Death's Bright Angel

by Janet Neel

  ‘You actually want us out of the way, but ostensibly doing something useful, Henry,’ Francesca pointed out. ‘I don’t mind,’ she added hastily, ‘I’m just getting clear what I’m doing.’

  ‘It comes of giving them the vote,’ Martin said into the silence.

  ‘Aye, that was a mistake,’ Henry agreed heavily. ‘Right, lass, we’ll drop you and Martin at Britex and I’ll go on to the airport. I want those lists. Get them typed, too.’

  ‘Sir,’ both his subordinates said together, and fell about while Henry reflected comfortably that this giggling pair would have produced, by lunch-time, a first-class analysis of customers and suppliers.

  He collected the Connecticut directors, Hal Guadareschi and Ed Patello whom he had known for many years, two amiable, apparently relaxed Americans in their mid-fifties, both born of Italian immigrant parents, but changed by the USA so that only the most fleeting trace of the Milanese peasantry from whence they sprang showed beneath the careful, amicable surface of the prosperous American businessman. He briefed them in the car and took them straight to Peter Hampton’s office when he arrived, catching a reassuring glance of Martin and Francesca seated at a paper-covered table, heads bent in concentration.

  In his long career as an auditor, he had several times walked a factory accompanying a prospective purchaser and the existing management, and that situation was always fraught with social pitfalls. Himself by no means an insensitive man, he had learned just to keep his mind on the job and ignore all the emotions, but as a connoisseur of these parties he decided that Hal, Ed and Peter Hampton were making a particularly graceful occasion of it. Hal and Ed started off by commenting knowledgeably and favourably on what there was of quality in the factory, while taking it in turns to elucidate, quietly, the extent of the problems. Hampton had warned the shop floor of their visit, describing them as American technical experts come to consider what improvements could be made to the lines. Henry was not sure to what extent his cover story deceived a shop floor alert for trouble, but the Americans’ soft-spoken command of their subject and the ease with which they dealt with the workforce, stopping to ask a quiet question here and there, or to watch with undeviating concentration the way a particular machine was working, were in themselves impressive. At one point Hal fell behind and was found watching one of the big looms, standing silent amid the thought-shattering banging of the looms. He finally turned and walked slowly back to the group, took the foreman a little away and said something to him, the broad, clumsyseeming hands moving with precision. The foreman looked startled, nodded, signalled a fitter who was lounging on the top of the row, and disappeared purposefully. Peter Hampton raised an eyebrow enquiringly as Hal returned.

  ‘Bar on the shuttle — five, no six — out of alignment,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘Where’s your wrench, Hal?’ his fellow director asked teasingly, and Hal, with his easy smile, said that there were perfectly good mechanics about who could fix it up without his interfering further in someone else’s business.

  ‘Missed that,’ Peter Hampton said easily. ‘Thank you,’ and he led the group on, with Henry at the rear thinking about him. He was behaving impressively today despite the difficulties and Henry wondered whether he had been fair in his initial judgement of Hampton’s quality. In the end, the only way you could judge a managing director was by his results, and by that test Hampton was a failure; his business was in worse shape now than it had been when he took it over. But he knew his business and was obviously a hard worker. He had perhaps been unlucky in finding himself in the eye of the hurricane that had hit the European textile Industry, and in finding himself in charge of a company with substantial borrowings which was, like an over-canvased sailing-ship, thereby less equipped to ride out the storm. He watched Hampton swapping jokes with Ed, apparently without a care in the world, and decided that both were true: he was a flawed character, but also an intelligent manager who had been unlucky.

  He caught up with Ed, who was suggesting that they might have lunch after the tour, and after lunch they might perhaps be allowed to see a list of the firm’s principal customers and suppliers. ‘I imagine they’ll include some mutual friends?’ he said easily to Hampton.

  ‘That list is being prepared now,’ Hampton said drily, sliding a look at Henry. ‘We had lists of course, but Henry’s people are organizing them in a different way.’ Henry smiled at him blandly. ‘Are we allowing them to join us for lunch, Henry?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think so,’ Henry said placidly, and explained who he had with him.

