“Hilary,” Katie said to the girl behind the reception desk, “this is Mr. Porter from London.” The girl stood up and forthrightly shook Dan’s hand. “Could you do me a great favour and pop round to the Greasy Spoon and get him a bacon sandwich?”
“Of course,” she replied keenly, immediately retrieving her raincoat from the stand beside her desk.
Dan thrust his hand into his pocket for change. “Listen, I must—”
“No, don’t be silly,” Katie interjected. “I think the least we can do after your desperate trip to the frozen north is stand you to a bacon sandwich.” She took off her anorak and hung it up on the coat stand, then pulled off her Wellington boots and kicked her feet into a pair of old brown sailing shoes with broken backs, an indication that changing her footwear was a pretty regular occurrence. It was the first time that Dan had seen her free from her somewhat unflattering rainwear and he was impressed with what he saw. He watched her as she walked over to where the electric kettle teetered rather precariously on one of the windowsills. She gave it a shake to check that there was sufficient water in it and switched it on. Although no taller than five and a half feet, she had a figure that was totally in proportion to her height. Her hips were slim, her bust was full but firm inside her blue cashmere polo-necked jersey, and although she was wearing a brightly coloured pair of Vagabonds, the generous cut of which would no doubt have delayed many a “heavier set” woman from going on a crash diet, he could tell that, in Katie’s case, they were hiding from view a pert bottom and a shapely pair of legs.
“Right,” she said, returning to where he stood at the reception desk. “While we’re waiting for that to boil, would you like me to explain what’s happening in here?”
Dan took off his leather jacket, which had begun to steam in the heat of the office and give off a smell like a bullock with a personal hygiene problem. “Could I hang this somewhere to dry? It’s soaked right through.”
“Of course,” Katie said, taking the jacket from him. “I’m sorry. I should have thought.”
She walked to the far end of the room and spread the garment over a radiator at the back of an unoccupied desk that Dan reckoned to be her own. “That should do it.”
“Are you sure it’ll be all right like that?” Dan asked, eyeing his precious jacket with concern.
“I would think so. It won’t harm the leather, if that’s what you mean.”
Dan decided to trust her judgment. She, of all people, must know about that kind of thing.
“Okay, then,” she said, stopping behind the two women who sat at the computer screens, talking incessantly into their mouthpieces. She put a hand on a shoulder of each. They turned to give her a brief smile without faltering in their conversations. “These two lovely ladies are Heather and Maggie. Come over here and I’ll explain what they’re doing.”
Dan moved around the side of the reception desk and walked over to stand beside her.
“Best to look at Maggie’s screen. She’s just started to take an order.” She paused as Maggie typed in the name of a Mrs. Catherine Swift. Dan watched as the screen immediately filled with Mrs. Swift’s address, telephone number, and banking details. “That’s what I like to see,” Katie whispered to him. “A satisfied customer returning for more.” She reached over Maggie’s shoulder and pointed to one of the field boxes near to the bottom of the screen. “That shows that Mrs. Swift has already spent five hundred and eighty pounds with us this year.”
Dan was impressed. “Are there many customers like her?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied quite assuredly. “Once Maggie has finished this order, I’ll ask her to bring up our Top Ten list. I’m pretty certain that you won’t find Mrs. Swift’s name on it.”
Maggie pressed a key, and the address and banking details were replaced by another screen format. She started to type in the order that was being given to her over the telephone.
“This is the stock handling format now,” Katie explained. “Maggie types in what’s required and then checks it against stock. If we have what the customer wants, then she reserves it and that’s knocked off the stock list. If we don’t have it, then it goes into a pending file. After each order is taken, it gets transferred to the monitor in the stockroom and, if all goes well, it should be in the post by the end of the day. If there is some part of the order that is pending, it gets printed out onto a manufacturing list, and along with stock update sheets, goes through to the girls in the workshop who then know what they have to produce.”
“Why do you bother printing out hard copy for them?” Dan asked. “Why don’t you have a monitor in the workshop like you do in the stockroom?”
Katie smiled. “Because the girls in there don’t like computers. We tried it once but it nearly ended in a walkout.” She walked over to the kettle, which Dan had heard click off a minute before. “They much prefer good old-fashioned pieces of paper.” She spooned instant coffee into a mug and poured in the water. “How do you like it?”
“Black’s just fine.”
As Katie handed him the mug, Hilary walked in through the front door of the office, the shoulders of her raincoat damp with rain and her long dark hair plastered against the sides of her face. She placed a silver foil package on the top of the reception desk, took off her coat, and then shook her head from side to side, spraying out water like a shaking dog. “My word, that’s horrible out there,” she exclaimed, tousling her hair with her fingers. She walked over to Dan and handed him the warm package before replacing her raincoat on its peg.
“I’m sorry about that, Hilary,” Katie said. “I should have stopped by on the way here. I’m afraid my mind is a bit full of other things at the minute.”
“Not to worry,” the girl said brightly.
Dan smiled his appreciation at the young receptionist before she resumed her seat.
“What would you like to do?” Katie asked. “We could either sit down and have a chat now, or we could continue with the tour?”
