I didn’t have to be asked twice. ‘Of course.’
‘I know you want to race in nationals next year, but if you’re willing to keep my offer open, then I’m willing to keep yours in mind. I’ll make a wager with you. If you make the top ten in the final, I’ll finance your national campaign. Don’t, and you race in the Clark Paints series.’
It was a bet heavily weighted in Hancock’s favour. The Festival is highly unpredictable. Usually the best driver wins, but there’s no accounting for mechanical failure or just plain bad luck. Either way, just making it to the final grid of twenty six cars was going to be a hard enough prospect.
‘Sure,’ I said.
We shook on it.
Hancock insisted we celebrate after that. We ordered dinner and he went for a steak half the size of a cow, while I ordered the chicken, the cheapest thing on the menu. I didn’t want to take advantage of the guy’s hospitality, even if he was trying to manipulate me into staying in the Clark Paints series.
With our business seemingly out of the way, our conversation turned to motor racing. Hancock told me he’d been a spectator since he was a kid. As a Kent boy, born and bred, Brands was his local hang-out. He remembered seeing my dad clinch the Formula Three crown here by claiming second in the race. I remembered it too. I watched the race with my mum from a hospitality box. I’d thought days like that would never end. I was wrong.
As we finished our dinners, he insisted on after dinner drinks. I never drank and drove, so accepting a drink meant I’d be stuck with Hancock for at least an hour.
When a pair of whiskies arrived, Hancock raised his glass. ‘Here’s to people always needing parts for their cars and making me richer.’
‘Amen,’ I said and clinked glasses.
‘How much do you know about me?’
I knew what I’d read off his website. ‘You operate the biggest car salvage and auction firm in the country.’
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s the business side of me, but what do you know about me?’
I couldn’t dodge the question, not that I saw the point of it. ‘Not much other than you’re a race fan and you’ve sponsored a few people over the years.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Well, there’s a lot more to me than that,’ Hancock said. ‘Anyway, let’s have a toast. To great friendships – past, present and future.’
I clinked my glass against Hancock’s. ‘To great friendships.’
‘Alex was a good friend. I got to know him well over the years. His parents are great people and that Alison is a wonderful girl,’ Hancock said.
‘I agree.’
‘You knew Alex well then?’
‘Not well, but I thought he was a really nice guy.’
‘You pointed out his broken exhaust pipe mounting during qualifying, didn’t you?’
‘That was nothing,’ I said. ‘Drivers look out for each other.’
I felt a shift in Hancock’s mood. I didn’t know if it was the booze talking or not. My whisky represented my only drink, but Hancock had been hitting the wine over dinner pretty hard in addition to the whisky he’d ordered before dinner. There was a need in his eyes, like he wanted something from me, but instead of coming out and asking outright what he wanted to know, he jabbed at me with question after question in the hope I’d spill the answer he was looking for.
‘I saw you and Alex chatting just before the race.’
I realized he must have meant when Alex and I were in the men’s room. Hancock hadn’t been in there while we were, so he could only have seen us come out together.
‘What’d you talk about?’
I remembered how happy Alex had been to give racing up for Alison. The memory hurt. ‘The future, as sad as that seems now.’
‘So you didn’t talk about me?’
The question caught me off guard. ‘No, why would we?’
He tried to brush his weird question away. ‘No reason. Pit lane talk. You know. Your grandfather has an account with us,’ he said, throwing a new wrinkle into the conversation.
‘He does?’
‘Yeah. Goes back years. I wasn’t sure if you were discussing that.’
Hancock had lost me. I couldn’t see how that could be a topic of conversation. ‘No, we didn’t talk about anything like that. Sorry.’
‘No reason to be sorry. I just noticed that when you went your separate ways, you looked disappointed.’
This conversation had taken a very weird detour. Why the hell was Hancock watching Alex so closely? It was strange that first Derek, and now Hancock, had commented on my contact with Alex. More interesting still, both of them had read more into the encounter than really existed. What did they think Alex and I had discussed?
‘I had a lot on my mind and there was a lot of drama going on in the paddock that day.’
