Another silence.
Basil Rudd said, “If you drain the new oil out again, and take the engine apart, you’ll find whatever the stopper was that Terry pushed through the sump, but that’s a very expensive procedure and not justified, I don’t think.”
Another silence.
“I’ll ask my father,” I said.
We trooped back to the office and I reported the last-resort expensive solution of dismantling the engine.
“Do nothing. Stay where you are,” my father commanded. “Just do nothing, and wait. Let me speak to Basil Rudd.”
The chitchat went on for several minutes. Basil Rudd said he thought the boy — meaning me — was making a hullabaloo over nothing much, but in the end he shrugged and said, “Yes, yes, all right.” He put down the receiver and said to me, “Your father is sending someone for the Range Rover. He wants you to stay here for now.”
Terry muttered that he had done a proper service on the Range Rover and no one could tell him different. Basil Rudd gave me a look of disfavor and said he couldn’t waste any more time, he had mountains of paperwork to see to. I didn’t exactly apologize, but I said I would wait outside in the Range Rover and walked peacefully across to where it stood in the wire-fenced compound. I disarmed the alarms, opened the door and sat behind the driving wheel, going through the systems and reading the instruction book.
I waited for over an hour until Basil Rudd appeared at the window beside me. I opened the door, stepped down to the ground and met the man accompanying the garage owner, who announced with a glint of irony that he had come to solve the mystery of the missing sump plug. His name, he said, was Foster Fordham. He looked more like a lawyer than a mechanic: no blue collar to his gray-and-white pin-striped shirt or his neat dark suit. He had straight, dark, well-brushed hair, light-framed glasses and polished black shoes.
Basil Rudd, turning away, asked Foster Fordham to report to him in the office before leaving and, watching Rudd’s departing back, Fordham, apparently bored to inertia, informed me that he was here to do my father a big favor, as normally he was a consultant engineer, not a hands-on minion.
I began to explain about the gunshot, but he interrupted that he knew all about it, and all about the missing plug.
“I work in car-racing circles,” he said. “My field is sabotage.”
I no doubt looked as inadequate as I felt in the face of his quiet assurance.
He said, “I understand that yesterday you were going to drive this vehicle from here to Quindle. How far is that?”
“About twelve miles.”
“Dual carriageway? Flat, straight roads?”
“Mostly single lane, a lot of sharp corners, and some of it uphill.”
He nodded. He said we would now take the road to Quindle and he would drive.
Perplexed but trusting, I climbed into the passenger seat beside him and listened to the healthy purr of the engine as he started up and drove off out of the garage compound onto the ring road around Hoopwestern, bound for Quindle. He drove fast in silence, watching the instrument panel as intently as the road, and said nothing until we had reached the top of the long steep incline halfway to what I thought was our destination. He stopped up there however and, still without explaining, did a U-turn and drove straight back to Rudd’s garage.
Cars flashed past, appearing fast towards us from blind comers, as they had the day before. Fordham drove faster than I’d felt safe doing in Crystal’s car, but if his field was racing, that was hardly surprising.
At the garage he told Terry to drain the engine oil into a clean container. Terry said the oil was too hot to handle. Fordham agreed to wait a little, but insisted that the oil should still be hot when it was drained.
“Why?” Terry asked. “It’s clean. I did the oil change yesterday.”
Fordham didn’t answer. Eventually, wearing heavy gloves, Terry unscrewed the sump plug and let the hot oil drain out as requested into a clean plastic five-gallon container. Fordham had him put the five-gallon container into the luggage space at the back of the Range Rover and then suggested he should screw the sump plug back into place and refill the engine with fresh, cool oil.
Terry signaled exasperation with his eyebrows but did as he was asked. Mr. Fordham, calm throughout, then told me that he had finished his investigation and suggested we say farewell to Basil Rudd and return in the Range Rover to my father’s headquarters. Basil Rudd, of course, wanted to know reasons. Fordham told him with great politeness that he would receive a written report, and meanwhile not to worry, all was well.
Fordham drove composedly to the parking lot outside of my father’s headquarters, and with me faithfully following, walked into the offices, where my father was sitting with Mervyn Teck discussing tactics.
My father stood at the sight of us and limped outside with Fordham to the Range Rover. Through the window I watched them talking earnestly, then Fordham took the plastic container of oil out of the Range Rover, put it into the trunk of a Mercedes standing nearby, climbed into the driver’s seat and neatly departed.
My father, returning, told Mervyn cheerfully that there was now nothing wrong with the Range Rover and it could safely be driven all around the town.
We finally set off. I drove, feeling my way cautiously through the gears, learning the positive message of the four-wheel drive. My father sat beside me, accompanied by his walking stick. Mervyn Teck, carrying a megaphone, sat in the rear seat, squeezing his lumpy knees together to allow more space for two volunteer helpers, thin bittersweet Lavender and motherly Faith.
The rear-seaters knew their drill from much past practice, and I with eye-opening wonderment became acquainted with the hardest graft in politics, the door-to-door begging for a “yes” vote.
The first chosen residential street consisted of identical semi-detached houses with clipped garden-defining hedges and short concrete drives up to firmly closed garage doors. Some of the front windows were adorned with stickers simply announcing BETHUNE: he had worked this land before us.
“This road is awash with floaters,” Mervyn said with rare amusement. “Let’s see what we can do about turning the tide our way.”
Directing me to stop the vehicle, he untucked himself from his seat belt and, standing in the open air, began to exhort the invisible residents through the reverberating megaphone, to vote JULIARD, JULIARD, JULIARD.
I found it odd to have my name bouncing off the house fronts, but the candidate himself nodded with smiling approval.
Lavender and Faith followed Mervyn out of the car, each of them carrying a bundle of stickers printed JULIARD in slightly larger letters than BETHUNE. Taking one side of the road each, they began ringing front-door bells and knocking knockers and, where they got no response, tucking a sticker through the letter box.
If a door was opened to them they smiled and pointed to the Range Rover from where my father would limp bravely up the garden path to put on his act, at which he was clearly terrific. I crawled up the road in low gear, my father limped uncomplainingly, Mervyn activated his megaphone and Lavender and Faith wasted not a leaflet. In our slow wake we left friendly waves and a few JULIARDs in windows. By the end of the street I was bored to death, but it seemed Lavender and Faith both reveled in persuasion tactics and were counting the road a victory for their side.
After two more long sweeps through suburbia (in which at least one baby got kissed) we respited for a late sandwich lunch in a pub.
“If ever you get invited into someone’s home,” my father said (as he had been invited five or six times that morning), “you go into the sitting room and you say ‘Oh, what an attractive room!’ even if you think it’s hideous.”
Lavender, Faith and Mervyn all nodded, and I said, “That’s cynical.”