  ‘Francesca, eh?’ Ed smiled, amused. ‘My sister’s name. She Italian by origin?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Hampton said. ‘Pure Norman, I would have thought — you know, long nose, absolutely regular features. Straight off a tapestry.’

  Henry contemplated reflectively a notice adjuring employees to wear ear protection at all times or risk premature deafness. So Hampton too had thought of the Bayeux tapestry; it made him more imaginative than the usual run of MDs in a production industry, and also indicated a real and intelligent interest in Francesca.

  ‘The Normans colonized Italy too,’ Hal Guadareschi pointed out, surprising Henry again. ‘Have to have a look at her.’

  Henry with some firmness said they could postpone this pleasure while he had a preliminary chat before lunch, and asked Peter Hampton if he would mind going to round up Martin and Francesca and the product of their morning’s work. He settled into the boardroom with Ed and Hal, waiting patiently for them to gather their thoughts together.

  Francesca and Martin had meanwhile finished the first draft of the lists, and Francesca, who was easily bored, had prowled restlessly out into the corridor, leaving the patient and audit-trained Martin to double-check and cross-add his lists.

  ‘Fran. Ask someone for the Alutex, Allied Yarns and Browns ledgers, will you?’ he called after her, not lifting his head from the lists. She pushed through a door labelled ‘Purchasing’ and found herself in a small overcrowded office looking at the backs of two men who were hunting through a filing cabinet, papers spread out all around them. One of them dropped a file, knocked his elbow on the edge of a filing drawer and swore as she wished them good morning.

  ‘Sorry to make you jump, Mr Blackett.’ She smiled nervously at William Blackett as he stared up at her, clasping his elbow, livid patches on the cheeks particularly bright against his general pallor.

  ‘Ah. Miss Wilson. You again. Didn’t realize you were here. Just doing some tidying up.’ All three of them blinked at the chaos on the floor.

  ‘Do you know Simon Ketterick? One of my salesmen at Alutex. We are just trying to help Peter Hampton get our records straight.’

  Francesca gazed at him, wondering what the records had looked like before they started tidying, but was distracted by Ketterick reaching across the table to shake hands. His hand was so cold and damp that she started very slightly, and looked at him carefully. Only a little taller than her, but probably a stone and a half lighter, skeletally thin. She wondered if he had been ill.

  ‘Sorry again to disturb you. Have you by any chance the Alutex ledger for the last year?’

  ‘Why do you need that?’ Blackett sounded both alarmed and aggressive, and she decided to play dumb.

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea. My colleague Martin is an accountant, as you know, and he seemed to think it would be useful.’

  Blackett, still looking doubtful and ruffled, stared helplessly down at the mess, but Ketterick produced the ledger and handed it over, dropping a piece of A4 as he did so, which Francesca neatly caught.

  ‘Don’t know if I need this,’ she said, considering it carefully, ‘but it is to do with a supplier, so perhaps I’d better take it.’

  Ketterick moved round to her side to look at the paper, and she tried not to flinch away from a particularly foul-smelling breath. ‘No, no, but that is one of the things we need,’ he said, firmly and took it from her, brushing her hand; again she not
iced how pale and cold his skin was. He showed the paper quickly to Blackett, and the man’s jaw dropped down momentarily, but he recovered himself.

  ‘If there is nothing else, Miss Wilson, perhaps I can take you back to where you are working.’

  Francesca, embarrassed, started to apologize and back out, but the door banged open and she had to move swiftly sideways to avoid a clout in the back as Peter Hampton came briskly through the door, and stopped, gazing at the mess.

  ‘Martin sent me to look for some ledgers, and I found Mr Blackett here so I asked him.’ Francesca, realizing immediately that he was furious, tried to get her version of the story in first, and edged round him towards the door, but he stopped her.

  ‘Francesca, would you please ask only Michael Currie or Jim Finlay for anything you want, and stay where you are put? We cannot have visitors wandering around.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have waited.’

