'So, what are you going to do, then?' Charley asked anxiously.
Lizzie looked at her younger sisters, the familiar need to
protect them, no matter what the cost to herself, stiffening
her resolve.
'There is only one thing I can do,' she answered. 'I shall
have to go.'
'What? Fly out to Thessalonica?'
'It's the only way.'
'But we haven't got any money.'
That was Ruby, the baby of the family at twenty-two, sitting
at the kitchen table while her five-year-old twin sons, who
had been allowed a rare extra half an hour of television,
sat uncharacteristically quietly in the other room, so that
the sisters could discuss the problems threatening them.
No, they hadn't got any money—and that was her fault, Lizzie
acknowledged guiltily.
Six years earlier, when their parents had died together,
drowned by a freak wave whilst they were on holiday, Lizzie
had promised herself that she would do everything she could
to keep the family together. She had left university, and
had been working for a prestigious London-based interior
design partnership, in pursuit of her dream of getting a job
as a set designer. Charley had just started university, and
Ruby had been waiting to sit her GCSE exams.
Theirs had been a close and loving family, and the shock of
losing their parents had been overwhelming—especially for
Ruby, who, in her despair, had sought the love and
reassurance she so desperately needed in the arms of the man
who had abandoned her and left her pregnant with the adored
twin boys.
There had been other shocks for them to face, though. Their
handsome, wonderful father and their pretty, loving mother,
who had created for them the almost fairytale world of
happiness in which the family had lived, had done just
that—lived in a fairytale which had little or no foundation
in reality.
The beautiful Georgian rectory in the small Cheshire village
in which they had grown up had been heavily mortgaged, their
parents had not had any life insurance, and they had had
large debts. In the end there had been no alternative but
for their lovely family home to be sold, so those debts
could be paid off.
With the property market booming, and her need to do
everything she could to support and protect her sisters,
Lizzie had used her small savings to set up in business on
her own in an up-and-coming area south of Manchester—
Charley would be able to continue with her studies at
Manchester University, Ruby could have a fresh start, and
she could establish a business which would support them all.
At first things had gone well. Lizzie had won contracts to
model the interiors of several new building developments,
and from that had come commissions from homebuyers to design
the interiors of the properties they had bought. Off the
back of that success Lizzie had taken the opportunity to buy
a much larger house from one of the developers for whom
she'd worked—with, of course, a much larger mortgage. It had
seem to make sense at the time—after all, with the twins and
the three of them they'd definitely needed the space, just
as they had needed a large four-wheel drive vehicle. She
used it to visit the sites on which she worked, and Ruby
used it to take the boys to school. In addition to that her
clients, a small local firm, had been pressuring her to buy,
so that they could wind up the development and move on to a
new site.
But then had come the credit crunch, and overnight almost
everything had changed. The bottom had dropped out of the
property market, meaning that they were unable to trade down
and reduce the mortgage because of the value of the house
had decreased so much, and with that of course Lizzie's
commissions had dried up. The money she had been putting
away in a special savings account had not increased anything
like as much as she had expected, and financially things had
suddenly become very dark indeed.
Right now Charley was still working as a project manager for
a local firm, and Ruby had said that she would get a job.
But neither Lizzie nor Charley wanted her to do that. They
both wanted the twins to have a mother at home, just as they
themselves had had. And, as Lizzie had said six months ago,
when they'd first started to feel the effects of the credit
crunch, she would get a job working for someone else, and
she still had money owing to her from various clients. They
would manage.
But it turned out she had been overly optimistic. She hadn't
been able to get a job, because what industry there was in
the area geared towards personal spending was shedding
workers, and with the cost of basics going up they were now
struggling to manage. They were only just about keeping
their heads above water. Many of her clients had cancelled
their contracts, and some of them still owed her large sums
of money she suspected she would never receive.
In fact things were so dire that Lizzie had already made a
private decision to go to the local supermarket and see if
she could get work there. But then the letter had arrived,
and now they—or rather she was in an even more desperate
situation.
