The mood in the factory the morning after it ended was subdued, sombre even. Only the announcement of the five-thousandth car off the assembly line lifted spirits. Actually, such was the release, it nearly lifted the roof off.
Randall stopped by Don’s office shortly after the announcement was made.
‘I didn’t see that coming.’
‘That’s because it’s the four thousand eight hundred and ninetieth… I thought today might be a day for rounding up,’ said Don and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘I don’t understand it. I thought they would have been glad, all of them, that madness in the prisons was over. Unless of course they’re thinking the same thing I’ve been thinking.’ His gaze had drifted off towards the window, but returned now. ‘This government seems to like a fight. Who is it going to pick one with next?’
Two days later a member of Thatcher’s party accused DeLorean in the press of misuse of public funds, citing the example of Warren House, whose bathroom taps he claimed were made of solid gold.
DeLorean was en route to Daytona Beach when Randall rang him.
‘Who is this fucking guy?’ DeLorean wanted to know. Nicholas Winterton was the answer and Randall by now had enough experience of the British political classes to further identify him as one of the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em brigade’. Hang ’em, flog ’em, anything at all but subsidise ’em.
DeLorean’s first instinct was to hire someone to investigate Winterton’s own expenses. He didn’t care what country you were talking about, nobody walked very far in public life without getting some shit on his shoes.
‘And what’s Haddad doing? Why isn’t he on the phone to me?’
‘Well, you see, that’s the thing, Winterton’s taken all this stuff from a memo Bill sent you last Christmas.’
‘Bill sent me a memo about faucets? The hell he did. If Bill Haddad had sent me a memo it would be sitting in my office not that asshole’s.’
‘It was in your office,’ Randall said. ‘Marion leaked it.’
‘Marion?’
‘Seems she landed in England the day before yesterday and went straight to Winterton’s constituency.’
He could nearly hear the blood pulsing in DeLorean’s temples. ‘No,’ he said at long last. ‘It’s not possible.’
‘It’s in the newspapers, the London Times, the Daily Express…’
But DeLorean had decided. He said it again, ‘It’s not possible.’
Randall awoke next morning to photographers camped outside the gates of Warren House. They were still there — if anything had swelled in numbers — when he returned from the factory that evening, there when he picked up the phone at gone eleven o’clock to call DeLorean again.
‘I think we should let these guys in,’ Randall said.
‘Why in the world would we do that?’
‘To let them see we have nothing to hide.’
‘Edmund, you ought to know better than that. We don’t capitulate to asinine gossip in this country.’ By ‘this’, Randall assumed, he meant ‘that’, which is to say not the country from where he was speaking but the one where Randall stood listening while looking out at the spark-spark-flare of the press photographers’ lighters. ‘And we don’t let people bully their way into our homes either. If anyone does think we have something to hide let them get a warrant.’
So then early the following evening the police arrived, two armoured Land Rovers of them, very apologetic. Doubly apologetic: ‘We need two Land Rovers these days just to check a dog licence,’ said the inspector who dismounted from the back of the second, warrant in hand. They had been asked, he went on, as part of the investigation into the allegations made by Mr Nicholas Winterton to examine certain fixtures and fittings…
‘You mean faucets?’
‘Gold painted,’ the inspector said to Randall when his examination of the f-words in question (it had lasted for several silent minutes) was complete. ‘Gold painted,’ he said to his men, distributed about the sitting-room sofas as comfortably as their holsters and body armour would allow. He turned again to Randall. ‘That’s not really the same thing at all, is it?’
‘No,’ said Randall, ‘it isn’t,’ and he heard all around him the sound of heavily armed men struggling to lever themselves up from soft furnishings.
Nicholas Winterton was not so easily satisfied, or as eager to quit his cushion on the sofa of a Breakfast TV set, which he had been inhabiting, it seemed, non-stop since he had set the misuse-of-public-funds hare running. Well, parliament was, for all that it was October, still in summer recess. Where else did he have to be?
There had been further ‘revelations’ in the papers about DeLorean’s track record with expenses at General Motors: the highest claims in the entire company — highest in the entire history of the company.
Which finally brought the man himself into the fray, in an Italian-suited, Breakfast-TV-sofa, thank-you-for-giving-me-the-right-of-reply kind of way. ‘I am proud of my expense claims at GM,’ he told the interviewer, with a corroborating tilt of his chin. ‘Do you know why? Because I never once disguised them the way executives did who were spending three times as much as me, and I never — ever — freeloaded on dealers out in the field who were already getting a hard time over their expenses. I settled all my bills and brought the receipts back to head office where everyone could see them.’ As for the memo that had started all of this the police had already investigated some of its more outlandish accusations, but the fact that such a memo existed proved how open and transparent the DeLorean Motor Company was. He did not think there was a single shredder in the whole organisation.
Sure, some people who worked for him asked questions. That was their prerogative: more than their prerogative, it was their duty as DeLorean Motor Company employees. Frankly, the more of these sorts of memos there were in circulation the better. We all liked to think we were going to be around for ever — and he sure as heck wasn’t planning on going anywhere any time soon — but ‘All Things Must Pass’, wasn’t that what they said? At least he could be sure he would be leaving some pretty well informed people behind. If anybody was looking for some DeLorean gold, meanwhile, they could enter the raffle that American Express was planning on running for two specially commissioned DMC-12s: not painted, but 24-carat-electroplated.
The interviewer, hands dangling between his knees now, cross-examination over, segued into a question about Cristina Ferrare. Actually, a volley of them: She was back on the small screen in the US, was that right? The Love Boat? Was he a fan of the series? How much influence did he have on her choice of roles?
‘With respect, you obviously don’t know Cristina if you think I could influence the parts she chooses. Of course’ — a smile as he said this — ‘I had a few ideas for improvements to the boat, although’ — the smile turned rueful — ‘I thought maybe I ought to confine my observations to the engine-room and the exterior…’
Even the cameraman could be heard to chuckle.
A week and a day after it broke Winterton’s story was officially a non-story. Police on both sides of the Irish Sea let it be known that they would not be making any further enquiries.