  ‘I’ll take you back, if you now have everything you need.’ Francesca, unnerved, said she was sure she did and she could find her own way back, sorry, but Hampton was tight-lipped and silent as he walked her to the room where Martin was adding up columns of figures, opened the door, and stood aside to let her through.

  Francesca’s heart sank as she realized that further trouble was at hand. Martin, his back to them, was patiently working his way through a wall cupboard, stacking papers and boxes on the table next to him. He turned to greet them, two heavily discoloured silver cups in his hands, sweeping another box and some outsize paperclips from the untidy shelves as he did so. Then he saw Peter Hampton’s expression, and closed his mouth on the explanation he had been about to offer.

  ‘Could we just agree that you two ask me for anything you happen to want?’ Peter Hampton said, grittily. ‘No, for God’s sake, don’t put everything back in the cupboard — just leave it alone, will you?’ He watched, stony-faced, as the two civil servants slunk back to their chairs, apologetically, and bent over their papers, then walked out, shutting the door over-emphatically.

  Back in the boardroom, Ed and Hal had worked round to the meat of the discussion.

  ‘The kit’s not bad, Henry, and the factory’s well laid out.’ Ed Patello looked at his hands. ‘That’s the good news. The quality on household textiles is shit-awful; the trouble with an integrated factory is that your mistakes live with you. A bad piece of spinning is still there as a flaw in the finished sheet. That is, unless you pick it up at an early stage and scrap it. Their standards are just not high enough.’

  ‘We can fix that,’ Hal pointed out, ‘but it’ll take a long time and I’d guess we’d have to bring our own people over. You can get a lot more use out of this lot than these guys here are managing. Their maintenance is poor, no proper schedules.’

  Henry sighed. ‘Of course, our people don’t adjust their own machines because of the unions.’

  ‘We’d have to have a special deal if we were to take over here, Henry. I hope your people understand that.’

  Henry confirmed, unblushingly, that the Government well understood that many restrictive practices embodied in union agreements were wholly untenable in any industrial structure, but warned that they were unlikely to say so publicly. The Americans nodded and fell silent, while Henry, out of long experience, waited out the silence. Hal finally broke.

  ‘I don’t know how to say this, Henry,’ he observed, showing no signs of diffidence whatsoever, ‘but Ed and I are in agreement that there is no way Connecticut Cottons would get involved with this factory unless we could be offered substantial assurances by your government of financial and business support on a major scale.’

  Henry, who had been waiting for some version of this speech, confirmed that this too was understood.

  ‘As to management, Henry, I guess we’d have to rely on our own people supplemented by some local recruitment. I don’t like to take on a management that has already failed, and I would have to say that I would not be sure that the chief executive, to be specific, is as involved with the detail as we would like to see. I believe, Henry, that a manager that we had trained would have noticed that misaligned shuttle. Equally, I would not like to feel that one of our people would be allowing so many flaws through to the final article.’

  Henry noted with interest that Ed’s was exactly the same verdict as his own initial reaction — Hampton sat a little too light in the saddle and did not really control all the business. That might not matter in the boom times, but it was all important when the markets turned sour.

  ‘Maybe we ought to break now?’ Hal suggested. ‘It’s been some time since breakfast. Shall we find the others?’

  ‘The arrangement was that they would find us — here they come.’

  The door opened to admit Martin and Francesca, both looking crushed, and Hampton scowling.

  ‘One list is still being typed, Henry, and will be finished after lunch,’ Francesca said briskly and turned to greet Ed and Hal who were regarding her with interest. Amid civilities they all went out and waited while cars were fielded to go to the nearest hotel. Francesca was standing by Henry’s elbow, uncharacteristically silent.

  ‘Trouble?’ he said to her quietly under cover of the negotiations as to who went in which car.

  ‘Yes, a bit. Peter is cross with us. Tell you later. Not serious, don’t worry.’

