Early One Morning (11 page)

‘Pull that down for me will you, Deakin?’

He reaches in and tugs. The handle snaps and comes away in his hand. Rose raises an eyebrow, a silent instruction to continue. He traces the edge of the thick cardboard partition until he finds some leverage and tugs.

Deakin can’t help it, he screams, or at least something halfway between a scream and a gasp emerges.

The body, trapped in the compartment for all these years, away from aquatic scavengers, has remained remarkably intact, so he can still see that it is, or was, a woman. The skin has mummified, stretched and wrinkled over the underlying bone, and there is still a mess of dirty blond hair attached to the skull. Slowly it topples over and hits the floor of the boot with a thump, sending up a sickly shower of ancient flesh particles.

‘Fuck,’ says Deakin quietly.

Rose, playing nervously with the elaborate watch on her wrist, nods and says, almost to herself, ‘You know, I always wondered what became of her.’

FRANCE, FEBRUARY 1937

E
VE IS DREAMING
, remembering in lurid details how they had made her husband so unhappy, so very unhappy. After all he had done for them. In reality they had been at Maxims when it happened, but in the dream they are in a cellar, a cellar lit only by red lights that give everyone a devilish glow. Maurice is telling a convoluted joke about Satan and sex, when Robert enters, his eyes dark coals.

He orders a couple of Pernods and gives one to Williams, almost forcing him to gulp at it.

‘Will. I have spoken to Ettore. He says yes. Le Mans. We can have two Tanks.
’

Williams beams and Eve feels for him. The Tanks, the Type
57,
are big beautiful alloy-clad racers, like something from the movie
Things To Come
or
Metropolis,
which Williams has spent hours making super-reliable for an assault on the 24-hour race.

It is at this point Robert’s voice becomes oddly metallic, inhuman, as if a speaking weight machine were saying the lines.

‘Ettore appreciates what you have done, Will. Without your breaking the endurance record at Montlhery, he wouldn’t consider this …’

Williams seems to shrink, his voice growing smaller. ‘But?’

‘But France needs a victory. Badly. If you were to win, it would be an English victory …’

‘In a Bugatti? Surely it’s the car, not the driver. At least, that’s what Ettore’s always said to me.’

Robert takes a deep breath. ‘He wants me to drive with Wimille.’

Williams nods, knowing that by championing Wimille he has been the instrument of his own downfall. ‘And the second Tank?’

‘Veyron and Labric.’ Two more Frenchmen.

Williams blinks hard, downs the Pernod and leaves, squeezing Robert on the shoulder as he goes. Robert looks across at Eve and shrugs, unhappiness written across his entire face.

‘How could you do this to your friend?’ Eve screams at him and runs out after her husband, but the wet glistening streets are empty, just a few wraith-like wisps of smoke left hanging in the air.

Eve felt something move lightly through her hair, tickling her scalp and sat up, fearing a mouse. She squealed when the creature ran down the side of her face. Williams stepped back. ‘Sorry. I frightened you. You were asleep.’

Eve looked around, momentarily disoriented. She was at the kitchen table, and had been lying with her head in her arms. The dogs lay in the dark corner, panting, having given up on supper.

‘God. I was dreaming …’

‘What about?’

‘About how you should have raced at Le Mans.’

He shrugged. He was past caring now. The team had won, a French victory when the Germans were taking everything else in sight. Eve shook her head to try to clear the image of that cellar. ‘What time is it?’

‘Ten.’

She stretched, trying to shake off the heavy weariness of sleep. ‘I thought you weren’t back till tomorrow.’

‘We have a customer in England. Interested in an Atlantic. I’m taking one over.’ The Atlantic was Jean’s astonishing sleek coupé, very low, very fast with a strange fin riveted down the back, giving it the air of some super hero’s pursuit vehicle than a road-going motor. ‘Coffee?’

She nodded. ‘Are you going?’

‘We also have an invitation to run a couple of Jean’s 4.7s at Beddington.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Hampshire. Invitation only. They have asked Rudi and Mercedes. Stuck and Auto Union. There’s appearance money. One hundred and fifty pounds a driver. Plus two hundred for the winner. Ettore says he will cover the rest of the costs.’

The last sentence faded and she smiled as she wondered if this was Bugatti’s little consolation prize for depriving her husband of Le Mans glory.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Nothing. Do you want to go?’

