By lunchtime the following day he was in a car being driven up the A11 on its way from Heathrow Airport to Ketteringham Hall.
Colin Chapman had agreed, with a pretty poor grace, to take half an hour out from what was — he could not stress this too much — a very heavy schedule. He was only recently returned from an extended spell in the US built around the final race of the Formula 1 season, the Caesars Palace Grand Prix, from which he had watched both Lotuses retire with barely a third of the seventy-five laps gone. Between the early-season rows and the late-season engine problems it had been a wretched bloody year on the track. And even more bloody wretched, frankly, off it. The US market had completely collapsed (because if you thought trying to sell a $25,000 sports car there was hard you ought to try selling one that cost half as much again). American Express International had decided not to renew the loan that had been in place for the past seven years. The auditor’s report had had to be delayed, and delayed again, and then, he had been obliged to inform Companies House just the day before, delayed a third time. So, in truth, in answer to the question from Randall that had prompted this litany, no, he was afraid he had not been paying much attention to the trials and tribulations of other motor manufacturers, even ones with whom his own company had in the recent past been intimately connected.
‘Is still connected,’ Randall said. They were in an upstairs library he remembered from the last time he was there. (He remembered too that there were no keys to open any of the bookcases.) Chapman had not even asked him would he like to take off his coat. ‘And we’re not just talking about a bad year for DMC, we’re talking terminal decline.’
‘I think John will pull through,’ Chapman said complacently. A circle of coloured glass was set in the leaded pane behind his head, De Tout Mon Coeur running round the circumference in Gothic script. Randall had no idea what it meant.
‘He thinks you could help make sure he did.’
Chapman locked his hands together, right thumb-pad tapping out an intricate Morse against the left. For once he seemed to be having to strain for superciliousness. ‘Look, I already told John what I just told you. The bank has cut off all further credit. We barely have enough flesh on our bones to sustain ourselves through the lean times ahead…’
‘I think what he had in mind was the GPD money.’
Chapman’s thumb stopped tapping. In the next moment his right hand had uncoupled itself, snatched up the nearest heavy object — a wedge of uncut lapis lazuli doing service as a paperweight — and flung it across the room. It thudded against a wooden panel, well wide of its (Randall) mark, unless the violence of the gesture itself had been the sole aim.
His moustache was twitching but his finger was steady. ‘I don’t know who you think you are, or more to the point who you think he is. I was not the only one to benefit from GPD. Ask him where his share went. Ask him how he found the money to buy that snowcat outfit.’
Randall walked slowly across the room, doing the calculations in his head: the trips to Geneva and to Utah; he bent to pick the stone up off the floor.
‘Don’t touch that.’ Chapman was on his feet, poised between defence and further attack. ‘And don’t dare ever come back here.’
Outside again, the hall and its five hundred years of history massed at his back, Randall was struck by a sense of his own powerlessness. He could nearly not be any farther removed from Park Avenue and all that was happening there than in this small corner of the eastern rump of England.
Oh, no… He stopped in his tracks.
He wouldn’t have.
Would he?
He would. He did.
DeLorean knew exactly how things stood with Chapman. He never seriously expected to get any money out of him, still less that Randall would be the one to help him get it. He needed to be sure that he did not carry out his threat to come back to New York, was all.
Randall had the car stop at the first pub on the road back to London, gave the landlord twenty pounds for ten pounds’ worth of silver from out of his cash register — ‘You’re cleaning me out here,’ the landlord said, struggling to keep his frown in place — and tucked himself into the very corner of the yellowed hood over the pay phone to dial.
Carole, answering, on the far side of the pips, was guarded. ‘You don’t sound like yourself,’ she said.
‘I’m in a pub in the middle of the English countryside.’ The pips went again. He pumped in another pound in ten pence pieces. ‘I have to speak to John.’
‘Mr DeLorean is not here.’
Mr DeLorean?
‘But he’s in New York?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say that.’
‘Carole…’ More damn pips. More coins. ‘It’s me: Randall.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry, but I Am Not At Liberty To Say.’ He caught her drift finally. It was not him, it was not her, it was the phones.
‘Hold on.’ He shoved in as many coins as the box would take, the ridged rim of the final one visible just beneath the slot. ‘Roy, then, can I speak to him?’
A silence. He thought for a moment he had lost the connection.
‘Roy’s in Wichita,’ she said finally, quietly.
‘Wichita? What’s he thinking of, going to Wichita now?’
She cleared her throat. ‘Court,’ she said.
So it had finally come to pass. The dispute over the blank lease form and the nine thousand dollar discrepancy in an elderly couple’s memory of what had been shaken on and Roy’s had gone to trial.
Whatever else he may have misrepresented, Bill Haddad was not wrong in his assessment of Nesseth. He was a bully and a boor and with millions of dollars at stake, the very future of the company, he had allowed himself to be dragged into court over less than ten grand. Very big, Roy, very bad.
While Randall was thinking what to say next his money ran out.
The landlord was still waving as the car pulled out on to the road again. ‘Come back any time!’
Arriving back at Heathrow, a sombre couple of hours later, it crossed his mind that he could trade up his return ticket for a flight to New York, to what end though, with nothing in his pockets but his hands?
He submitted himself instead — for the very last time? — to the invasive bag and body searches and police interrogation that Belfast people had been conditioned to accept were part and parcel of flying to that (only slightly offshore) region of the United Kingdom.
20
On the evening before it was all due to end, Liz was cutting through the parking lot when she saw him a little way off to her right, head tilted back against the wall blowing smoke into the frosting air. She thought for a moment of putting her own head down and hurrying on — he was so lost in thought she doubted he would even have noticed — but it seemed somehow churlish, the more so because of the word that had made its merry way out of the canteen a short time before: that he had ordered in fish suppers for all the occupiers and half a dozen cases of Harp to wash them down.
She checked her stride.
‘That was a nice thing you did,’ she said. He turned — returned from wherever it was he had just been this October night to the lot at the back of the DeLorean factory. ‘The fish and chips and the beer.’
He shuffled his feet. ‘It was little enough,’ he said.
She wasn’t about to make more of it than it was. ‘I know, but all the same.’ She shrugged. ‘I just thought it was nice.’
They stood for an awkward moment looking at the cars parked about the lot. She couldn’t help herself, she sighed. ‘It’s all a bit heartbreaking, isn’t it?’