Controlling Interest

Cordelia “Cory” Hollis had been listening to Gerald Pryce for the better part of twenty minutes, and in that time he had said “exposure” more times than she cared to count. He said it the way other men lowered their voices to mention a relative’s divorce. If the word had been part of a drinking game, everyone at the table would have been plastered by now.

“Yes, Gerald, exposure. Got it.”

Gerald looked at her over his glasses. He wore a three-piece suit in a decade that had given them up, and kept his glasses on a cord, and lined his pen up with the edge of his notepad before every sentence and again after. Cory looked back, pen still, one eyebrow a fraction higher than the other. It was the look she kept for people who mistook her time for their own, and he had watched it work on a fair few of his borrowers.

“Quite,” said Gerald, and squared the pen. “I appreciate it is a word you have heard before. I would only observe that the committee has heard it a good deal more.” He lowered his voice again, as if someone might be listening at the door. “The second tranche leaves the bank with considerable exposure. Two members of the credit committee have asked to see the file. A third has asked who approved the renewal.”

He did not say who. He did not need to. The chair at the far end of the table, where the head of lending should have been, was empty. His apologies had been sent in advance and were, Cory suspected, sincere.

“We have been patient,” said Gerald. “I would go so far as to say we have been extraordinarily patient. But patience, I am afraid, does not appear on the balance sheet.”

“Patient,” Cory agreed, and wrote it in the margin of her notepad, because a woman who is writing is a woman who is listening.

She was giving Gerald about half of herself. It was a generous allocation, by her standards. Gerald had never said anything in his life that could not be reduced to a single line. She had already reduced this one: the bank wanted its money back, quietly, and wanted someone else to be blamed if it did not. That somebody was her. It generally was.

The eleventh floor of Harcourt & Lyle had been designed to make people feel that money was serious. The windows ran from floor to ceiling, and behind Gerald’s shoulder the city was dissolving quietly into grey. The table was pale oak. The junior beside Gerald, a pink-eared young man called Daniel who had not yet learned to sit still, kept squaring the same folder against the edge of the table.

It was a thin folder. In her experience, that meant either a simple case or a bad one.

“Three covenant breaches since last year,” Gerald went on, “and head office now classes the loan as impaired. The order book is a shadow of what it was. The plant is, I’m told, museum-grade. And the principal, the old man, was not what you would call a modernising influence. He passed away three weeks ago. A family concern, you understand. Whitaker Mills.”

Cory’s pen stopped.

She did not drop it. The pen stayed on the paper, a small dark dot spread beneath the nib, and she watched it grow with every appearance of interest in her own handwriting.

Whitaker.

It was a common enough name. There were thousands of Whitakers. There were Whitakers in every county in the country, and one who delivered her post, and another who had once sold her a dreadful second-hand car. There was no reason on earth for a word to go through her like a draught from an open door.

Whitaker. Joss Whitaker. Black letters on a white card. A cheap plastic holder, clipped crooked to a dark jacket.

Cordelia Hollis, hers had said, on the same cheap card. The registration desk had got it wrong, of course. They always got it wrong. She had been Cory since she was nine, since the day she decided that the name her mother had chosen belonged to a girl in a painting. She had no intention of being that girl.

And yet, across a bar, with a glass in her hand and her guard up, she had heard it said as though it were something worth saying slowly.

Somewhere, a long way off, Gerald was still talking. She caught the shape of it the way you catch a conversation in the next room: facility, and forbearance, and a date. She let it run. She put the memory down. She was good at that. It was most of what she had been doing for two years.

“...which brings us to the son,” said Gerald, and she came back into the room as smoothly as a woman surfacing from a swimming pool. “I’m afraid he is rather the difficulty.”

“Go on.”

“Estranged. Left, from what the family’s solicitor tells us, at about twenty-two, and has had nothing to do with the firm since. He did try his hand at running it, you see, when he was young. Fresh out of university and full of ideas. The old man gave him his head, and the boy nearly lost them their biggest customer within the year.” Gerald sighed, the sigh of a man who had seen a great many sons. “There was a row. A rather spectacular row, I gather. He walked out and, as far as anyone can establish, spent years drifting about the world. A small consultancy of some sort in recent years. Nothing of any substance.”

“A drifter.”

“Let us say, a young man who has never had to be accountable for anything. And who has now, rather suddenly, become the sole heir to a failing mill and everything it owes.” Gerald spread his hands. “He has not yet signed anything. He has also, I think, not yet worked out what he is inheriting.”

Debt, she thought.

She knew the type. She had sat across tables from them for years: men who had been handed a business and had treated it like a coat. They arrived in good shirts. They believed the firm was owed to them. They thought a balance sheet was a kind of opinion. They were, almost without exception, charming, and almost without exception they were the reason she had been sent for.

She drew a small box in the margin and wrote spoilt inside it. It cost nothing, and it made her feel better.

“Daniel,” said Gerald.

Daniel opened the folder and slid a single sheet across the oak, face up.

It was a printout from some trade journal’s website, slightly grainy, with a few lines of caption. An event photograph, taken in a lobby with bad lighting. A man at the edge of the frame, turned a little away from the camera, as though somebody had said his name and he had not yet decided whether to answer.

Joseph Whitaker, 38, at an industry awards dinner.