‘To race against Rudi again? Maybe Nuvolari? Yes. Would you come?’

Eve could see the fire burning in his eyes once more, the need for the chance to feel adrenaline pump through his veins. The moronic English quarantine laws would mean she couldn’t take even one of her dogs. But she could see this meant a lot to him. She nodded and he kissed her forehead.

‘Beddington it is, then.’

BEDDINGTON, ENGLAND, 1937

T
HE SEPTEMBER SUN
bounced off the fields of wheat stubble and haystacks, bathing the English countryside in a comforting, golden glow. Eve shifted in her seat as Maurice contemplated his cards and let her eyes wander down the vista the way the designer intended, taking in the lake and its faux-Roman temple and the water gardens beyond, ending at the dark copse before the farmlands began.

Behind her was Beddington House, a grand eighteenth-century Palladian villa, trying hard to keep its dignity with a fan of rude racing cars parked on its lawns—the usual Alfas, ERAS, Rileys, Delahayes, MGs, Talbots, Maseratis and, right next to where she sat at the folding table with Maurice, a brace of gleaming new Bugattis.

To one side of the house a group of drivers and mechanics, including Robert and Williams, were playing football on a makeshift pitch. The pair of them were running that bit harder to keep up with the younger men, and she hoped they remembered they had a gruelling set of pre-race trials the following day before the race proper in the afternoon.

The innocuous new asphalt road to her right snaked around the house and, out of sight, connected to the racetrack the Duke had carved out of the glorious landscape at the rear of his house, across the gardens, through the forest, round the deer park, into the field he had rented from a neighbouring farmer and back again. For three miles, 125 yards, it twisted and rolled around a slumbering English countryside unaware of the kind of mechanical mayhem about to be inflicted on it.

The course bristled with hastily constructed stands, a press box, a commentary platform, feeding into a speaker system the engineers were struggling to perfect, hence the occasional howl of feedback or a hideously distorted voice drifting over the mansards of Beddington House. Now and then they heard a bark of German. The radio station Deutschlander was due to send back bulletins of the race to the home country.

Tomorrow the crowds would start to arrive, perhaps up to thirty thousand, drawn by the carrot of seeing the new Mercedes and Auto Union Silver Arrows, scourge of the continental raceways, at work on a field of English and French rivals. They would pay their 4 shillings (children 2/6, parking 2.0s). The
Light Car,
the
Sporting Life, Motor Sport
and the
Autocar
correspondents—including the famous ‘Grand Vitesse’—were already here, sitting in deckchairs with owners and competitors, sipping Pimms served by the white-gloved staff and waiting for the bulk of the Germans to arrive.

There were whispers, of course, that the Germans weren’t coming. There were rumbles about an annexation of Austria, Sudetenland and Danzig and ever since Hitler marched into the Rhineland unopposed, the mood in Britain had been jittery. The possibility of war was even mentioned at the wonderful RAC club on Pall Mall, where they had had dinner before travelling to Beddington.

Eve heard a strange giggle and looked up to see two young, freckle-faced mechanics sneaking away from the rear of Williams’ Bugatti. She stood up and moved around to see what they had done. An L plate had been taped to the elegant rear of the car. She plucked it off, bringing a flake of blue paint with it and cursed. Some distance away the two young Englishmen guffawed at their prank.

She tore the sign into a dozen pieces and threw it on to the Duke’s already ruined lawn.

‘I hate this country,’ she said to Maurice, ‘if they’re not snobs they’re imbeciles.’

‘Or both,’ he said as he grabbed a passing Pimms and sipped. ‘At last. A drink that doesn’t taste as if it came straight from a tradesman’s bladder.’

Encouraged, she took one from the tray just as the sound of a high-powered sports car bounced through the trees lining the driveway and off the Portland stone of the house. ‘Ah. Here comes Rudi and the stiff arm brigade,’ said Maurice.

The little Mercedes roadster swept on to the gravel path then bumped its way over the grass to stop near them. At the wheel, as Maurice had correctly identified, Rudi. Beside him was a uniformed officer of some description.

Rudi beamed when he saw them and climbed out. He was wearing a canvas jacket over white overalls, as if he expected to leap straight into a car and start competing. ‘Eve. How nice to see you. Maurice.’ He pointed at the rather stiff, correct figure hovering behind. ‘May I introduce Assistant Sportskorpsführer Keppler.’