  Nonetheless he did. She stuck by his side so that they and Ed travelled in one car, with Hampton, Hal and Martin in the other, and at lunch she was careful and rather quiet, and sat herself firmly between Ed and Hal. He was amused to notice that the Americans were respectful of her, rather than charmed.

  As the party broke up at the end of the meal, he saw Hampton make a beeline for her and say something obviously apologetic. She smiled back, equally obviously relieved. He edged closer to where they stood, Hampton very close to her, looking down, saying, ‘I’m sorry I can’t come with you to the station, but I must go and talk to these chaps.’

  ‘Of course you must.’

  ‘I’ll ring you when I’m coming down, OK? And sorry to snap this morning. Stress or something.’

  ‘No, it was my fault. I didn’t think.’

  Henry collected her and Martin with a look and the group broke up, the Departmental team going to the station and the others back to Britex. They caught the train with none too much time to spare. Francesca looked round for John McLeish and was disappointed to find he was obviously not on the train anywhere. She took her coat off and found Henry watching her.

  ‘What was the difficulty, Francesca?’

  ‘I went down the passage to look for something Martin wanted, and ran into William Blackett and one of his salesmen sorting out a filing cabinet. They were pissed off because I picked up a piece of paper they didn’t want me to see, and Peter was furious because he didn’t want me wandering around upsetting people.’

  ‘As you seem to have done. Bit tactless, lass.’

  ‘Martin didn’t do any better. They are touchy today.’

  ‘What happened, Martin?’

  ‘Fran was getting hungry, so I looked in a cupboard for a biscuit, and got the freezing treatment from Hampton. He didn’t creep up and apologize to me afterwards, either, but then he doesn’t fancy me.’

  ‘Imagine how distressed you would be if he did,’ Francesca pointed out, coldly. ‘No actually, Martin, I thought it was kind and tactful not to say you’d only been in that cupboard because of me. I always knew there must be something in the public-school system.’

  ‘What was in the cupboard — papers?’

  ‘A load of old rubbish.’ Martin assured him. ‘Two cups for some long-gone swimming gala, draft accounts for three years ago, and a couple of boxes.’

  Henry sighed. ‘Try and be a bit careful when people are on edge, though. All right, Frannie, tell me about the bit of paper; what was it?’

  ‘I read it quite carefully. Hold on while I try and think.’ She propped both elbows on the table in front of her and closed her eyes. ‘The hea
ding is ALUTEX and it’s a handwritten schedule of figures, in four columns. One script, three figures. Let me just try and get the column headings. The headings are — ah — it’s date, then the next one is order number, then it’s val — that’s value presumably, then the next one is com. What’s com?’

  ‘Commission.’ Both men spoke at once and Henry asked cautiously what she was doing.

  Her eyes opened in surprise. ‘I have a photographic memory. I thought you knew. If no one worries me, I may be able to reproduce the rest of it.’ She closed her eyes again and Henry and Martin exchanged looks.

  ‘Make a bloody useful auditor,’ Henry murmured to Martin.

  ‘There are four sub-headings under the com column, just letters, P, S, W, and Total. The left-hand column goes June 6, July 10, August 12, Sept 4, something, can’t see further. The next column goes two nought nought three.’ She ran off the next four numbers and said fretfully that that was as far as she could go, then moved to the next column. ‘Starts with pounds three four six seven five nought.’

  ‘Can you do the com column?’ Martin was producing a table to her dictation.

  ‘Under P. it says pounds 2080; pounds 1040 under S.; and pounds 2080 under W. Total pounds 5200.’

  ‘One and a half per cent,’ Henry said promptly and Martin nodded.

  Francesca opened her eyes again and Martin passed her the table he had drawn up. She read down the figures, closing her eyes every now and then to consult the picture in her head. Henry thought he had rarely seen anything more disconcerting than the matter-of-fact way she treated this unnerving ability.

  ‘It looks like an ordinary salesman’s record,’ Martin observed, puzzled. ‘Why did they get uptight? Is 1½ per cent high for the trade, Henry?’

  ‘About average. Was there a salesman’s name on it?’

  Francesca closed her eyes. ‘No.’