This was my test for Hancock. I wanted to see how he would react. He wanted to squeeze something out of me about that day and I wanted to know what it was. I hoped my reply would provoke an admission.
Hancock waved a dismissive hand. ‘That thing with Derek, he wouldn’t do anything like that.’
He spoke as if he knew for sure Derek hadn’t had anything to do with Alex’s death. I almost believed him.
‘You have Alex’s car now, right?’
‘Yes, I’ve got it.’
‘I know you’re planning to have the car scrapped, so I’d like to compact it. No charge of course. It’s something I’d like to do for Alex.’
‘Thanks, I appreciate it.’ My appreciation failed to sound sincere, but Hancock’s alcoholic state left him too dulled to pick up on it.
‘I can send someone over to pick up the car tomorrow.’
‘No,’ I said. I needed an excuse. I couldn’t say I was keeping the car for evidence. ‘It wouldn’t be convenient. I’m working and Steve won’t be at the workshop for the next few days. And I know a few of the drivers want to be there when it’s destroyed.’
‘Just give me the nod when it’s a good time and I’ll have someone there.’
‘Sure.’
With Hancock’s bizarre questioning, I wasn’t sure I wanted him to have the car at all. Looking at everything that had been said, I questioned the validity of his sponsorship offer. Was he dangling this carrot so that he could pump me for information?
Hancock finished his drink. The waitress took that as her signal to deliver the bill. He paid and I was more than ready to go. We headed out to the lobby, but he stopped short of leaving.
‘I’m getting a room here tonight.’
‘Good move,’ I said.
He didn’t say anything for a moment, just stared at me, as if examining me for answers. ‘So you don’t know much about me.’
‘No,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘We’ll have to change that.’
Lap Thirteen
W
ednesday evening gave me and Steve our first chance to examine Alex’s car. We hadn’t had time to do more than unload the wreck from the van, get it on stands and cover it with a drop cloth since picking it up from Alison’s on Monday night.
We stood looking at the remains of the car. The damage had robbed it of its elegance. It sagged under its own weight and its scars were ugly. In racing trim, it looked like a formidable piece of machinery. Now, it looked vulnerable, like an injured creature.
‘What do you want to do?’ Steve asked me.
‘Reconstruct.’
We emptied out the boxes of buckled and broken parts which hadn’t remained intact from the crash. I didn’t want to reassemble the car. Couldn’t. Many of the parts were too damaged to simply reattach them. Instead, we laid the parts out like an aircraft crash investigator with aircraft parts or a palaeontologist with a dinosaur skeleton. I hoped to see how the car had picked up its wounds. It was hard to tell which ones were a direct result of hitting the wall and which ones had caused the wreck.
The biggest broken piece was the right front corner, consisting of the upper and lower suspension wishbones, the push rod to the shock absorber, the wheel and tyre still attached to the upright. The impact had tied it into a knot, but it was all in one piece. Steve and I put it on the floor where it should have been attached. We duct taped the fibreglass bodywork in place and spent the next hour placing all the pieces of this skewed automotive jigsaw in their rightful positions until we had an exploded view.
We didn’t have all the parts. It wasn’t surprising, really. The car had crashed at high velocity. The tinier pieces would have been flung far and wide. Even if they weren’t, they could have been lost when the recovery vehicle lifted the car over to scrutineering or during the car’s transportation from Stowe Park to Alison’s parents’ house. One of the missing pieces was a bolt that connects the tracking arm to the mounting on the gearbox. The tracking arm is a tie-rod that adjusts the ‘toe-in’, the angle at which the wheels need to point in order for the car to travel in a straight line. Generally, all four wheels on any car point slightly inwards to make this happen. Considering the massive impact, the bolt had probably been sheared off.
I snapped photos of the car for later reference. I planned on keeping the car to use it as evidence, but I knew people expected it to be crushed, and soon. In case I lost the car before I was done, I needed a photographic record.