Two of her more recent clients, for whom she had done a good
deal of work, had further commissioned her to do the
interior design for a small block of apartments they had
bought in northern Greece. On a beautiful promontory, the
apartments were to have been the first stage in a luxurious
and exclusive holiday development which, when finished,
would include villas, three five-star hotels, a marina,
restaurants and everything that went with it.
The client had given her carte blanche to furnish them in an
'upmarket Notting Hill style'.
Notting Hill might be a long way from their corner of
industrialised Manchester, on the Cheshire border, but
Lizzie had known exactly what her clients had meant: white
walls, swish bathrooms and kitchens, shiny marble floors,
glass furniture, exotic plants and flowers, squishy sofas…
Lizzie had flown out to see the apartments with her clients,
a middle-aged couple whom she had never really been able to
take to. She had been disappointed by the architectural
design of the apartments. She had been expecting something
creative and innovative that still fitted perfectly into the
timeless landscape, but what she had seen had been jarringly
out of place. A six-storey-high rectangular box of so-called
'duplex apartments', reached by a narrow track that forked
into two, with one branch sealed off by bales of
dangerous-looking barbed wire. Hardly the luxury holiday
homes location she had been expecting.
But when she had voiced her doubts to her clients,
suggesting that the apartments might be difficult to sell,
they had assured her that she was worrying unnecessarily.
'Look, the fact is that we bargained the builder down to
such a good price that we couldn't lose out even if we let
the whole lot out for a tenner a week,' Basil Rainhill had
joked cheerfully. At least Lizzie had assumed it as a joke.
It was hard to tell with Basil at times.
He came from money, as his wife was fond of telling her.
'Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and of course Basil
has such an eye for a good investment. It's a gift, you
know. It runs in his family.'
Only now the gift had run out. And just before the Rainhills
themselves had done the same thing disappearing, leaving a
mountain of debt behind them, Basil Rainhill had told Lizzie
that, since he couldn't now afford to pay her bill, he was
instead making over to her a twenty per cent interest in the
Greek apartment block.
Lizzie would much rather have had the money she was owed,
but her solicitor had advised her to accept, and so she had
become a partner in the ownership of the apartments along
with the Rainhills and Tino Manos, the Greek who owned the land.
Design-wise, she had done her best with the limited
possibilities presented by the apartment block, sticking to
her rule of sourcing furnishings as close to where she was
working as possible, and she had been pleased with the final
result. She'd even been cautiously keeping her fingers
crossed that, though she suspected they wouldn't sell, when
the whole complex was finished she might look forward to the
apartments being let to holidaymakers and bringing her in
some much-needed income.
But now she had received this worrying, threatening letter,
from a man she had never heard of before, insisting that she
fly out to Thessalonica to meet him. It stated that there
were 'certain legal and financial matters with regard to
your partnership with Basil Rainhill and my cousin Tino
Manos which need to be resolved in person', and included the
frighteningly ominous words, 'Failure to respond to this
letter will result in an instruction to my solicitors to
deal with matters on my behalf. The letter had been signed
Ilios Manos.
His summons couldn't have come at worse time, but the whole
tone of Ilios Manos's letter was too threatening for Lizzie
to feel she could refuse to obey it. As apprehensive and
unwilling to meet him as she was, the needs of her family
must come first. She had a responsibility to them, a duty of
love from which she would never abdicate, no matter what the
cost to herself. She had sworn that— promised it on the day
of her parents' funeral.
'If this Greek wants to see you that badly he might at least
have offered to pay your airfare,' Ruby grumbled.
Lizzie felt so guilty.
'It's all my own fault. I should have realised that the
property market was over-inflated, and creating a bubble
that would burst.'
'Lizzie, you mustn't blame yourself.' Charley tried to
comfort her. 'And as for realising what was happening— how
could you when governments didn't even know?'
Lizzie forced a small smile.
'Surely if you tell the bank why you need to go to Greece
they'll give you a loan?' Ruby suggested hopefully.
Charley shook her head. 'The banks aren't giving any
businesses loans at the moment. Not even successful ones.'
Lizzie bit her lip. Charley wasn't reproaching her for the
failure of her business, she knew, but she still felt
terrible. Her sisters relied on her. She was the eldest, the
sensible one, the one the other two looked to. She prided
herself on b...