AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I doubt your employees do, either,’ Liz remarked. ‘Do they know the distillery’s in trouble?’ She thought of Simon, the Master Distiller, who had so proudly showed Liz his father’s portrait on the wall.
‘No, of course not.’ Ben looked haunted. ‘And I’d prefer that they didn’t have to.’
‘Right, but if you’re considering closing, you owe it to them to give them as much notice as possible to find something else,’ Liz counselled. ‘Loch Cameron is a small village, and if your employees are mostly local…?’
‘All local.’ Ben looked glum.
‘Right. Well, even more reason, then. It won’t be easy to find something else,’ she continued. ‘And, might I say, I would have appreciated knowing that I had three months to turn the business around before I said yes to the job.’
‘I’m sorry. I know I should have said something, but if I did, I didn’t think you’d take the job. And I knew we really needed you,’ he sighed.
‘That doesn’t really make me feel any better about it.’
‘It’s not strictly three months. It might be six,’ Ben said. ‘I just need… help. I need business to improve at least, by then. Otherwise, yes, I will take the offer.’
You need a bloody miracle, Liz thought, but she didn’t say it. She thought for a minute.
On one hand, she could turn around now and go back to her old job. She knew that Sharon would have her back in a heartbeat, and she’d only just left. She didn’t think they’d finished recruiting for her replacement yet.
But did she really want to go back? No. She didn’t.
Liz didn’t want to go back to long commutes on busy trains, where people sneezed in her face and pushed her around. She didn’t want to go back to sitting in traffic, or being expected to be the first in the office and the last out. And she couldn’t go back to her old flat. It had too many memories of her and Paul.
Most of all, she didn’t – couldn’t – go back to passing the hospital every day, where she’d had to go twice, both times when she’d miscarried.
As much as the nurses told her that miscarriage was something normal that could happen as part of fertility treatment – and it could also happen if you weren’t doing IVF, of course – it didn’t make it any easier to bear the grief of losing her babies. Yes, they were early, they were just weeks along, but Liz had still felt a horribly deep loss. They had pulled at her heart, her almost-babies. Her would-have-been children.
There were many reasons for Liz to leave Glasgow. But not having to see the hospital where she’d had to go, both times, for the nurses to kindly make sure that everything was over, was right at the top of the list.
Liz loved her little cosy cottage and was grateful for it. She loved the fact she could walk to work across the fields, with views of the loch, and come to work in her little office with its exposed brick walls and leather seat, where Carol might make her a really great cappuccino, and where Henry could pad around her office as she worked. But she was also grateful that this was a place with no memory for her; Loch Cameron was a blank slate.
Because those memories still haunted her, and she couldn’t think about them.
This was somewhere she could recover from everything that had happened to her, but it was also somewhere she could make a real difference. And, that, too, had been missing for a while in her old life. Once upon a time, she had been known for taking ailing companies and turning them into successful ones. Then, she’d been recruited by the biggest firm in the industry because of her reputation, and that had been fun in a different way.
Yes, she’d been great at her job and won various awards. But the last company she’d worked for hadn’t really needed her to make them successful. They were already successful. Liz’s efforts were just icing on the cake, and she had started to feel a little… unnecessary.
In Loch Cameron, Lizwasthe cake. And, she realised that she had missed beingneeded.
‘Right. Well, I’ll do what I can.’ She let out a long sigh. ‘But you have to doexactlywhat I say, sales-wise. And that means we have to relaunch the brand, ideally develop at least one new product, and we have to present to all the big retailers. Three months isn’t enough time to get a deal with them. They can take a lot longer to even come back to agree to a meeting. Fortunately, I have good contacts there, so I can get us in the door. But even six months is a challenge to get them to sign on the dotted line. I’m just warning you.’
‘Okay,’ Ben sighed. ‘Whatever you say. I just… well, to coin a phrase, I want to make Loch Cameron Whisky great again. You know, we had a Royal Warrant, back in the day. It would be great to get that back, too.’
‘You had a Royal Warrant?’ Liz looked up from her pad and pen. ‘You mean, the whisky was approved by the Queen?’
‘Yeah. We lost it in the 90s, though. Too much competition, and I think Dad slipped up somewhere. I’m not sure of the details.’
Liz wondered what else had been missed over the years; how many otherslip upshad there been that had cost the company money?
‘Right. Well, that’s something we need to get back, then.’ She wrote ROYAL WARRANT on her pad and circled it.
You do like a challenge, she thought to herself.Or, at least, you used to.
It was time to see if the old Liz was still there: the one who had turned around three ailing drinks companies and turned them into multi-million-pound enterprises. Did she still have it in her? She didn’t know. But she was going to try.
SIX
Liz was walking along the cobbled high street in Loch Cameron, spending a pleasant lunch break browsing the local shops. The sun glinted on the loch which bobbed with a faint tide: unlike some inland lochs, Loch Cameron was connected to the sea, via a long estuary, which was why there were still fishing boats moored up on its sides. Liz had seen the fishing boats coming back from their catch when she’d been walking to work; she imagined how cold it must get in the winter, leaving your warm bed and going down to the loch at two or three in the morning, only to be greeted by freezing wind, rain and the bite of the cold water.