“If it’s all the same to you,” Dan replied, “I think it might be best to leave questions to the end.” Holding his coffee mug between arm and chest, he took the silver wrapper off the bacon sandwich and threw it in a wastepaper bin. “As long as you don’t mind me having breakfast as we go.”
“Not at all. Come on then, we’ll start in the workshop.”
Katie led Dan through the windowed door at the back of the office and immediately he was hit by the whirring discord of the sewing machines and the blare of pop music from the speakers that were suspended from the metal rafters above the shop floor. Dan counted twelve machinists, all bent in concentration over their work, running the brightly coloured fabric through their machines, working foot pedal and hands in complete synchronization. Beside each workstation was positioned a stack of plastic boxes on the sides of which were written a series of numbers, preceded by two letters. Dan noticed that no two boxes were the same.
Katie saw him studying them. “Those are the manufacturing codes,” she shouted into his ear. “Different fabrics, different size garments, and different panels. Everything gets started at the back beside the cutting table and then moves forward, so that the finished article comes off over there by the door. Elsie here”— Elsie glanced up when she heard her name being mentioned, took one look at Dan, and went puce with embarrassment—“is doing pockets, and once she’s finished this batch, she’ll push her boxes on to Karen in front there who’ll put in the elastic.”
Katie led the way through the row of machinists to the back of the shop floor. As they walked, a shrill wolf whistle pierced the air and Dan turned to see the girl next to Elsie lean over and give her a teasing punch on the arm. Elsie’s embarrassment was so intensified that her head almost disappeared into her lap.
Katie laughed. “Don’t worry. They give that treatment to any man who walks in here. You actually got off quite lightly.” She rested her hands on the edge of the large cutting table, and both she and Dan watched as a well-built girl wearing
a baseball cap back to front deftly steered an electric cutting knife around a pattern that was laid upon a layer of fabric almost a foot deep.
“This is a pretty skilled job,” Katie boomed out. “One slip of the knife and that whole lay of material may well have to be junked.”
“Has that happened before?” Dan asked.
Katie smiled at him and moved close to the baseball cap. “Morag, he’s asking if we’ve ever had to scrap a lay before?”
The girl’s head jerked up to look at him, and Dan was quite taken aback by the obvious affront that flashed in her eyes. She shook her head once before resuming her work.
Dan could tell that Katie was suppressing a laugh. “There’s your answer.” She turned and made her way back towards the door. “It is without doubt these girls that have made this company, not me. They think nothing of working over the weekend or well into the night if we fall behind on manufacturing. I seem to remember that when you called on Sunday night, it was pretty late, wasn’t it?”
Dan nodded.
“Well, there you are then. In a way, you’ve already been witness to it. They all take pride in what they do, and what makes it even better is that they’re all my friends. We’re just one big happy family.”
Dan couldn’t help but notice that there was almost a heaviness of heart in the way that Katie adulated her workers. As they returned to the office area, it came to him that of course she would feel that way. She was selling the business, after all, and the uncertainties regarding the future employment of her “family” had to be weighing heavily on her mind.
By the time that Dan had finished off his bacon sandwich and drunk his cup of coffee, they had completed the tour, having passed quickly through the high-shelved stockroom, with its neatly folded rows of trousers and jerseys, and the dispatch room, stacked with packets of tissue paper and smart blue boxes with Vagabonds written in gold italics across their lids. Returning to the reception area, Dan collected his holdall and followed Katie to the rear of the office. She pulled a chair away from the wall for him before sitting down at her desk.
“Right, then,” she said. “Let’s get to the questions. What would you like to ask me?”
Unzipping his holdall, Dan dug around to retrieve Nina’s battered exercise book. “May I?” he asked, reaching across and taking a biro from the wicker pen tray on Katie’s desk. He sat down on the chair and crossed his legs. “Well, let’s start with the most important question. Can I ask you what your turnover is?”
Katie raised her eyebrows, seemingly startled by the forthrightness of the question. “Right.” She hesitated briefly. “Well, I think that last year we were at about the half-million mark, but I reckon that the company will surpass it this year.”
For a moment, Dan hovered pen above pad. He hadn’t been expecting anything close to that. His mind raced back to what he and Josh had discussed in the kitchen in Clapham. If Vagabonds wasn’t yet “scratching the market,” then, by hell, it wasn’t doing badly as it was. Still, he found it hard to believe that a business such as this was housed in what looked like a Nissan hut in one of the farthest outposts of the United Kingdom could ever be capable of achieving such a turnover.
“And your profit margin?”
Again Katie seemed perplexed by the question. She let out a sigh. “I couldn’t give you an exact answer to that. You would have to speak to our accountant. Our manufacturing costs are pretty high, but I would never think of changing the way we work. Last year, I think we cleared about twenty-five thousand after wages, but most of that went into paying off a medium-term bank loan.” She leaned forward on her desk. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Dan replied.
“Why would anyone reading Woman’s Weekly be at all interested in profit margins?”
“I’m sorry?”
