘That’s even more unhealthy. Incest.’

‘But that’s ridiculous! It’s not like that here. Don’t they realise that? We’ve always been a team, for God’s sake! And, this buyout – well, we’re all in it together, aren’t we?’

We certainly were. George was putting fifty thousand cash into the buyout, and another fifty thousand against his house. So were Alan and John, the other Hartford directors. But that was how the venture capitalists liked it, to have the whole lot of us over a financial barrel.

I passed George the page from
The Times
. ‘This may not help.’

George read the article and spluttered, ‘What’s this? Years of low investment? What are they damn well talking about! We’ve upgraded the batching plant, for God’s sake. We’ve installed the stem-pulling machines—’

‘It’s nonsense, of course—’

‘And lacklustre sales! They’ve stood up bloody well, considering. Apart from Packenhams.’

This was one of our worst blows, being de-listed by London’s second largest department store.

George thrashed a hand against the paper. ‘Who gives them this rubbish?’

But I didn’t try to answer that.

George hadn’t cooled down yet. ‘It makes Hartford sound like some cottage industry filled with Luddites! As if we’d fought change tooth and nail!’

The irony wasn’t lost on either of us. While Howard and I had been running the company it had hardly stopped changing. That was the whole trouble. We had moved too far, too fast, expanding rapidly into mass-market glass and chinaware just as trading conditions began to worsen. While my father was alive he hadn’t liked much of what we had been doing but had never tried to interfere. I was glad he had died in February. It had saved him the anguish of seeing quite what a mess I had made of everything.

‘At the end of the day it’s only a newspaper story,’ I said.

George, forcing himself back to his natural state of optimism, declared, ‘Right! Right!’ He laughed loudly and abruptly. ‘We never thought it was going to be easy, did we?’

I laughed too, awkwardly. This deal was the hardest thing I had ever attempted. In the six weeks since the Cumberland takeover, I had been cut loose from the new parent company to run Hartford Crystal on a nil-salary basis, while simultaneously planning to buy it out. Raising the three million pounds of leverage from the banks, keeping all the financial and legal balls in the air, pulling together all the strands of what was an amazingly complex deal, was a Herculean task which, even on an eighteen-hour day, was stretching me to my limits. Much of the time I was suffused with a wild conviction that we would pull it off, and then I flew on adrenalin. At other times, faced by endless setbacks, I settled into something more mechanical, a mindless persistence fuelled by the determination to save what I had so foolishly jeopardised.

There was no mystery about my motives. For me this buyout was about restitution. My father had worked hard for twenty years to build up the company and pass it on to me in good shape, while I had worked hard for ten to achieve nothing more, it seemed, than to let it slip away and threaten the livelihoods of all the people who worked for us. I wanted it back, I wanted to show what I could do with it now that I was free of Howard and his remorseless drive for diversification. I wanted to make a success of it for my own sake, certainly, b ut more than that I wanted to feel I could look the employees in the eye again.

George and I talked our way through the monthly sales figures and were just starting on the cash flow analysis when a woman’s voice sounded in the outer office. There was something about it, the suggestion of a lazy laugh, of dark overtones, that caught at my memory and chilled my heart.

‘You all right?’ George asked.

‘Fine.’ Reaching for my coffee, I promptly knocked it over. Trying to retrieve the cup, I got that wrong too and sent it flying across the table.

I muttered ‘Jesus!’ Then as I picked the cup off the floor: ‘What an idiot!’ I gave a disbelieving laugh. But as soon as George had gone in search of a cloth I sat in silence, wondering what on earth was happening to me and whether this was just frayed nerves or a form of delayed shock. Whatever, the loss of control frightened me, and I was unnerved by the thought that it might happen again.

By the time George returned with a roll of kitchen paper, I was staring bleakly at the pool of coffee, trying to suppress visions of dark water and Sylvie’s flesh, mutilated and cold.

‘Do you want something to eat?’ George asked when he had finished clearing up. ‘A sandwich? Biscuits?’

‘Thanks, no.’

He peered at me. ‘You look as though you need something. If you don’t mind my saying so.’

I shook my head and jumped to my feet. ‘We’d better go.’

As we made our way towards the factory floor George’s secretary hailed me from her office. ‘Mr Hugh, a message from Dr Wellesley. He’ll be free from twelve-thirty.’

‘Hugh or Mr Wellesley,’ I corrected her halfheartedly, having largely abandoned the hope that the long-serving staff would drop their archaic terms of address. ‘My brother will be at home, will he?’

‘Yes. And there was an enquiry from a Detective Inspector Henderson. No details. Just could you call him?’

She gave me a slip of paper with a number. The area code was Exeter. ‘Thank you.’

I glanced at the number again, then, stuffing it into my pocket, walked quickly away. George caught up and started singing the praises of some training scheme, but I was hardly listening. I was wondering what questions the police would ask me. I had no doubt it was Sylvie they wanted to talk to me about, it could hardly be anything else. We must have been seen together, on the pontoon perhaps, or the boat. Such things did not go unnoticed in a small community like Dittisham. Ever since Sylvie’s death I had been telling myself that this summons would come, yet now it had materialised I felt oddly shaken.

We reached the batching plant and I managed to ask the warehousemen some sensible questions about the new forklift and the revised storage bay layout. The route George and I took through the factory had been laid down since the beginning of time. After a circuit of the storage bay which took us past pallets of silica, lead oxide, litharge and potassium, we inspected the computerised batch mixer, then, after a few minutes with the batch quality control staff, we went through to the heat of the blowing room.

The dull roar of the furnaces still stirred me in some atavistic way. The transmutation of the dry amalgam into clear lava still seemed like some mysterious alchemy. The groups of schoolchildren and visitors who toured the factory on the overhead walkways lingered longest over the blowers as they ballooned and moulded the cooling lava into shape, or beside the cutters as they chased the designs into the glass, waiting in nervous delight for them to make an error and abandon the goblet, tumbler or bowl to the reprocessing bin with a crash of splintering glass. But for me the fascination had always lain here, in the unimaginable heat, in the impenetrable trembling magma that seemed incapable of any transformation, let alone the miraculous metamorphosis into a material both dense and transparent, both complex and flawless.

Bill, our senior master blower, raised his eyebrows in greeting. Many years ago when I had worked here in my university vacations, sweeping floors and wheeling bins, Bill had tried to teach me to blow the simplest shape. My best effort sat at home somewhere, a far-from-round object of uneven thickness with a trail of bubbles up one side.

The factory buzzer cut our tour short at the grinding and polishing area. Following George towards the canteen, the ideas for my speech, such as they were, seemed to scatter, and I wished I’d made more time to prepare.

As the staff gathered I greeted as many as I could by name. A few had been at Hartford for thirty years or more; some twenty; a good number for more than ten. There were two entire families – father, sons, daughters-in-law. We even had a grandmother and granddaughter on the payroll. A hundred and fifty employees in all, people whose lives were dependent on this factory, and – never had I needed less reminding – on my ability to restore its fortunes.

The moment came. George called for silence and I stepped forward, beset by strange emotions.

‘As soon as the takeover was agreed I promised to keep you in touch with developments,’ I began. ‘I also promised you that we were going to do everything in our power to get this management buyout off the ground.’ Voicing it, I felt a new weight of responsibility. ‘Well, the good news is that we’ve reached agreement with some venture capital people called Zircon. They’re going to put up about a quarter of the money. That still leaves a full half to be raised from the banks, and I won’t pretend that it’s proving to be easy, because it isn’t. We’re in the second round of talks with two banks, the Chartered and the West Country Mutual. We haven’t been turned down yet. That’s all I can tell you so far.’