Keppler gave the soft, half-hearted version of the Heil Hitler salute, bending his elbow and nodding his head.

Maurice sniffed. ‘What’s an Assistant Sportskorpsführer?’

Keppler stepped forward and smiled. He was not a handsome man, his face slightly puffy and the eyes too small, but there was a liveliness about it that was somehow engaging. ‘I am the person who makes sure you all lose.’

Eve laughed and Keppler beamed and went off to look at the rival cars, walking around the Bugattis with his hands clasped behind his back.

‘Where’s Baby?’ asked Eve. Rudi’s wife Alice, whom everyone called by her nickname, was famed as the best timekeeper in Europe, a devil on the twin chronometers. He rarely travelled without her.

‘Switzerland.’ He lowered his voice. ‘House hunting.’

Eve raised an eyebrow.

‘Just in case.’

‘How is racing for Adolf?’

He unzipped his jacket and showed her the swastika on his breast pocket as if it were some kind of festering wound. ‘They’ve made me a Sturmführer now.’ He pulled a face but wiped the expression when he realised Keppler was coming back.

‘Do these have the new rear axles?’ Keppler asked authoritatively.

Eve and Maurice looked at each and shrugged. ‘You need to speak to a driver or mechanic,’ said Maurice. ‘We’re just along for the ride.’

All looked over when they heard the hiss of air brakes and a huge silver truck edged its way in through the stone gates, its sides centimetres from the twin pillars and metalwork. ‘Ah,’ said Keppler. ‘The first of the trucks,’ and strode over to direct the great lorry.

Eve looked quizzically at Rudi. ‘How does he know about Jean’s new axles?’

‘There’s a spy at Molsheim,’ replied Rudi flatly.

‘What? Are you serious?’

‘There’s a spy at every race works across Europe. And some in America.’ He smiled at Maurice. ‘In answer to your question, that’s what an Assistant Sportskorpsführer does.’

Keppler stood proudly on the lawn, hands on hips, and waved the truck to his side. The cab doors opened and out jumped a stream of tall, handsome lads, all in steel grey overalls, who began to prepare the reception area.

‘The pits are round there,’ said Eve to Rudi, pointing along the slip road.

‘I know. But Mercedes always has a second pits, away from prying eyes.’

Eve could see the football game was forgotten, and Robert, Williams and the others were drifting over to witness the spectacle. As the transporter ropes were untied, cords pulled and from the top of the truck a massive banner unfurled, proudly displaying the German eagle.

‘My God,’ said Williams when he reached Eve’s side. ‘What is this?’

Rudi turned and offered his hand and Williams pumped it. ‘This,’ said Rudi slowly, ‘is the future of motor sport.’

Robert snorted. ‘Well they can count me out.’

Rudi laughed. ‘They intend to,’ he said.

The Mercedes mechanics had produced a floor area made of strips of articulated aluminium and unrolled it. Tubular steel barriers were erected. Two ramps emerged from the rear of the trucks and down them came a covered shape, the green tarpaulin masking the outlines of some sleek, silver machine. The car was wheeled on to the metal flooring and the cover whisked back

The W126 Mercedes seemed to suck up the rays of the English sun and fling them back defiantly. It was all riveted alloy, fluted air intakes, wire wheels, a race car stripped to bare aerodynamic essentials, a perfect synergy of form and function. And the function was to win. The swastika on the tail told whom that victory would serve.

As the German mechanics began fuelling, using pumps and pressure hoses, Williams sniffed. There was a strange, sweet aroma, not the usual benzol smell, drifting over. ‘Christ, Rudi, what does she run on?’

‘State secret.’

‘Probably Hitler’s piss,’ suggested Maurice.

‘Sshh,’ said Rudi nervously.

‘Why are they fuelling her? You’re not taking her out?’

‘The Auto Unions are three hours behind. They got held up at Dover. There was no crude oil for their trucks.’ That meant Rudi’s great rival Bernd Rosemeyer would be late arriving, too. ‘It’ll be dark when they get here. So I can get a couple of trial laps in.’

Rudi walked over, inspected the car and climbed in. Before he put his helmet on he fiddled with something at each side of his head. Rudi then signalled one of the mechanics who sprinted forward with a small trolley and plugged a metal cylinder into the side of the Mercedes. Robert and Williams glanced at each other knowingly. No hand cranking. Electric start.