‘They’ll have taken him over the border somewhere,’ the guard told Randall. ‘That’s where they all end up.’
‘All?”
‘Oh, no, here, don’t take that the wrong way. I mean touts and the like — informers.’ He clamped the cigarette in his mouth and mimed pulling a trigger two-handed, aiming at the back of a kneeling man’s head, removed the cigarette, exhaled mightily. ‘There was a whole thing going on at the time they took him about IRA guys in prison down south. Generally they leave the foreigners well alone and, like, even if they didn’t they would never in a million years lay a finger on any of your crowd. Can you imagine the stink the Irish Americans…?’ He swallowed the end of the last word. ‘Sorry, you’re not…?’ Randall shook his head. The big guy swiped a hand melodramatically across his brow: phew! ‘Anyway, you can just imagine it, can’t you, the stink?’
Which was not quite to Randall the reassurance the big guy clearly thought it was.
He walked back up the drive to the hotel, alert to every rustle from the bushes crowding in on either side, went into the bar and had another drink, his fourth of that particular night. Well, fourth then fifth.
DeLorean returned at regular intervals throughout the autumn and winter, usually with Bill Collins in tow, sometimes with Kimmerly, now and then with a new guy, Bill Haddad, who had used to work for the Kennedys and who had been enticed away from his last job as a columnist on the New York Post — a slightly grander newspaper connection than Randall could boast, as Haddad occasionally reminded him — by the offer of Vice President for Planning. PR, from what Randall could see. DeLorean and his job titles.
The itinerary varied little from trip to trip: site visit, presentation from Dixon Hollinshead and Chuck, meeting with Mason and the Industrial Development Board, interview with one or other of the local TV channels (‘I couldn’t be happier with how things are going, couldn’t be happier at all’), then back to the airport for a late-afternoon flight out, because always, whatever his intentions, something would have come up in the course of the day that demanded he return that night to London or, if Kimmerly was with him, go on to Geneva, where it appeared there was some deal afoot, involving a new set of initials, GPD, General Products Development. (There ought to have been an S and an I as well — Services Inc — but they didn’t make the cut and Randall, with so much else to occupy him, didn’t give them, or the three letters that did, much in the way of thought.)
All of which meant that Randall’s opportunities for liaising with DeLorean one-to-one were usually restricted to the walks from building to car between meetings; the car itself, as he had observed in LA, having become a kind of motorised phone booth, where it was impossible — short of having a phone of your own to ring him on — to get a word in.
On one of these walks, early in the new year, after a working lunch with his senior managers in the Conway (left as usual largely untouched: Randall noted that his was not the only appetite to shrivel in the presence of such fastidiousness), DeLorean was delivering his customary apology for having to leave when he suddenly stopped.
‘We need a house,’ he said.
‘Right.’
‘Cristina and I, a permanent base here. Somewhere we can put visitors too when we are not around, let them relax a bit more than they can in a hotel.’
‘Right.’
‘It would need to be…’
‘Private,’ Randall was about to say. ‘Pretty secure.’
‘Of course.’
‘Some of these people might not have been here before, they might be a little nervous.’
‘There is one place I can think of straight off,’ Randall said. ‘It’s not far. I can go with you in the car and point it out.’
DeLorean thought a moment, looked at his watch. ‘Tell you what, wire me some pictures. You have experience in this field, right? I trust your judgement.’
And with that he was in the car and away again.
Warren House was not far at all, standing as it did at the northern tip of a more or less equilateral triangle whose other vertices were the factory site and the Conway itself. Randall had caught glimpses of it through the trees — multi-paned sash windows, ivy in profusion — long before he noticed the For Sale sign at the end of the lane that led up to it off the main Belfast road. Only after he had mentioned it to DeLorean and had phoned the real estate company to request a brochure did he realise that it was the same house he had looked at, albeit with a little less ivy, who knows how many times in a book on the hotel’s reception desk. Turns out it too used to belong to the family that owned Conway House — all the large houses in the district seemed to have belonged to them once upon a time although few of them had had such a curious and colourful afterlife.
The most recent occupants had been a chapter of the Plymouth Brethren — a sect Randall had hitherto mistakenly imagined was a uniquely American phenomenon. ‘They are like hermit crabs, that crowd,’ the real estate agent said when he took Randall to see the house. Lee Bell, he had told Randall his name was: ‘Three ls, three es and a B and that’s me, nine Scrabble points.’ He wore large-framed glasses that, when you looked at him head on, had the disconcerting effect (even more disconcerting after his mention of crabs) of making his eyes appear to bulge out at either side. ‘They will move in practically anywhere, even somebody else’s church building, although they tell me they don’t believe in churches. Make sense of that if you can.’
There were still chairs arranged non-hierarchically in a circle in the drawing room, it being another guiding principle of the Brethren, Lee Bell explained (‘the things you learn in this job’), that no man had a right to be raised above, or seated at the head of another.
‘You’re welcome to keep anything here you think is of use.’
Randall was still staring at the non-hierarchical circle. Whatever it was Lee Bell read in his expression — clearly not suppressed amusement (non-hierarchical circles? DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd?) — he started stacking the chairs. ‘Not these, obviously, but anything else — fixtures, fittings…’ He gave Randall the benefit of his full, distended regard. ‘Or you can have the whole place gutted.’
‘Are you kidding me? Gutted?’
Lee Bell shrugged. ‘Well, you never know with people,’ he said, as though referring to a species distinct from real estate agents.