So Randall did.
At the last moment he detoured into the factory again, lights still on in the canteen from which quarter singing came, not raucous, or confused, a single voice, too far off for him to catch the burden. He wanted to go and tell them not to worry, but there wasn’t time for that and for what he had come here to do.
Five minutes, that took. He would make it up between here and Shannon, between here and Portadown. Out the gates he went for the third time that night and that really was him away.
21
Liz heard the rumour as soon as she walked into the assembly shop in the morning that Randall done a runner during the night.
TC said he wasn’t the least bit surprised.
Anto cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Listen, you can hear the other rats leaving too.’
Liz said nothing at all, not even (an effort of will) to herself, but walked to her locker, where the first thing she saw was a ragged edge of paper protruding from the bottom of the door. She turned the lock and the page — torn from a notebook — floated to the ground, blank side up. She hesitated before crouching and turning it over. This can all still work out, it said. Believe with me. He had signed it. E.R.
Like the Queen, was all she could think. She stayed there a few moments, sitting back on her heels, the page a ball in her fist clasped to her forehead, then she pushed herself forward and up with her toes, locked the metal door and carried on out to the assembly shop again.
They went about their tasks in silence, each keeping to her, or his, own part of the factory floor, choosing not to meet one another’s eyes. Liz didn’t know about the others but she was torn the whole time between finishing the car (she had been working on the same one for the past eleven days) and putting her spanner through its windscreen.
She made it as far as lunchtime. ‘I can’t wait around like this,’ she said, and started there and then taking off her overalls.
Anto and TC laid down their tools too.
‘What’ll you do now?’ she asked them.
Anto shrugged. ‘Go to the canteen, join the sit-in.’
‘While there’s life…’ said TC.
‘Yeah,’ said Liz, while there’s life.
She put her arms around them both.
Back at the house she picked up the first of the day’s notes, left by Robert this morning on the dressing table. ‘I am still waiting for a proper explanation.’
As to why she had not called last night to say she would be late, as to where she had been all that time.
He had driven up to the factory looking for her an hour before she finally arrived home and of course she was nowhere to be seen.
He came into the kitchen when he heard her at the back door, closing the living room door behind him, letting her trap herself in a lie about a tricky carburettor and no change for the payphone.
‘Is it that fella Anto?’ he asked.
‘Oh, for God sake, Robert.’
‘Don’t you for God sake me. There’s someone, there’s something.’
She had allowed herself to be turned around by him, her back to the sink. His face was in the space where hers should have been, her own drawn back so far she thought her neck would snap. His eyes were wild, but it was fear she saw in them, not anger. When it got to the point there was no violence. He reminded her, heartbreakingly, of the boys, all mouth and trousers.
And he was half right. There was something, but though she had kissed another man not half an hour before there was no one. She wasn’t even sure she could explain it to herself, not last night, not now.
One day, maybe.
*
She looked at the figures on the clock radio: 14:59. She slid the button from auto to on as all but the first digit changed and the pips sounded for three o’clock.
She heard the news out then reached under the bed for the suitcase.
It was now or never.
*
Randall didn’t know what set him off — exhaustion, maybe — but all of a sudden, sitting on the lip of that enormous desk on the thirty-fifth floor, he began to shake with silent laughter.
He picked up the envelope with its pink-tinged edge and for a moment he thought he should put it back in his pocket, leave here and go find Tamsin — Pattie too, if that was what it took, and whoever Pattie was sharing her life with now — and just disappear together. How great could the reach of Jennings’s associates be, after all? But even as he was asking the question he knew he could not risk his daughter’s happiness or safety to find out and knew too that without her he was not disappearing anywhere. He searched in the little dish at the base of the bust of Abraham Lincoln for a thumbtack, turned with it in his hand, looking for a suitable spot.
Carole watched apprehensively from the door. ‘I don’t think you should do that,’ she said, too late, as he made a sudden move across the floor to the photograph of DeLorean and his son in the surf and pushed the tack into it so that the envelope covered the I recall that followed life’s illusions.
‘I think thumbtacks in pictures might be the least of his worries now,’ he said.
*
DeLorean was looking down on the clouds from his airplane window, trying to get a sum right in his head. He wrote the answer down on his drinks napkin, next to the other seven- and eight-figure calculations. He had run the numbers dozens — hundreds — of times before, as indeed he had been running them all his working life, but he needed to be absolutely sure. This deal had been months in the making and bar one moment of folly, compounded by noises — to be specific quacks — off, kept from even his closest confidants. (Cristina, much to his regret, was completely in the dark.) There had been other offers on the table at various stages, more or less plausible, more or less attractive, but this was the one he kept coming back to, or rather that had kept coming back to him (for its proposers were the ones who made the running, seeming at times to anticipate events), trustworthy almost in inverse proportion to those involved in it. Morgan Hetrick and Jim Hoffman were not men who you could have brought into a room with Sir Kenneth Cork. They made Roy, frankly, look like a kid stealing apples from his neighbour’s yard.
Edmund thought he couldn’t see it, but his eyes had been wide open from the start. These men did not have scruples or much in the way of morals. They did though have money to invest and he had a scheme — the trust agreement prospectuses were in his briefcase — to enable them to invest it: a brand new company, DeLorean Motor Cars Inc., which would only come into existence — this was the genius of the thing — at the moment of their investing and which would straight away invest in DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd, or, for the time being at any rate, Cork Gully Receivers.
And, yes, he was aware that they wanted more from him, some reciprocal investment in their own business, but he had concocted a story that he was confident would keep them at arm’s length on that. (What was business but telling — and selling — the best story?) He was in hock to the IRA in Belfast was what he had told them, he had zero room for manoeuvre, unless Hoffman and Hetrick wanted to get them involved too, which he was pretty sure — if they knew anything of that organisation’s methods — they did not.
Still.
Earlier in the week he had written a letter to Tom Kimmerly, sealed inside another envelope, Only to be opened in the event of my death, in which he laid out, step by step, the path he had tried to tread in his dealings with these people, from his first casual conversations with Hoffman — in so far as anything Jim Hoffman ever said could be classed as casual — to the legal nicety that was DMC Inc. Emphasis on the legal. He hoped Tom would not mind this once, but he had, as much for Tom’s own sake as his own, taken other advice: Hoffman and Hetrick would not be buying John DeLorean, they would be making a donation to the British government.