Katie sat back in her chair. “Well, surely they’d be more interested in, well, less mundane matters. In fact, I was rather surprised that you wanted to do an article about me so soon after the last one.”
Dan frowned. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
Katie stared at him for a moment. “You’re wanting to write an article on me, aren’t you? For Woman’s Weekly?”
Dan laughed. “No. What on earth gave you that idea?”
“But that’s what you said on the telephone.”
“I never said anything of the sort.”
“But you are a journalist?”
“No, I certainly am not.”
Katie’s fresh-faced complexion seemed to drain of colour. “You’re not from the Inland Revenue, are you? Because if you are, you’ll have to—”
“Listen,” Dan interrupted her, beginning to feel an itch of irritation niggle at his sleep-starved mind. “I saw an article about you in a copy of Woman’s Weekly that my mother had given me”—that was a good start, he thought—“for some recipe or other, and I read it. I then rang you up and said that I wanted to speak to you about your company, and you told me to come up. So I have done exactly that.”
“But why?”
“Because,” Dan replied, his voice rising in frustration, “you said that you were selling your business and I thought that I might be interested in buying it.”
Katie thumped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, no,” she mumbled.
“What do you mean, ‘oh no’?”
“I didn’t hear you say that.” She paused for a moment, biting at her bottom lip. “Oh my goodness, I think that I must have picked up the wrong end of the stick altogether.”
Dan shook his head dismissively. “Oh well, there’s no harm done.”
“But there is,” Katie replied quietly. “I’ve brought you all the way up here to Scotland for no reason.”
“Well, let me be the judge of that.”
“There’s nothing to judge!” Katie exclaimed. “I sold the business two weeks ago!”
For a moment, Dan was rendered speechless. He sat staring at her as her words sank into his brain. “What do you mean? It can’t be . . . I mean, so soon?” he stuttered. “I’d only just read about it in the magazine.”
“Didn’t you look at the date?”
“What?”
“The date on the Woman’s Weekly. That article was published about four months ago.”
Dan screwed up his eyes in disbelief. “You’ve got to be joking!” He leaned back in his chair and smacked his hands on his forehead. “For heaven’s sake, I never even thought to look.”
“I really am so sorry. If I’d known that—”
“No, no, it’s entirely my own fault. I should have checked. It just never occurred to me.”
Katie made a brave attempt at a smile. “Would you like another cup of coffee?”
“No . . . thank you.” Jeez, he thought to himself, being out of work must have stagnated your brain. If someone in the bank had carried out such an appalling research job, he would have been out on his bloody ear! Moreover, what a waste of time! What a damned waste of money! “Can I ask who bought the business?”
“A young couple who wanted to downshift from London. I had three offers, one of them being higher than theirs, but they were the only ones prepared to keep the factory running up here.”
Dan let out a deep sigh, and leaning forward, replaced the biro in the pen tray. “Well, that’s that, then,” he said, dropping Nina’s exercise book back into the holdall.
“I feel awful about this,” Katie declared, her teeth clenched in embarrassment.
“There’s no need to. It can all be blamed on my own stupidity.” Zipping up the holdall, he got to his feet and took his jacket off the radiator behind Katie’s desk. He was pleased at least that it had dried out. “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time,” he said, putting on the jacket.
“I really am sorry that your trip was so abortive.”
“As I said, it was my own fault entirely.” He picked up his holdall. “Listen, you should maybe tell the new owners of the company that there is a huge untapped market for Vagabo
nds in London. My son told me that all his friends are after them. They are apparently the ideal wear for clubbing.”
“Really?”
“That’s what he says. They’re supposedly deemed to be ‘ultimate’ wear, and believe me, that’s some praise coming from my son.”
Katie rose to her feet. “In that case, I certainly will tell them.” She pushed her hands into the pockets of her trousers. “What are you going to do now?”
Dan remembered his thoughts of earlier that morning about going into a local pub and anaesthetizing his chilly discomfort with drink. The idea of it had suddenly increased its appeal by at least the power of ten. “I’ll just head back to town and kill time until this evening.”
Katie started towards the entrance door. “I’ll give you a lift, then.”
“No, don’t bother. I feel that I’ve wasted enough of your time already. I’d be grateful, though, if you could ask Hilary to call me a taxi.”
Katie sucked her teeth loudly. “This is ridiculous,” she said, marching across to the coat stand and taking down her anorak.
“What’s ridiculous?” Dan asked as he followed on.
“I can’t have you waiting in Fort William all day for your train.”
“Look, please don’t bother about—”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I do bother.” She turned to Hilary. “I’m going to take Mr. Porter back to Auchnacerie, so if anything urgent crops up, you can get hold of me there.” She dug her hand in the pocket of her anorak and took out a bunch of keys. “Right, come on then. Let’s go.”
“Where exactly are we going?”
“Back to my house.”
Dan sighed quietly. Under the circumstances, he would much rather be alone in his own company with a large drink in hand. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to raise an objection?”
“None at all. No matter what you say, I feel responsible for bringing you all the way up here under false pretences. It’s the least I can do.”
A Risk Worth Taking Page 11