Marchetti had made architectural glass since 1961. Three hundred and twenty people at the peak, in a building outside Wakefield with her grandfather's name on the gate, doing the difficult things nobody else would quote for: curved, laminated, the impossible stuff, the jobs where an architect said can this exist and Marchetti said yes and then spent nine months making it true.
In March of the year before, it had lost the Southbank contract.
That was the beginning. Everybody agreed that was the beginning. They had lost it on price to a firm in Belgium nobody had heard of, by four per cent, having quoted the job for nine weeks, and Amelia remembered the phone call with her father, and remembered him saying four per cent, love, in a voice she had never heard from him before.
Then the bank had moved the facility from three years to one.
Then the insurer had reclassified them.
Then two of the three big customers had gone to sixty-day terms in the same month, and Marchetti had gone into the autumn needing fourteen million pounds it did not have, and every single one of these things had been, everyone agreed, terrible bad luck of a kind that happens to old family firms in a bad year.
And a man Amelia had met at a wedding in June — patient, funny, unbothered, who had asked her four questions about her father's business and then listened to the answers — had introduced her father to somebody who could help.
The file was Ray Fenwick's chronology. Ray had been her father's solicitor for thirty years and had had nothing to do since March and had clearly spent all of it on this.
Page nine was a copy of the Belgian firm's filings. Registered nineteen months before the Southbank tender. Two directors. One shareholder: a Jersey company.
Page fourteen was the Jersey company's ownership. Held for a nominee. The nominee's other appointments ran to a page and a half.
Page fifteen was a list of eight of them.
Page sixteen was the bank's internal credit note about Marchetti, which Ray Fenwick should not have had and did not explain, recommending the facility be shortened following market intelligence regarding the Southbank award and consequent order-book risk.
Dated four days before the tender result was announced.
Amelia sat on the floor of the ironing room and turned the page.
Page seventeen was a photograph of a signature page. An advisory agreement, unsigned, in draft, between Hale Kentridge Partners and a client whose name had been redacted, dated the eleventh of February — five weeks before the Southbank award — providing for a success fee on acquisition of the Marchetti asset at or below a distressed valuation.
Page eighteen was the same agreement, executed.
Julian's signature was the top one. She knew it better than her own; it was on her marriage certificate, and on the deeds of the house she was sitting in, and on the card that had come with the flowers on Thursday.
Page nineteen was a note in Ray's handwriting, and it said, in full:
Amelia. I am 71 and I have no idea what to do with this. I have known you since you were four. If you want it to be nothing, it is nothing, and I will never mention it again.