Glenn Patterson - Gull

‘I don’t know,’ said Anto. ‘Maybe.’

They had been following the various proposed rescue plans as best they could, a combination of what they read about and heard about in the news and what was carried their way in the constant swirl of rumour and speculation that seemed if anything to travel faster now that the factory was nine-tenths empty.

They were officially Not Getting Their Hopes Up over anything, but — human nature — it was hard to keep your thoughts from running away with themselves. ‘What if… Just say… Imagine…’

The management in large part left them to their own devices. What was there to be gained after all in urging them on to finish the cars faster? Once these parts were used up, that was it. Better the deadline expire — if expire it must — before the factory.

She remembered from the early days of training, before there was even a shop here to tour, one of the videotapes that was shown in the old carpet factory: DeLorean sitting on the edge of a desk. She was that busy looking at the stuff surrounding him — a bronze bust with the back of its head to the camera, photo frames facing the wrong way too, a telescope in front of the window — that it took her a while to catch up with what he was talking about… duty to the customer. She was looking right into his face when he said there were no shortcuts to quality. (He had a slight tremor in his bottom lip between sentences. For all his fame he was nervous doing this.) Even at Pontiac where they were doing four thousand cars a day he had told his workers that: prepare each new car as though it were your own new car.

She didn’t know that she had always managed to live up to that before, but she was doing it now, because each car she worked on was in a very real sense hers alone.

She and Robert were barely speaking. If it wasn’t silence it was shouting. ‘I don’t understand you at all. I could have had a job all lined up for you. Surely to God you can see it, the place is never going to recover.’

‘Oh, yes, Fount of all Knowledge?’ She gave as good as she got. ‘And how come you’re so sure about it when even the government isn’t?’

‘Because it’s Belfast! It’s what happens here!’

The boys shouted at the two of them — ‘Would yous for God sake quit it?’ — and nine nights out of ten stomped out of the house to see their gormless mates.

*

It was the end of the first week of October before Randall heard that the Virginia loan was only going to be worth half the amount the government was demanding as a condition of the other, bigger loan — the bail out . Whether it was Cork’s doing, or Prior’s, with Thatcher twitching his strings, or whether it was just Jeanne Farnan’s inability — for all that firmness of purpose — to sell her colleagues a deal that involved everyone but DeLorean himself risking their money, the simple fact was that they had reached if not the end of the line then the final colon: DeLorean had less than a fortnight to come up with ten million dollars.

All of a sudden Randall’s calls were stalling at Carole’s desk. She was sorry, John was in a meeting, if he could try again in an hour… She was sorry (one hour to the second later), the meeting had ended five minutes early, John had just walked out the door, she couldn’t say when he would be back. Couldn’t say or wouldn’t say. Couldn’t or wouldn’t say to Don either, from what Randall gathered.

After another five days of this he wired: Must talk, prepared to come to you . The reply arrived within the hour. Suspect people working to undermine us. Beware of phones. Randall read this far and felt something slipping away. Have important job for you there , the telex went on . Await instruction.

Two days he waited. Late on the third another telex arrived, one word and a clutch of initials: Chapman GPD .

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.