‘Jesus! James bloody Stewart, that’s who! Remind me never to have you in my pub quiz team. Go on, Macy.’
‘He was never any use on film questions,’ she laughed, ‘if it involved real actors. Walt Disney was his limit. So, there’s Mackail Extrusions, kept going purely by its orders from Destry Glazing, the problem I identified earlier.’
‘Except,’ Haddock, keen to re-establish some authority, interrupted, ‘Destry wasn’t a problem as long as it paid its bills on time.’
‘You’ve got it: which Destry didn’t. It wasn’t that it couldn’t, for it was cash positive; no, it was the widow Stewart’s policy to keep her suppliers waiting. Eventually that proved fatal for Mackail Extrusions. By that stage the company’s viability was on a knife-edge; it was operating on a big overdraft with a usurious interest rate.’
‘And the See You Next Tuesday pulled the plug?’ Pye asked.
‘Precisely. He knew the debt was out there, but he refused to extend further credit. Hector Mackail had run out of cash, even though by that stage he’d re-mortgaged his house to stay afloat. He couldn’t pay his own creditors and he couldn’t pay his employees’ wages. He had no choice but to call in the receiver.’
‘He wasn’t completely innocent,’ Haddock said. ‘While his business was effectively down the tubes he ran up a bill with a design company, trying to generate new orders by rebranding it.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ the journalist admitted. ‘It doesn’t surprise me, though. Mackail wasn’t the brightest; he should have gone legal with Destry Glazing at an early stage, but he didn’t.’
‘Why didn’t he?’
‘Because it was owned by Eden Higgins, that’s why not. Scotland’s business angel is not a man people like to cross.’
‘I thought he was squeaky clean,’ Pye observed.
‘He is, but that’s because nothing ever sticks to him.’
‘There’s mud to throw?’
Macy contemplated her second drink. ‘I’m starving,’ she said, looking at Haddock, who took the hint and went to the bar, returning with a pie on a plate.
‘Beef chilli.’
She flashed her eyes at him. ‘Darling, you remembered.’
‘How could I forget? You used to put those away two at a time.’
‘Of course I did, when you were paying. You’re lucky I’m on a diet just now.’ She took a bite of the pie. ‘Tasty,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, Eden Higgins. Guess what happened to the leavings of Mackail Extrusions?’
‘We feed you and we have to play guessing games?’ Haddock exclaimed.
‘Fair enough. The liquidator put the bite on Destry Glazing. It paid up without a murmur, and then it bought the assets of the failed company for a song, those assets being all its plant and equipment. By the time the bank was paid, and the liquidator himself, of course, the other creditors were left with something like fifteen pence in the pound. Effectively, Destry Glazing Solutions bought itself an in-house extrusion facility for little more than zero, right at the moment when the construction industry’s coming out of hibernation.’
‘That’s a hell of a story, Macy,’ Pye remarked. ‘I read the business press, so how come I’ve never seen it anywhere?’
‘You don’t watch Bloomberg, since you’d never heard of it before tonight.’
‘You ran it?’
‘I ran a piece about the role of the bank. When I put it together I called Destry Glazing’s PR people and asked for a comment. They promised to get back to me, but they never did. Instead I had a call from Eden Higgins’ lawyers, threatening me with an action for defamation if his name was even hinted at in my report.’
She renewed her attack on the pie. ‘Nobody else in Edinburgh touched it,’ she mumbled. ‘So I guess that my colleagues in the printed media were all warned off.’ She leaned forward. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘how does all that relate to the dead child?’
‘It doesn’t, not really,’ Haddock confessed. ‘The designer that Mackail ran up the bill with, she was the mother. She was attacked as well, but that never made the press. We’ve been looking for a connection, but I don’t see one.’
‘Oh no?’ Macy murmured. ‘There’s a PS to the story. I heard it a month or two back, from a bloke I know on the Daily Record business staff. Yes, it’s a red-top but it does have a business reporter. His girlfriend had just chucked him, and, well, I consoled him.’ She beamed at Haddock. ‘I always was good at consoling, Harry, wasn’t I?’
‘No comment,’ ‘Harry’ muttered.
‘Anyway,’ her second drink had disappeared without either detective noticing its demise, ‘in the aftermath, when we were wondering