I made sure I had plenty of shots of the tyre burns on the right side of the car. The telltale black, circular scuffs strafed the bodywork behind the radiator pod. This proved Derek had manoeuvred his wheels inside Alex’s. If I was right, there’d be corresponding tyre burns on the side of Derek’s car. No wonder Derek hadn’t wanted me getting my hands on Alex’s car.
I picked up the envelope containing the pictures I’d taken of the crash site. I slipped them out and compared the skid marks on the track to the wrecked car in front of me.
Steve moved in behind me to peer over my shoulder. ‘You know this doesn’t prove anything.’
I’d come to the same conclusion, but I hadn’t wanted to admit it.
‘We can prove that Alex crashed into that wall,’ Steve said, tapping the photo in my hands. ‘We can prove that Alex and Derek locked wheels. What we can’t prove is intent. All that we can prove is what everyone says; this was an accident. Nothing here says malice was involved.’
Every one of Steve’s words was a kick in the teeth. I’d been threatened with a shotgun, warned off by the cops, burned bridges with people in the community and pissed off the grieving families. Now I was in serious danger of picking up a defamation charge if I said too much. And all for what? I couldn’t prove a damn thing beyond the official story. I shoved the photos back in the envelope and tossed them on the work bench.
‘I need the videotape,’ I said.
‘No,
we
need the videotape,’ Steve said and patted me on the back. ‘You’re not alone in this. Has Paul gotten back to you?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll call him.’
‘Get that tape and you’ve got Derek over the barrel. Prove intent and the wreckage, skid marks, and photographs will mean something.’
The workshop doors rattled and then someone knocked. Steve looked at me for answers and I shook my head.
‘Hello?’ a familiar voice called out.
‘It’s Alison,’ I said.
Steve crossed the workshop and swung open one of the large double doors. He smiled at her.
‘Is Aidy here?’
‘Come in, Alison,’ I called out.
She smiled when she spotted me in the depths of the workshop, but her smile dropped when she saw me standing next to Alex’s car. I reached for a drop cloth to toss over it.
‘No, it’s OK,’ she said. ‘I came to see what you’re doing.’
‘OK,’ I said and put the cloth down.
‘Aidy, I need to go out for a while,’ Steve said.
This was his code for giving us some privacy. I almost frowned. What happened to I wasn’t alone in all this? Actually, it was probably better that I talked to her alone. I got the feeling she wanted to talk and she might feel uncomfortable with Steve in the room.
Passing Alison in the doorway, Steve said, ‘That boy is going all out for you and Alex. Let him know how much it means to you. He’s got a good heart and he deserves thanks for it.’
She smiled at Steve’s fatherly tone. ‘I will.’
I blushed.
‘Back in an hour, Aidy,’ Steve said.
‘That was embarrassing,’ I said.
‘But he’s right.’
Alison hesitated in the doorway a fraction too long.
‘We don’t have to do this now if you don’t want to,’ I said.
‘No, I want to,’ she said.
She came over to the car and ran a hand over the shiny fibreglass. It was a loving touch, as if she were stroking Alex’s cheek. I looked away to give her this moment and picked up the envelope of photos.
‘What have you found?’
I showed her the tyre burns down the side of the car. I slid the photos from the envelope, careful to hide the images from her. ‘Now you might find these disturbing, but we can—’
‘Stop trying to protect me,’ she interrupted, frustration edging her words. ‘Everyone is trying to wrap me in cotton wool and I want it to stop. I’m not that fragile.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not trying to.’
‘Yes you are. You’re just trying to be kind. And while that’s nice, it doesn’t help me. I’m going to get upset. I’m going to cry. But that’s OK. I lost someone very close to me. It’s only natural.’
Alison impressed me. She was a fighter. No wonder Alex was willing to give up racing for her.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll treat you like anyone else and I won’t worry if you cry from time to time.’
She smiled. ‘Thank you. You’d be the first.’
I smiled and showed her the photos. I explained their relevance, but also pointed out their lack of meaning without more proof.
‘So you don’t have anything.’
‘I have pieces. I can show that Alex and Derek interlocked wheels. I have a room full of people who heard Derek say he was going to kill Alex. What I don’t have is proof that he made the manoeuvre on purpose.’