Dark hair, shorter than she remembered. A jaw that had been shaved in a hurry. His mouth, and she did not let her eyes stay on his mouth for longer than it took to confirm that it was his.

It was.

It was unmistakably, ridiculously him.

Well, said some cool, dry part of her brain, calmly, while the rest of her stood still in a corridor, there you are.

She did not move her face. It had never been so well employed.

The son. The drifter. The spoilt boy who had never been accountable for anything.

She tried to lay the two men over one another and found that they would not sit flat. The man at the bar had not looked like somebody who had been handed anything. He had listened more than he had spoken. He had asked her nothing, and she had been grateful, and it had not occurred to her until this minute that the not-asking might have been a kind of discipline. He had seemed, God help her, like someone who had spent a long time building something for himself and was careful what he gave away.

Recalibrate, she thought. It was the word she used at work, when a set of figures turned out to be telling a different story from the one she had been told. Start again. Reserve judgement.

It was a professional response. It did not explain the heat at the back of her neck.

“Ms Hollis?”

“Yes?” She looked up. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

“I said,” said Gerald, squaring his pen, “that I have been considering who should take this. It will be unpleasant. A great many people may lose their livelihoods. And I confess I had been inclined to give it to Marcus.”

Marcus. Marcus Dane, who ran the restructuring desk at a rival firm and sat on the bank’s panel of advisers, as she did.

She kept her face where it was.

“Marcus is quick,” Gerald went on. “He is tidy. He has a reputation for an orderly sale, and the committee is fond of an orderly sale.”

“The committee is fond of a number,” said Cory. “Marcus will give them a small one, on time.”

“I would not call it small.”

“You would if you had seen the plant. Museum-grade, you said. Museum-grade machinery sells for scrap. Marcus will have the looms in a lot at auction and the building on the market within weeks, and you will recover a fraction of what you are owed.” She turned her pen over. “And a headline on top. A mill that has stood for generations, closed by its bank. The local paper first, then the nationals. The committee will ask louder questions than it is asking now.”

Gerald winced. It was a small wince, and it went straight to his pen. “One does not care for headlines.”

“Nobody does. I keep it running, you get your money back, and nobody writes anything. That is not what Marcus does.”

“Efficiency, Ms Hollis, has its merits.”

“Efficient is not the same as large.”

Daniel stopped squaring the folder.

Gerald looked at her for a long moment, over the top of his glasses. “You seem keen,” he said.

“I am keen not to lose the bank’s money.”

It was true, as far as it went. A mill with that much history deserved better than a man who saw nothing in it but the debt. She did not look at the sheet of paper in front of her.

“Quite,” said Gerald. He folded his hands. “Then I take it there is no difficulty.”

There it was.

It was not even a question. That was the beauty of it. He had laid it down gently, like a rug over a muddy patch, and all she had to do was walk across it without asking what was underneath.

She was aware of everything at once: the hum of the air conditioning, Daniel not breathing, the rain on the glass. And underneath it, small and steady, the sound of a person arguing herself into a decision she had already made.

No one knows, she told herself. Nothing links us.

He had never learned what she did, or where she lived, or whom she worked for. She had never asked. Her name on every engagement letter was Cory Hollis, and Hollis was a name you could lose in a crowd. He had read one card, once, in a crowded room. He would have had better things to do with his memory.

It was one night two years ago.

People were allowed to have had a night. People were allowed to have had it and put it down.

You will keep it entirely professional.

Of course she would. She had sat across tables from men who wept and men who shouted and, on one memorable occasion, a man who had tried to bribe her with a racehorse. She could sit across a table from one man in a good shirt.

All sound reasoning. Every point of it could be defended in front of a committee.

All of it, quite precisely, beside the point.

Because there was a proper form of words for what she was not about to do. Any firm in the country would have recognised it. A prior personal connection with the principal of a client, however brief or long ago, had a name. The name was conflict of interest.

The correct procedure was to say it aloud, in this room, to this man, and hand the folder back.

She knew exactly what Gerald would do. He would thank her for her candour. He would give the case to Marcus. She would go back to her good, orderly life.

She would also never find out what it was about that night that had followed her around for two years like a tune she could not name.

Curiosity, she told herself, is a respectable professional instinct.

It was not, in fact, a lie. She was curious. She wanted to see what he had become, now that he was somebody’s heir and somebody’s problem and not a stranger across a bar. She wanted to look at him by daylight, in a room with the lights on and a great deal of paperwork between them. She wanted to see whether he would be smaller than the memory.

She thought, with the blunt honesty she kept for three in the morning, that he probably would be.

She thought that would be a relief.

“None that I can foresee,” said Cory.

It was a neat sentence. It was, in the strictest sense, even true: she could not foresee it. She heard the lawyer’s shape of it as it left her mouth and decided, firmly, not to examine it any further.

Gerald nodded as if she had given him a gift.

“Splendid. You’ll go up on Thursday. He is expecting someone, though I’m afraid we have not given him very much to go on.” He tapped the folder. “Daniel will send you the rest.”

“Thank you, Gerald.”

She gathered her notepad and the single sheet of paper, folded it once without looking at it, and slid it inside the cover of her notebook. In the lift she stood straight and watched the numbers fall, and all the way down she did not take it out.

It was not until the doors opened on the ground floor that she realised her hand was resting flat against the notebook, pressing it shut.